Hi! So, I’ve gone for years thinking that my books were Young Adult in target audience, since my characters were teenagers and I wrote it with my friends’ feedback while I was in high school, but every time I looked for suitable comp titles (other published books that you can compare yours to to easily tell others what your book is like), I struggled to find any that reflected my characters’ maturity levels.
YA was just so full of 17 and 18 year old protagonists, or protagonists that felt 17 or 18 years old. I was so frustrated because I had made sure that my characters reflected the maturity level of me and my friends when we were their age. In fact, I even made my main characters age with me as I wrote because I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to authentically write a POV character that wasn’t the same age as me. I also didn’t enjoy reading those YA books after a while because the protagonists constantly felt… too mature. New Adult is still an emerging genre, and perhaps some of these YA books do belong there, but still.
My characters start out in the “lower teens”, 15 years old. Each new draft had me reanalyzing how old they should start out as, considering how old I wanted them to be at the end of the series. Now that I am considering making this officially MG, or rather Upper MG, I’m also considering making the kids start out as 14 year olds. My thing was always age and maturity level, but I recently had an agent tell me that my voice is also very Middle Grade, so yay! I’m on the right track!
However. You know how I always struggled to get my word count down to be more acceptable for a debut YA novel? Last draft ended with 108K words? Yeah… Even Upper Middle Grade will find issue with that. Luckily, this same agent pointed out filter words and imbalanced showing/telling in my first chapter (Didn’t I say I probably stubbornly ignore my own advice in my post about word count?), so I hopefully will be able to cut the word count waaay down without losing the heart of the story and characters in this next draft!
The school year has started and I am actively working on reading, writing, and working. I love how every time I get back into editing, I remember that I love and loathe it at the same time. Yesterday I spent all day reworking a paragraph just to… end up with the first change I made. BUT! I am trudging onward and hopefully polishing the stone more and more, even though editing always feels like I’m just making everything worse. XD
Advice: Sometimes you have to keep writing even if you feel like your “improvements” are making it absolute garbage. It won’t look like a beautiful garden while you are zoomed in on the rose bush you are pruning. Give the bush time to breathe and then see if the flowers are blooming brighter than before!
Hey, every day is full of its own struggles. Remember that you matter. You are valuable. You are worthy of life and love. It will come back to you in time. ❤
Have a good!
N. K. Valek: Author 