haikujaguar: Speaking with a YA Voice

M. C. A. Hogarth (

haikujaguar) wrote,
@ 2008-03-28 17:52:00

Current mood:	thoughtful
Entry tags:	writing

Speaking with a YA Voice
Re-reading Kushiel's Scion has been an interesting exercise for me. It's a novel written for adults, but told from the first person viewpoint of a fourteen-year-old child. Imriel has thoughts like this:

I sat and thought about it until I came to understand how Maslin of Lombardy might hate me for giving him his heart's desire. For caring so little that I could afford to toss it to him as a sop, the least of my undeserved holdings. How my careless charity might be a hateful reminder of the disparity in our status. How he might hate me for being forever in my debt, and how his pride would gall him at the sight of me.

Meanwhile, at fourteen, I was writing things like this:

Today is Sunday. We moved my sister's furniture to Gainesville today. By some strange feat of magic, the couch did not fall off the pick-up and none of us got lost. Anyway, I have a headache from my cold. I've been beseiged by relatives since I've last written (the reason for my headache, the real reason?). I still have no money. Nevertheless, for some unfathomable reason, I am well-content. Maybe it was the piece of cake I just ate...?

I mentioned that I flipped through my high school journals before writing "Hubris" to get a feel for how a teenager writes, and... well, I was a very dramatic and florid teen, and I repeated my words and sentences, and had not-very-clear sentence structure, or in fact any sense of structure at all. The one characteristic that stood out the most was the one I absolutely couldn't use in writing that short, which was that I was not concise. I rambled. And wow, the world ended on every. Single. Page. My WOES were EXTREME.

I wanted that story to sound like it had been written by a teenager, though, and I think I did passably at that. But even as I wrote it I knew I was sacrificing a lot of that teenage "voice" to the needs of the story, to be concise and clear, to tell it well. In no way, shape or form could the me-at-fourteen have had the depth of thought or the skill to write (or speak) the way Imriel does in Kushiel's Scion. Maybe that's inevitable, because the novel is intended for an adult audience... perhaps they'd be bored by the real concerns of a fourteen-year-old. I don't know. But it made me think, suddenly, how hard it would be to write believably for a YA audience from a YA viewpoint. I don't know if I could do it, or if I would produce what Jacqueline Carey did, a novel whose narrator is fourteen only by authorial fiat.

I still like the book, by the way. I'm just thinking out loud here.

Stardancer Home.

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sartorias
2008-03-28 10:16 pm UTC (link)

I think you nailed it when you said that the intended audience is adults. I suppose a fourteen year old could read the book, and maybe even one might recognize something of her "fourteenness" in the character, but that logic chain presupposes awarenesses that I haven't experienced in any fourteen year old, even the ones going to college classes. (And kids at the home I worked at had a very different mode of looking at the world that had no awareness of privilege, but an intense focus on the minutae of survival.)

for art, though, we stretch these things, and buy exaggerations if we're entertained. I mean, part of the fun of fantasy is people who fly!

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dancinghorse
2008-03-29 01:02 am UTC (link)

Well, then there's the question of whether a particular author writes credible characters of any age. In this case, I find all her characters that I have read to be what they are by fiat (love that term!), so I'm not surprised that this is more of same. I gave up after the first book, in large part because of this, and won't be reading the latest. Clearly I'm not the intended audience.

I'm writing a 14yo for 14yos now, and the editorial advice I was given on review of the partial was that voice is absolutely critical in writing for this age. If the voice doesn't ring true, the readers won't go for it.

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	sartorias 2008-03-29 01:36 am UTC (link)
	Well, I didn't want to get into the books--they weren't for me--but just the subject of YA, because it's always good to examine these thing. And you are very right. (Reply to this)(Parent)

dedoc
2008-03-28 10:41 pm UTC (link)

And yet...

There are certainly suggestions in Renaissance literature that 14 yr olds could function at literacy levels we find startling. I don't know the Kushiel cycle well enough to have a feel for historical analogues, but it does... not seem impossible to me... that a 14 yr old in Terre d'Ange might think, and thus "write", in such fashion.

Even the 14 yr olds of the Late Unpleasantness sound very different than contemporary 14 yr olds.

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	talix18 2008-03-28 11:33 pm UTC (link)
	Along those lines, a 14-year-old in Imriel's time is not equal to a 14-year-old of modern times. The dangers are different, the responsibilities of his status are different, and his expected life span is different. We grew up in a time that gave us the luxury of believing our woes were world-ending because we had no idea what ending worlds really looked like. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	haikujaguar 2008-03-28 11:47 pm UTC (link)
	thinks Do you think then that maturity can come that early? (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

archangelbeth
2008-03-29 12:10 am UTC (link)

I think maturity -- not to mention vocabulary -- comes at different stages for everyone, just like sexuality does. (I am forever vaguely shocked and appalled when I hear of anyone thinking sexual thoughts before about age 15. Because I was asexual till then. Aliens! They're all aliens, these strange early developers!)

My kid, my 8 year old, uses words like "anthropomorphic" and terms like "on the verge" without half-thinking about it -- though she has trouble saying "specific" (spasficic shows up now and then) correctly, even though she knows what it means.

And the theme with Imriel is that he was essentially tortured at a young age, and had to "grow up fast." I... don't know if I grew up fast, but maybe I did, in some ways, when I became more of a confidant for my mom, 'cause my sire was emotionally abusing her.

I'd have to dig up my Mary Sue that I wrote when I was about 15-16, sometime. Ah, there's some teenage angst! O:D

(Imriel's still definitely on the skinny end of the bell-curve when it comes to maturity and vocabulary, though... >_> )

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sartorias
2008-03-29 01:34 am UTC (link)

What do you mean by maturity? Physical maturity--menses--we (when I was young) were taught came very early, then in the mid seventies, when graduate students started shifting to social history rather than Big Events, and studying records of ordinary people, it was discovered that marriages (and menses) in most of northern europe, at least, did not occur at 10 and 11 as we'd heard. It could be as late as sixteen. The famous exceptions had been used as the rule. And even then, marriages at twelve would turn out to be deals for property, but the married couple did not sleep together for years. Like the Duke and Duchess of Burgoyne, Louis XIV's grandchild and wife. Saint-Simon and Madame de Maintenon both wrote reams about the minutae of those children's lives.

I've been reading letters and diaries for some years. Not many kept diaries at young ages, letters are more common, but enough did that even when one takes into consideration relative privilege (the Lisles were definitely privileged, but the pitiful diary of small family in Germany during the 1500s, wherein the daughter married a modest merchant, they had one child, and she anxiously hovered over this boy listing the terrible things doctors did to him until he died of worms at fifteen) showed literate people not privileged, just somewhat educated. There was a raft of letters and diaries during the French early salon period (early 1600s) that give a wonderful glimpse into female lives in the upper classes, and in the educated classes. And back to England, one of the very best diaries is the Wynne Diaries, where three sisters began diaries at extremely young ages, two of them kept them going, one until her eighties or nineties. The family was in France when the revolution started, had to run for safety, ended up in Italy, knew Lady Hamilton, and Betsy married at eighteen a captain in Nelson's navy, who died in '28. She kept volumes until mid Victorian eras. Anyway, when the girls (who were extremely well educated, speaking three or four languages at young ages) wrote about events, they definitely had a child-eye view of adults, adult motivations and actions.

Yadda yadda. (You can tell I love this subject.) Here's the point, if I may generalize. Some of them encountered marriage and sex in their mid teens. But overall, they were like most teens in not seeing patterns that most teens don't. When we're small, everything is about us. In our teens, when we're breaking away from the parental attachment, everything is about us and peers. Later years, we begin to see others' motivations and so forth as patterns separate from us, and interacting on a bigger and bigger scale. That clip you showed looked, to me, like thirty-something patterning, not fourteen. Even smart and educated and sexually experienced fourteen. (I've known a lot of these latter due to work with abused kids.) That's okay--art allows for lots of stretches both ways--but I find it interesting when I delve through English, German or French records (I can only read those languages) and realize again how many things humans still have in common at every age.

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cissa
2008-03-29 02:40 am UTC (link)

If needed, yes. Probably even earlier.

A lot of the pioneers who settled the country were married couples with the wife maybe 14, and the husband 16, or so I have read. And they managed- not only being adult, but being adult in very trying and difficult circumstances.

Similarly in the European apprentice system, young teens often had far more responsibilities than we would now think appropriate.

Was this positive psychologically? I don't know enough to know; from my amateur POV, I think arguments can be made both ways. As a devil's advocate, I do think that much of the destructiveness that our teens experience is because they don't have more positive and pressing needs for their abilities... but even believing that, I would not choose to put a child of mine in such a situation without safeguards (which the earlier kids didn't have).

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talix18
2008-03-29 01:08 pm UTC (link)

Sure. While the older you will have more experience and perspective (and thus more maturity) than the younger you did, where you are at any particular time changes with what you've been exposed to up to that point.

There may be concepts that are dependent on brain development just like there are abilities that are dependent on physical development, but I'd guess that the biggest of those changes have already happened by adolescence.

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ysabetwordsmith
2008-03-29 04:26 pm UTC (link)

I've seen it happen. Young Amish are ready to start a household around 12-13 because they've been raised that way -- taught all the skills they'll need as soon as possible. Usually they wait a few years more, but that's mainly a concession to non-Amish society. There are other cultures that do similar things. Maturity has a strong contextual factor.

Bear in mind, too, that there's a natural factor in play: puberty. Young humans become sexually mature around 12-13, though it takes a few more years to reach full growth. Sexual maturity is the point at which Nature says, "Okay, young mammal, it's time to leave your parents and go find a mate." And what do we do? It's another 4 years (age 16) to legal consent for sex in many states; then 2 more (age 18) to legal adulthood; and in practical terms often another 4-7 years (age 22-25) before schooling is complete and the young person can actually set up their own household. From the perspective of 12, that means a span of time equal to the whole life-to-date will be spent under parental care, all the while with Nature cracking the whip.

No wonder teenagers are miserable and flip-flop between mature and immature behavior. Society won't LET them grow up. That's maddening...clinically maddening, if the rise in teen eating disorders, depression, suicide, etc. is any guide.

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bluedressdevil
2008-03-28 11:02 pm UTC (link)

Though my writing at 14 likely was pretty...immature. I feel like my internal dialog was similar to what it is now. Though as you said overly dramatic.

I think the major difference between when I was a teen and now being an adult is how I think. When I was a teen I thought about how things effected me, how they made me feel. Now as an adult I think about how I effect the world around me more and how my actions echo out to the world. I see myself more as the player than the pawn.

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tuftears
2008-03-28 11:18 pm UTC (link)

Podkayne of Mars leaps to mind when I think about YA fiction written to the YA point of view. Not that you'd necessarily expect RH to know anything about how young women feel, but rather than trying to write a 'typical young girl', he's writing 'a smart, brave, but plausible young girl'. And what he gets is someone that young women might want to emulate.

So what does this have to do with voice? It's analogy - I don't think YAs want to read something written in the 'typical young girl' voice, but rather, how they wish they could write. A minimum of rambling to convey a teenager's digressions, flavor with observations of things that especially bedevil YAs but would seem unimportant to adults. Otherwise, what you wrote is how I'd write a YA, except that I'd chop out some extraneous words.

I agree that the text you quoted from Kushiel's Dart doesn't seem very modern YA-ish. Maybe a Victorian era woman who was extremely literate. But the intent of the Kushiel story seems to be to evoke a more Victorianesque setting. (though I don't like the Kushiel books, anyway)

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	newroticgirl 2008-03-28 11:18 pm UTC (link)
	Ohhhh yeah. At 14, my writing was the woesiest. I mostly only have poetry from those days. OW OW OW it's painful (but funny) to reread. My friend dr_pretentious holds a Bad Poetry Party near her birthday and I busted out the high school angst for the occasion. Alas, I lost out to somebody else's high school angst (found on the internet, not their own). :) (Reply to this)

arielstarshadow
2008-03-28 11:34 pm UTC (link)

One thing to bear in mind is that our childhood isn't necessarily anything like the childhoods of the worlds in fantasy novels - heck, go back a few hundred years and look at the childhoods of children right here on our own planet and they bear little resemblance to what we have now (or, for that matter, the childhoods of those in 1st World countries is different from those of 3rd World countries). A 14-year old of the Victorian period is quite different from a 14-year old of 2008.

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	haikujaguar 2008-03-28 11:48 pm UTC (link)
	Do you think it's good that we let children be children that long? I don't know the answer, it's just... if 14-year-olds can be that grown-up... should they be? (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	arielstarshadow 2008-03-28 11:57 pm UTC (link)
	I don't know where the line should get drawn - what I do know is that we seem to have an awful lot of people these days who are still children despite being in their twenties. Is that because we've crossed the line in terms of "how long should childhood last?" (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

talix18
2008-03-29 01:12 pm UTC (link)

I think it works the other way too - there are children who grow up way before they need to because of the things they see around them (the children of active drug addicts are examples). While I tend to think kids should enjoy being young as long as they can (because adulthood lasts a whole lot longer than youth), there are certainly those who are enabled to take extreme advantage of the opportunity.

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	artfulruin 2008-03-29 12:14 am UTC (link)
	I knew I was sacrificing a lot of that teenage "voice" to the needs of the story, to be concise and clear, to tell it well. I thought of that, but I was also aware that you were writing from the pov of an adolescent Ai-Nadari, not an adolescent human. (Reply to this)

	whitecrow0 2008-03-29 12:30 am UTC (link)
	OMG! The u at forteen is soooo much more ~~artik~~ ~~articulit~~ good at words than evryone @ MySpace!!!eilevnty! Um. Maybe I shouldn't post that. I was fourteen once myself, and if I read this, I would be quite angry at myself. (Reply to this)

	martes 2008-03-29 12:44 am UTC (link)
	I just assumed most of those books are being written when the protagonist was an adult (such as "To Kill a Mockingbird"). Looking at that from that point of view makes the sophisticated writing style seem less odd. Unless the book is in the form of an actual diary, simply assume the adult version of the protagonist is writing about stuff that happened when he was 14. (Reply to this)

	hummingwolf 2008-03-29 03:06 am UTC (link)
	You kmow, as a paid LJ user, you can do a directory search for people in a specific age group (at least when the search is working properly). While some people do lie about their age (I distrust the 109-year-olds), it can still be educational. Edited at 2008-03-29 03:08 am UTC (Reply to this)

janni
2008-03-29 05:34 am UTC (link)

I think it's like ... we take the memory of and observations about being 14, write from that, but then sort of overlay it with adult writing skill, to better convey it. You can't lose that awareness of what 14 is like, but you can -- polish it up a bit to convey it better. Sort of a version of what we do with adult conversation, where we edit out all the ummms and errrrrs. :-)

I do think we keep kids young to long ... but I also think, when we write YA, we're writing it for kids who are alive today, so the story needs to have something in it they can relate to and that feels real and true, too.

Which doesn't mean one should underestimate or talk down to teens, ever, in fiction or out of it--one of my pet peeves as that we do see teens as just children in our society, when they're really almost-adults. But a character like the Kushiel one--yeah, that does ring as untrue, and as an adult writing another adult and calling it a teen. Not just because of the language, but because of the level of self-awareness.

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	poliphilo 2008-03-29 12:03 pm UTC (link)
	Novels by fourteen year olds rarely get published. There's a reason for this. I think you did a good job of suggesting a teenage voice without descending into the emo wearisomeness of teenage prose. (Reply to this)

	shadesong 2008-03-29 05:04 pm UTC (link)
	nods I'm writing YA with a 12-year-old girl protagonist. I feel confident that I can capture the voice, but that's because I have a bunch of 12-to-14-year-old girls in my house every day. twitch (Reply to this)

miintikwa
2008-03-30 10:00 am UTC (link)

I have my 14 year old die-ary.

I have days where it is "WOE! ANGST! ~~bad~~POETRY!"

But I also have several entries that involve some pretty heavy-duty words, and some serious thought. (Heh. The one about Church and coming to grips with not wanting to go anymore made me laugh and realize that my LJ-tangent-typing is not so far off from how I used to write in my paper journal, all those years ago.)

It all depends on the individual, I think.

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	ruggels 2008-03-31 01:03 pm UTC (link)
	On a completely unrelated note,are you aware of this going opn? http://www.ncobrief.com/index.php/archives/the-eight-hundred-pound-gorilla/ Scott (Reply to this)(Thread)

	haikujaguar 2008-03-31 01:09 pm UTC (link)
	Yes. I'm curious to see what will happen. As big a deal as this is to independent writers, your average Amazon shopper isn't going to know or care about it. (Reply to this)(Parent)

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