YA Fiction, an Emerging Genre

As some of you readers may know, I am an aspiring author. Specifically I want to write Young Adult fiction. This is a growing genre which hasn't been around for a very long time. I believe I heard somewhere the first Young Adult genre novel was Go Ask Alice, a supposedly true diary of an anonymous teen who had a very big drug problem. Many people now believe it was written and published to scare kids away from drugs. But, that is not the point, the point is that the book was first printed in the 1970s. Do you see how recent that is?

Since then the world of YA fiction has been growing and expanding and forging its way through the world of literature. The point of this genre is to relate to young adults and write about things that would interest them and even get them interested in reading for later in life. I am such a big fan of these novels and the people who write them that I receive tweets from authors I like. This, other than helping me get a glimpse of what they do when they aren't writing, gives me a way of communicating with them. The people who write YA novels are really great with communicating with their target audience and I have a few ways to prove it.

1. The Nerdfighter Phenomenon: John Green(author of Looking for Alaska; An Abundance of Katherines; Paper Towns; and Will Grayson,Will Grayson) started making regular Youtube videos with his brother Hank and since then the following of these two brothers has grown to immense numbers. The brothers interact with this group of people they have named Nerdfighters (nerds who fight to decrease world suck) to help out in communities and just have a lot of fun.

2. My Interview with E. Lockhart: E. Lockhart is a YA author who knows how to write romance and also how to expand the way young adults think. In her novel, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, she presents the ideas of the panopticon and secret societies to the reader. The panopticon,which was originally the architectural design for a prison in which the guards were placed in a centralized area and the prisoners were in rooms that formed a circle around the guards. This made it possible for the guards to see the prisoners at any given moment, thus creating the fear that they are always watching. I found this concept interesting, especially when she applied this to the way we view other people and the "rules" of society. Since I liked it so much I used the idea for a research paper and casually asked E., via Twitter, if I could get an online interview with her. She responded by telling me that she normally doesn't do interviews, but since she was on Twitter at the time, she would let me ask a few questions. This was one of the best moments in my life. Not only had an author I loved replied to my tweet, but she was willing to let me interview her as well. I have to say, if I had any doubts about wanting to write YA fiction, they were shattered in that instant. I knew I someday wanted to be the person who made young adults think, really think. And I also wanted to be the person to give them the time of day, like so many other celebrities neglect to do.

Those are some of the reasons why I love YA literature and how it got me to want to be a writer as well.