Guest post: Why YA

This guest post i brought to you from R.P. Channing

Why YA?

Young Adult is the one genre where a writer is pretty much free to do anything he likes.

Too many people look at the “Young” part of Young Adult and miss completely the “Adult” part.

Young Adult and MG are galaxies apart in content. Young Adult is the one genre read far and wide by almost all age groups.

We were all seventeen once (some of us still so), and Young Adult appeals to a market that knows what it’s like to be seventeen. That’s pretty much everyone who reads.

The stories deal with issues that we, as a adults, face every day. And it deals with them tastefully.

Young Adult stays firmly within boundaries that I feel comfortable with as a writer, without reducing anything in the quality of the story.

Some of the scariest scenes I ever read were in The Hunger Games. I had chills. And yet, when I move into Horror itself as a genre, I find all the gore to be in bad taste. I lose interest, and I’m even a little repulsed sometimes.

Young Adult focuses on the story without getting into excessive details that we don’t really need in order to tell that story. The romance in YA is endearing, gentle, sweet, kind, loving. Who didn’t think Twilight was one of the most romantic books ever written?

A Young Adult author has free rein in many genres. He is not stuck too firmly into a classification such as “Fantasy” or “Romance” or “Horror” because YA can encompass all those genres and still remains “Young Adult.” There are people who liked Twilight and yet didn’t like The Host. They are both “Young Adult” but they are also in different sub-genres.

I’m working on two stories right now, both in completely different genres, but both “Young Adult.” I’d hate to stay firmly within “Fantasy” or “Romance” or “Horror.” With YA, I can move around, I can act freely, I can write what I feel like writing, and write about characters that I look up to and that I’d like to be like.

The age of YA characters is a magical age. Nobody likes moping character. Teenage characters don’t mope. They have spunk, verve, sass.

In other words, they have all the qualities we find good in people.

And what is a story without good characters?

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R P Channing started writing three years ago, but never published anything even after churning out over a million words of fiction. Thirst: Blood of my Blood is the first book he dared to publish. When asked why, he said, “Because it’s the first thing I wrote that my wife actually enjoyed reading.” When not hammering away (most literally) at his keyboard, he can be found buried in a book, reading anything from romance to horror to young adult to non-fiction to comedy.