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Cause and effect
For my own later perusal: Every brilliant piece of writing advice from Clarion 2012.
But this is the one that struck me:
“YA has fewer male protagonists because boys tend to either stop reading after middle-grade age, or go straight to adult books.”
Couldn't we equally say that boys tend to either stop reading after middle-grade age, or go straight to adult books, because YA has fewer male protagonists? Or -- at the very least you're leaving off a "because": Boys tend to go straight to adult books because...
Well --
I've often speculated that precocious readers tended to be speculative fiction readers because if you're a precocious reader, you get out of middle-grade books, and adult mainstream fiction has too much stuff you can't relate to as a young teen: adultery and mid-life crises and the experience of parenting. Whereas there are not only plenty of books with teen protagonists published as adult SF, there are also plenty of adult SF novels with adult protagonists that don't go to the kind of dark and emotionally sophisticated places that teens aren't necessarily ready for.
Very few fifteen-year-olds, no matter how well they read, are really ready for Raymond Carver.
What's changed, recently, is that there's a lot more mainstream YA fiction that's really emotionally sophisticated than there used to be. There always was some, but page counts have increased so much, and I think there's a big difference in what you can fit into a 300-page John Green novel versus what you can fit into a 150-page Paul Zindel novel.
Books by writers like Cecil Castellucci, Sara Zarr, Sarah Dessen, John Green, Aidan Chambers, and so on, are quite sophisticated but they also tend to be really verbose and explicit about what's happening emotionally. The characters tend to be hyper-analytical about their own feelings and the feelings of others. (For example, Aidan Chambers's depictions of the main character's "mouse moods" in "Postcards From No Man's Land" -- it's incredibly thoughtful about what it's like to be handling irrational feelings of sadness and anxiety, and to recognize them as irrational and still have to deal with them in a way that's compassionate to yourself and others.) That's a hyper-analytical-ness that, I think, girls are socialized to do and boys are socialized to not do. (Who gets held up as examples of manly writing? Raymond Carver, Ernest Hemingway. Who seem to try to convey emotions as minimally and understatedly as possible.)
I find that authors who write in that vein, even if (like John Green) they write very believable and interesting boy protagonists, seem to be much more popular with girls than with boys.
(It certainly isn't true that all mainstream adult fiction is Raymond Carver kind of stuff, I should say. I really don't read enough mainstream adult fiction to make any generalizations -- but it's rare to see the kind of voluminous emotional unpacking that I see in YA.)
So, if you look at it that way, I think it makes sense that boys are more likely to jump straight into adult books. Boys who are socialized not to read books that are full of feelings will find adult writers who don't write books that are full of feelings. (Some mystery writers, some thriller writers -- by no means all!) Girls who are socialized to read books that are full of feelings might find adult books to be either too understated in their emotional processing, or else just too mature when it comes to topics (parenting, married life, office politics). Hence, YA books.
But this is the one that struck me:
“YA has fewer male protagonists because boys tend to either stop reading after middle-grade age, or go straight to adult books.”
Couldn't we equally say that boys tend to either stop reading after middle-grade age, or go straight to adult books, because YA has fewer male protagonists? Or -- at the very least you're leaving off a "because": Boys tend to go straight to adult books because...
Well --
I've often speculated that precocious readers tended to be speculative fiction readers because if you're a precocious reader, you get out of middle-grade books, and adult mainstream fiction has too much stuff you can't relate to as a young teen: adultery and mid-life crises and the experience of parenting. Whereas there are not only plenty of books with teen protagonists published as adult SF, there are also plenty of adult SF novels with adult protagonists that don't go to the kind of dark and emotionally sophisticated places that teens aren't necessarily ready for.
Very few fifteen-year-olds, no matter how well they read, are really ready for Raymond Carver.
What's changed, recently, is that there's a lot more mainstream YA fiction that's really emotionally sophisticated than there used to be. There always was some, but page counts have increased so much, and I think there's a big difference in what you can fit into a 300-page John Green novel versus what you can fit into a 150-page Paul Zindel novel.
Books by writers like Cecil Castellucci, Sara Zarr, Sarah Dessen, John Green, Aidan Chambers, and so on, are quite sophisticated but they also tend to be really verbose and explicit about what's happening emotionally. The characters tend to be hyper-analytical about their own feelings and the feelings of others. (For example, Aidan Chambers's depictions of the main character's "mouse moods" in "Postcards From No Man's Land" -- it's incredibly thoughtful about what it's like to be handling irrational feelings of sadness and anxiety, and to recognize them as irrational and still have to deal with them in a way that's compassionate to yourself and others.) That's a hyper-analytical-ness that, I think, girls are socialized to do and boys are socialized to not do. (Who gets held up as examples of manly writing? Raymond Carver, Ernest Hemingway. Who seem to try to convey emotions as minimally and understatedly as possible.)
I find that authors who write in that vein, even if (like John Green) they write very believable and interesting boy protagonists, seem to be much more popular with girls than with boys.
(It certainly isn't true that all mainstream adult fiction is Raymond Carver kind of stuff, I should say. I really don't read enough mainstream adult fiction to make any generalizations -- but it's rare to see the kind of voluminous emotional unpacking that I see in YA.)
So, if you look at it that way, I think it makes sense that boys are more likely to jump straight into adult books. Boys who are socialized not to read books that are full of feelings will find adult writers who don't write books that are full of feelings. (Some mystery writers, some thriller writers -- by no means all!) Girls who are socialized to read books that are full of feelings might find adult books to be either too understated in their emotional processing, or else just too mature when it comes to topics (parenting, married life, office politics). Hence, YA books.