— Your Writing Prompt —
M. T. Anderson Asks: Why is it Important to Write for All Ages and Genres?
In our November prompt nearly a hundred of you shared thoughtful responses around why you love to read. To round off 2015 we’ve partnered with bestselling author M.T. Anderson who wants to ask you:
“Why is it Important to Write for All Ages and Genres?”
The Writing Prompt: Over to You!
- Do you believe that it’s important for children and teenagers to fall in love with reading, and that YA fiction can often be the gateway to a life-long reading habit? (Or perhaps like John Green you feel that teens are smarter than most adults give them credit for!)
- Which genres have you fallen in love with? With options ranging from Bizarro Fiction to Asemic Writing and Ergodic Literature to more traditional genres, what value does this multitude of weird and wonderful literary genres add to society?
- Do you feel that it is a privilege to explore those early years that tend to be a significant point of change for most of us, when we are at our most vulnerable and when everything in life is still possible? Do you appreciate the opportunity to experiment with brave categories and to take risks with your penmanship?
Already have thoughts brewing? Fantastic! Skip to the end of this post to see what you can win and to start writing your response. Otherwise keep reading for thoughts by M. T. Anderson, John Green and others…
Enter M.T. Anderson
“Like a lot of professional writers, I’ve built my career in various genres: from picture books to historical novels, from nonfiction to science fiction, from kids’ adventure stories to absurdist fiction for adults. But I’m best known for the books I’ve written for teens — and so I’m asked all the time why I bother to write for that audience.
As soon as I could, at age thirteen or so, I stopped reading books for teens and started reading books for adults. Given who I was, this mainly meant space opera — the more extra eyes the better — and fantasy novels about lonely, geeky young men who discovered they had incredible psionic powers that made them nationally important and strikingly attractive. While my taste may not have been everyone’s, that experience of moving on early to books for adults used to be pretty common.
Back then, it often felt like books written for teens talked down to us, patted us on the head, hid the difficult stuff.
So as an adult, I wanted to write books for younger people that were as sophisticated as novels for adults. It strikes me as weird — if kindly intended — when an adult says to me, “This book is too good for teens. You should have sold it to adults.” What is that supposed to mean? That kids deserve something dumber, crappier? Who do they think teens are? Teens are full of wonderfully strange ideas and eccentric enthusiasms. That’s who I want to write to”
Each one of my books comes out of the experiences I remember from when I was a kid. In the case of Feed, my sci-fi satire, of course technology was not as advanced back in the 80s as it is now — and yet, at the same time, I already felt like I had the voice of advertising in my head. It whispered to me not just about what I should desire, but also about who I should be, how I could be loved. Those voices in all our heads have simply gotten louder in the decades since then.
I wanted to write this book for an audience still fresh enough, still young enough, to be able to imagine the world in a different way. Teen readers are passionate because they’re still building their world. Adults have already stacked up a world around them and are squatting in it, complacent. I wanted readers to seize on this book and argue intensely with it as they read it — and young readers are much more likely to do that.
Once when I was speaking about the book at a college, a kid came up to me and waved a copy of Feed in my face. “I hated this book,” he said. “I hated it so much I bit it.”
He wasn’t wrong. He held the book up. It’s not a short book, and he’d chomped off the whole corner — really admirably strong jaws — with the torn pages scalloped by the ridges of his teeth.
“Wow. Yeah,” I said, and we high-fived, and then both started laughing until we cried.”
Here at Litographs we have collaborated with M. T. Anderson to create this design entirely from the text of ‘FEED’. Learn more about that process here… or keep reading to find out how you can win one of these t-shirts and a signed copy of FEED for yourself.
The most thoughtful response will receive a signed copy of M T Anderson’s ‘FEED’, a brilliantly ironic satire about identity crises, consumerism, and star-crossed teenage love and one of the first Litographs FEED T-shirts! One runner up will also receive a signed copy of Feed.
**Contest now over, but we’d still love to hear your response!**
Below are 7 insights on the value of writing for all ages to spark your imagination…
1
“I think teenagers are asking big and interesting questions… there’s an intensity to it, they’re asking them for the first time, when you’re coming of age you’ve never thought about them before… when you were 7 you just didn’t have that thought yet, when you’re trying to grapple with these big questions over whether there is meaning in human life, or whether you should be deriving it from some source… that’s a really interesting question and I think that we should credit teenagers with the way that they grapple with that. I don’t know I find them inspirational actually, I think a lot times they’re smarter than I am, a lot smarter than I am in terms of the way that they grab onto a question and really really wrestle with it without fear.”
— John Green
2
“Young adult literature has long been the refuge of those on the outer edges of the societal zeitgeist. Women have legitimacy within its realm, seeing successes not often available to them on the mainstream market. And with such successes, pushback has happened regularly upon gendered lines — realliterature is literature written by white men. Books by young women about young women are called “fluffy,” “immature,” and not dealing with serious enough topics. Ruth Graham rolls her eyes not because emotional catharsis and likability are inherently unworthy, but because these books are about girl things experienced by girls. We’ve been trained that this is less important than listening to Jonathan Franzen pontificate.”
– Dianna Anderson
3
“By writing YA, we’re not crossing out adult readers. YA isn’t a reading level, it’s a category of story about a particular stage in life. Many of my adult friends thought if I started writing “teen fiction” it wouldn’t be a story they’d enjoy. But about half of YA readers are over 18, and a huge portion of the adult readers of YA are over 30. I didn’t find YA and start reading it myself until I was in college — and I’m so glad I did find it, because it reminded me how honest and surprising and deeply human fiction can be. When you write YA, you’re writing to a wide, diverse audience. Adults buy and read YA all the time. Of course, it’s important to write with teen readers in mind, too, since they’re a significant portion of the audience, and no one can sense preachy messages or condescending stories like a teen.”
— Chuck Sambuchino
4
“I’ve had other friends look at me in bewilderment when they realize my books are young adult novels. I can practically see all their assumptions whirling through their mind: These books are for teens, so I probably won’t be interested. They’re probably dumbed down and not worth it. What is my friend doing writing for teens, anyway? She’s better than that! As a writer, my own path to young adult fiction was an unexpected one. Some stereotypes about YA fiction are based on the idea that a YA novelist is deeply nostalgic for her teen years and wants to relive them through fiction. For me, there are some very specific things about YA that make creative sense. YA is particularly story-based. Think TV and film: you are drawn in to a story immediately, or at least, that’s the goal. Story, story, story. This is YA. I’m the first to admit that I’ve never been especially drawn to adult literary fiction. I very rarely connect with it, although I have read and loved the odd literary novel. This is because I generally value story over literary affect. I tend to prefer an arresting tale over a pretty sentence.”
— Malinda Lo
5
“The truth of the matter is that writing for young adults is, for many authors, simply more rewarding than writing for adults. Remember being a teenager? The excruciating embarrassment, the wanting to be noticed whilst wanting to disappear, the massive questions about the point of everything, the just-as-important questions about sexuality, religion, and how to make your hair behave? Well teens today have moved beyond all that (they have Google, Wikipedia and a whole host of hair-styling tutorials on YouTube). What they’re looking for instead is brave new worlds where the things that adults prefer to brush under the carpet (rape, suicide, self harm, poverty, compulsive gaming, racism and, more generally, the utterly unfair nature of life on this planet) can be held up to the light, considered, explored and, ideally, used as the basis for a fantastic story.”
– Gemma Malley
6
“When people comment that I managed to create an authentic teenage voice with the main characters in both my novels I often joke that it’s because I’m very immature for my age. Having met teenagers who are far more articulate and intelligent than I am, it’s definitely only a joke, but for me, adolescence still doesn’t feel that far removed. There is something about that time — all the anxiety and worry and insecurity but also all the excitement and thrill of discovering boys and sex and drinking for the first time — that seems to be indelibly imprinted onto my subconscious and, as a result, accessing all those emotions is easy for me.”
— Louise O’Neill
7
“My theory is that we’re always every age we ever were. My teenage self is still hanging around; it’s just choosing to engage with him, writing books for him, seeing what he felt and needed that he wasn’t getting. I genuinely think it’s the simple action of taking a teenager seriously, which is amazingly rare.”
— Patrick Ness
Now it’s your turn! Tell us why you think it’s important to write for all ages below…
REMEMBER…
Tag your response on Medium with “Writing Prompt” then tweet it using #WriteforAll & @Litographs. You must submit your response before 26th December for a chance to win one of the beautiful Litograph ‘FEED’ t-shirts and a signed copy of FEED.
