YA vs. Adult (Made Simple)

[mrissa]

sartorias was talking about the boundaries between YA and adult fiction, and I have a very easy answer.

In the early drafts of YA novels, the characters sigh all the time.
In the early drafts of grown-up novels, the characters twitch all the time, mostly about the lips.

No, obviously this cannot just be me; my experiences are universal, aren't they?

returns to "Find [twitch]"....

Comments

[scott-lynch.livejournal.com]

Wow. Here I was wondering if I'd maybe over-used sighing in my (decidedly not YA) manuscript.

God, it's so comforting to know that these crazy neurotic nitpicky worries are a general phenomenon.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Sighing is a hard one, but I find it even harder with protags between the ages of 12 and 16, who in many cases would realistically be sighing ridiculously often.

This is what critique readers are for, though: they can speak up and say, "You know how you didn't have everybody sighing their lungs out? Good for you. And you know how you removed 'Well' from the beginning of half the dialog tags? Bully. But you have this problem with twitching lips...."

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

It's this world. It does make one sigh. (Sigh.)

[mmerriam.livejournal.com]

I agree with sigh, but from where I'm sitting it's smirk and chuckle, not twitch.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I have only had one smirker so far, and she was in my first two novels, which are YAs.

[mmerriam.livejournal.com]

I have one character in my novel who has been a bit of a sigh factory. She's the youngest of the principal characters in the book, and was suffering from Misunderstood Teenager Angst. Now that Really Bad Stuff has happened to her, she sighs less.

And so help me, the next one of my characters that chuckles gets whacked...

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Sometimes Well-Understood And Justified Teenager Angst is worse.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, if there's too much clenching, you know it's a Stephen R. Donaldson novel. I shudder to think what the drafts were like.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

[rude comments about the said Mr. Donaldson considered and omitted]

But gosh, they just write themselves, don't they? Clenching.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

What about sighing?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It gets alarming if your characters are producing gale force winds all by themselves, unless they have superpowers and all that.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Superpowers! All RIGHT!!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Be extremely careful. Superpowered characters often cause more problems than they solve.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

I'm much too weary and angst-ridden today to identify with any Superpowered character.

Someone named "Whiny"--I could work with her.

:) Yes, I can see how Combusto might be difficult to live with.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

scottjames claims that my superhero name (or at least one of them) is The Great ComplicaTOR. But I think most other superheroes are lesser complicaTORS at the very least.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

A lesser complicaTOR--wonderful.

Let's see--my superhero name is Brittle.

I shatter all the time, and then try to cobble myself back together again.

It's my life's work.

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

Ah, twitching lips. I may have to go through Vicious and do a purge.

Kythe seems to be remarkably free of them so far, but that may just be because Alt doesn't bother noting it. Or possibly everyone's just far too grim.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah, I still want the moments that make the characters' lips twitch. I just sometimes want to report a different telling detail. I think we're down to an acceptable number of twitches, though.

See also "shudder."