Adam Selzer (sigh, he’s so adorable. Check out Sparks if you haven’t already.) posted this over at his blog: YA stuff to avoid from now on. His list is awesome and spot on. I am going to add to it.
11. He didn’t add “no romantic interests who act like rapists,” but I’m going to. I’m also going to stop reading books that have these sorts of boys in them. Urk.
12. No more average girls being chased around by 3, 4, even 5 different boys like it’s mating season. This doesn’t happen in real life, nor do we want it to. It’s awkward and weird and reeks of an author’s narcissistic fantasies starring a weird idealized author-self.
13. No more clumsy girls. I get it’s just another way for the girl to need the male lead to catch her sometimes because not only can she not take care of herself, she can’t even walk straight. It’s kind of offensive and stopped being cute ages ago.
Passivity is so last year. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/11781862@N06/4551322068)
14. Violently passive girls. Girls who walk into the open arms of a blood thirsty killer because they are kind of hot. Girls who willingly go to the docks at midnight to meet a bad guy and yet still make mention in her head that it’s a really bad idea. Girls who don’t listen to their gut because they aren’t good at saying no. Girls who meet someone online and go on a date without telling anyone who or where she’s going. Girls who walk around the warehouse district alone at night because she’s too nervous to ask for a ride from the cute boy.
15. Being reminded of some character trait every couple of pages. His marble, God-like body. His cold skin. Her biting her bottom lip. His hotness. Her clumsiness. Her averageness. Her messy hair. His messy hair. His lopsided grin. His adonis-like body. His bronze skin. Her untamable red hair. We get it. Save the word count for plot twists.
16. GIRLS IN DRESSES ON COVERS FOR NO GOOD REASON.
17. Dead girls on covers for no good reason. (Carrie Ryan gets a pass on this. She writes about zombies. Fair is fair.)
18. Abusive, condescending boys who don’t shape up, but the violently passive girl takes it anyway. See number 11 and 14.
19. Girls who can’t do anything for themselves. Anything.
20. Setting up characters and situations where the phrase, “You have no regard for your own safety/life,” is used as an accusation against the female lead character. Especially when this leads to the male character taking over her life and decisions because she can’t be trusted to make any decisions for herself.
21. She really can’t make any decisions for herself. Give her some roller skates and she heads for the nearest cliff.
Ok, clearly I have some issues to work out with my genre.
Did I miss any? Let me know in the comments and stop over at Adam’s blog and say hi! His blog is excellent.
Sommer
My name is Sommer and I'm a writer from the Midwest. I am currently working on a YA novel about superheroes, reading as much as I can, blogging, and saving the world.
[...] Adam Selzer & YA Stuff to Avoid From Now On by Sommer Leigh at Sommer Leigh [...]
“Save the word count for plot twists.”
Yes, please! Although, after checking out some of the links in your post about racism and the Hunger Games, I guess there are a few readers out there who need reminding every few pages of what a character looks like…
I’m also tired of Too Stupid To Live female characters. And brooding, dangerous boys. You know, boys are people too. They’re not some exotic foreign species, not even when you’re a teenager.
What’s interesting, is in all the reading I do about getting published in the YA market and studying the writing craft, most of these you mentioned are cited as no-no’s (specifically weak female leads) AND YET these factors are rampant in YA. The message seems muddled: don’t do these things as a writer, well unless you want to be published by HarperTeen and have your book cover an entire endcap at what few bookstores have survived the e-book-acolypse.
What’s frustrating, is there are books with strong female leads, characters of color, covers w/out pretty girls in dresses… but many of those don’t seem to get the promotional attention or the backing of the big pub houses. Which is disturbing.
I Hunt Killers by Barry Lyga is a pretty cool YA book I just read. Male protag, son of a serial killer, has an African-American girlfriend (who I really hope is featured more in the second book) and it went to a darker place than I expected; thought it might wuss out on the serial killer angle but I think it delivered, given it’s YA.
Can I add to your list? Things to avoid… always going for the female protagonist in your writing. Girls, it is okay to sometimes have a boy as a protag. And oh…he could also be some other race than white OMG! Stop the presses!
But in the end…no one will listen.
I love boy protags! I have one. Well, I have 2 protagonists, a girl and a boy, but they share equal face time. Writing boys is very, very, very difficult. At least for me it has been. I think it would be easier if I had ever been one, but having not been one, I spend a lot of time analyzing the behaviors of all my guy friends.
very true!
I should really also add in that we should stop talking about breathing all the time. I read through “50 Shades of Grey” and found that if you took out all the references to breathing, you might be left with a novella.
The “no more rapist-like guys” was implied in one of them; I had a bad guy acting like that in I KISSED A ZOMBIE (which was supposed to be a satire of books like that) and was SHOCKED at how many reviewers didn’t understand why the girl in the book didn’t go after the vampire who tried to convert her against her will (i.e., rape and kill her).
Thanks for plugging Sparks – that’s my favorite out of all my books, but probably my least-known.
Yes! How did I forget breathing? Girls are taking so many breaths these days you’d think our bodies wouldn’t do it automatically if we didn’t remind it to.
I love Sparks! I remember when it came out because the cover was very different than everything else people were recommending to me. I’m going to have to check out I KISSED A ZOMBIE because it sounds right up my alley. I thought about putting “No more zombie books where zombies go to high school and get the girl because zombies are scary. SCARY. Stop trying to make them romantic leads.” I was kind of hoping that trend was over. I’m really hoping Courtney Summers’s new book THIS IS NOT A TEST will spark a new trend of bringing the scary back to zombie stories.
I tried really hard to make it believable that my zombie could pass for a normal person; he was brought back to life before he could decompose much, and just looked like a really sincere goth. Also, he was in Des Moines, and you just don’t expect people to turn out to be anything unexpected when you live in Des Moines (he’s just as surprised to find out that the girl is Jewish as she is to find out he’s a zombie). But then they made him look like a Michael Jackson zombie on the cover, and one blog reviewer after another assumed that he looked like that and that the girl would have to be a complete idiot not to notice. Only about 20% of them noticed that I was making fun of Twilight at all. C’est la vie.
I didn’t really want to do the Romero-esque ferocious zombies; these ones were brought to life by Megamart to work as slave labor. But I know you just can’t do zombies without having them get a bit violent now, so in this version, newly-risen zombies as “feral” and dangerous until they calm down.
I think one of the reasons all these things have become issues is that the buying market for YA has become completely dominated by a very particular type of reader. I can name any number of fantastic books that have been out in the last few years, but hardly any of them were widely available in stores or anything. The smart, left of center sort of kids, and adults who normally read adult books, just don’t seem to be buying much YA these days. And who can blame them?
brought to life by Megamart to serve as slave labor….
this has just become a MUST read.
I don’t read young adult but those all sound annoying to me.
GOOD LIST! You had me at number 11…
(also, I take it you weren’t crazy about Twilight?)
Haha, you know, I have nothing against Twilight (the first book.) I thought it was pretty entertaining and since everything she did wasn’t replicated all over the place yet, I forgave some of the stuff I didn’t like. It’s appeal makes sense to me.
I didn’t like the other three books at all, especially the fourth book which is possibly the worst book I’ve ever read. It took me months to drag myself through it. I don’t begrudge those who like it because I get why they do, I just wish people would stop taking the worst from those books and replicating them all over the place! I’m afraid the 50 Shades of Grey thing is going to make most of these so so much worse.