These are older books. Some have been reprinted many times. What you see is the edition Amazon was trying to sell. If that's the new edition of a living writer's book, that's what I want to send you. If it's one of several editions of a book whose author is dead, cheaper copies may or may not be available; I'll e-mail you about them before cashing your payment.
(By the inner 18-year-old of the writer known as Priscilla King)
Dear World That Seldom Writes to Me,
Here is yet another article about how to write books that a certain kind of school librarians like. You need to read it because it's not about how to write books that actual students like. It's about how to write books that make students rush to check out the school library, then whine, "Oh boooring, it's full of lame, stupid books nobody wants to read."
http://www.teenlibrariantoolbox.com/2018/09/sunday-reflections-why-dont-we-ask-the-teens/
The writer's logic is: Teenagers who don't read books have certain problems, so maybe, if all the new books we buy are about those problems, those teenagers will read those books.
The two false premises are:
(1) Teenagers who don't like books would like books if the books were about characters exactly like them, facing problems exactly like theirs. Does not happen--or not often. Teenagers see right through "You're a Latina who wants to be a police officer, so you ought to like Espie Sanchez"...
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| https://www.paypal.me/PriscillaKingUS/10 |
or "You've been sexually molested, so you should read Chinese Handcuffs..."
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| https://www.paypal.me/PriscillaKingUS/20 |
Some teenagers just don't like books, period. Some teenagers do like books, but they're interested in books that distract them from those of their problems that are most obvious to adults. Maybe they're Puerto Rican all the time and don't particularly want to read about that, but what they would like to discover, in English, might be some lyrical and witty poems...
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...or an easy-to-read, fast-moving animal story...
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| https://www.paypal.me/PriscillaKingUS/5 |
...or something informative that stretches their brains and helps them enjoy being intelligent...
![A Brief History of Time by [Hawking, Stephen]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/61cQQST7o9L.jpg) |
| https://www.paypal.me/PriscillaKingUS/15 |
(Note from the adult who's actually typing these words: None of these was a favorite of mine but they were favorites of ethnic-minority students who rejected the minority-experience stories and teen-problem stories that were supposed to be just for them.)
(2) Teenagers who do like books don't usually like being bombarded with information about the problems they don't have.
Like, okay, this one is at least funny about the subject, which I like, sort of...
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...but this is exactly what I do not want, even if you think every teenaged girl does, or should...
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| https://www.paypal.me/PriscillaKingUS/20 |
...and if you hand me anything like this, I am sooo never speaking to you again you disgusting pervert!!! (In the United States it is illegal for teenagers to have any experience that would allow them to identify as any kind of "sexual." It ought to be illegal for adults to tell them to think about it.)
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| I wouldn't sell this one, but someone on Amazon undoubtedly would. |
...'cos what I really want are nice clean stories about people who ignore their hormones, which are only going to get them into trouble, and have lives, like with adventures. Even if they're the same stories I've been reading over and over since grade three...I'd rather reread a family story, this time from the older sibling's perspective, than read another disgusting Teen Romance:
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| https://www.paypal.me/PriscillaKingUS/15 |
...I'm not into science fiction, but it certainly beats romance...
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| https://www.paypal.me/PriscillaKingUS/10 |
...and I'm not into war stories, but at least this kid had real worries other than silly teen romance...
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Get the picture? I don't date because I don't want to date. Like most teenaged girls I have lists of boys who find me attractive and boys whom I find attractive, but I don't need to read more about how one day one boy is going to be on both lists at the same time, because, if and when it happens, that's going to be another problem. Somehow I don't think anybody is publishing novels about how young couples say no to making babies. Actually, I might be more interested in true stories about people who don't let their hormones push them around, who tune out all the cultural pressure and do all the other things I am trying to do. I'm a teenager. I want to explore the whole world, not lock myself into a flippin' nursery. I just got out of the nursery!
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| https://www.paypal.me/PriscillaKingUS/40 (and yes, it's still worth that) |
I don't want to be a homeless nomad like so many young Americans. I want to get some use out of...
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Because I'm female and do well on tests I keep hearing "Teach, teach." I do not particularly want to spend my whole life in schools. Maybe I'd like to explore more about the other ways...
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I am frankly tired of reading about Marya Sklodovska Curie, about whom half a dozen biographies have been written and all of them are constantly handed to girls who are "smart" enough to know we don't want to work with radium, but I like reading the memoirs and essays of novelists...
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| https://www.paypal.me/PriscillaKingUS/35 |
I skimmed every single book in the school library's fiction collection in grade nine, and if you want to know which book I liked best, it was a book full of fresh new (to me) history, and adventures; it showed me that being Christians didn't mean just always doing what you were told and pretending to like it, that even teenagers could actually make Christian choices of their own. There weren't nearly enough books like that in the school library. There is a Teen Romance in this book but it's kept in its place.
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(Another note from the adult writer: Not all of these books were available to me in high school, but I liked each of them when I found it, in the way I would have liked them if I'd read them in high school.)
Several writers whose young adult books I liked, as a teenager, young adult, or young-at-heart adult, have written about how they wrote such good books.
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Several of them mentioned, at various lengths, a point Joan Aiken made particularly well...
It may be useful to bear in mind that 55% of teenagers "live in non-traditional families" (and yes, unfortunately most of those are not healthy extended families but dysfunctional broken homes), and 10% think they're something other than heterosexual (and something is badly wrong when anyone under eighteen has enough experience to say a thing like that), and 46% identify as "non-Caucasian," and 41% are classified as living in what at least passes for "poverty" in these United States of Obscene Wealth, and 36% are Internet addicts, and 50% claim to have used drugs, and 20% are classified as having mental illnesses (most of which are probably produced by the said drugs), but at least, the social workers can be proud, only 7% are able to drop out of the schools where they lead such dysfunctional lives. Or, in short: writers tend to write for our young relatives, and writers' young relatives tend to be privileged young people.
But good books are not written "by the numbers." Good writers don't sit down to write a book about a trendy problem, which would obviously be "living in a non-traditional family," set in a trendy city, with a trendy solution, where all the characters have trendy names and trendy interests and trendy personal paraphernalia. Good writers sit down to write a story they (and, ideally, their young relatives) consider interesting.
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Harry Potter is not a story written by the numbers about an ethnic-minority gender-confused teenager who lives in "near poverty" and uses drugs and struggles with a mental illness; it's a fantasy about a White teenager who lives at school, is rich, and struggles with the social problems produced by having a talent, which is a safer topic to discuss when the talent in question is pure fantasy rather than a talent for writing or math.
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Clueless is not a story written by the numbers etc. etc.; it's what happened when a writer almost as gifted as Jane Austen tried to remake one of Jane Austen's novels (and some other classic novels, later) into a contemporary young adult story, and she and her students had so much fun that the remakes became a movie and TV empire.
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Twilight wasn't written by the numbers, or what a certain kind of school librarian thought the non-readers at his school ought to read, either. By any stretch. How teenagers relate to the ethical problems of being a vampire, school librarians probably don't want to know.
Even the works of James Patterson, Danielle Steel, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, or Debbie Macomber--all of which a lot of people who are otherwise non-readers do read (at all ages)--weren't written by the numbers, as something "supposed to be good for you." (The only one of those writers I like at all is Stephen King, and his novels do contain diversity: White people from Maine or New England, ghosts, space aliens, monsters, demons, vampires...)
My outer grownup, the bookseller, sees one way people who are physically 18 years old differ from people who are thirty or fifty or seventy years old: Today's 18-year-olds will accept a "graphic novel" or manga book as a serious work. Most older people will not. The mere idea of Maus being presented in a cartoon format, with the author's parents drawn as mouse-people, seemed to many older people like a silly, disrespectful way to "make light of" what his parents had lived through. I didn't have a problem with it and suspect those who are physically 18 years old today wouldn't have one either. They'll come up and ask for manga and they don't even mind reading the original Japanese editions that are, to American eyes, printed backward.
Here's what my outer grownup sees people-different-from-me doing in the real world: When they buy books, young adults actually seem to have similar taste to adults. In my part of the world that means a lot of interest in Christian books (nonfiction books about the faith), Christian writers, and Christian characters in fiction. (Quite a few people who look for Christian content are also interested in writers of other faiths--but they're more likely to spend the money for a new book to encourage a writer of their own Christian denomination, more likely to buy a book by a non-Christian in a dime-a-dozen sale.) I've worried about setting up a display with 50% Christian books--no worries, the Christian books sold first!
Of course that's partly because people of all ages, in my part of the world, buy books as gifts for newly baptized Christians and/or ministers, at least as often as they do for personal enjoyment. Some of the teenagers who buy Bibles, and ponderous Bible dictionaries, concordances, and commentaries, to give to their elders, buy only games and movies for themselves. Video discs definitely move faster than books...but books do move.
When young or old adults buy books for themselves, they like facts. They like history, especially local history but also foreign history. They will buy scholarly books when they're not even taking the relevant classes. They like comedy. After Christian books, history and comedy are the fastest selling genres, and novels are the slowest. Cookbooks and other how-to books are reasonably popular. Books about stamp collecting move faster than novels.
When they do buy novels, gender correlates with genre and mood, but age does not. Male fiction readers like adventures and suspense. They don't demand violence, gore, or horrors per se but they like stories with a sense of real danger, stories that nannies might have worried would keep them awake at night when they were little boys. They like stories that they can accept as mostly true. Female fiction readers like "exciting" stories with dangerous adventures in them too, and many of them don't mind a good gross-out, but they will also read a nice cozy romance about how a Christian couple who are already married settled their disagreement and lived happily ever after. (Male readers are likely to agree that, in the absence of real doubt that even the marriage will survive unharmed, those stories are "boring as Hell"...how boring that is probably depends on whom you're visiting, so they can talk about their relatives and I'll talk about mine.)
They do not prefer "dark" (pessimistic) over "light" (optimistic) content, I'm glad to see. Older people with depression as a symptom look for "happy" books that don't make them think of illness, death, or guilt. Young people, whose moods are still swinging far and wide regardless of what they read, often look for "exciting" books that seem to help them build mental toughness. The ones who like war stories don't seem to worry about how much the authors dwell on the gore and the wounded babies. They don't demand either grit or grimness. I like a mix of sad and happy endings, myself.
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A guy who's already learned how to beat off bullies learns how to work with other people. Only, it's a series, and if you read the earlier books you know that, after making his last year in school a good one, the guy dies.
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The kid copes with all his teenage challenges, and the story is laugh-out-loud funny. Only, at the end, and on through the sequels, he's still a self-obsessed nerd.
Then there's Anne Frank, linked above: The kid copes with all her teenage challenges, and several extra ones, with so much grace, wit, and insight that people carry on about whether her parents only helped her edit her war memoirs (she was definitely writing for future publication) or wrote them for her. Only, after the end of the diary, we all know she dies...
Good books for young adults usually (not always) are about young adults. Beyond that, the only rule is that they need to be good books.
They can be about animals.
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They can be about space aliens.
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| https://www.paypal.me/PriscillaKingUS/5 |
Funnily enough, the book that adults thought was going to crawl right inside my head and tell me all about myself ('cos adults thought all I was interested in was myself, ((eyeroll))!) always seemed to me to be about space aliens.
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Those written-by-the-numbers characters with their very very timely and trendy problems did not remind me of anybody I ever knew. Of course, that's partly because, when I've met people who seemed as if they might have been this boring even when they were thirteen, I've avoided them. Also they've probably avoided me,'cos the character in that book who looks like me is Laura Danker, right? Nufsed.
Tip for adults: Okay, so like once in a great while, like when we wake up in a messy bed, teenagers do want to consult one of those "Darling-You-Are-Growing-Up" books. (Information about getting the mess out of the sheet before anyone else sees it would be totally groovy. I mean, I now know about shoving anything with blood on it under cold water, fast, but I had to find that out from a deeply icky conversation with my mother, whose business I felt it was none of.) The rest of the time, will you please take your eyes and minds off our changing bodies and tell us something we do not already know? Like I know more about being towed through life by C-cups, already, than most of the people who write those lame books about Adolescence ever will know, so maybe they could tell me about, I don't know, how to find a publisher for a really super-lame-brained book and sell it to school librarians and get rich.
Like I wrote one, right? At fifteen? On a bet? The terms of the bet did not say anybody had to publish it, and I would have died of embarrassment if they had! I wrote the school novel to end all school novels, where this sloppy girl has a crush on this boy who is so obviously a funny-looking pizza-face, and it just got lamer from there. I mean this girl lives in the real world, but she's a total loser. I do not actually think the world needs more novels like that. But at least it was closer to reality than Judy Blume's young adult novels. That was one writer who should have stuck to primary school books.
I will admit I like some books about people whose problems aren't exactly like mine, only in some way they are.
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| https://www.paypal.me/PriscillaKingUS/15 |
This is not really a book about the civil rights movement, although it's set in that period of history. It is about bullies and working around them.
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This is not really a pair of books about gender identity, although people used to want to make it one. It is about the difference between having fun and being mean. Mostly it's about having fun, so it's fun to read.
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And if this one were really a romance, it'd be a lousy one. Scarlett is a selfish spoiled brat who doesn't deserve True Love and doesn't get it. It works, though, as a serious summary of our Southern States history in a literary form. Men who don't have any better sense than to marry Scarlett deserve what they get, but they're symbols of different ideas we've tried to live by. This story is really about what kind of belief system we want to live by, now. That's why everyone has to pick their own ending...
Yes. Right. Teenagers do notice literary stuff like structure and symbolism, when adults leave us alone.
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