Writing and Selling the YA Novel (10 page)

As an author for young adults, you have the opportunity to bring to life characters that will stick with your readers long after they have closed your book, illuminating aspects of human nature that might otherwise have remained in the dark. You have the chance to influence your readers at a time when they are still forming their worldviews and discovering themselves. This is both the solemn responsibility and the great joy of writing YA novels.

because he allows her to connect to the world instead of shunning it. For the young man who yearns to be on the football team, the teacher might also be the football coach. Pay special attention to which characters seem most interesting to you. Which ones do you feel you could most easily develop? What draws you to them?

If there's one thing that remains vivid from my teen years it's the school lunchroom. I can still recall the smell—it was never a clear smell, always an amalgam. For me, there was a feeling of nausea that was both related and unrelated to that scent. The odd thing is, I spent very little time in the lunchroom because most days I wiled away my lunch period in the choir rehearsal rooms. So why does the lunch experience stand out so vividly?

I can answer that in one word: drama. There was always something happening in the cafeteria and most of the time it wasn't good. The lunchroom meant making difficult choices—forming alliances as you chose where to sit and figuring out how to avoid the more obvious pitfalls of unwittingly stepping into someone else's territory or, heaven forbid, tripping while carrying your lunch tray. There were consequences to these actions. One wrong move and you might be the object of the nearest bully's ridicule or the laughingstock of the whole school. Entire reputations could be made or shattered in the lunchroom.

This is what plot is all about. Good plots have something at stake. They're full of the triumphs and heartbreaks that make us human, and there are consequences to every decision. They take navigating, and it isn't easy to wind your way through.

To explore the essentials of plot, it's necessary to look closely at conflict, believability, and resolution. These three things make up the engine that will drive your book forward, taking readers along for the ride before depositing them safely home again. Once you understand the heart of plot, it's possible to look into the mechanics of developing a story line from start to finish.

WHY CONFLICT?
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Conflict isn't fun. In real life, most of us avoid it like the plague. It's ironic, then, that nothing can draw us into a book faster than a good dose of conflict. Take a look at these first sentences from popular YA novels:

They promised me nine years of safety but only gave me three. (
Such a Pretty Girl
by Laura Wiess)

"Dear Lord," prayed Mercy Carter, "do not let us be murdered in our beds tonight." (
The Ransom of Mercy Carter
by Caroline B. Cooney)

Things had been getting a little better until I got a letter from my dead sister.
[Dead Girls Don't Write Letters
by Gail Giles)

What do they all have in common? They open with conflict. It's clear right from the start that all is not well, and instantly the reader wants to know more. How did the situation get to this point? How will it be resolved?

Our interest in conflict is threefold. First, and most importantly, it provides that page-turning quality where we can't wait to know what happens next. Without conflict, a reader can pretty much guess what will happen in the story because no one will do anything surprising or tantalizing or outside the bounds of the familiar. With conflict, the options are abundant, and the only way to find out what really happens is to turn the page.

Second, conflict inspires strong emotions, both in your characters and your readers. When we're drawn into the tension an author has created, we allow ourselves to live vicariously through the book. Although we might not want to feel terror or grief or anger in our own life, experiencing it through the filter of a character's life gives us a chance to explore that emotion without consequences to ourselves.

Third, as we learned in English class, conflict can be a way to explore character development because how a person handles a given situation tells us a lot about him. Most people are naturally curious about our fellow human beings and when we read, we see people in action—people faced with tough decisions—so we have a chance to observe and judge their choices. Conflict is present in every genre. It's even present in books we might perceive as "light" reading. That teen romance novel your fifteen-year-old niece packs for the beach? It's full of conflict. If the guy and girl started out together there would be no need to keep reading. That humorous new Louise Rennison novel that will make you laugh until you cry? There's plenty of conflict. Just read
Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging
and you'll see that main character Georgia Nicolson's life is no walk in the park. How could she make us laugh so much if she didn't get into precarious situations that constantly required outlandish solutions?

There are many different types of conflict that can affect our characters. Sometimes that conflict is delicious, like sexual tension crackling between two characters who haven't yet admitted their love, and other times it's dangerous, like the cloak-and-dagger events surrounding a teenage spy. Sometimes conflict takes the form of grief or embarrassment or pain. But always, it's the anticipation of resolution that keeps us turning the pages to learn the outcome.

BELIEVABILITY
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As we turn the pages, there's one important quality that can't be ignored: believability. If plots are driven by the conflict that is set up in the beginning of the book, believability is a reader's willingness to suspend his disbelief and go along with the story as it unfolds. This is not to be confused with realism. Realism means representing things as they are in reality, but believability has little to do with reality and everything to do with your reader's state of mind.

Have you ever had the experience of being so immersed in a fantasy novel that you forget the characters aren't human? Have you jumped when reading a horror novel? Cried when reading a love story even though the events portrayed are clearly outside the realm of anything that would ever happen in real life? That's believability.

You want your readers to be so immersed in your characters and story that they forget they are reading a book. This is a particular challenge when writing for teens because teens are so aware of different forms of media. They are inundated with stories on TV and in movie theaters, and these days, with the prevalence of behind-the-scenes shows and DVD bonus features, they know a lot more about

the mechanics of how stories are put together and marketed than they used to. If a story seems contrived, a teen will be instantly catapulted out of the book. Instead of caring what happens, she'll be thinking, "This isn't real."

Believability is important, so when you're crafting your plot, make sure you choose characters and events that draw a reader in, inviting her to suspend her disbelief. Much of this quality will come from your writing style, but some of it will come from the choices you make and the choices your characters make. If you're writing realistic fiction, be aware not only of what
is
true, but of what your readers will perceive as true. Both are important.

RESOLUTION
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No matter what type of conflict you set up at the beginning of your novel, it must have some kind of resolution by the end. This is a basic tenet of plot, and at first glance it might seem flat-out wrong—what about the countless novels that leave us hanging, suspended without knowing the fate of the main character? What about books where the hero dies or the couple doesn't end up together? Certainly we can all think of books that don't wrap things up neatly at the end.

But resolution in writing has little to do with wrapping everything up. In fact, unless you're writing a deliberately formulaic novel, the more perfectly you tie everything up, the more likely a reader is to find your story hard to believe. Readers recognize that stories reflect life-even if that life takes place on another planet or in a fantasy world of our own creation—so they expect at least some degree of ambiguity.

Resolution in novels has more to do with carrying a theme from beginning to end than with providing an answer to a stated problem. I've heard it said that when a reader begins a book, she makes an unspoken contract with the author. That contract is shaped by the type of book she's picked up (the genre, the design, the promotion, etc.) and by the setup the author imposes in the beginning of the novel. If an author starts out writing a thriller, the audience wants it to remain a thriller until the end. If the main character begins by making a plan to find his long-lost father, we want to see whether he accomplishes his goal. Even if he does
not
accomplish his goal, we want to hear how the quest has changed him along the way.

Many, many times resolutions are not satisfying in the sense of making us happy or erasing all questions from our minds. They can be infuriating or painful. They can leave you hanging, asking yourself more questions than when you began. But there must always be some acknowledgment of where you began when you end. Not a literal stated acknowledgment, but a sense of a journey taken and fulfilled.

Plots have beginnings, middles, and ends, and endings are what you leave your readers with, so it's important to ask yourself how you want to affect them. Even if you want to leave your readers yearning for more, you still need to give them some sense of completion.