 Good afternoon everybody. I'm Betsy Peck-Learned. I'm the Interim Dean of the Library here. Some of you have heard my spiel before, so I apologize for that. I wanted to welcome you to our first spring semester talking in the library series here, and featuring Derek Nikitas. And Adam Braver, our writer-in-residence, is going to introduce him. But I just had a couple things to talk to you about today. One is, I wanted to mention the other two talking in the library events that are coming up. One is the fiction writer Greg Jackson, and he'll be here on March 29th. And on April 11th, Claire Massoud will be here. She'll be leading the Vermont Fellowship Workshop for some of our creative writing students, students that have applied for the fellowship. And she will be speaking on April 11th at Rogers Free Library. We're trying to get some collaborative events going with the Rogers Free. So keep those in mind and you'll be seeing posters and all kinds of them. So today we're meeting in this Mary Teft White Center's new instant theater. And Mary Teft, or Happy White as she was finally known, was an alumna of the university. She earned her degree very late in life. I think she was in her 70s. And she visited the campus often. And it was her generous endowed gift that allowed us to create the original Mary Teft White Cultural Center which was this whole area without the glass walls and the fancy furniture a decade ago. And her hope was that this series would introduce students to professionals and faculty and accomplished individuals who could share their professional and personal goals. So that they would inspire and motivate students to pursue their careers. And we are also grateful to her son John Hayeson White Jr. who was here this fall. He spoke and I think he was the first speaker in our series in the fall. He is continuing his mother's legacy through supporting the transformation of this room. So he donated funds in order for us to be able to create a really high tech space here. And there is abundant technology. You can just see the displays around the room this is really kind of a state of the art room. And it can transform. The reason it's called instant theater is it can transform from a presentation space to like this to a student collaborative space. And if you come here during the day you will see lots and lots of students studying in this room. It's a little warm today but normally it's a nice space to work in. We think we need a mural though. What do you say? Especially when the screen isn't down it's pretty bland. So I'd like to introduce John Braver. He's going to introduce Derek. Thanks for coming out. It's especially on an icky day. I know some of you are out here with guns in your backs and stuff but either way I'm glad you came out. So and I also want to add the Greg Jackson that Kevin Marshawn has a lot riding on Greg Jackson being here. So you guys have to make sure you put that on your calendar. It doesn't have egg on his face. In my field meaning the arts almost inevitably the question of what makes something literary or serious writing versus popular writing. I'm almost inevitably the question of what makes something literary or serious writing versus popular writing and vice versa always comes up. When I teach summer workshops rarely is there a time when the issue isn't raised. To some the answer comes in a distinction between the character-driven work versus the thought-centered work. For others a difference lies in genre. Each would be a perfectly fine answer I suppose if expedience was an issue and a simplified answer was all that anyone had time for. If only it were that easy. If only the great detective writer Dashel Hammett or the legendary pulp writer Jim Thompson didn't write works that were every bit as literary as contemporaries such as Fitzgerald and Nathaniel West. And if only television the ultimate lower form. Didn't in fact have some of the most artful and innovative writing currently seen on any screen. And then of course there isn't the addition of YA to the conversation. Literature or literature in that kind of way for young adults perhaps the answer to all these questions lies somewhere in the notion of the artful. That is how the work is constructed and approached from an artful position in terms of notions of structure, language, depth of character, intent, metaphor, etc. My experience in working with students interested in genre writing is that even when their resolve remains steadfast about their particular genre thinking about it as a piece of art rather than just a story almost always makes it better. I'm really glad we have Derek Nikitas here today to among other things hear him help us parts out these distinctions. And I can't think of a better person to bring into this conversation. Putting aside for the moment his MFA in fiction and his PhD in English and his professorship at URI, we will look to Derek the writer. Derek's first two books the Edgar nominated Pires and then the second book the Long Division were quote adult thrillers while his most recent extra life is a YA sci-fi thriller. There are also allegedly some zombie stories. Derek is someone who sees and understands the artful yet also will speak of the liberation that so-called genre writing allows. He is someone who is thought considerably about the relationship of the forms both as a scholar and a writer. And Derek is someone who can contribute perspective to this ongoing discussion. Derek Nikitas. Okay, can you hear me alright? Hopefully my voice will hold up. Hopefully my voice will hold up. I'm on the tail end of a cold here and a little concerned about it but I think I'll be okay. First I'd like to thank the Dean of the Library and Adam Braver for inviting me here today. I'm really excited to be part of this conversation when I talk to Adam about what I should do for this. He did mention some of the things that he talked about in his introduction just a minute ago and the idea that many of you might be interested in dealing with or thinking about the distinctions between popular fiction, literary fiction, young adult fiction and all those things in between. I'm not sure that at the end of it all I'll be able to clarify anything for anybody because these things continue to be questions that I ask myself a lot but they do keep my process of writing interesting to me and exciting to be thinking about with each new project what different approaches I can take and how I can keep changing what I'm doing. One of the most common pieces of advice that I hear from other writers has to do with this notion of finding your voice. You heard this before, it's so important for the young writer to find his or her voice and I've always thought that that was an odd thing to say because I haven't, I've been working at this since I was a teenager and I still haven't found a voice. I'm just interested in using different voices from time to time in each subsequent story or each subsequent novel so I've always, you know there are certainly authors who have a distinctive voice and you see it over and over again in all of their work and that can be really interesting but at the same time there are other authors I think of folks like Michael Shabon or Juliana Baggett, Joyce Carolotes, Jonathan Lethem who keep changing what they do from novel to novel and keep negotiating the boundary lines between what's considered art or literary fiction and what's considered popular fiction or whatever you want to call it. So I figured that's what I'd talk about today and I'd do it by way of giving you a little bit of a background in my own experience as a writer and my own negotiation of this question. So as Adam mentioned a minute ago I got my MFA in creative writing back in 2000 at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and so I went through a year three year program that was very much focused on teaching me how to be a literary writer and that means specifically teaching me how to be the kind of writer who would be published in who would be able to publish short stories in literary magazines university literary magazines or small presses and things like that and I, you know embraced it almost entirely. I did have the pleasure of having a couple of classes with some different kinds of visiting writers who had a somewhat different approach to what I just mentioned that gave me a different perspective especially because I think like a lot of people I made my way into, I was a very early writer I was very interested in writing even before I was ten years old and the models that I had at that time were things that would have been interested to a kid growing up in the 80s so there was a fantasy, YA as we think of it now didn't really exist you know you had a wrinkle in time and things like that and the schools would assign to you but nothing that seemed marketed directly toward kids and so most of my reading material was you know Dean Coonson, Stephen King and Anne Rice was a little older than ten my parents wouldn't let me read that stuff until I was a teenager and you know big fat fantasy novels by Terry Brooks and Tolkien and stuff like that so I came into creative writing as a genre or fiction writing as a genre from that perspective and it took me a couple of semesters to embrace the idea of working on the sentence level you know the artistry of the sentence, the artistry of the character and interiority and all of those things became especially important to me and I tended to embrace writers who kind of skirted a line between the two like I remember being pretty obsessed with John Irving for a while he seems to write the same book over and over again these days so I'm a little less interested in him but he was one who had sort of a popular repeal at the same time that he took his art very seriously and it wasn't until after I graduated with my MFA that I and I was on my own that sort of terrifying period of time soon after the MFA when you no longer have workshops with peer students you know for example I remember specifically he still this fellow writer is still a good friend of mine so I don't mean any ill will toward him at all but I remember submitting a story for workshop in which there was a gun and his comment in workshop was it's kind of cheesy to have a gun in a story at all it doesn't even get fired it's just the idea of doing that made it pushed it into the seedy realm of genre fiction and I thought that was a pretty odd comment but that was kind of the exemplary of the world that I was in and so when I graduated I kind of had to think about how I wanted to negotiate this myself and I published a number of short stories in your traditional literary magazines but I also was having a lot of trouble with it you know I totally embraced the idea that you have to keep submitting things over and over again and I compiled my massive rejection letters that all my professors told me that I would have to compile before I started thinking that I was a real writer you know that sort of thing but it still seemed to take me 25 different times sending one story out to different magazines and getting nothing but form rejections until I started submitting to magazines that were considered more obviously genre magazines especially Ellery Queen Mystery magazine I don't know if any of you are familiar with this thing but it's you know it shows up in I would say Borders and Barnes & Noble but they don't have Borders anymore so you know it's Barnes & Noble and some other grocery stores I suppose from time to time it's a very old fashioned Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen there's two like old fashioned mystery magazines and I thought I didn't really have much of a chance there either because I wasn't writing old fashioned Alfred Hitchcock kind of stories but I submitted one story to them and they accepted it within a week and then I submitted a second one and they accepted it within a couple of days and then I started thinking what's going on here is something is off and it wasn't that it wasn't that Ellery Queen was you know some kind of low rent venue it was very popular and very widely known and still is and so that started to clue me into the notion I was pretty thick about it for a while to clue me into the notion that maybe I wasn't the kind of writer that my MFA program was expecting me to be and it kind of groomed me to be then I started because I was getting interest from agents one of the things I learned along the way is you know if you publish stories in high profile literary magazines sometimes the agents will come to you which happened a lot of times they'd always come to me and then I'd send them something and they'd say actually on second thought I forget so that happened a lot but I did eventually find an agent with my short stories and he started helping me out with his short stories as any agent that I've ever heard from will tell you you know once they get a hold of you they sort of say enough with the short story stuff let's get a novel going here and that's what I did so after about three or four years out of my MFA I started working on novels and you know started a lot of them and would get feedback from my agent at the time telling me things most of which had to do with the marketability of the book because I happened to choose an agent who was interested in you know selling to a major New York press instead of small presses who'd be less interested in marketability and more interested in artistry and you know to me growing up on Stephen King and Dean Coons and all of that other kind of stuff I was still wanted to you know have I still wanted to work in I still wanted to have that kind of wider appeal I suppose so eventually I put together finished a draft of this novel Piers which is which does something that I've always been really fascinated with not just writing in a genre but blending genres bringing genres together I think of Game of Thrones for example takes a fairly classic fantasy medieval kingdom kind of idea and combines it with a political thriller so that it has all of the tropes of a political thriller at the same time that it has all of the tropes of fantasy and it's through that combination through bringing it's basically like fusion in restaurants right like bringing Italian and Korean food together suddenly you have some new and interesting thing and so I love the idea of that kind of fusion you know going all the way back to Star Wars which is you know people call it science fiction but it's not it's a fantasy mixed with a western mixed with Japanese samurai stories basically and a bunch of other things but I think those are the three prominent ones and of course Star Wars was hailed as something very original when it first came out but really what it was was a combination of things and so I was interested in doing that so I took a fairly straightforward mystery who done it you know there's a murder and somebody has to figure out who did it and put it together with a fantasy story that was kind of bringing in these magical realist elements of Norse mythology and all that other kind of stuff and you know people thought it was crazy for doing that sort of thing the agent that I had said this is like the fifth time said this is completely unmarketable no one will buy this and so I dropped the agent or we sort of mutually agreed that it just wasn't going to work out because I couldn't I couldn't reach that level of writing something that's just absolutely popular fiction for him so then I worked on the novel a little bit longer I got another call from an editor at St. Martin's who said I really enjoyed your story in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine do you have a novel and by the way the I've been I was taught this in my MFA program by a professor who was mainly worked in the business from a publishing background more than a writing background he had a sort of weird storied history he was Jack Kerouac's agent and also a producer for Fragile Rock later on so that's how varied his resume was but one of the things that I remember distinctly him saying is if an editor calls you up and says do you have a novel the answer is yes and then when you hang up you hurry up and finish it or start writing it you don't say no so luckily I was pretty far along the way but I wasn't finished yet so I said yeah I have a novel and he you know after a couple of months I finished it up and sent it to him and he wanted it so I had to find it this is the backwards this isn't how it's supposed to work at all he's supposed to get an agent first and then the agent chops the story around or the novel around it gets it finds a publisher for you hopefully but in this instance it went the other way around I found an editor first and then I needed an agent to broker the deal so to speak and that's what I did I got a two book deal with a class that in St. Martin's called Minateur which is specifically geared toward the mystery and crime noir genre they publish a lot of books in crime noir and things like that and so the book came out as a crime noir book and I still hadn't hit me entirely that that's what my genre was nor had it hit me that the expectation would be that the second book would be also in crime noir genre because this is a thing that happens you know you publish a book in a certain genre and if it does okay which this one did because it had the I was really lucky to get nominated for an Edgar award which is the big prize in mystery writing in the United States and so there was a certain degree of exposure because of that and that made it that sort of pushed me into that position at a much smaller level than what Stephen King did early on in his career but if you read about his first couple of books he talks about the same thing after Carrie was published and did so well many many many times better than mine did did so well then he's then he got a lot of pressure to he didn't consider himself a horror novelist he just considered himself a writer but he started to get a lot of pressure to submit horror novels he had actually two novels ready to go after Carrie and his agent told him to go with Salem's Lot and that kind of sealed his fate so to speak from time to time he does publish things that are not horror but for the most party sticks with it so once the second novel came out something interesting happened which was that it didn't do very well it was I guess a much more conventional crime thriller I was doing some weird things some kind of experimental things with the structure that didn't quite hit exactly right and so when my deal with St. Martins was over I was thinking about doing various things none of which were really following it up with yet another crime novel because I didn't feel like I felt like I was kind of done with it I felt like I'd said what I wanted to say and didn't want to go there again and that period was especially strange and I kept having a lot of false starts kind of thinking about what I was going to do sometimes I thought that I would just try to write another crime novel and see what would happen but at other times I'd have these other ideas because I was much more interested in dealing in messing around with genre I'd have fantasy ideas and science fiction ideas there was a back in 2008 I had an idea for a zombie novel and I actually started writing it and I sent it the first 50 pages to St. Martins and they were like remember this was 2008 they were like well it's good but zombies I don't know it's sort of way old fashioned isn't it I excised part of it for a short story that appeared in a zombie anthology but I never went back to the book and now it's too late so I was a little bit ahead of the curve on that one and should have stuck to my guns I guess and seen what happened so eventually I came around to the idea of writing a young adult novel partly for commercial reasons partly I wanted to see if I could really write a novel that was geared toward a specific audience that had a mass appeal and to see if I could actually do it because I was actually doubting that I could do this thing that my first agent kept telling me that I couldn't there was always that itch to get it right at the end of it all I'm not even sure if I did get it right or not but you know I tried so I had this idea I've had this idea floating around for a long time about this very specific kind of time travel situation which is more like where it's one day and the character keeps going back in time so it would be kind of structurally interesting because the characters would keep going through the same time period with things changed and so forth so it was a little odd structurally and I don't remember exactly the moment when I decided that this novel should be a young adult novel other than this feeling that I had I tend to get ideas plot ideas first and then decide what kind of character would best fit into that plot idea and for years I'd had ideas about putting an adult character into this situation and it just wasn't working until I decided to put a young adult the 16 year old into the situation and then suddenly the idea of a like a control free 16 year old who wants to you know be a filmmaker and all this other kind of just gelled together with this idea and so I was able to bring the character together with the story idea itself and put together this YA thing. So having absolutely no experience in YA other than having a lot of students over the years I used to teach novel writing courses when I taught at Eastern Kentucky University for a while you know I had like three novel writing courses and invariably most of my students or at least 50% of my students wanted to write young adult novels and I felt ill at ease advising them on how to write young adult novels because I was not a writer of young adult novels and I knew very little about it so I sought to fill that gap in my experience and see what I could figure out. What I discovered was you know I did the research to find out what constitutes a young adult novel, what makes it different from an adult novel and I read a good number of young adult novels. The most popular ones I guess this is probably true in all cases but the most absolutely popular ones like Twilight and Hunger Games I found awful. You know Twilight is just unbearable but Hunger Games is a little bit better but the character is so bland and uninteresting that I just couldn't get into it at all and then I had a friend who had read all three of them and I said you know I got through the first one is there should I read the next two and he said no all she does is fall unconscious a lot and then all of the interesting thing happens while she's unconscious and then she wakes up and it already happens so it's really not that interesting. But I did begin to find young adult writers that were very interesting to me. The one exception I think to hugely popular being terrible is John Green. I think John Green's work is both popular and pretty darn good especially The Fault in Our Stars and Looking for Alaska and so reading John Green was really sort of an eye-opener to see that yes you can kind of have it both ways you can write something that is artistically fulfilling to you at the same time as angling a story toward a certain kind of audience but of course John Green writes realism and my interest was in science fiction so there's a few other authors like Joe Schreber who wrote this little book called Aurevoir Crazy European Chick which seems ridiculous but I read it and it was the sort of fast-paced thriller novel that really opened my eyes to how to structure a novel like the kind of novel that I was interested in. So I want to stop here for a second and make this a little bit more collaborative because I've been talking for too long and ask you the same question I asked myself when I sat down to write this book what makes a young adult novel? What is a young adult novel that an adult novel isn't or vice versa I suppose? How many of you are taking creative writing classes? So a good number of you. Is it a question you've asked yourself before? No? I'm looking at it more and I see a lot of young people in stories but I don't think that necessarily makes it young adult because younger people want to know what is going to be in that kind of thing so I'm trying to figure out like is it the character? Does the character have to be young and naive or can it be older and just have that more naive look at it? Yeah and so that seems to be the first and most obvious area that you'd inquire about is the age of the protagonist and I think one of the very few things that we can say for sure about young adult novels is that the protagonist probably needs to be a teenager. I'm not familiar with too many young adult novels that would be about adults or having adult protagonist but then obviously as you insinuated or said outright there are a lot of novels for adults that have teenager protagonists or young protagonists to kill a mockingbird for example and so the question becomes even if you have a young person as the protagonist what other qualities have to be in place for it to be considered a young adult novel? Yeah palatable that's a good word, I like it I did read a lot about exactly what constitutes a palatable and where you should be on that line and then you start thinking about what kind of compromises you might have to make as a writer to to angle this novel or the story toward a young adult and in one respect you might consider that selling out or pandering or whatever but it's not that much different from the very same thing that we do to ourselves no matter what kind of piece of writing we're doing we create boundaries for ourselves in all of our writing we decide to write in a certain point of view for example or we decide to write in a certain time period so we are always creating these I don't think very many of us ever come to a piece of fiction with absolute open mindedness we're always giving some boundaries to ourselves about this so this boundary, the boundary of palatability was perhaps something slightly imposed from the outside but at the same time I saw it as a kind of challenge so I guess the next question becomes what do we mean by palatable and what makes some novels palatable for young adults and some not I guess there are some dark themes that are the most popular I'm not so sure of tragedy and tragedy here you want this, that's not really the task of disappointments but maybe I actually spent a lot of time thinking about that as well and I noticed something very interesting, my presupposition my presupposition was very much like yours that if it was going to be young adult fiction so the first two novels that I wrote were frankly really dark they were crime noir from time to time I still get reviews on Goodreads and stuff and the last one the last one that I got was in French so I ran it through I don't know French so I ran it through Google Translate and at the very end it says that Nikitas removed a piece of my heart by the end of the story it was a good review and I thought man is that a mistranslation or what, so there's this so my experience and some of the things that have been said about my work is that it is incredibly dark especially the second novel is very downbeat and so I thought if I'm going to write a young adult novel then I really need to make sure that I do something a little bit more upbeat and life affirming and I ended up doing that I mean the novel that I did write is far more it still has dark themes but it's far more upbeat and life affirming so I did do that however one thing that I did discover is that my presupposition about young adult novels was just not the case there are some really dark depressing young adult novels there are a lot of dark depressing young adult novels with very little life affirming qualities to them and I think the distinction is between what we now consider you know you can go back into the 80s and mid 90s and all the way back through the 60s and find novels that are considered you know Judy Bloom and you know folks like that you can go back and find those and nowadays those novels would definitely be considered young adult but the young adult market up until about the turn of the century just maybe a little bit before the turn of the century was filtered through the schools so the books that would reach the hands of young adults were books that were kind of sanctioned by the schools and vetted so that they did have life affirming qualities and often were connected to something like Johnny Tremaine or something you know often connected to some kind of historical event and so they were very much connected to the schools but so I don't you know enough research to know exactly what happened here but some time around Twilight and so forth the publisher started marketing directly to young adults rather than through the schools and so that barrier of vetting work and making sure that it has life affirming qualities and making sure that it has some degree of quality at all kind of fell away and it became more about what do teenagers want and what teenagers want a lot of times is really dark and depressing stuff like one of the most popular books of the last ten years or so was Jay Esher's 13 Reasons Why which is a series of cassette tapes that a girl who commits suicide leaves to her friend to explain why she killed herself so it's a 250 page novel that's just a long explanation of why this girl killed herself because of all the horrible things that she went through not exactly I mean maybe there's an uplifting ending I don't remember but not exactly a life affirming situation so I was surprised to discover that some suppositions I had about about content were really no longer true which was freeing but also surprising you had your hand people the advantage that the strength of the younger generation is the ability to relate to the reader and at that point the the younger reader is usually in high school where there's a lot of stuff to do so they usually want to start to relate to that something with the rebellion and stuff like an hunger game and a rebellion against the capital and stuff something that I'd really like to tell you again how usually they have issues with like how they're going to tell you what to do and stuff yeah it's no surprise that we have so many of these young adult novels about totalitarian governments the analog for parents is just so painfully obvious but you know at the same time there are these reoccurring themes that I think we need to think about and address if we're looking at young adult you always have to be careful about how you say this because there's always exceptions but there's a more limited scope I suppose of areas of interest for young adults and so you are confined a little bit in that regard you can usually find metaphors like totalitarian governments for example to get at what you're trying to address with young people other ideas that you have about young people feel like they don't have very much control so in young adult novels it seems like something always happens to them they might not go out seeking for a change or something but it comes to them and it might result in them gaining more power on their own once this thing happens to them but they never had control of the first thing at the beginning the agency of the protagonist he doesn't go out seeking for the letter to Hogwarts so you mentioned Harry Potter which causes me to pause and perhaps make a further distinction because one of the things I learned very quickly is when we talk about I have a colleague at URI who talks about my children's book and every time he does I'm like it's not a children's book exactly but you can't get there somehow but there are just you know there are children's books there are middle grade books which I think is what Harry Potter is and middle grade is a specific genre than there's a young adult and more recently there's been this tentative nod toward what they're trying to do a new genre called new adult you heard about this it's very much like young adult but it's usually undergraduates you know college age people usually very realistic fiction you're not going to find a lot of horror or science fiction usually pretty sexy not a young adult novel but a new adult novel but from what I have been able to see it doesn't seem to have really taken off I think because perhaps you guys, you college students have a lot of other reading that you have to do and so maybe new adult isn't catching on like they expected it to but there are further distinctions between middle grade and young adult that we often times have to address one of them being I think that middle grade still very much is vetted through schools and through publishing companies like Scholastic who pay minds to the to the thematic issues and whether or not their life affirming and uplifting etc and of course the protagonist is going to be a little bit younger and the reading is going to be a little easier other observations? it goes toward this and you mentioned Kilmahkiller and I think of books like a separate piece or Catcher and the Ride had the category a young adult existed at the time they would for marketing purposes maybe going straight there I wonder are there any authors maybe Green or others you might think of who are almost being denied a broader readership because the marketing mechanism drives them toward young adult because of their young protagonist and the kind of life situations I just wonder if that category is almost too restrictive for some writers I don't think so and part of the reason is that when you actually look at the sales records most people who buy young adult fiction are adults about 60% of the purchasers in their 30s or older and so there really isn't that boundary line where you would think if John Green were only marketed to adults and adults would buy his books adults do very regularly buy his books in larger quantities than young adults do I think the reverse is probably more true I have an author friend Megan Abbott who writes these crime thriller novels about her last few have been about young women in high school in these bizarre sort of context so one is called dare me which is about she calls it cheerleading meets fight club so it's about the cutthroat world of the very dark and cutthroat world of high school cheerleading when there's body dysmorphia and injury and all this other and peer pressure and all this other stuff that happens it was it did very well but it was marketed to an adult audience and I don't know that I don't know that it would have done even better if it had been marketed to young adults as well I don't have a clear answer for you but certainly I do think that young adults has not for the most part been an impediment to getting adults to buy books in fact adults who there are a lot of folks who are not necessarily readers Lee Child the thriller writer Lee Child published something in The Guardian last week about this about the fact that Amazon is creating brick and mortar stores and he published a piece about that but an ancillary issue was how many people actually go on Amazon to seek out a book digitally virtually versus people who are impulse buyers at grocery stores and the vast majority of books get bought on impulse at grocery stores they don't actually get mostly bought on Amazon because most people don't go on Amazon and find books that they want you know like seek out books that they've heard about they usually just stick with the authors that they know and they all that person James Patterson has a new book out I'll buy it today I didn't even know that probably seems weird to most of us because we live in this little bubble of people who go on Amazon or wherever you know go into bookstores and seek out books that we want to read but that's sort of the majority of people and so a lot of the authors who do well are young adult authors who are in that kind of category whose books get picked up at the grocery store and so forth I forget where I was going with that but it's an interesting piece of information well here's a couple of other things that I noticed along the way what was the word that you used? I picked up this word from an essay that I read which was impatience I think it's a nicely neutral word for the most part to describe certain things so there's a couple of things I think that readers of young adult novels whether they're adults or not are slightly impatient about one of those things is extended passages of interiority or going into the character's head for a long long period of time that's more of what you'd find in adult novels or literary novels and so one of the restrictions that I knew that I had going from writing adult novels to young adult was being more conscientious about the economy of the interiority that I use this was the first novel that I wrote in first person but which lends itself even more to interiority in some ways but I had to be careful about exactly how much I included because I knew that the story you know interiority has many important qualities but one of the things that it does is it tends to slow down the forward momentum of the novel so that's one of the reasons the other thing that it is said that young adults have a little bit of impatience for is poetic language right or lyrical language the kind of thing that takes a little bit longer to understand perhaps or to parse out all the meanings of if you're reading you know you can spend 20 minutes on a Melville sentence if you want but that Melville wouldn't be a good writer of young adult fiction maybe so I had to think about that as well that was really the toughest one for me because I had grown up or I had been through the MFA program and I'm very attached to lyrical writing and beauty on the sentence level and so to be hamstrung a little bit in that regard was tough at first but once I got used to one of the things about putting it in first person was that I had to be bound to the way that a 16 year old would express himself and so that helped me get over that hump a little bit that some of the things if I wrote too lyrical a sentence it would be showing off it would be the author showing off and it wouldn't be true to the character and therefore I would have a good reason to revise it and rethink what I was doing the other thing that I'd say the other two things have to do with the narrative perspective one of which is an almost total lack of retrospective if you talked about this at all in your creative writing course is retrospection the idea that especially when you have a first person narrator even in third person sometimes the character may be the character who's going through the actions in the story is much younger than the character who's telling the story if there's a great degree of retrospection almost all stories have a little bit of a degree of retrospection because there's always some distance between when the story is being told and when the events of the story happen there's some span of time but young adult novels are impatient about extended degrees of retrospection they want the narrator to still be a teenager so probably the most retrospection you can have is a year or two if you go any further into that and you start writing a story from an adult perspective looking back on the childhood then you have that issue of how well can an adult writer reader connect to a character like that who has a great degree of retrospection so that was difficult that's why a lot of young adult novels are in present tense I don't know if you've noticed this but it's a weird device because it makes no sense whatsoever I think the Hunger Games is in first person present tense so if you think about it it presupposes that Katniss is telling this story at the moment that it is happening to her while she's trying to defend herself from being killed by other teenagers on the battlefield it doesn't make any sense she would have to have told the story after the fact in retrospective so there's a bit of a I mean we're used to it because it's a convention that we accept but it's weird when you think about it so there does have to be certain retrospective even if it's in first person it's a bit of a cheat but putting it in present tense is a way of signaling that you're really not considering retrospective at all and then the last one is sort of connected but it has to do with nostalgia and so Ernest Klein published a novel a couple of years ago that was very very popular called Ready Player One and it was mostly a pop culture novel with a slightly post apocalyptic elements to it and the protagonist was a young person if I remember and it was there wasn't a lot of interior it was very easy to read every sign pointed it to being marketed as a young adult novel as far as I could see but the one thing that made it different is that the main characters whole story arc has to do with being nostalgic about all of these things from the 80s like Back to the Future and early Atari video games and all this other kind of stuff story elements that would really not be of interest to most young adult readers and so that was the one that nostalgic sense or looking back to an earlier period of time was the one element I think that made a difference for Ready Player One it did very very well regardless of how it was marketed but it was one case where I think that one extra element of nostalgia made all the difference that doesn't mean that you can't write a young adult novel that's a period piece and a number of successful YA period pieces from Libba Bray's The Diviners which I think takes place in the 30s or even earlier than that I don't remember exactly when and that's okay as long as the author does all the work to situate the reader into the time period and makes a real effort to show the young adult reader that young adults in the 1930s were dealing with the same sort of issues that you are now and there's really no difference it's not nostalgia so much as it is bringing the reader into that time period so that was that was it those were the elements that I thought about those were my kind of guiding principles for writing the book and this is what came out of it and that's my spiel so to speak I don't know I suppose I should open it up to questions if we have time we were talking about how you had to set those brand over the audience I was thinking about like how maturity plays into things and that maturity is very different for every young adult and every person in general and so how do you think about tone and dialogue so that you don't feel like you're excluding or talking down to the audience in an attempt to make it something very local John Green has said a lot about this because he gets slacks sometimes for the way that his characters speak reviewers will say these people do not sound like they're 15, 16 years old they sound like they're 35 with master's degrees and his perspective is always that one thing that we do have to accept is when you write a young adult novel you're not marketing to all the young adults you're marketing to adults once again as I mentioned earlier but you're also marketing to a specific subset of young adults who are readers and so that presupposes a certain amount of interest and all of that kind of stuff and so I tend to air toward John Green's perspective on things which is that there's no reason to talk down to aside from the issues of impatience that I mentioned a couple of minutes ago then in terms of dialogue or the complexity of a character's emotional state or something like that there's no reason to talk down to a young adult audience and most audiences will appreciate if it didn't seem like you were pandering to a less intellectual audience does that cover it? I'm wondering also on another level you can get how much that's changing now in terms of the situations and often might write about still not run up against that betting process you mentioned earlier one of the first concerns I had, we didn't even get into this, was content like if there were ratings for books what would the book be rated and much like I was surprised to discover that many young adult novels are pretty dark I was also surprised to discover that many young adult novels are pretty racy and pretty violent the only thing that I can really see is you know they don't want you to swear a lot so you have to find ways to get around that within reason if it's ridiculous to, I actually had an early reader who read one draft of this book who saw me like bending over backwards to try to avoid having my character swear and she was just like come on I mean it's obvious that what this person means to say here so just go ahead and say it so most of the time I didn't worry about it too too much mainly because I didn't create characters who were going to swear all the time but in really high intensity situations maybe they would but I have read passages in young adult novels that in terms of sexuality it made me blush and in terms of violence are just as crazy as a Quentin Tarantino movie and so I think part of that part of that shift from marketing through schools and directly to young adult audiences has gotten rid of that boundary line in terms of content so there's very little that I see that would be restricted which creates an issue I think for parents who don't because movies and video games have rating systems and it's always been sort of the idea with books that you know it's mostly your imagination interacting with the story so you can only be as bad as your imagination is I don't know if I necessarily agree with that you know it does create a situation where parents don't really have a clear sense necessarily of what are in some of these books which is why you have these situations of banned books somebody usually you know in the Midwest or something somebody will read their kids book and discover oh my god there's this passage in the book that I think is going a little too far I think it probably does have to be some interaction between the kids and the parents about what's in the book so writing, times of the day do you write in an environment that's for you to do something do you write a computer, do you hand write okay so when I'm working on a project I write every day I won't pretend that I write every day in between maybe a couple months we'll go by in between projects but when I do start a project I think it's vitally I'm not the first person to say this but I think it's vitally important to write every day at the same time for the same period of time so that you train your brain to be prepared for that moment and not get ready early in the morning when all of the trials and tribulations of life have yet to seep into my consciousness is the ideal time to do that because that's when the subconscious is most available and again I'm just reiterating things that I've heard a lot about the writer say that I firmly believe because they have been true for me so for the most part I do write every day especially when I'm writing the first draft of a project it does get a little spottyer once I start revising I'm a planner which is another thing that really set me apart from most of my MFA peers and professors most of the people that I talk to in academia in literary writing talk about you know the the freeing way and the process of discovery that happens when you just let the work take you wherever it wants to go I know that that must be true and I absolutely believe that it is true for people but for me the end result is writer's block and so I pretty meticulously plan the work that I do you know ultimately I think it's the same thing I don't we all at some point freely brainstorm are writing it doesn't you know but for me once it comes down to writing the story on a sentence by sentence level I want that brainstorming to be done because I want to have my mind free to write this paragraph and write the sentences I want to know what I'm doing but in the process of writing the outline then I'm completely open-minded and free as to where the story goes but once that outline is solidified I stick to it pretty well that doesn't mean it doesn't change here and there and little bits and pieces but for the most part I stick to it it wasn't something that came to me I didn't know and I do this to my I used to do this by the end of the semester they know the whole process is not to convince them that planning is the right thing to do the whole process is to put them through it to see if they discover for themselves that it's the right thing to do or if they discover for themselves that it's just the wrong thing to do for them unfortunately the ones who discover that it's the wrong thing to do have probably killed a project in the process but at least then they know that it's important to try all the different strategies for writing and some of them they learn that they are planners and they swear by I think most people don't try it until they're forced to and then the ones who take to it very well discover a much less laborious process another thing I remember from my MFA program was how long my professors would talk about their 25 drafts it took me four years to write this short story I just sit there thinking I don't you know one life to live man I don't have time I don't have time to write 25 drafts so for me one of the one of the good things about planning ahead of time is that my first couple of drafts are that outline and it's obviously a much much shorter draft of something than the full-fledged novel and so when it comes time to revise the novel I'm only looking at it again hopefully only like five or six more times thanks for coming out