Genre Guide — Young Adult

If you want to write in a genre, you have to read that genre. Experts in the industry are consistent with their advice that you must be an avid reader of a genre to write well in it. The books below are a few staples of the genre, but with a genre this big, you'll need to go to your particular subgenre in the Amazon Top 100 to really get a feel for things.

Do you feel younger than your age? More importantly, do you feel you can, as Susan Cooper puts it, "look again at a mystery through the eyes we used to have?" Because that is the essence of writing for the young: the ability to look at things through their eyes — which are, indeed, our eyes just, as Cooper again says, "not yet wearing our heavy jacket of time."

If you can put aside time's weighty coat and douse yourself in the heady perfume of having an entire life yet spread out before you, then you are ready to write YA.