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Jonked posted:Sorry to distract from slang chat, but I've got a question for any YA authors here. I've got an idea a story that would be pretty good for a middle school/high school audience, but it's more of a longer short story or novella length idea. I looked around on Doutrope, and didn't really see any magazines that accepted those sorts of stories - most of it seemed to be flash fiction or shorter stories, or novels. I also didn't see many major publishers on Doutrope when I searched, though. Is there just no real niche for novella length YA stories? Novella-length shouldn't be a major hurdle for a middle-grade novel--the recommended word counts for most MG publishing lines basically stack up with average novella lengths. Once you get into YA, though, "too short" could be a bigger problem, and a true short story, even a long one, is going to be hard to publish in either MG or YA unless you're already an established author. I wouldn't worry too much about the length of it, though--if it's good enough, publishers will work with you on it, either by having you flesh out the premise or by manipulating the page layout, book size, etc. to make it seem longer than it is.
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Aug 17, 2012 02:31
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Subway Ninja posted:How do you suggest dealing with coincidences of characters (Perhaps bad phrasing, but it's the description that most readily comes to mind)? Write it anyway. If you get to the point where you're looking to publish it, raise your concerns with your agent or your editor, and they can tell you whether or not it's something you need to be worried about. Lots of writers tend to overestimate (or underestimate) how close their characters or plot are to somebody else's--it may not be something an outsider will even pick up on. Fantasy especially (and all genre fiction, really) tends to involve a lot of archetypal characters, so what strikes you as a rip-off may just be considered a stock fantasy character by somebody else. If the similarities are enough to bother you whether others pick up on it or not, then sit down and brainstorm how you can change your character so that she's different enough from the already published one. There are tons of changes you can make--appearance, manner of speaking, personality, moral outlook, etc.--that can change your character just enough without affecting the role they play in the story. And the more thought you put into it, the more likely it is that you're going to hit upon a change that will make that character work even better than she does right now.
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Aug 27, 2012 06:47
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Just those people. I've actually heard the opposite--the usual complaint about MFA programs these days is that they teach a very formulaic kind of fiction (of which the ambiguous ending is an essential part). Pretty much every recently published short story collection I've read consists of at least half ambiguous endings, sometimes all ambiguous ones. I don't think the ambiguous ending has ever been more en vogue in literary fiction circles than it's been the last 10-20 years, really. Of course, if you're writing genre fiction then it's a lot harder to get away with that kind of ending. And even with a gray ending, you have to make sure that your character goes on some kind of emotional arc where change is implied; you just don't have to spell out exactly what it is.
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Aug 30, 2012 19:10
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It's silly to frame it as an either/or proposition. There are very few published fiction writers out there who aren't doing both. If they weren't writing for an audience, they wouldn't be published. There's no point in writing only for the market, though. A) You probably don't understand what makes something popular, and your imitation is likely to miss the mark. B) What sells tends to change quickly, and writing tends to go slowly, so by the time your novel is finished, the trend you wrote it to capitalize on will either by over or the market will be flooded. That's why most writers/publishers/agents will advise you to write the book you wish you could find on shelves but can't--if you want to read something like it, other people probably do too. Unless you're a total weirdo. I usually write the story I want to write, then address what other people want to read in editing. Fortunately the stuff I want to write is usually pretty commercial, so I rarely have a huge gulf between one and the other.
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Dec 30, 2012 23:25
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I think the tense thing depends a lot on genre. I read a lot of YA and first person/present tense is par for the course there; I don't find it remotely distracting within that genre. It works for the conventions of YA--heightened emotions, stepping into the protagonist's shoes, strong voice, etc. If I'm reading literary fiction, though, it's harder for me to get into a present-tense narrative, because (for example) the protagonist's voice doesn't necessarily matter to me as much as the author's voice/I'm not necessarily being asked to identify with the protagonist/the emotions are more restrained--and I think you can do a lot more interesting things with the past tense/third in literary fiction than you can with the first person/present. In general I find that tense/person are almost invisible to me unless they're done really, really badly, though. You could ask me about my favorite books that I've read 10 or 15 times, and there are some of them that I still wouldn't be able to tell you if they were first person or third, past or present.
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Oct 31, 2013 07:48
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