Why YA? Michelle Dean for the New York Times Magazine

"I suppose I'm admitting that those people who call young-adult readers "childish" are onto something. It's just not the pure desire for regression they pompously diagnose. It's a desire for stories substantial enough to withstand the ages, that are like smooth river rocks you can turn over and over again."

-Michelle Dean. Our Young-Adult Dystopia. The New York Times Magazine. January 31, 2014.

Why YA?

Eliot Schrefer wrote a great online column for the Times about writing YA fiction. It comes the closest to describing my personal reasons for reading/writing YA of any of the other articles of this sort that I have read. Here's the gist:

"...what Y.A. novels value above all else is storytelling. It took me even longer to realize that that needn't lessen a book's complexity -- it just prioritizes the reader's experience. Ultimately, if there's a refrain I hear from the many adults turning to Y.A., it's not that the books are any simpler. They're just more pleasurable."

Literary Inspiration: All Our Pretty Songs by Sarah McCarry

"Cass has a guillotine heart, severing ties as neatly as a whistle-sharp blade cutting the head from the body. Like any good revolutionary, she pretends that the casualties mean nothing."

-Sarah McCarry. All Our Pretty Songs. 2013. St. Martin's Press, New York. pages 30-31.

Reasons to Write Every Day

Because if you don't work on your novel every day, you forget what it is about.

Literary Inspiration: Valentine by Tessa Hadley

"I wanted everything I learned to be an opening into the unknown, whereas Gerry's knowledge added up to a closed circle, bringing him safely back to where he began, confirming him."

-Tessa Hadley. Valentine. The New Yorker. April 8, 2013.

Reasons to Write Every Day

Because your subconscious is smarter, quirkier, braver, darker, and funnier than your conscious mind but only emerges if you provide ample blank page space and pretend to be looking the other way.

Literary Inspiration: Dare Me: A Novel by Megan Abbott

“...a senior boy and freshman girl doing furtive nastiness in some far-flung corner, his arm jammed up her shirt, over her baby-fat girl belly, her eyes wide with panic and excitement, already, in her head, practicing the telling of the moment even as the moment slips from her.”

-Megan Abbot, Dare Me: A Novel (2012. Reagan Arthur Books: New York. page 73)

Literary Inspiration: The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There by Catherynne M. Valente

Like its forebear, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, Catherynne M. Valente’s The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There is a complete delight, chock full of some of the most delicious language I have ever read. For example:

"Iago yawned so wide his eyes bulged and his white teeth shoed sharp. He licked his dark muzzle. “Cats don’t have dark sides. That’s all a shadow is—and though you might be prejudiced against the dark, you ought to remember that that’s where stars live, and the moon and raccoons and owls and fireflies and mushrooms and cats and enchantments and a rather lot of good, necessary things. Thieving, too, and conspiracies, sneaking, secrets, and desire so strong you might faint dead away with the punch of it. But your light side isn’t a perfectly pretty picture, either, I promise you. You couldn’t dream without the dark. You couldn’t rest. You couldn’t even meet a lover on a balcony by moonlight. And what would the world be worth without that?"

-Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There (2012. Feiwell and Friends: New York. p. 202)

Mmmmm. Scrumptious. And there are gems like that on every page. Practically every sentence. It’s a book so dripping with beauty and imagination that it should be read only in small chunks, nibbled on and savored like the fanciest dark chocolate. This is literature designed to stimulate and grown the spirit, to nourish as well as to entertain. 

Literary Inspiration: The Diviners by Libba Bray

"...they talked, too, of their futures, as if they could shape the glittering course of their destinies with secret confessions offered like prayers to the room's benevolent hush. They talked until their words grew sparse with their drowsiness."

-Libba Bray, The Diviners (2012. Little, Brown and Company: New York. page 125)

Literary Inspiration: Every Day by David Levithan

"If you stare at the center of the universe, there is a coldness there. A blankness. Ultimately, the universe doesn't care about us. Time doesn't care about us.

That's why we have to care about each other."

- David Levithan, Every Day (2012. Alfred A. Knopf: New York. page 320)