Debate It Guest Post

Debate It is a wonderful site where readers and writers debate books and bookish topics. I was delighted to be given a guest slot, along with being Author of the Week. I put down my thoughts around whether YA (young adult) is an easier genre to read and/or to write. Read my interview below and visit the site here.

For me, reading YA is usually way easier than reading adult fiction, but the reasons might surprise you. It isn’t because the books are “dumbed down” in any way - YA novels tend to have plots, characters and themes as complex as any you will find in adult literature. It has everything to do with the fact the books are, for the most part, just so much more enjoyable!

For one thing, I love the pacing of YA books. The stories move! With a shorter word count, there isn’t time for anything not essential to the story. Adult books, particularly those styled as “literary” tend to take their own sweet time getting to the point. Sometimes, the flowery descriptions and story meanderings feel like padding which contributes little to the plot. In YA, every scene, description or dialogue exchange has to serve multiple purposes. So a description of a dystopian landscape will happen as the action of the scene unfolds (and not in a separate paragraph), and the protagonist’s reaction will reveal character, and layers will be added to themes at the same time. This means that YA fiction is often particularly rich and dense, and moves along with a sense of urgency.

Another aspect of YA which appeals to me as a reader, is the “freshness” of the characters’ experiences. They are grappling with the concerns of coming of age – exploring identity, choosing values, grappling with politics, falling in love – for the first time. The characters in adult books are often jaded and cynical about the world and the people in it, and that makes for unsatisfying reading – if the character doesn’t care about much, the reader often can’t be bothered, either.

When I taught high school students, I loved their passion, their optimism, their determination to seek justice and fight causes and make a damn difference in the world. YA stories are about these interesting individuals who have not yet had their sharp edges ground down to mediocre smoothness by life experience in an imperfect world. And I want to read about them. I want to be moved to outrage, to infatuation, to elation and to grief by the raw, almost pure, quality of their experience. I think it’s this aspect of YA novels which gives them their punch and their power.

Adolescence is a time of questioning, challenging and rebelling, and this enriches not only the plot and characterisation of the novels, but also allows for innovative ways of story-telling. If you want to see the cutting edge of fiction, and the unorthodox modes and techniques writers are experimenting with, read YA!

Of course, what makes YA novels easier and more pleasurable to read, is what can make them harder to write. It’s a misconception that Young Adult novels make for quick and easy writing. Good fiction, whether for teens or adults, requires clever plotting, complex characterisation and intriguing conflict.

A YA writer is a disciplined writer – you need to cut the waffle and get to the point. Every scene has to serve triple-duty, every character needs to be absolutely necessary, and every paragraph needs to earn its right to exist.

To make dialogue realistic, the adult who writes for teens needs to develop a keen ear for the way young people speak, and then walk that fine line between including enough informality so that it sounds fresh and natural, but not so much slang that the book will be dated by the time it’s published.

It’s a myth that you can’t include swearing, or “taboo” topics, or sex in YA novels, but I believe there is a greater onus on the YA writer to do so responsibly, to show context and consequences. At its best, YA fiction makes the reader think, in addition to giving her great entertainment with “all the feels”.

Writers who are new to writing YA fiction often struggle with capturing the right “voice”. While it obviously varies according to the point of view of the different characters, I think it’s fair to say that overall, the YA voice must be immediate, fresh, “alive”, emotional and true. The writing must be honest, especially since it tells the stories of firsts - first kiss, first betrayal, first heroism. In YA, there’s also always room for writing with humour – which I love.

One difficult aspect of writing YA fiction is that you’re not taken as seriously (as writers of adult fiction are) by the literary establishment. It’s like you’re either a “writer” or a “children’s writer” in the same way as, in the bad old days, you were either a “doctor” or a “lady doctor”. I hope in time, as more adult readers discover the joys, deep satisfaction and writing expertise to be found in YA, that this bias will fade.

As a practising psychologist, I see first-hand just how intense memories of our teen years can be. In a fabulous article entitled Why you never truly leave high school, Jennifer Senior explains that our high school years are like a dark shadow that trails us into adulthood. There are neurological reasons why teens experience everything more intensely than adults, and it seems that the human brain is particularly sticky for experiences that happen in our teen years. For better or worse, we never quite get over their impact on us. I think that part of the reason adult readers enjoy immersing themselves in YA, and authors enjoy writing it, is that it helps us re-experience and re-examine those often tumultuous years from a more mature perspective.

I read a lot of YA novels. Not all of them, of course, are great quality - but the same holds true for adult fiction. The best of YA novels are punchy, challenging and take the reader through an immediacy of experience and an intensity of emotion that is often missing in adult fiction. No wonder so many adults love YA!

So for me as a reader, YA is easier to get stuck into. For me as a writer, writing YA fiction is no easier than writing adult fiction. (Though it might be more fun!)

What do you think? Is it easier to read YA than adult fiction? Is it easier to write it? Let me know in the comments.

The Big Thrill - Interview

International Thriller Writers is a fabulous association of authors from around the world. They publish a wonderful monthly online magazine called The Big Thrill which covers books, authors, agents in the world of crime and thrillers. This month, I'm honoured to be featured alongside such greats as James Patterson and Val McDermid.

You can read my interview here in which I chat about shifting genres, pitting the word against the scalpel, and the influence of my profession (psychology) on my writing.

Enjoy! And thanks to ITW for featuring me :)

Process Blog Tour - Guest Post!

Michael Sears was one of the writers I tagged in the Writers' Process Blog Tour, and I'm delighted that he's my guest today. 

 Michael  is one half of the writing partnership who, with Stanley Trollip, forms the writer Michael Stanley, author of the fabulous Inspector Kubu novels set in Africa. Read more about him here or follow Inspector Kubu on Twitter or Facebook.

Here are his answers about his writing and writing process.

1. What am I working on?

Currently Stanley Trollip and I are working on three projects and inevitably that means they are all going quite slowly.  The fifth Detective Kubu novel is with our wonderful new editor – Marcia Markland at Thomas Dunne Books – so I’m drafting a plan for the sixth book in the series.  It started as an idea for a novella, but seems to have grown into a full length book.  It links the witch doctors of the fourth book and the Bushmen of the third book and keeps Kubu on his toes.

Meanwhile Stanley is well into a new venture for us – a stand-alone thriller set partly in the US, partly in Zimbabwe and partly in Asia.  We’re trying to decide if it’s first person narration, third person, present tense etc. etc.  But we think we understand the protagonist at last and that’s vital.

Finally, that promised novella is still out there tossing ideas into our heads.

2.  How does my work differ from others in the genre?

I suppose the obvious answer is that I write with someone else.  Even that isn’t as unusual as you might think.  There are quite a few very successful crime/thriller writing partnerships.  Most of them write under one name, (as we do) - our editor told us it’s too hard for people to remember two names.  PJ Tracy, Nicki French, Charles Todd, Roslund and Hellstrom immediately spring to mind.  But one finds that every writing partnership works rather differently, and what may make us unusual is that we both do everything – plotting, research, writing, editing.  And we enjoy every minute of it.

 3.  Why do I write what I write?

Keeping in mind that both of us are scientists who became enthusiastic mystery writers quite late in life, I think the answer is that crime fiction has always intrigued us.  There has been something of a renaissance in the genre in South Africa over the last ten to fifteen years and it was easy to get caught up in that.  Then, very long ago, we were in the bush together in Botswana watching a pack of hyenas tear apart and devour a wildebeest.  Nothing was left but the horns.  It seemed to us a wonderful way for a murderer to get rid of a body!  Of course that wasn’t a story, it wasn’t even a plot for a story, but it did get us thinking about why someone would want to make a body disappear that way – completely without trace.  And twenty years later that led to A CARRION DEATH.

It was our intention to set the story in South Africa, but it’s not so easy to rustle up hyenas to do their work on a body in South Africa without going through fences and control gates.  So the story migrated to Botswana, a country we both know and love.  That turned out to be a wonderful boon for us; it allows us to explore issues in southern Africa that are not related to the legacy of apartheid, but still deep and important issues here.  Blood diamonds, the plight of the Bushman peoples of the Kalahari, the legacy of the war in Zimbabwe, the power of the witch doctors.

4.  How does my individual writing process work?

When it comes to the writing, one of us will do a first draft of one or two chapters.  That is sometimes chosen by our individual interests and expertise, but often it is just when one or other of us has a good idea or concept for that particular piece.

The first draft then gets emailed to the other, and comes back covered in red track-changes - wording issues, comments, suggestions.  The overall reaction ranges from: “I love it – just a few tweaks” – translation: “It will be fine when you’ve completely rewritten it” to “This needs work” – translation: “Even after you’ve completely rewritten it, it will be hopeless.”

If you write with someone else you both have to buy into the writing being the most important thing.  Don’t have a thin skin!

Thank you, Michael!

The Writing Process Blog tour

Thanks to the fabulous and friendly Jody Holford for tagging me in this challenge! Jody is the author of the romantic Forever Christmas and is also published in Holiday Spice - a collection of spicy romantic stories. Like me, Jody is a Gemini and prone to worrying. You can read more about her writing process here and find her on Facebook and Twitter.

I'm fascinated by the writing process of other authors. It's always the question I ask at book launches and in interviews and no two answers are ever the same. I'm fascinated by my process, too, because I don't seem to have one. The way I write each book is different - partly driven by the age range and genre, and partly - apparently - dictated by the Muse! The great thing about this challenge is that it reassures writers that there are endless ways to skin the story cat, and no one way is the "right" way!

1.  What am I working on?

I'm about 12k words into the third in my Turtle Walk series for teens. The girls are a year older and things are getting serious! I recently finished the second in a Young Adult dystopian trilogy and am percolating the story and character arcs for the third in my writerly brain.

I'm very excited that my Publishers will soon start translating my dark and twisted psychological thriller for adults, Dark Whispers, which was released this year, into Afrikaans. I think the process is going to be so interesting - how do you preserve the characters' and the author's voice when you translate into a different language?

As usual, I also have a new YA romance idea bubbling in my subconscious - watch this space!

2.  How does my work differ from others in the genre(s)?

Initial reaction to this question: "Crap, I have no idea! You tell me."

More considered response: In my day-job, I'm a psychologist in clinical practice. Although I never base characteries or stories on what I hear in that confidential sanctum, I think my training and experience in psychology helps me deepen my characters. Usually, at least one of my main characters has some psychological problem, but in general I think I understand how people react to trauma or grief or stress, and this gives my novels a thematic depth and character complexity which you might not always find in other books. Unless I just flatter myself. Which is entirely possible!

I also love humour, and so whether I'm writing an angsty teen romance, or a dark adult novel, you'll always find something funny, because that's just how life is - for me at least!

3.  Why do I write what I write?

The wand chooses the wizard, Mr Potter. 

Yes, I know that's another story, but the principle holds. The story chooses the writer. Or it does with me :)

YA romance seems to find me most often, usually in the form of a dramatic image whose story I need to explore. But sometimes a bizarre news story hooks my attention (as happened with Dark Whispers), or I'll be watching something on TV which just strikes me as surreal and I'll start thinking... "What if..." (as happened with the dystopians I'm working on).

I started my Turtle Walk series because I was tired of most books for teens being fantasy-based (I've never been a fan) and featuring male leads with helpless, decorative, pink-princessy girl sidekicks. I have a daughter and wanted her to read better stories, featuring kick-ass, resourceful, intelligent girls who care about some really big issues and aren't saved my boys or adults. I couldn't find them on the bookshelves, so I started writing them myself!

4.  How does my individual writing process work?

Ah, the million dollar question!

As I said above, my process varies for every book. I usually start with a couple of ideas which I think would be fascinating to combine (in a hypnosis session, a psychologist uncovers the sick deeds of a ObGyn at her hospital), and the idea for some interesting characters (psycho doctor meets empathic psychologist who has a saving "thing"). Then I think of 5-10 "tentpoles" - events which need to happen to get the story from the activating end to the climax. I might generate these as a spider-diagram on a big piece of cardboard - I don't use online tools like Scrivener.

I usually know how it will end (vaguely), but this almost always changes. With Dark Whispers, I put (another) twist in the tail after reading a non-fiction magazine article in the dentist's office, which gave me an excellent idea! A popular song sparked an idea to change the ending of one of my YA romances, so I like to stay flexible and open to new ideas.

When I know the beginning, some of the main points of the middle, and maybe the ending, I begin writing.

Except when I don't.

Some genres and books, I have discovered, require me to have a much more rigorous plotting process. With Dark Whispers, I had to go into more plotting detail because there are red herrings, hidden reveals, plot twists, and the requirement to be medically accurate. Man, it nearly broke my brain! I plotted this one in a notebook and on Word, but that doesn't always allow you to see things at a glance.

In one of YA romances, I used index cards and I found that very useful. Laying the cards out on my big coffee table, I could immediately see the gaps and the lags.

For the dystopian trilogy, by brain has been doubly-broken, because I need to plot the story and character arcs for each novel, but also plot the overall arching story. So I need to plant things in book one that only become relevant in the sequels, and I need to be very careful about what I reveal so as not to give things away. Here I experimented wiith the Save the Cat plotting method. I wrote each interacting story-line (there were 5!) in a different coloured pen on a series of index cards, and then ordered them. What was very useful was being able to cluster crises from across the five lines in single events, to get some truly brutal and exciting scenes! After I'd written the first draft, I printed it out according to the Shrunken Manuscript method and could immediately get a better feel for the overall structure and pace. 

I like experimenting with different methods, so sometimes I write in marker pen in notebooks, sometimes in MS Word, and I often quickly rescue ideas by dictating them into my phone's voice recorder. I tend to have the general story in my head when I begin, but I think up the detailed scenes as I go along - like that metaphorical car with the headlamps lighting up a little of the way ahead.

For me, the best way to dream up the scenes is literally to dream them. I lie in my bed, an airline mask over my eyes, and deep-breathe myself into an alpha dreamlike state. (Does this sound crazy-eccentric? It does, doesn't it?!) Then I imagine the story as if it was a movie playing out in my mind. Great images and some punchy dialogue come to me this way. I've never actually sure how much of this I'm actively creating and how much is "taking dictation" from the muse and the characters. If I think about it too deeply, it begins to worry me - some of the characters I write are foul and I can't decide whether it's worse that these are products of my own mind, or that there's some other explanation... dah dah daaaah!

I spend a lot of time on editing, incorporating suggestions from my beta-readers and agent, Michelle Johnson, and then I leave it for as long as I can stand before coming back to reread with sort-of fresh eyes.

I can't write on days when I do my therapy work, or my training development (my other other job) because they put my head into different modes, so I do my different jobs on alternate days. I can't write at my practice office (don't know why, just doesn't work), so I write at home, spread out messily on the dining room table. I like to wear sweatpants when I work (a writer's perk!) with fingerless gloves in winter, and when I handwrite in notebooks, it has to be in purple, blue or green markers. I write best when I'm home alone, and uninterrupted.

That's it - and it's probably more than you wanted to know! (Blame Jody, lol.)

Here are the writers I'm tagging...

Michael Sears

Michael Sears is one half of the writing partnership who, with Stanley Trollip, forms the writer Michael Stanley, author of the fabulous Inspector Kubu novels.

Michael is a mathematician, specializing in geological remote sensing and was born in South Africa. He has travelled extensively in Africa, having adventures such as tracking lions at night, fighting bush fires on the Savuti plains in northern Botswana and being charged by an elephant! His love for the bush works its way into his writing.

Read more about him here or follow Inspector Kubu on Twitter or Facebook.

Next Up, Gail Schimmel

Gail Schimmel is talented and has a great sense of humour. It's no surprise to discover that she's been writing stories since she could put pen to paper. 

Now Gail fits her writing into any spare moment she can snatch, when she’s not busy running her own consultancy as a specialist in advertising law and raising two children. 

In 2007 she published a children’s book, Claude & Millie, under her married name Gail van Onselen. Her first adult novel, Marriage Vows, was published in 2008, also by Kwela Books. Gail lives in Craighall Park, Johannesburg, with her family.

Catch her on Twitter or visit her blog.

 And 3 for 3, Fiona Snyckers.

Fiona Snyckers was born and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa, where she studied English Literature. She has been writing fiction since childhood and is the author of the new adult Team Trinity series and the YA prequel, Trinity Rising. She is awfully fond of cats and handbags, and is one of that rare breed of authors who can write without the help of coffee.

Catch Fiona on Twitter or at her website.

The Bloody Book Week

I had a wonderful time last week when the Bloody Book Week festival was held in Johannesburg. Every year, Jenny Crwys-Williams rounds up a wonderful gang of crime fiction authors and non-fiction writers and gives readers a wonderful chance to interact with these interesting people. 

This year, I got to chat to South Africa's own Amanda Coetzee, David Klatzow and Scotty Elliot, as well as having excellent opportunities to chat to the UK's best-selling author, Pater James (Ins Roy Grace mysteries). Peter is madly curious about everything, as well as charming, friendly, approachable and very talented - as I rediscovered when I was sorted into his group on the "Murder Train" event. 


This was the concluding event and highlight of the week. A bunch of readers and writers boarded the Joburg to Pretoria Gautrain, clutching the beginnings of a crime story and we had to plot the end and explanation on the short, high-speed journey, and then our author (with a little help from the team) wrote up the story in the fabulous Blue Train lounge. Every team got a chance to read their story (much excitement and hilarity) and then it was time for the judges to deliberate and announce the winner: Amanda Coetzee! 

It was fascinating to see an ace writer's process up close and personal:) If you have the opportunity, make the effort to attend this festival next year! In the pics: Peter James and his lovely fiance, Lara, frantically typing our story; Amanda Coetzee and I at the Gautrain station; and Peter James showing the amazing silk lining of his jacket - printed with pages from his Not Dead Yet - a gift from a tailor mentioned in the book!