{"id":52,"date":"2013-08-01T09:07:28","date_gmt":"2013-08-01T09:07:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/phenweb.wordpress.com\/?p=52"},"modified":"2025-06-19T19:19:02","modified_gmt":"2025-06-19T18:19:02","slug":"what-the-hell-is-ya","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/phenweb.co.uk\/es\/what-the-hell-is-ya\/","title":{"rendered":"What The Hell Is YA?"},"content":{"rendered":"

What the hell is YA as Wikipedia (https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Young-adult_fiction<\/a>) defines YA as the following:<\/p>\n

\u201cYoung-adult fiction<\/i><\/b> or young adult literature<\/b> (often abbreviated as YA<\/b>),[1]<\/a><\/sup> also juvenile fiction<\/b>, is fiction<\/a> written, published, or marketed to adolescents<\/a> and young adults<\/a>, although recent studies show that 55% of young-adult fiction is purchased by readers over 18 years of age.[2]<\/a><\/sup> The Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA<\/a>) of the American Library Association<\/a> (ALA) defines a young adult as someone between the ages of twelve and eighteen. \u00a0Authors and readers of young adult (YA) novels often define the genre as literature as traditionally written for ages ranging from twelve years up to the age of eighteen, while some publishers may market young adult literature to as low as age ten or as high as age twenty-five.[3]<\/a><\/sup> The terms young-adult novel<\/b>, juvenile novel<\/b>, young-adult book<\/b>, etc. refer to the works in the YA category\u201d<\/i><\/address>\n

\u00a0<\/i>So what exactly is YA?\u00a0\u00a0 Should I be writing for this market, which seems to dominate many categories or other genres or is this just a marketing gimmick? What distinguishes this genre from other categories? \u00a0When I was in this age category I read grown up fiction to prove<\/i> I was an adult.\u00a0 Children\u2019s books consisted of Enid Blyton and the classics of Robinson Crusoe<\/em>, Treasure Island<\/em> and Kidnapped<\/em>.\u00a0 I also read The Hobbit<\/em>.\u00a0 I have of course read as an adult the Harry Potter series with my own children but also for myself.\u00a0 Being from the Neolithic age pre-Internet, I regard all these stories as children\u2019s books.\u00a0 Classic books were what we studied at school in English classes, I love Shakespeare, I have read Jane Austin, some Dickens, are these YA?\u00a0 Do I have to reclassify Romeo and Juliet as a YA targeted story?\u00a0 So maybe it\u2019s my upbringing and age that causes my confusion and I am back to what exactly is this genre.\u00a0 I browsed the list of books on Goodreads: http:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/list\/tag\/young-adult<\/a> and I am none the wiser.\u00a0 There were 549 group discussions tagged as YA on Goodreads, but the definition still escapes me.\u00a0 I certainly do not wish to offend any of the clearly millions of YA readers or the thousands of YA Authors. \u00a0So what is it that distinguishes this category?<\/p>\n

Adult themes appear such as abuse, despair, and the struggles of modern or historical life.\u00a0 There are fantasy and Sci Fi stories, YA Romance, thrillers, short and long books.\u00a0 So is it the content I should look at or the language used.\u00a0 There may be non-explicit sex and violence, but many traditional genre books hold back from one or more of these.\u00a0 Relationships may not be consummated in YA, but Romance genre has lots of looking and gazing and very little actual sex.\u00a0 Is it the literary complexity of the language that dictates a YA novel or just the absence of swearing?\u00a0 One forum discussed the use of YA lead characters in the story as a guide, but that doesn\u2019t seem to hold true for all the stories.\u00a0 If I read a Sci Fi novel about teenagers fighting off werewolves is it YA, Sci-Fi, Horror, Fantasy, or a romance because one character dreams of kissing another?<\/p>\n

My books tend to have fairly robust, some would say explicit, sex and violence and some swearing, does that mean they cannot be considered as YA?\u00a0 My second book To The Survivors<\/em> has several YA age group characters.\u00a0 Is Lord of the Flies<\/em> a YA novel?\u00a0 Who decided that this category even exists?<\/p>\n

I turn to the marketing industry for guidance, and I am even more lost by tweens, teens, YA.\u00a0 They separate the three as individual target audiences.\u00a0 As adulthood is a cultural and legal definition, is a sixteen year old, a YA, a teenager, or a child?\u00a0 As a sixteen year old I positively avoided reading anything labelled as for a teenager, or a child.\u00a0 I wanted to be treated and saw myself as an adult, I read newspapers and adult<\/i> fiction.\u00a0 I read Heinlein, Asimov, Silverberg and Clarke in Sci Fi.\u00a0 I read Heller and Updike, but added Le Carre and Deighton, whilst at school we had more Shakespeare to name just a few. \u00a0\u00a0I also read Lady Chatterley’s Lover<\/em> and other D H Lawrence books and I sneaked in to watch the 18 rated films until they came on TV.\u00a0 I craved adult content that dealt with sex and violence not some pastiche of a 1950\u2019s Hollywood movie where Rock Hudson and Doris Day are married but sleep in separate beds wearing more clothes than the did in the day time for fear of falling foul of the censors.<\/p>\n

So is YA another form of censorship?\u00a0 The US TV market (excluding cable), gives us a guide, no sex, no swearing but endless violence is fine.\u00a0 Twilight<\/i> the books and movies have chaste kisses and dreamy looks whilst violence and death surround the protagonists.\u00a0 Is this YA? \u00a0If it is, then no thanks.\u00a0 If I ever write a children\u2019s story it will not have sex, violence or swearing.\u00a0 My other fiction will be written for\u2026. Well I suppose I am writing for me.\u00a0 I have blogged previously on this subject so I\u2019ll try not to repeat myself.\u00a0 For the YA market, I think if you are a YA then you will like my books because they feature adult themes, but they are not in YA.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not in YA, I don\u2019t understand the category maybe someone else can explain the definition of this alleged genre to me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What the hell is YA as Wikipedia (https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Young-adult_fiction) defines YA as the following: \u201cYoung-adult fiction or young adult literature (often abbreviated as YA),[1] also juvenile fiction, is fiction written, published, or marketed to adolescents and young adults, although recent studies show that 55% of young-adult fiction is purchased by readers over 18 years of age.[2] […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[14,33,115,195,202,234,290,298,320,498,619,639,778,833,834],"class_list":["post-52","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary-blogs","tag-adulthood","tag-american-library-association","tag-censorship","tag-dickens","tag-doris-day","tag-enid-blyton","tag-genres","tag-goodreads","tag-harry-potter","tag-neolithic","tag-romance","tag-sci-fi","tag-twilight","tag-young-adult-library-services-association","tag-young-adult-fiction"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/phenweb.co.uk\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/phenweb.co.uk\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/phenweb.co.uk\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phenweb.co.uk\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phenweb.co.uk\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/phenweb.co.uk\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/phenweb.co.uk\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phenweb.co.uk\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phenweb.co.uk\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}