Writing YA: What IS

I had a miserable adolescence. So much so I took my SATs as a freshman and skipped the last year of high school altogether. I hated every minute of it. I could list the reasons. And so you don't think I was friendless and dateless, I had a hunky boyfriend. I'll consider scanning the prom picture to prove it. If you ignore my hideous dress. It was a slinky peach spaghetti strap number, and I vaguely recall high heels in WHITE. White! The last time either color was on my body, I think.

There were drugs in my high school. The guy next door grew very tall pot plants on the property line between our house and his parents' house. My mom thought they were weeds. A kid hung himself my sophomore year. I saw a girl get slugged by her boyfriend.

But even at that, as I raise four kids, I know things are crazier for them. In my high school, the couples that had sex were a minority--usually people going steady. In high school now, the virgins are very much in the minority. Eating disorders are at a rampant level. Media images bombard young girls--and boys. Drugs are stronger. I knew ONE kid who shot up, and had a boyfriend later who dabbled in heroin. My oldest has known many who have tried it. I knew a handful of girls who had abusive boyfriends, a handful who were raped. The numbers stagger now. Binge drinking. Teen pregnancy. You get the idea.

And the thing is, I write YA. And I feel that it is my responsibility to show the world as it IS. Not as I WANT it to be.

And if I was going to say the biggest mistake I think I see in YA writers trying to break in, it's that difference. I cannot tell you how many times I have encountered writers at a conference who say, "Well, MY book has no premarital sex, no bad language. It's the high school I remember, not what's in the media today. It's not the Gossip Girls."

And that's fine. We don't need ten Gossip Girl series or TV shows. But if you are going to WRITE for this age group, you better have EMPATHY for them. My books are relatively tame, but they are always about outsider girls. "Different." Self-assured. But definitely the different girl. The lonely one. And I cannot tell you . . . every day, EVERY day, I hear from kids. And they tell me things. Some good, some bad. Some make me cry. Some make me laugh. I have a lot of empathy for them.

And in creating that world . . . it is fine if your hero or heroine makes bold choices, makes choices that are the "right" so-called choices. That's fine. But you had better, I feel, address what IS. As a YA writer you cannot, I don't think, create a pretty little world without any semblance of what kids face today because that's what YOU think those kids should be living. It doesn't have to be all grit and ugliness. But you have to at least pull that ostrich head out of the sand and acknowledge.

Every day my kid passes through a metal detector. She's in a top school--a "blue ribbon" school. And it's not near a city. And they've had a handful of suicides--one spectacularly AWFUL one two weeks ago (in the method this young man chose). They've had former students just a year out of school killed in Iraq. They've had multiple lock-downs for vague gun threats.

When you write for YOUR audience, it isn't your high school. Or your parents' high school days. It's today's teens. And you need to respect your audience enough that you give a nod to what is, even if you wish it were otherwise.

Thoughts?