Michael: Raise the Woof: Underdogs in YA

I stayed at a bar and listened to “Live Irish Music!” last night. You know why? Because no one else was. The musicians outnumbered the listeners, and I felt a little bad for those forlorn fiddlers. It got me thinking of the importance of underdogs, not so much in bars (though, please note, I can now write-off that trip) as in young adult literature.

There may be no other type of writing where the underdog is more common and more important, because in one way or another, almost every main character in YA is one. No matter how confident and competent they are, they are still teens living in an adult world—and possibly vampires living in a human world, wizards living in a muggle world, delicious, delicious humans living in a zombie world, or something else, but let’s stick with that first one for now.

And of course many of these characters are much less than completely confident and, in terms of competence, are at least as much MacGruber as MacGyver. The main characters in my first book, Gentlemen, are classic underdogs: They are lower-class kids from broken homes, remedial students, and they definitely have a tendency to bite. The narrator of Trapped, on the other hand, is basically an average kid—a good athlete and a decent student—but he’s at least as much of an underdog.



What makes him one is the weeklong blizzard that strands him and six other kids at their high school. Frankly, he could be the love child of Jack Bauer and La Femme Nikita and still be an underdog in that situation. All sorts of obstacles conspire to stack the odds and make characters sympathetic in YA, whether it’s being the new kid in town or subject to the machinations of a hellish dystopian society.

But the biggest obstacle remains adolescence itself. It is a confusing age, and it definitely doesn’t seem to be getting any less so. (Thanks a lot, global political/economic/cultural/technological upheaval.) The characters are sympathetic because they are going through the same things the readers are (or were). They are misunderstood, uncertain, disrespected (it’s right there in the word “minors”), and liable to be ignored on the one hand or to attract the wrong kind of attention on the other.

If you write YA, whether you intended it or not, your main character is probably an underdog. Of course, that’s true of many types of books. What’s remarkable about YA is that, if you look closely, the bullies, jocks, rivals, crushes, exes, friends, and enemies who round out the cast are probably underdogs too.

Nina: On Getting Out of the House

Before I published my first novel, Hold Still, in October of last year, I used to look at novels on bookstore shelves and think that it must be easier for published writers to write than it was for me. I thought that writing might be like making my mother’s (delicious!) buttermilk pancakes. The first try would be disastrous (somehow both burnt and undercooked); the second try, a little better (but too lumpy, with little clumps of baking soda); the next few attempts, just okay. But then, after a while: success! And then, each time that followed: more success!

If I hadn’t gotten the delicious novel recipe down by my first book, I certainly should have it down by the second.

So with inevitable ease and success in mind, last summer I wrote the beginning of my second novel and an outline for the rest of it. It’s a road trip story, and I determined where my characters would be on each day and what they would do and, of course, what would be done to them. My first draft deadline was in the winter, so over the fall, I followed the outline I made, checking off scenes as I wrote them. My outline became a giant to-do list.

Which was a problem.

Where did the inspiration go? The creativity? You know that feeling, when you sit down to write a scene and then, suddenly, it becomes almost a living thing, starts moving in unanticipated directions, surprises you in the best way possible? Well, I didn’t get that feeling. All of it felt like work.

But worse than the work itself was the pressure. The pancake theory burned up, was replaced with the realization that writing is, at least for me, going to be an eternal struggle—and even more frightening than that, for the first time, people will be watching. So instead of only worrying about the book itself and whether it’s any good, I’m now also worried about how it will compare to my first novel. Of course, I want it to be better. I want to keep growing.

This summer, as though rebelling against my former stick-to-the-outline self, I began my revision and expansion work as haphazardly as possible, dipping into scenes at random, adding a few lines of dialogue here and there, letting my narrator think more freely. Upon re-acquainting myself with the novel, something good started to happen. In many scenes, moments that seemed unimportant became seeds of larger moments. I thought of a whole side trip that wasn’t there before, with new characters and new events solidifying the older themes that didn’t quite come to the surface in the first draft.

But I kept questioning myself: what if these new ideas weren’t actually that great? Maybe they were just new. So I decided to get on the road.

I brought music, a camera, and a few changes of clothes. I brought my wife, who is, among millions of wonderful things, a swift driver and a gifted exchanger of ideas. We drove where my characters drive, we saw friends, and we met new people, and through it all, I was open to everything. Just as my narrator is. Almost everywhere we went, I discovered something new to add to the novel. The restaurant in Medford with cinnamon buns the size of my face and impossible riddles as reading material. The farm on Vashon Island, where our close friends are living. The friend of a friend in Portland, who told stories about working jobs I never knew existed. Everything we saw out the window as we whizzed past it.

The trip revealed gaps in the story I hadn’t recognized, and then showed me how to fill them. I’m excited, now, about where the book is going and the ways in which it continues to grow. And, though certainly no replacement for the recipe I thought I would master, I learned something that I’ll be able to apply to the next book: in order to breath life into my work, I need to get outside and live a little.

Jeff: The End of the World as I Know It

Look at any list of upcoming YA novels and what jumps out at you? More than likely it is some combination of the words post-apocalyptic or dystopian. I mean, they're everywhere; right? I should know, my book, The Long Walk Home, is one of them.

Now, assuming all us writers aren't just trend followers (Honestly, it's not really possible. It just takes way to long to write edit and get a book published) what's going on? Why are so many writers, independent of each other, writing stories like this and why are people so interested in reading them? Specifically why are kids interested in reading them?

Well I can only theorize why kids are reading them (which I'll do in a minute) but here's what led me to write mine....

I was thinking about the Gordian Knot. You know the story. Alexander the Great comes to Gordium and finds a knot so complex he can't untie it. His solution? Chop it in half with his sword. Problem solved. I think alot of people think our world feels alot like that knot--mind bogglingly complex and so twisted up with competing ideologies and completely unsustainable, but politically unassailable, policies that the whole thing has just ground to a halt and become completely useless. Sometimes it feels like the only solution, the only way we'll ever be able to move forward, is to just tear it down and start all over again. I mean, who doesn't have a fantasy of a simpler and quieter time? A time when we live closer to nature, closer to each other, closer to our own necessity. I think that idea, the idea of being able to hit the reset button on the world and being faced with the sheer sense of possibility that would bring, is what drew me to writing a book like this.

Now, why do kids want to read this stuff? Well partially I think for the reasons above. They live in the same world that we do; they're not blind. But also I think that when you're moving through your teens years your life is a constant upending of everything you know. Like many writers, I spent my early teen years as an impenetrably shy loner. I ate alone. I had no friends. I had no direction. But then one day I wandered into our High School's theater when auditions were going on and for some reason I got up on that stage and BAM! For the first time in my life I was good at something! And so much followed that. I found a focus, I found friends, I found a sense of humor, I found girls that were actually willing to talk to me. I found a me that simply wasn't there before. If this wasn't the end of one world and the beginning of a new one I didn't know what was.

And it seems like when you're a teen so many events in your life are like that, these huge catalysts for transformation. You go from Junior High to High School. Maybe your parents move and you have to switch schools. You make the football team or you don't. A girl talks to you or she doesn't. One little adjustment and everything can change. Over and over you're saying goodbye to one world and hello to another. Didn't it feel like that? So monumental? We laugh at it now, all the drama, but add years of near constant transformative change to a set of raging hormones and a evolving sense of self and no wonder every little thing felt like the end of the world. Of course our teens years felt monumental. They were monumental.

So I think when teens read this sort of story they connect to it because they understand the idea of a life that is constantly subject to transformation, they get the grandeur of it, the angst and fear and possibility of it. I think teens like this stuff simply because the end of the world makes sense to them. To them it's something that happens every day. I know it did to me.

Coert: Engaging the Young Adult Reader

The paperback of my first book The Brothers Torres is released today, which—in addition to conjuring painful flashbacks of Dennis Cass’s fantastic Book Launch 2.0—has me thinking about a book I haven’t looked at in a while. What follows is an adaptation of my contribution to the Engaging the Young Adult Reader panel at last year’s IRA Conference.

I taught a high school film class for six years. The students wrote, directed, produced, and edited a variety of assignments, from music videos to commercials, documentaries and narrative films, and at the end of the year, they presented a final project. Three years into it, I began to dread these final projects, knowing that every single one would include some or all of the following: envelope-pushing public displays of affection, slow-motion fights with their parents, and most of all: shot upon shot of their cars. From the passenger p.o.v. the driver’s p.o.v. The camera on the dashboard, on the hood, montage after montage of driving around the city, looking wistfully out the window, all accompanied by the latest emo tune. Make it stop, I thought. I see this every year.

What I realized, thankfully, was that while I might have seen it all before, this was the first time my students had ever had the opportunity to express these stories and emotions. They had something to say, and it was fresh for them, and that was the important part. And once I was able to achieve a kind of critical distance, I realized that there was complexity in a lot of the representation. Their view of the world, once we got past the slow-motion slamming of the door in the mother’s face, was beginning to show nuance. The students were beginning to see themselves as part of a complex and difficult world, and it wasn’t until I began writing for Young Adults that I realized what that meant.

Before I say anything about engaging the young adult reader, I think it’s important to examine what I think of as Young Adult literature. I’m hesitant to oversimplify, but one of the conclusions I’ve come to is that YA doesn’t so much reflect a writer’s decision to write for a particular audience as it does a marketing decision based on a combination of protagonist and narrative stance.

This is not to say that we don’t care who our audience is; the stories we tell are of course influenced by the audience. What I mean is that once the story has been chosen and it comes time to write it, then—if we really want to “engage” the reader—we should forget who the audience is and concentrate on how we’re telling the story.

For every story there is a narrative stance—be it omniscient, effaced, first or close-third person, present or past, retrospective or not—that maximizes the potential of the story itself. And Young Adult literature (this is of course a massive generalization, but bear with me) tends to be first or extremely close third person, non-retrospective narration, either in present or past. This particular narrative stance mirrors the emotional and intellectual state of the protagonist (and in many cases the young adult reader herself): a kind of netherworld somewhere between the benevolent narcissism of pre-adolescence and the potentially crippling self-awareness of adulthood. It is a time in the teenager’s life when he’s beginning to grasp adult issues while still within the framework of himself as the center of the universe. Representing this state allows the YA writer to show the world in all its complexities, and while the reader might not see the complexity right away, he will feel it, just as he feels it in his own world.

Besides, the real world is not a series of simple either/or choices—Do I do drink, or no? Do I join a gang, or no? Do I stand up for what I know is right, or no?— it makes no sense, if we want to engage with our readers, to craft our fictional world that way. We can take advantage of the complex narrative stance in order to present the world in all it’s greyness.

My book, The Brothers Torres, which is set in a fictional small town in northern New Mexico, is told in the present tense, from the first-person perspective of the sixteen year-old narrator, Frankie Towers. There is no retrospection, so Frankie starts the book thinking his story is just another boy wants girl:
So, there’s a guy, right? And he’s known this girl forever, from back when they used to take swim lessons and throw dirt clods at cars and lift packs of Juicy Fruit from Arroyo’s QuickMart. But she’s all grown up now. She’s sixteen and in high school and somewhere along the line she got smoking-hot. And this dude, he wants to ask her out, but he can’t bring himself to do it. He doesn’t know the right words. He gets this nasty pinch underneath his rib cage when she even turns around to look at him and blah, blah, blah. I know, you’ve heard it all before. I thought I had, too. Until that dude turned out to be me.
This first paragraph doesn’t mention the brother, but it does confront head-on the narrator’s awareness that while this story has been told so many times before, it’s different now—it’s worth listening to—because it is happening to him. As the novel progresses, the storyline of the brother pushes itself into Frankie’s life, and eventually we have a character who can no longer ignore the outside world. One challenge was to present the world as Frankie sees it while also passing along enough information about the “real world” so that the reader can place him in it.

The beauty of the first person, and of having a point of view character who is insightful, whether he knows it or not, is that the reader can take part in two narratives: what comes through the subjective eyes of the narrator (value judgments, jokes) and objective information that the narrator passes along, in the form of action and dialogue, for example.

What follows are some of the ways I tried to take advantage of this particular narrative stance to engage the reader with a complex world—with Frankie’s perception of his love interest, Rebecca; with his parents, and finally, with his brother Steve.

The object of Frankie’s affection, Rebecca Sanchez, appears at first to be a one-dimensional construct—the pretty girl who exists solely in Frankie’s fantasy. And sure enough, Frankie works hard throughout the novel to convince us of her perfection. He says:
Straight black hair, creamy light brown skin, a kickin’ body—not too skinny.
A few chapters later, as he catches a glimpse of her walking with her friends across the quad at school, he tells us:
You know those movies where the hot chick has a couple friends who are almost as hot but not quite? They always walk in slow motion with the hottest one in the lead, like a squadron of attack planes in V-formation? Rebecca could make that happen if she wanted to. But she doesn’t need that attention, and Katie seems to want it, so Katie’s the one in front.
On the surface, we get Frankie’s description of Rebecca, which helps justify the lengths he goes to win her heart. But if we’re paying attention, he gives us language to suggest that perhaps there is a more objective way to see her. What does “not too skinny” mean? What does that mean when combined with the fact that Frankie brings up the hot chick movie convention and then explains why Rebecca isn’t in front? We see what role Rebecca plays in Frankie’s world, but we also get a glimpse of how she exists in the “real world” of the novel. This complicates our impression of her character while at the same time informing us about Frankie.

Then there are the parents. Frankie’s understanding of his role in the world, in the family, is shifting so rapidly that he can hardly keep up (at one point, he even feels himself being thrust into the role of the parent.) Frankie’s observations lead him at the beginning to conclude that his parents are a joke. “I love my dad, right?” he says at one point, “but it’s like he learned how to be a father by reading self-help books.” Frankie thinks they concentrate all their parenting on him while letting his older brother Steve walk all over them. When he comes home after having been beaten up, all Frankie can process is that his mother is freaking out; even though he tells us what she says, he hardly pays attention to it:
Mom’s voice finally cracks. “Someone attacked my baby and my husband’s at work and my boys won’t talk to me for some reason pero no se porque no me hablan—”
“Mom.” She’s panicking now. Talking to herself. Making no sense.
“—both coming home with bruises all over, and I don’t know what’s happening to my family—”
“Mom!” I come home after getting my ass totally beat, and my mom goes off the deep end? How does that help anything?
Are Frankie’s parents really jokes, or does the objective information indicate otherwise? Frankie says his mom is making no sense, so he interrupts her and dismisses what she’s said—“both coming home with bruises”—by telling us she’s gone off the deep end, but he’s also given us enough information to reach our own conclusions.

Objective information also tells us that the father is just overmatched. He’s doing his best to keep a struggling business afloat, he’s trying to have a relationship with his kids while at the same time he’s devastated that he has no idea how to relate. Late in the novel, Frankie actually pretends to be asleep so as not to have to talk to him:
He places his hand on my shoulder, and it takes everything I have not to react. I give a pathetic half-groan and stretch out my legs, but I’m still asleep, of course, so I shrug my shoulders up close to my ears and go back into the fetal position. Dad’s hand is still on my shoulder, but he doesn’t say anything.
We stay like this for over ten minutes. I know because I count the whole time – counting helps me breathe more naturally. Six hundred and twelve Mississippi. His hand resting on my shoulder.
We see Frankie’s perspective: he’s tired, he doesn’t want his father to keep bothering him (to keep fathering him) and at the same time, all the father wants is a connection. The scene from Frankie’s point of view (“counting helps me breathe more naturally”) also helps to moderate the scene’s potential heavyhandedness—if you’ll pardon the expression.

Ultimately, it’s the storyline with his older brother Steve that forms the emotional center of the book. Frankie’s repeated inability to stand up to his brother drives the conflict forward as the situation worsens, resulting in a climax that pits the two of them against each other. The narrative stance here helps to draw out that tension, to let it simmer as long as possible.
Even as Frankie has complained to us that his parents aren’t taking Steve’s illicit activities seriously enough, he can’t help himself from doing the same thing. Remember, he’s perceptive, but not always correct. When Steve’s friend Flaco shows up at the mini-golf, Frankie can’t help but be impressed:
He looks extra-fierce tonight—the khakis, the wallet chain, the flannel buttoned at the top over a white beater, the mesh trucker hat pulled low over his eyes, the shiny ponytail halfway down his back. I’ve never been happier to see anybody in my life.
And later, as Flaco is joined by Steve and the rest of their crew, Frankie tells us:
We don’t really have gangs here in Borges, but if we did, this is what they’d look like.
Here the reader can sense that Steve is in trouble, just as Frankie does even though he doesn’t want to admit it. And even though he’s given us detailed description, because he doesn’t want to admit it, he comes to a conclusion that excuses his brother’s behavior. We may go along with it: we may allow ourselves to excuse it away as Frankie does, or we may not. If we do, then we stay deep in Frankie’s point of view. If we don’t, a double narrative presents itself. We may even recognize (as Frankie starts to in the end) that he’s excusing his brother’s behavior in much the same way that his father does.

I’m not suggesting that Frankie is an unreliable narrator. He’s certainly not hiding anything from us. He just a character who sees the world the way he sees the world, and he’s telling his story in a non-retrospective first person point of view. Our job is to figure out how his perspective works. And if this perspective is successful, then every reader will read it differently, will come to different conclusions, will invest herself in this second narrative.

But let’s say that the reader doesn’t recognize any of this double narration business? What then? Well, then there are other ways to engage. As readers, we engage on the character level with an unlikely hero—a guy who isn’t super-smart, doesn’t have spectacular abilities, isn’t fabulously wealthy or dirt-poor, doesn’t become famous, a narrator who stops the present action to address the reader in the second person. We engage on the plot level with a dangerous situation that only escalates. We engage with fireworks and a one-eyed best friend, with the pressures of a boy who needs to find a date for the dance, with the almost-foreign setting of northern New Mexico and a quirky small town where the tallest building and largest employer is a tortilla factory.

And as writers, no matter the genre, we can engage the young adult reader if we address what Carson McCullers’ twelve year old narrator Frankie—no relation—refers to in her 1946 novel The Member of the Wedding as the “old question”: “the who she was and what she would do in the world and why she was standing there that minute.”

Lisa: On writing verse novels

Happy Poetry Month!

In honor of one of my favorite months, I thought I'd talk a little about novels-in-verse, since I've published two young adult novels, soon to be three, in this format.

One of the questions I get asked a lot is, "Why do you write in verse?"

Good question.

I didn’t choose the format as much as it chose me with my first YA novel, I HEART YOU, YOU HAUNT ME. I sat down to write, and what came out was sparse, poetic language. I had written three mid-grade novels prior to this one, and half of a young adult novel, all of them in prose. This verse stuff was all new territory. At least as a writer. I had read and loved many verse novels by authors such as Sonya Sones, Ellen Hopkins, and others.

I wrote about ten pages, sat back and thought, what am I doing? As if it isn’t hard enough to sell a novel, now I’m going to make it even harder by writing in a format that will scare some people off? But, I liked what I had and decided to keep going. As Sara said when she took me on as a client, the verse created a unique atmosphere for this ghostly love story, something that would have been harder for me to achieve through traditional prose.

When I wrote my second one, FAR FROM YOU, I had been thinking about the award-winning verse novel by Karen Hesse, called OUT OF THE DUST. At times, the writing is so strong you can almost taste the dust and heat. I wanted to try and do something like that so I thought, what's the opposite of heat and dust? Snow and bitter cold. And so the seed of an idea was born.

I like writing in verse for a couple of reasons. First of all, I do well with little description. That is, trying to find a unique, short, poetic way of describing something. This is much more my strength than writing beautiful, verbose paragraphs. But I didn’t actually know that until I started I HEART YOU. People ask me if writing in verse is harder than writing in prose. And I’m not sure how to answer that. It’s definitely difficult, because you have to tell a complete story and try to be poetic in how you tell it. But for me, it sort of comes naturally. That’s not to say I don’t have to work at it, because I do. I just finished revisions for my third YA verse novel, CHASING BROOKLYN, due out in 2010, and this was the hardest one yet, as the story is told in two alternating points-of-view, a male and a female. Not an easy thing to do in verse! But I hope with each book I improve, and get better at weaving in the poetic elements.

I also like writing in verse because it allows me to get to the emotional core of the story. I’ve received quite a few notes from people who say something like – I love your books, they make me cry! I believe through poetry, a writer can bring to light an emotional truth in a new way. FAR FROM YOU just received a review from “School Library Journal” which states, “[A] roller coaster of emotions to which many teen readers will relate.” That’s my ultimate goal, I suppose, and personally, verse helps me create that ride.

Some people will say – but do teens really want to read a book written in a poetic format? And I say, of course they do. Not all teens, but yes, some do, just like some teens like science fiction and some don’t, some teens like nonfiction and some don’t, etc. Verse novels give readers another type of book to choose from. I’ve found they are great for reluctant readers, because there's lots of white space on the page and they are a fairly quick read.

However, I won't write every book in verse. Not all stories are going to work in that format, after all. But if the verse can add something to the story and help me create that emotional roller coaster teens want to ride, than I'm going for it.

Have you ever read a verse novel? If not, this is a great month to try one!

Marianna: Let's Get It On -- Sex Scenes in Young Adult Novels

I’ve been a connoisseur of sex scenes in YA fiction since I was nine, when a dog-eared copy of Forever made the rounds in my fourth grade class. So I was shocked that when I tried to write one for the first time, it was a disaster. I was embarrassed. My characters were embarrassed. None of us knew what to do with our hands. We didn’t even get to first base.

Writing sex scenes for adult readers can be awkward, as well, but writing for young adults brings a whole other set of concerns. The considerations of how to deal with the (touchy, sticky – insert pun of choice here) topic of sex in such a way that is appropriate for readers of varying levels of maturity can seem extremely complex. Add to that the worry about censorship, people accusing us of corrupting their kids, the issue of portraying responsible sex, etc.

All of those worries, along with basic inhibitions, distracted me from my main concern – crafting a good story. Once I stepped back and looked at YA novels I think handle sex beautifully, I realized I needed to come back to that – the craft. Because, in the end, good craft will set us free. My firm belief is that our responsibility is to tell the most honest stories we can, and that the question is not, “What is appropriate?” but, “What is appropriate for the story I am telling?” (I loved Varian’s Nov. 24th post that dealt with this issue of the writer’s responsibility.)

Anyway, I went back to that sex scene I’d tried to write and looked at it from a more objective, less panicky and emotional, point of view. I considered it from three angles: plot, level of detail, and language, and brought with me what I’d learned from studying those books I loved.

Regarding plot/”What should those hands be doing?” -- simply put, the physical actions should reflect the emotional truth of the scene, the relationship between the characters, and often, larger themes of the novel. I believe the key to finding this emotional truth is respect -- respecting the right of characters to make mistakes, to take risks, to be desirous, and, if the story calls for it, to do things that I wouldn’t do, or that I wouldn’t want my (hypothetical, at the moment) son or daughter to do. If a character is fully fleshed out, readers will understand her decisions.

In Bringing Up the Bones by Lara Zeises, Zeises’s eighteen-year-old protagonist, Bridget, is dealing with the recent death of her boyfriend, Benji. During one of her first post-death social outings, she briefly meets a boy, Jasper, goes to his apartment, and sleeps with him. This event is the catalyst for the rest of the novel – the story of how Bridget’s relationship with Jasper helps her overcome Benji’s death in unexpected ways. Zeises uses that first sex scene between Bridget and Jasper to establish the dynamics that will characterize their relationship throughout the book:

His lips brush from my breasts to my belly button to the dampened cotton crotch of my panties which soon find their way to the floor. I come quickly, guiltily. But it doesn’t stop there.
He reaches over me to the wood-laminate nightstand, fishes around the top drawer until he finds a condom. I can feel him looking at me in the darkness, can feel him wondering if I’m one of those girls who likes to slip it on the guy herself. My nails dig into the soft flesh of his shoulders; my tongue thrusts itself into his mouth. He decides to do it himself, rolls away from me a bit.
And then he’s inside me, and I’m expecting to feel the searing pain I did with Benji but it’s not like that this time. […]
When it’s over, I start to cry. Quietly at first, then louder (27-28).

The details of this sexual interaction hint at so many aspects of the novel: the oral sex speaks of Jasper’s tendency to give, and Bridget’s to receive; the moment with the condom reflects Bridget’s use of sex/body language to communicate instead of words; her mention of Benji shows Bridget’s constant need to compare Jasper to her idealized ex; and her guilt and tears reflect her emotional confusion.

This is brave writing. By allowing her character to have sex with a stranger, Zeises risks making her unsympathetic to readers. I would be very surprised though if anyone read this book and felt harshly towards Bridget, because the scene is emotionally honest. We fully believe that this is what Bridget would do in the situation, given her grief over Benji, and once we know Jasper, we believe it’s what he would do. The physical reflects the emotional – with all its mess and complexity.

Another book that does a great job of using the specific events in a sex scene to reveal theme and character is Doing It, by Melvin Burgess. Protagonist Dino wants to lose his virginity – primarily to reassure himself that he’s the stud people think he is, not the unsure, vulnerable kid he is inside. But his girlfriend won’t oblige. In his desperation, he decides to have sex with a girl he meets at a party at his house. His parents are away, the house is empty, she’s willing. Dino’s all set.

He pushed her gently to the bed, and she got in. He took his trousers off and got in after her. […] He peeled her knickers off and she lifted her legs to help him. And then…and then…
Dino began to lose it.
[…] He rubbed his pubis on hers, but as his fear of failure grew so his knob got softer and softer and now at last it was nothing but a felty slug hanging off him.
[…] The girl lay under him looking up with a half-smile on her face, and Dino had never felt so alone as he did then, in bed with a girl and no erection (99-100).

Adolescence is a time of losing control and gaining control – as you lose control of your body in some ways, you gain independence and control of your life. The sex scenes in Doing It perfectly illustrate this dichotomy. The physical result of Dino’s emotional confusion makes for a pretty devastating scene, one that, again, took bravery to write.

So, when I’m writing a sex scene, I think about what happens through the lens of what it says about my characters, and how it can illustrate the book’s themes. Both Zeises and Burgess succeed because they let their characters tell them what would happen, regardless of the fact that their characters’ actions aren’t ones that you would assume would be sympathetic to the reader.

The two examples I’ve given go into a fair amount of graphic detail, although less experienced kids might not grasp exactly what’s going on. And that’s certainly fine. Many sex scenes are written so that the meaning will only really be clear to more experienced readers. But sometimes, it’s appropriate to describe things with a certain level of detail. Again, the decision of which way to go has to come from the character, from the story, from the tone of the narration.

Anatomy of a Boyfriend by Daria Snadowsky is the story of seventeen-year-old Dominique’s first love and sexual experiences, and the sex scenes live up to the book’s title. None of the language or content is inappropriate or gratuitous, though. Scenes are written to reflect Dom’s confusion and curiosity.

Even by the dim blue moonlight filtering in through the glass balcony doors, I can recognize the features of his penis from my anatomy books. The shaft, the head, the urethral opening – it’s definitely all there. Only it looks so much more alive and urgent than any photograph could ever capture. […] (112-114)

Nothing left to the imagination here! But filtered through Dom’s eyes (she’s an avid science student in addition to being a curious virgin), this is the only way the scene could have been narrated. For Dom, these first explorations are not about passion so much as they are about experimentation.

In Jenny Downham’s beautiful book, Before I Die, terminally ill Tessa makes a list of things she wants to do while she’s still able. First on the list is having sex. The very night she makes her list, she goes out with a friend to a club, meets a boy, and sleeps with him.

He lies down, moves my legs apart with his, presses closer, his weight on top of me. Soon I’ll feel him inside me and I’ll know what all the fuss is about. This was my idea.
I notice lots of things while the red neon numbers on his radio alarm move from 3:15 to 3:19. I notice that his shoes are on their side by the door…
He supports himself with his arms, moving slowly above me, his face turned to one side, his eyes tight shut. This is it. It’s really happening. I’m living it now. Sex. (25)

The emphasis is on her distracted thoughts, not the sex. Tessa has no connection to this boy, no emotions about the sex. The details of it aren’t important to her. She couldn’t care less what his penis looks like. It’s the fact of finally having sex that matters.

So, I ask myself how important the actual details of what happens are to my narrative. Are they going to express something about the characters and about the book’s themes? Do they provide a necessary clue about something? Or would a full description be gratuitous?

Closely related to the issue of explicitness is the issue of language. Obviously, the language in the example I gave from Anatomy of a Boyfriend is an extreme example of one approach – using the anatomically correct words. More often, slang is appropriate, as that’s usually going to be a more natural fit for the narrative voice. But different slang words bring different connotations. Take the following line from Ellen Wittlinger’s Sandpiper: “…it’s clear that what he really needs is for me to put my mouth around his dick.” This immediately shows Sandpiper, the protagonist’s, hostility about her sexual encounters. “Dick” brings a sense of harshness. On the other hand, when one of the protagonists in Doing It says he has to go “shake hands with Mr. Knobby Knobster,” well, we know that his relationship with himself is a friendly one.

I gave a lecture on this topic at Vermont College that went into more depth about our responsibility as YA writers, but here I’m just going to say this: if we treat our characters with respect, and write the scenes with honesty, we are fulfilling our responsibility. And part of respecting our characters is respecting them as desirous, sexual beings. A well-written scene of a sexual interaction can show characters at their most vulnerable, truest selves, and can be among the strongest in the book. I leave you with one last moment from Downham’s Before I Die, when Tessa, now very close to dying, has a final sexual encounter with her boyfriend (someone she’s very much in love with, not the random boy from the club):

His hand slides to my waist to my belly to the top of my thigh. His kisses follow his hand, work their way down until his head is between my legs and then he looks at me, asking permission with his eyes.
It spills me, the thought of him kissing me there.
His head is in shadow, his arms scooped under my legs. His breath is warm on my thighs. He very slowly begins.
If I could buck, I would. If I could howl at the moon, then I would. To feel this, when I’d thought it was over, when my body’s closing down and I thought I’d have no pleasure from it again.
I am blessed.

And readers are blessed that Downham had the bravery to write a scene of such emotional honesty.