Frank Cottrell Boyce - no Christmas card for you
This is from Boyce’s review of The Knife of Never Letting Go:
If I have one quibble, it is that I think it should be sitting proudly on the shelf next to these books, rather than being hidden away in the “young adult” ghetto. There’s been a lot of fury among authors recently about the proposal to “age-band” children’s books, but in a way they’re too late. The real disaster has already happened. It’s called “young adult” fiction. It used to be the case that you moved on from children’s fiction to adult fiction, from The Owl Service, maybe, to Catcher in the Rye. There were, of course, some adult authors who were more fashionable with teenage readers than others - Salinger, Vonnegut, Maya Angelou. But these were chosen by teenagers themselves from the vast world of books. Some time ago, someone saw that trend and turned it into a demographic. Fortunes were made but something crucial was lost. We have already ghettoised teenagers’ tastes in music, in clothes and - God forgive us - in food. Can’t we at least let them share our reading? Is there anything more depressing than the sight of a “young adult” bookshelf in the corner of the shop. It’s the literary equivalent of the “kids’ menu” - something that says “please don’t bother the grown-ups”. If To Kill a Mockingbird were published today, that’s where it would be placed, among the chicken nuggets.
This is not just a question of taste. It seems to me that the real purpose of stories and reading is to take you out of yourself and put you somewhere else. Anything that is made to be sold to a particular demographic, however, will always end up reflecting the superficial concerns of that demographic. I’ve lived through an era in which demographic-fixation murdered popular cinema and replaced a vibrant art form with a kind of digital holding-pen for teenage boys. I think we’re in danger of doing the same to fiction. The best young adult fiction - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, A Swift Pure Cry, Noughts and Crosses and so on - strolls out of its category. I’ve no doubt at all that The Knife of Never Letting Go will do the same. Don’t let the demographic exclude you.
What a fool.
June 16th, 2008 at 5:23 pm
Why thank you.
I’m not saying anything against YA books. I love lots of them. I can think of a dozen that should have won the Booker/ Miles Franklin whatever. I think it’s great for librarians and bookshops to think in terms of YA. I think it’s a problem if publishers do because they will inevitably encourage authors to write for the demographic and that way lies destruction. Honestly I’ve been a screenwriter for twenty years. I know what I’m on about with this.
June 16th, 2008 at 6:06 pm
Frank, Isn’t the “digital holding pen for teenage boys” also taking its grip on the wider, adult audience? I just feel that we are asked to swallow a lot of pretty dumb stuff when we go to the movies. Choice and difference have been chiselled away for the horrible brand-name mall fillers and franchises. The genius is in the marketing and somehow the choices available to adults gets smaller and smaller.
The demographic has been stretched so that ‘kids’ films may become the default for adults, too. Think of something like Enchanted, which adults flocked too. Why? Well, that’s what the mall was offering that month. I just see more and more movie-going to be like that. I would suggest that it’s not teenagers who are being excluded from the wider world but adults whose choices are narrowed as movie houses maximise bums-on-seats by flogging us these kids films dressed up, and films for adults dumbed down to appeal to the widest audience. Urgh, I hate it.
I would be interested to hear you thoughts on the marketing of movies and the demographics of the popcorn belt.
I don’t think YA is holding pen. Teenagers are way too smart to fall for that. But I do think they can meet a lot of great stories, complex and relevant ideas here.
And by the way, I agree. The Knife of Never Letting Go is a thrilling read. I will be very interested to see where Patrick Ness takes it in the next book. (PS, I’m one of the editors of this blog.)
June 16th, 2008 at 6:25 pm
The marketting of movies is driven by the fact that the core audience is seen to be teenage boys. It has to appeal to them first. Anything else is gravy. Of course lots of “grown-ups” are only too happy to identify themselves as teenagers well into their thirties so that’s OK.
My worry isn’t teenage readers. It’s the pressure on writers to write for a focus-group view of what teenagers are. It’s the culture - very potent in the film industry - of second guessing an audience’s desires, and flattering them, rather than challenging them.
I love lots of YA fiction. People seem not to have noticed that the article was giving five stars to a YA title.
June 16th, 2008 at 9:24 pm
Hi Frank
How can you say that you think it’s great for bookshops to think in terms of YA when you’ve just said that there is nothing “more depressing than the sight of a ‘young adult’ bookshelf in the corner of the shop”?
YA is the most flexible, challenging and dynamic genre in publishing. As a “demographic”, it allows writers to break out of the incredibly constrictive genre boxes of adult publishing. The books that you mentioned above are so brilliant and different because they are YA, not in spite of it.
I don’t think the problem is with publishers or demographics. The problem is with people who think that only adults can read adult books, and only teens can read teen books. The problem lies in the snobbery towards YA - and that comes from the media, not the publishers. It comes from people saying hysterical and patronising things like “it’s the literary equivalent of the ‘kids’ menu’”.
For someone who apparently loves lots of YA, you’ve got a funny way of showing it.
(PS, I am the other editor of this blog).
June 16th, 2008 at 10:55 pm
I suppose the “funny way of showing it” includes giving this title, Mal Peet’s Keeper, Anthony Horovit’s Dark Star and a whole slew of other YA books blindingly brilliant reviews in the Guardian week upon week. Does it?
My worry about YA is that it is shifting from an age group to a genre. And moving from “flexible, dynamic and challenging” into a set of conventions based around a vicarish obsession with issues. Anyone who can’t see this happening isn’t reading enough.
I’m sorry you think I’m patronising. I think what I am is passionate.
June 17th, 2008 at 8:52 am
I think you’re passionate too, Frank. I’m just not sure what you’re passionate about.
I’m sorry you think that YA is dying - I read a lot too, including your slew of blindingly brilliant reviews (and the books you’re reviewing). And that’s why I don’t really understand your argument.
I see no evidence that YA is moving to a “vicarish obsession with issues”. Quite the opposite, in fact. The “issues novel” hit its peak in the 1980s, and we are steadily moving away from it.
Read John Green’s Looking for Alaska, or Holly Black’s Valiant, or MT Anderson’s Octavian Nothing, or here in Australia, any of the titles by YA masters Ursula Dubosarsky, Margo Lanagan or Sonya Hartnett. YA has never been so rule-breaking and mind-bending. I honestly don’t think these books would have been published if we didn’t have the genre of YA.
June 17th, 2008 at 12:47 pm
“The writer is to serve god or mammon by writing the way it has been written or by writing the way it is being written that is to say the way the writing is writing. That is for writing the difference between serving god and mammon. If you write the way it has always been written the way writing has already been written then you are serving mammon because you are living by something some one has already been earning or has earned. If you write as you are to be writing then you are serving as a writer god because you are not earning anything. If anything is to be earned you will not know what earning is therefore you are serving god. But really there is no choice. Nobody chooses. What you do you do even if you do not yield to a temptation. After all a temptation is not very tempting. So anyway you will earn nothing.”
Gertrude Stein, ‘What is English literature’ quoted in Stein, How to Write.
(1931)
And, um … aren’t there all kinds of writers with various motives and concepts of their audience (or not) in adult and YA?
June 18th, 2008 at 7:46 pm
There’s focus groups?
For me as a writer, reader, structural editor and fan of YA, adolescence is a metaphor for change and identity, it serves as a structure to explore these issues that actually recur throughout adult life. I think like childhood, adolescence has a common language - a language of the body: hormones and body fluids and blurring categories and shifting signifiers and social restrictions, as well as power and sexuality (a language and experience similar to or resounding in parenthood, or growing old, or getting sick, or depressed, or being dumped, or falling in love). There’s a kind of poetics of adolescence that, within critical and academic circles, remains largely unexplored, rather neglectfully one might think.
I do think you raise an interesting point about YA being a sort of publishing ghetto. Sometimes I think the most receptive audience for some of my books is actually that growing readership of adults who love YA. I’d love to see market categories explode and books shelved all over the place. I’d especially love to see more adult readers contemplating YA, and adults and young adults considering picture books and junior readers and 12 year olds delving into poetry. I guess that’s not very practical though, is it? People like to be marketed to. They want to be wooed.
June 20th, 2008 at 8:14 am
How did Gertrude Stein ever get published?
June 21st, 2008 at 11:30 am
Bill, you have just paid her an enormous compliment, and so that is a question I’ll take seriously … indeed, someone from a publisher was once sent to meet her to see if she even knew what writing WAS. But I suppose someone thought that one day (and even then) people would want to read what she’d written. I’ve figured out that her book ‘How to write’ is actually a 400 page zen koan on writing ie accessable to intuition if not understanding. Like all of the best writing, it doesn’t always make sense, but is exhilarating and dare I say mind-blowing (old hippy term - forgive me…) And when I found a copy of her ‘3 lives’ in a 2ndhand bookshop a few years ago I bought it even tho twas outrageously overpriced (because falling to bits) because reading even a few sentences of it made me want to WRITE, and to my mind, a book can’t do better than that
July 3rd, 2008 at 10:51 am
I’m with Joanne, both about Gertrude Stein, who broke enough rules in a rule-bound time to make all sorts of writing possible, and from which everyone from Hemingway onwards benefits, even if they don’t realise it; and the reason for writing - which is quite different to the reason for publishing.
Any author who has had a rejection along the lines of “this is great writing but we can’t figure out which market segment it fits” knows that it’s better to have written than to never have published to meet focus group feedback.
But back to the original point of the post - thanks, Frank, for engaging in the debate, which is all fascinating, but I have to agree with Lili.
August 6th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
[...] this passionate debate about the merits of marketing and publishing books within a Young Adult genre. What do you [...]
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