Reading Rage Tuesday: How to Ruin Your Young Adult Fantasy Novel

I wanted in on the Reading Rage fun. I mean, I have a lot of rage. Especially when it comes to reading. I have a lot of love, too, don’t get me wrong, but I’m also totally wrathy.

Today, let’s talk about young adult fantasy novels. I’ll admit it, I’m hooked on them. I know, I’m an adult, and as such, I should probably be reading things with more style and substance. However, I can’t resist a good young adult fantasy novel. Harry Potter? Yes, please. The Hunger Games? More of that. The His Dark Materials trilogy? Swoon. Kristen Cashore’s Graceling series? Delicious.

But for every good young adult fantasy, there are swarms – SWARMS! – of horrible books, just waiting for me to stumble upon them and, after reading a few chapters (or, because I am stubborn about finishing everything that’s on my plate, the entire novel) run away cursing and screaming. Yes, I’m looking at you, Maggie Stiefvater, with your utterly craptastic Wolves of Mercy Falls series. Ugh.

Here are some of the ways that you, too, can ruin your young adult fantasy novel and ensure that I will mentally draw and quarter you. And perhaps flay. Yes, also perhaps flaying will occur.

Have a weak female main character.

More this, less, "ZOMG I NEED RESCUING NOW!"

I’m not saying you have to have a female main character (although I’m predisposed to like you more if you do, sorry, that’s just me.) I’m just saying, if you do, please, for the love of all that’s holy, show me WHY she’s the main character. If she’s constantly needing to be rescued by a strapping young teen in a tight white teeshirt, she doesn’t deserve to be the main character. HE does. I mean, is she only your main character so you can show how weak she is? You want an example. Oh, you don’t think I can? I’ll show YOU. I WILL GIVE YOU ONE. Hush, Hush by Becca Fitzpatrick. Not the worst YA fantasy book I’ve ever read. But the main character kept putting herself in these ridiculously stupid situations. “Oh! Patch (yes, yes, the romantic lead’s name is Patch, not anyone’s finest hour) told me NOT to go to the bad part of town and enter the pool hall. I MUST DO SO NOW. Oh! No! Patch! People are TRYING TO KILL ME!” It was disconcerting. I don’t want to read an entire book about some weakling who can’t save her own day – or, almost worse, can’t get out of her own way. It’s fine to show me someone’s weaknesses, but if they’re utterly idiotic, I’m tuning out.

Have a love triangle where one of the participants clearly doesn’t stand a chance.

Love this, but Duckie didn't stand a chance, because he was obviously gay. OH STOP IT. I love him too. But he WAS.

The best love triangles are the ones in which you can see WHY the person who’s having to make the choice is having a hard time deciding between the two contenders. Let’s take The Hunger Games, for example. Katniss had to choose between Peeta and Gale. You could see why she was having a hard time choosing: she’d grown up with Gale, he was the typical “male romantic lead,” and she’d always had feelings for him; Peeta, on the other hand, was new to the equation, but she found herself liking him, getting to know him, and he proved himself a strong champion. Therefore, since both characters had good and bad qualities, you actually had a stake, as a reader, in which she chose, and it made for interesting reading. Reading a book in which the love triangle is between a young man who is just perfect in every way and a young man who is bitter, abusive, and unintelligent is not interesting, because you know where it’s going. I mean, you do, right? I suppose the author might surprise you and have his character choose the lesser of the two choices, but then you have the ramifications of that choice, and that’s equally bad. Just give me two real characters for him or her to choose from, with real pros and cons, please. Not one real character and a shady weirdo who skulks amongst garbage cans or some such nonsense.

Have the teenagers act like adults.

My teenage years in a nutshell. "SO TORTURED AND ALOOOONE"

Have you ever been around teenagers? Or, barring that, how about this. Have you ever BEEN a teenager? Probably you have. I mean, I don’t know your life, maybe you’re a robot. Teenagers don’t make decisions the same way adults do. Teenagers don’t talk the way adults do. Teenagers don’t ACT the way adults do. (There’s a lot of emo-moping and tortured poetry and heaving sighs, if I remember my own teenage years correctly.) Sure, there are situations where teenagers, due to societal pressure or family breakdown or what-have-you, have had to mature more quickly, but even in those situations, the teenager in the teenager still breaks through now and then. Hormones are the ruling factor in a teenager. Bad young adult fantasy writers tend to forget this and write as if their characters are just smaller adults without diplomas or jobs. In the above-mentioned (shudder, SO BAD) Stiefvater series, one of the teenagers realizes she has this obscure medical knowledge – that I’d argue even an ADULT DOCTOR wouldn’t have – that can save the day. ARE YOU KIDDING ME. No. Just, no.

Tread ground that’s been trod before.

Awesome! But we don't NEED another Buffy and Angel. We HAVE a Buffy and Angel.

I know, this is a tough one, because, when you think about it, ALL ground has been trod before. We’ve got books about witches, werewolves, fairies, vampires, dystopian futures, on and on and on. I’m not saying you can’t use these plot points – you are, after all, writing young adult fantasy fiction, so you’re probably going to want to throw something along these lines in there – but do it differently than it’s been done before. How are your vampires different than the norm? How do your fairies differ from the stories? We already have a Harry Potter – do we need another book about witches at school? If you think we do, how will yours be different enough to matter? And NO. I am also not saying you need to throw stupidity in. Major, major rule: it is never a good time for stupidity just for stupidity’s sake, just to stand out from the crowd. Don’t make your vampires sparkle, please? Or make it so your vampires can breed with humans? I mean, we have to have a sense of DECORUM, here, people. Unless you want to be laughed out of your writer’s club, or wherever you go for feedback and coffee cake. See, writers, you’re people. And, as people, as much as it pains me to say it, we’re all special snowflakes, who were all molded and shaped by our individual experiences in life. Take what made you, and put that on the page. Your particular set of tools is different than everyone else’s. Use them to your full advantage.

Talk down to your readers. 

"Ugh, talk down to me AGAIN, you total asshat."

Yes, teenagers aren’t, as mentioned above, adults. However! Teenagers are savvy readers, especially in this day and age. They KNOW when they’re being patronized. They even smell the slightest hint of that, and they’re gone. And they talk, authors. Oh, do they talk. This can work in your favor – word of mouth from rabid teens has done wonders, I mean, look at Twilight! – but it can also hurt you if you decided to talk down to your readers and they caught wind of it. They’re going to SAVAGE you, both online and in real-life conversations. And teenagers have, despite what you’ve heard, long memories. Your next book? Forget it. They’ll remember that you thought they were stupid in your last book and they’ll stay far away from you. Not to mention that there are many adults, such as myself, who are reading your books, and, while we’re a little more forgiving, considering we’re reading young adult literature to begin with, we really don’t want to read something patronizing or childish. Things to avoid: rants in the middle of your text about social issues (the worst, and most egregious, is when you have one of your characters start spouting off how they’re “saving themselves for marriage” – NO NO NO. Listen, sure, there are teenagers who are doing this, and good for them, if that’s their thing. But I bet they’re not GOING AROUND DOUCHING IT UP AND PREACHING ABOUT IT. Not unless they want to be pantsed and made fun of on Facebook for the world to see or something. Gah), using elementary vocabulary (if we don’t show teenagers advanced language, how will they learn it? If they don’t know the word, they’ll glean what they need from context, or look it up, I guarantee you that), and assuming teenagers are too stupid to notice plot holes or cardboard characters (nope, this is a media-savvy generation, they’re all over that, and they’ll call you on it, too – they may not know what such things are called, but they’ll know something’s wrong.)

What about you, Booksluttians? Any young adult fantasy fans want to chime in? What do you hate when reading a young adult fantasy novel? What did I miss? And, perhaps most importantly, what good young adult fantasy novels should I be reading that I haven’t read yet?