Back in 2020, I faced the bane of every writer’s existence: a blank page, in an empty notebook. I was starting my first novel for adults in years, and I always struggle to find a way into the story. Except this time, I had a secret weapon in my back pocket: I’d written three young-adult novels, and writing YA had taught me so much — and given my pen a whole new lease on life.
Don’t let anybody tell you that young-adult books are easy to write. YA is a huge challenge, for exactly the same reason that it’s become so overwhelmingly popular among teens and many adults. YA usually starts with a bang, and the pace doesn’t let up. Every scene has to carry the story and the relationships forward, and the prose needs to immerse you so deeply in the perspective of the protagonist(s) that you feel their joy and pain. The world-building in a YA novel is sharply defined and instantly recognizable, even if it’s a fantasy or a future hellscape. Everything is heightened and happening right now — which is why so many YA books feature present-tense narration.
When I dove into the intense mother-daughter story that became my upcoming novel, “Lessons in Magic and Disaster,” I brought all the skills and joie d’écrire that YA had given me.
I can’t remember the moment I discovered YA. Coming of age before its boom, I was obsessed with books for young people by Madeleine L’Engle, Daniel Manus Pinkwater and Judy Blume. I remember the first time I read “The Giver” by Lois Lowry, published in 1993; it’s a complex allegory about repression and social control, suffused with warmth from the central relationship between Jonas and the titular Giver.
After “The Giver,” there were a few other megahits that helped put YA on the map. But one book felt utterly seismic: “The Hunger Games” by Suzanne Collins. Its publication in 2008 launched a whole dystopian subgenre and became emblematic of the rising prominence of teen books. Shockingly violent and full of nuanced barbs about mass media and propaganda, “The Hunger Games” contains an internal monologue so immersive that you feel the clash between the face Katniss Everdeen must put on for the world and her actual emotions.
I bathed in the flood of YA dystopias that followed “The Hunger Games” — some hard-hitting, some comparatively feeble. But as much as I loved seeing young people do battle with oppression, I found myself chasing That Voice: the urgent, conflicted narration of someone thrown too young into the center of a hell-storm.
Any author must suspend disbelief at least as much as their readers, and the key to writing for teens is to treat their experiences as valid and important. The world is full of voices telling adolescents they don’t matter and don’t understand anything, so a good YA book shouldn’t talk down to teens or portray them as helpless. One huge challenge in writing for this audience is creating a protagonist who has a lot to learn, without ever letting the narrative judge this hero. That was probably the biggest lesson I learned from YA: how to create flawed characters whose perspective still feels all-encompassing.
In retrospect, the heyday of YA coincided with the golden age of the CW, which always seemed to have a dozen adaptations of YA novels in development at any given moment. A handful of these made it to air: “The 100,” “The Carrie Diaries,” “The Secret Circle,” and, of course, “The Vampire Diaries.” These shows, too, featured complex worlds, intense relationships and protagonists whose burning emotions drove the plot.
At a certain point, I started to burn out on dystopias, but then YA changed. Two lush, immersive fantasies hit my radar around the same time in 2012: “Bitterblue” by Kristin Cashore and “Seraphina” by Rachel Hartman. They featured complex politics and monstrous villains but also felt less oppressive: “Seraphina’s” eponymous hero is a musician rather than an archer, and music is at the center of the book.
I saw more YA books that were fun adventures rather than desperate battles against a monolithic evil. The book that persuaded me to try writing YA myself was 2017’s “Warcross” by Marie Lu, a thrill ride about a teen hacker taking part in future esports and uncovering a conspiracy. More recently, “Legendborn” by Tracy Deonn grapples with hereditary privilege and racism but also plays with the lore of King Arthur deftly and delightfully.
In the last several years, we’ve seen more blockbuster YA books come out of communities that had been shut out, including authors of color and queer authors. “It’s been incredible to watch LGBTQIA+ authors expand the boundaries of what YA can do,” Aiden Thomas, author of “The Sunbearer Trials,” told me. It’s a scary time for young LGBTQIA+ people, and a key focus of a lot of queer YA, says Thomas, is “how to face the monstrosities of the world without becoming monsters themselves — or, sometimes, what happens when they do.”
In spite of a recent backlash, the rise of more inclusive YA has felt every bit as much like a seismic shift as “The Hunger Games” did back in the day. It’s given teen books a new relevance, and a new energy.
Alas, sales of young-adult fiction have been declining since 2021, in part due to well-organized efforts to ban books. In 2024, sales were down 4.3% from the year before. At the same time, sales of fantasy books have skyrocketed, driven by a craze for “romantasy” — fantasy with a strong focus on romance.
My theory is that adult readers who used to choose YA are now gravitating toward romantasy, for many of the same reasons: They crave strong emotions and intense relationships, in an ornate world. Take Holly Black’s “The Cruel Prince,” one of my favorite recent YA books, which sometimes gets categorized as romantasy. “Popular YA and popular romantasy draw on some of the same tropes and feature characters who are often only a few years apart,” says Black.
Even if YA is on the wane, its influence is everywhere: It’s rewritten how we think about stories. I’m not the writer I was before I started tackling YA, and I couldn’t be more grateful.
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