This is a topic near and dear to many people’s hearts here, and I was surprised to see such an interesting article about it:
There’s a New Yorker article cited in that one which I found so interesting I think it warrants a read too, especially as it’s on a tangentially related topic:
-The Slate article was written many, many years ago. Do you think the attitude toward adults reading YA has shifted significantly since then?
-Do you agree with the opinion that YA novels can’t provide the same depth of insight for adults as, well, adult fiction?
-How much do you consider likability for your characters, especially if, like the examples cited, they aren’t nice people? Do you feel your readers have considered certain characters of yours likable you didn’t expect, or vice versa?
-Did any of the authors quoted in the second article speak to you with their reactions?
I’ll type out my responses when I’m not on mobile, but I’ll say that both of these articles are more pertinent to Wattpad and our domain than one might think.
Yes, I know more teenagers who read manga than do regular books. My tastes align more with Manga than they do with YA books. Just seems to be more variety and the art makes it even more fun to read.
They can. Especially much older ones. I mean, if C S Lweis can write difficult concepts for children’s and adults in his Narnia series, you can learn something meaningful anywhere. But legitimately, there’s not a lot of “questioning of man” to be found in YA.
I don’t. I make them understandable, as best I can.
I’ve been told at least a few of them are.shrugs
Very little “speaks to me”.
But I don’t find the articles go far enough since they are in separate lanes from each other. Clearly, YA appropriation is female driven. Clearly, the likeability of characters is female driven. Audience drives all this.
From the first article:
“Meanwhile, the cultural definition of “young adult” now stretches practically to age 30, which may have something to do with this whole phenomenon.”
Young Adult when I was 25 was religious classes geared to the over 18-under 30.
Weirdest thing is that I find myself really liking Albedo, a female character, despite the fact that her heart is as cold and black as coal.
Part of that is I find her actions, if not good, understandable. She has a pretty fun personality and doesn’t screw around.
I don’t think it has. It’s been long enough now where the crowd who read Harry Potter as a kid is probably “adult” age-wise, or at least out of the traditional range for YA. As more and more YA movies get adapted to the big screen, and as social media means even more YA books go viral (at least in comparison to, IDK, Anna Karenina), I think it’s fair to say that YA is increasingly becoming the norm. Anyone who grew up with YA is more likely now to stick with similar writing now. When I was a kid, the Hardy Boys were peak literature for me, although those are more middle-grade, and I wouldn’t say I knew too many people who stuck with that sort of reading. I certainly didn’t then, but times are different now.
I do agree, although I would claim this is more a function of how YA novels are written to follow genre expectations and not that young people are incapable of making adult insights. The article said this a lot more eloquently than I ever could, but there’s a level of ambiguity, especially character-wise, that is encouraged in something like lit fic but not as welcome in other writing. Adults are expected to read between the lines more, “the curtains were blue” sort of stuff, and there’s also an expectation that consequently, there doesn’t need to be as much plot or character directly stated. A great example of this from the second article would be Humbert Humbert, a character who actions aside, wouldn’t be a great fit for how YA is supposed to deliver its ideas. I think you’d be laughed out of the room if you pitched him as a character to a bunch of YA editors.
I also think that attitude does affect how people read and perceive non-YA writing, when there’s less of a willingness to grapple with the unclear that’s only really a problem from the YA perspective. I do think people’s prevailing attitudes about how a book should structure its themes and so on has become a lot more YA-influenced, which makes sense in that it’s what sells, but also makes people a lot more inclined to discard those more “adult” narrative structures and themes. It’s also a lot more socially acceptable to criticize something like Anna Karenina or White Noise, to pick two radically different books that share a lot more with each other than with YA, as obtuse, unrelatable, and uninviting than it is to criticize Divergent or The Hunger Games (two books cited in the article as inherently insight-less).
NotARussianBot hit the nail on the head when they phrased it as a divide between “nice” and “interesting,” and that dichotomy is a question which is going to have a very different answer depending on who you’re talking to. The Wattpadian school of thought pretty much insists on likable characters whom you can root for from the very beginning; the idea that one would write a book that begins “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins” is anathema. Going back to the previous question, too, I’d claim that “unlikable” characters, ones you have to think more about to empathize with, and not necessarily from the very beginning, offer more room for deeper insights than ones who don’t challenge you in the same way. It’s why there are books about Humbert Humbert or Raskolnikov, and it’s why people gravitate toward those books to learn something about themselves: most people aren’t naturally likable in the “Wattpadian first chapter” sense, and it’s up to you if you want to go for the easy payout or take a risk with greater reward.
To answer the question in the context of my own writing, I’d say I have a pretty well-rounded cast of characters I’d want to keep a safe distance from my house, but still want to get to know about. We have an idealist who’s willing to sacrifice anything for the greater good, a self-interested Lady Macbeth archetype who’s most interested in the thrill of power, a brash rich kid who sees himself as defending a morality everyone else around him lacks, a social outcast who goes off the deep end once given an opportunity to turn the tables, and so on. I’d be surprised if you read any of those character descriptions and thought “gee, I really want this person to succeed.” But even if they aren’t nice, they’re still interesting, and I’d say what my readers who’ve enjoyed my writing most have said is that level of humanity is what kept them reading. They were invested in that and the plot, even if they weren’t rooting for their success.
Jonathan Franzen said “You’d unfriend a lot of people if you knew them as intimately and unsparingly as a good novel would,” and that’s a sentiment I agree with completely. In real life, one rarely learns what makes other tick in such graphic detail as a novel like Lolita or Crime and Punishment; we seek different sorts of human connection, sorts based around our favorite sports teams or brands of Halloween candy. One thing that a lot of books don’t do is present characters with all their jagged edges in such a way where we feel as if we truly know them as unique individuals not defined by archetypes, as we’d know real people. Most people don’t think, “My friend Bob from accounting is really a Ron Weasley sort of guy”: we know them as people who tend to break the mold in some way. I’m sure I’d unfriend a fair few people if I knew their innermost, most salacious thoughts like what I’d get reading a good novel.
Overlord is a light novel series about a complete monster that was originally published on a novel reading site. Something similar to Wattpad, but Japanese and for men. Overlord breaks A LOT of rules, it’s worth reading just for that.
It’s weird when I see authors try and fail to make their normal, relatable, young women characters(Yes, I’m talking about Scarlett St Clair’s A Touch of Darkness) less likable than fricking Albedo.
I mentioned this briefly in my post, but I don’t get a ton of comments talking about relatability/likability or the lack thereof. What do you think you’re doing that’s making your readers focus on that specifically?
I think it’s just the way I write my characters. Even in my most negative reviews, I was told that my characters were simple to understand and child-like.
I made a character based on John Yossarian, but his sense of humor, semi-tsundere attitude, and fact that he’s on the spectrum might endear readers more than the actual Yossarian. Doesn’t help that he goes through a lot and his arc is about being just a little bit nicer to the people around him.
As much as most people on Wattpad aren’t sitting naked in trees or going on bombing runs, I do think a lot of Wattpad readers would find themselves empathizing a lot with him if they were ever in a similar situation. One of my main characters is named John; one inspiration was the John from Brave New World, but another primary one was Yossarian.
I will always maintain that Crime and Punishment is a quintessential YA book. You might not like him as an adult, but as a teen, he is the original Bad Boy. I grew up with YA literature being Soviet, about good teens doing good deeds and learning to be moral and patriotic, very different from what there is in the West, so Raskol’nikov was my substitute for Wattpad toxic fix when I was 15 or 16. That’s how I remember Rodya. He is no end of likable, trust me, to the teen girl’s heart. Distilled teen angst.
On the other hand Lolita I hate with a passion of a thousand burning suns along with its main characters.
Again, no idea. Sorry. I meant something like Arkadiy Gaidar’s Timur and His Team, or Furmanov’s Young Guard. Not that anyone would ever have any idea what those books are.
I feel that Empress Theresa is meant to be about a protagonist learning to be good and patriotic and save the world but it got botched horribly early on.
