‘Endangered’ Author Eliot Schrefer’s Take on Writing for Adults vs. Writing for Teens
Excerpts from Schrefer’s article:
“I’ll admit that at first my new career smarted — the “young” in Y.A. felt like the “junior” in J.V. — though at the same time, I was relieved to be playing on what I imagined was an easier field. But once I was officially writing for young adults, it didn’t seem easy at all. My editor, David Levithan, had maddeningly simple advice: the only thing a Y.A. novel needs is a teenage protagonist.”
“When I turned in my first officially young adult novel, my editor didn’t cut for content. He didn’t strike a single moment of sexual desire or brooding or bad language. What he did was set a pretension barometer twice as strict as adult fiction’s and started deleting every time the arrow ticked over.”
