Entry tags:

rant

So Tamora Pierce and Julie Holderman want to start a con specifically for authors specializing in Young Adult (henceforth YA) and children's sci-fi/fantasy. Part of their reason for doing this is how other people see them.

Often kidlit writers are treated by members of adult F&SF cons in a manner that is patronizing at best, snubbing or scornful at worst.

I know what attitude this is. I grouched over the trainwrecked plot in a YA book to a coworker and her response was this: "What do you expect? It's young adult lit."

And I understand. I hate the YA section because if the back ad copies and hooks don't make me want to eat a kitten, the stories themselves almost invariably do.

But instead of asking why so many look at the younger kids' works with such scorn, they're taking their ball and going to play in their own damned backyard, thanks.

Seriously now. Let's think about this.

We don't have many Philip Pullmans in YA/Intermediate reader. We don't have many Lois Lowrys or Diane Wynn Joneses. What we do have--and what the average browser can readily see--are a metric assload of writers who hammer out the same damned story ten thousand times over.

Check out the SF/F section of Intermediate Reader (age group 8-12) at your local bookstore. You'll find buckets of magical school stories, interspersed with fairies and dragons and very few others. Check out the fantasy/horror part of the YA section--or, as named by a coworker of mine today, the Kiddie Sex Section. You'll find fairies, emo fucking vampires, and werewolves, with a terribly sparse spattering of sword&sorcery and almost nothing else.

This makes people scornful. It's writers who either don't care to think outside the bounds of what's been done already, or ones who aren't capable of doing so--or worse, ones who see the success of one venture and hurriedly squeeze off their imitation. It's the authors who hack out recognizable gobbets of someone else's plots or concepts, who write the same damned story four and five times over, who turn out half-assed characterization, invariably predictable plots, or wildly unbelievable dialog, or who beat the hell out of every single storyline cliché, then expect people to shell out money for it--actions that wibble between sheer authorial laziness, ineptitude, and flat-out taking advantage of the readers' inexperience.

A young reader doesn't analyze the book as they go. They don't know how. They don't get stuck on the plotholes. They don't say "Hey, you bastards, get your own imagination. I liked this the first time it was done." They may say something along the lines of "Well, this part didn't really make sense," or "It was like (fill in name of other, similar work)," but they don't know how to show their displeasure with narrative problems by penning a snarky review or refusing to buy more of that author's work. (And especially with the IR works, the buying power is frequently out of their hands anyway. When R. L. Stein killed the main character of a series halfway through one of their books, it threw me hard--and I was ten at most. But my parents kept buying Stein books for me, just because I'd liked 'em before.)

One would assume that the mentioned cranky congoers have seen this (if not also understood the implications), and have formed their opinions accordingly. It sucks if people who actually do try to write something original get pigeonholed along with mimics, metaphor-maulers, cliché-beaters, plothole-hoppers, collage artists, and bad fanficcers in disguise Clare? Paolini? I'm STILL looking at you., yeah--but that becomes a problem with the genre; one that requires a lot of cooperation to fix. Some people don't care, and won't care, and won't change. Far easier to take your ball to your own playground than it is to convince everyone involved that you should make a new game.