What's it to YA? (Brian Katcher)

 I remember once, while speaking at a high school, a bright young girl asked me if I ever considered writing children's stories, as I'm an elementary librarian during the day.

I of course had her removed from the audience; my contract specifically forbids the public from addressing me in any way. But as I watched that crying 15-year-old being hustled out the door by security, I pondered her question: why not try another genre? Why not children's literature, or adult literature for that matter?

Personally, I don't think I have the right temperament to write for younger readers. So much of that genre is visual and I'm no artist. Also, I think my dark side would ooze through and I'd write titles like: Monsters are Real and They Live Under Your Bed or Mommy and Daddy Got Divorced Because You Were Bad (autobiographical).

And why not adult fiction? Actually, my third book, Everyone Dies in the End, originally featured college age characters. Unfortunately, my beta readers all said that I'd merely taken teenagers and shoehorned them into an adult environment.

Personally, I think YA gives an author a lot more freedom than other genres.

*Your characters have enough autonomy that they can be free from adult supervision for long periods of time, but youthful enough to get into exciting situations.

*Your characters are experiencing powerful and crazy emotions for the first time. Teen romantic drama is powerful because it's all fresh. By the time you're 25, you're so jaded and emotionally dead that you don't even care that the person you really liked ended up some douche who's more athletic than you and why even bother? Huh? Why even BOTHER?

*It's a chance to relive your own lost youth through author avatars. That same emotionally awkward, crushing world of hormones and humiliations that characterized all our teenage years. Right? Back me up here.

*You just can't put murders in children's books. I really thought the world was ready for an abridged, kid-level version of Stephen King's works, but apparently Mr. My Novels are Copyrighted and his lawyers didn't agree.

So there you have it. Now I'm off to write my next YA masterpiece: two kids who don't get along suddenly are forced to work together to achieve a common goal and unexpectedly develop romantic feelings for each other. And the boy has cute dimples. There you have it.