power and adulthood in YA fiction

As I outline my new YA project, I’ve been thinking about adults and adulthood.

Generally speaking, YA characters in real-world settings are part of a web of power relationships. They’re children, so they have parents. They’re students, so they have teachers. If disaster strikes they can have people to turn to. Even if everyone abandons them, society provides a safety net; they can go to the police, and in the long term social services will (or should) place them with a new family.

Other settings might have no police, no social services, no schools, no responsible adults at all. A teenage character can be abandoned in much more profound ways, with literally nobody looking out for them. That character would have to take care of everything themselves -- like an adult. I’m thinking here of something like The Hunger Games. Although technically she has a surviving parent, Katniss has taken on the role of parent and provider for her family, and when she goes into the arena, she’s utterly alone. Nobody is coming to help her.

But the vast majority of YA novels I can think of place the characters in a world of responsible adults and mentor characters. Is that because a teenage character in an adult role is in fact in a meaningful way an adult? Do YA readers enjoy and sympathise with characters in positions of adult responsibility? If a teenage character is 100% independent and in no way looked after by an adult, is the story still YA?

I’ve been pestering the wonderful Teens Writing for Teens for their views because of my new YA project. I’m still thrashing out the details of my mostly-depopulated setting, but I’m pretty sure that everything the teenage characters used to rely on has gone byebye. No parents. No teachers. No police. No safety net. This is way beyond the classic Harry Potter situation in which there are loving adults, but the adults can’t or won’t always help, forcing the YA character to face their demons alone -- there are literally no supportive adults in this setting, period. One character is looking for a mythical adult figure who’ll save them all, but she eventually realises that this figure is just a myth, and if she wants any saving done she'll have to do it herself.

In this borderline post-apocalyptic setting, the YA characters themselves are having to (re)build aspects of their former society -- redistributing food, policing the streets, etc. I see this as a Battlestar Galactica-esque struggle to reclaim some kind of normality, starting with basic governmental functions, as a last-ditch attempt to avoid sliding into Lord of the Flies territory. (I admit constitutional rights and separation of powers are not obviously YA issues, but they’re fascinating, I swear!)

All this is absolutely fascinating to me and I think would make a fun YA novel, but I still haven’t read enough YA to feel truly confident in my genre knowledge. The difficulty I’m having in naming similar YA titles worries me. All good ideas have already been done; if something is uncommon or even unique in a genre, that’s probably because it’s a terrible idea.

What do you think? Is age what defines a YA character, or is it the social role of a young adult? Would strong characterisation and a compelling plot (hypothetically speaking, as I still have a lot to learn in that respect) be enough to sell you on this concept?

the challenge

Between November 05 and August 06, I wrote my apocalyptically terrible 220k second novel. (I was seventeen. Don’t judge me.) It was fun to write but a total trainwreck: redundancy problems and my inability to handle multiple viewpoints contributed to the ridiculous wordcount. I made a half-hearted attempt at revising it and then gave up. It was the last novel I ever wrote without an outline, and the last with multiple viewpoints. I didn’t complete another novel until March 09.

Now I’m going to rewrite it. From scratch. Without looking at the previous draft. Here’s what I’m planning to do:

• Aim for a wordcount of under 100k. I don’t have a length problem any more, and my last two novels both ended up around 80k, so I’m expecting this to be easy.
• Finish the outline. Then actually follow it. Outlines love me and want to be my friend.
• Tweak the setting.
• Keep characters and factions to a minimum. I have a redundancy problem, and the best fix is not to introduce unnecessary stuff in the first place.
  
• Switch the cast to all female. (Dystophil could have stopped this madness, but instead she encouraged me. Apparently there will have to be lots of girl-on-girl action.)

My new baby is called GLORY HUNTERS, and it’s full of attractive and terrifyingly unscrupulous women - one of whom has a master plan.