What YA Really Means

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Young Adult isn't just a tone or a trend or a marketing label. At its core, Young Adult is about the emotional reality of adolescence. It's the immediacy of voice, the importance of peers, the identity level stakes, the big themes experienced through lived moments, and the protagonist who is still becoming themselves. That's what makes YA feel like YA. Not slang, not surface level details, not a teenage protagonist pasted into an adult feeling story. Welcome to the Fiction Writing Made Easy Podcast. My name is Savannah Gilbo, and I'm here to help you write a story that works. I want to prove to you that writing a novel doesn't have to be overwhelming. So each week I'll bring you a brand new episode with simple, actionable, and step-by-step strategies that you can implement in your writing right away. So whether you're brand new to writing or more of a seasoned author looking to improve your craft, this podcast is for you. So pick up a pen and let's get started. In today's episode, we're talking about five secrets to writing young adult fiction that actually feels like young adult fiction. And I wanted to tackle this topic today because I've been getting a lot of questions about how to write YA. And the question I've been getting the most is some version of this. Do all the same craft rules apply to young adult as they do to adult fiction? And in general, my answer is yes. All the same craft rules and considerations apply to young adult fiction just like they do to adult fiction. You still need a strong protagonist with a clear goal, you need solid story structure, you need scenes that move the plot and the character forward, and everything else like that. But there are a handful of things that sit on top of those universal craft rules that make young adult fiction feel special. And when you get them right, they're things that turn what could be a regular novel with a teenage protagonist into a book that actually feels like YA. And those five things or those five secrets are what we're going to talk about today. So, with all of that being said, I'm not going to make you wait any longer. Let's jump right into secret number one. And the first secret is that the YA narrative voice lives in the moment. If you've ever Googled how to write YA voice, you've probably seen some version of the advice that says, make it authentic, which in theory sounds helpful until you sit down to write and you have no idea what authentic actually means on the page. And so what usually happens next is you default to the surface stuff. You sprinkle in some slang, you add a little sarcasm, maybe a pop culture reference or two, and you try to make your protagonist sound younger and somehow more authentic. But the thing is, none of that is really what YA voice is about. Those things can definitely help in the right story, but they're not what makes a voice feel YA. So what should you do instead? Well, the key thing I want you to take away from this is that the real ingredient in a YA voice is immediacy. And that really just means the reader needs to feel like they're inside the protagonist's experience as it's happening. So not hearing about it after the character has grown up, processed it, and made meaning from it, but actually while that experience is happening. And this is where a lot of early young adult drafts drift off course. The protagonist might sound 16 because let's say you do what I just talked about, you add some slang, some sarcasm, a pop culture reference or whatever it is, but the narration feels like it's coming from someone older, wiser, and more emotionally settled. So to give you an example of what I mean by this, I often see lines that explain the moment a little too cleanly. So stuff like, I was too young to realize how much pain my mother was carrying, or I didn't understand it then, but that was the day everything changed, right? It's almost like those narrators are speaking with hindsight and that wisdom that comes from being older and more emotionally settled. Now, that kind of narration or voice can work beautifully in adult fiction or in a story that is intentionally being told by a reflective older narrator, but in young adult, that kind of distance just pulls the reader out of the teenage experience. So to give you another example of what I mean so you can see the difference, an adult-leaning voice might sound something like this. I knew my mom was trying to hide how upset she was, and even though it hurt to see her like that, I understood why she wanted privacy. Right? So that version is emotionally mature. The narrator understands the mother's behavior, respects her privacy, and can articulate the complexity of the moment. Now, a more young adult feeling version of that same moment might sound something like this. Mom thinks I don't know she's crying in the bathroom. Like the shower running for 20 minutes is subtle. Like her eyes don't go all red and glassy afterward. Like I'm just supposed to sit at the kitchen table and pretend my entire life isn't making her fall apart, right? So same situation, totally different emotional distance. And what I want you to notice is that the second version feels more YA because the protagonist isn't calmly interpreting the moment. They are reacting to it. So there's hurt in that moment, but also irritation, fear, resentment, and self-blame. And the character doesn't have a tidy conclusion yet. They just have the raw experience of watching or observing their mother fall apart and not knowing what to do with it. Alright, so hopefully you could see the difference between those two examples. Now, here's another way I want you to think about this. Young adult voice often lives in the gap between what the character feels and what they understand. So they might know something is wrong, but they might not know how to talk about it. Or they might be angry when they're actually just scared. They might make a joke when they're embarrassed, or they might obsess over one tiny detail because the bigger truth is just too much to face. So that gap is where the voice tends to live and really thrive. And if you're writing or revising for your young adult voice, I don't want you to just ask, does this sound like a teenager? I want you to instead ask yourself, is my protagonist experiencing this moment in real time? Am I giving them too much perspective too soon? And then lastly, are they explaining their emotions or are they reacting from the inside? All right, so three quick questions you can ask if you're writing or revising your young adult voice. Now, one last thing I want to call out here is that the YA voice is often emotionally heightened. Something like a text message left unanswered can feel like a rejection. A parent's fake smile can feel like proof that everything is falling apart. And something like a best friend pulling away can feel like the end of the world. Not because teens are silly or dramatic, but because they don't always have the distance yet to know what will matter forever and what won't. And this is a big part of what makes the YA voice work. Not slang, not trendiness, not a character who simply sounds young, but a voice that lets readers experience moments from the inside, and one that just so often happens to be emotionally heightened as well. All right, so that is secret number one, the young adult voice lives in the moment. The second secret is that in young adult stories, peers are the center of the world. And what I mean by that is peers aren't just side characters. Friendships, crushes, rivalries, group chats, lunch tables, social hierarchies, betrayals, alliances, all of these relationships shape how your protagonist sees themselves and what they believe is possible or impossible. They are literally the protagonist's world. Now that doesn't mean that adults don't matter in young adult, they absolutely do. Parents, teachers, mentors, coaches, bosses, authority figures, they can all create pressure, they can all offer support, they can all misunderstand the protagonist, they can all set rules, and they can all stand in the way. But in most young adult novels, the relationships that change the protagonist the most deeply are the relationships with their peers. As a quick example, if you think about the hate you give, star's parents matter, of course, but the relationships that drive the plot are with Khalil, Chris, and all of her friends at Williamson. If you think about another story like Simon vs. the Homo sapien's agenda, it works the exact same way. And so does a good girl's guide to murder. Pip's investigation lives among her classmates, her friends, and of course Ravi. So in all three examples, the adults are around, but the protagonist's peers are their world. And surprisingly, this is one of the easiest places for a young adult draft to drift off course. And I say that because if a parent, teacher, or mentor becomes the most important relationship in the story, or worse, if the parent, mentor, or teacher start solving the central problem for the protagonist, then the novel can begin to feel less like a young adult story and more like an adult-led story with a teen character in it. So as you look at your own YA idea or your own draft in progress, I want you to think about a few questions. Number one is who has the most emotional influence over your protagonist? Is it the adults in their life or their peer group? Number two, who hurts them, challenges them, tempts them, or helps them change? Again, is it the adults in their life or their peer group? And finally, is my protagonist driving the resolution or is an adult doing it for them? And if your answer to these three questions are mainly the adults, then that is a sign you might need to shift more weight onto the protagonist's peer world. Now, one quick note here: shifting the weight doesn't mean riding the parents out of the story or making them absent or terrible. It just means asking which relationships are doing the deepest emotional work in your protagonist transformation and then making sure the peers are pulling that weight. So just to be crystal clear, the adults can still be present, they can be supportive, complicated, all of it. They just can't be the ones who change your protagonist the most or make all of the decisions that drive towards the resolution of your story. All right, so that is secret number two in young adult stories. Peers are the center of the world. All right, now moving on to secret number three. The third secret is that the stakes in young adult stories have to feel identity level. And here's what I mean by that. YA stakes don't work because everything is objectively bigger. They work because everything feels bigger to the protagonist. So something like a first kiss isn't just a kiss. It can literally feel like proof that someone is lovable, desirable, chosen, or finally seen. Something like a fight with a best friend isn't just a bad day. It can feel like social or emotional death. Something like a failed audition or a rejection letter or a public humiliation, a breakup, betrayal, secret being revealed, you know, things like that. All of these things can feel like they're not just changing the protagonist's circumstances, they're going deeper than that and changing who the protagonist is, right? So the stakes work because they feel bigger to the protagonist. And if you think about it, that's because young adult stakes are usually identity level stakes. So underneath the external problem, the protagonist is wrestling with questions like, who am I if this person doesn't love me back? Who am I if I fail at the thing I'm supposed to be good at? Who am I if my friends reject me? Who am I if I want something my family doesn't understand? Or who am I if the version of myself that I've been performing isn't the real me? Right? And this is why ordinary events can feel enormous in young adult stories. The protagonist doesn't have decades of perspective to go off of yet. They don't know that one rejection or one breakup or one mistake or one humiliating moment won't define them forever. Because to them it feels like it really might. And this is just one of the reasons why a story like The Fault in Our Stars works so well. Hazel and Augustus's love feels like the love, not just a love. And the author, John Green, he doesn't hedge the emotion or shrink it with adult perspective. He writes it the way it feels to the people inside of it. And it feels enormous and defining and impossible to minimize. So that's what you're aiming for in terms of YA stakes. You want to write each moment like it's the moment, not just a moment. All right, so your job isn't always to make the external stakes bigger. It's to make the internal meaning more clear. So think about things like what does this moment mean to your protagonist? What identity is being threatened? What version of themselves are they afraid of losing? And what truth about themselves are they afraid might be real? And when you can answer those questions, the stakes will start to feel truly YA because they're rooted in the protagonist's lived emotional reality, not in how big the external problem looks from the outside, but in how big it feels from the inside. All right, so that is secret number three. The stakes in YA have to feel identity level. Now, secret number four, or the fourth secret, is that themes belong in scenes, not in sermons. Now, just to be super clear, young adult stories can absolutely handle big themes. Things like identity, grief, mental health, sexuality, family, injustice, belonging, growing up, figuring out who you are and what you believe, all of it, right? But because YA often deals with big and emotionally charged subjects, it's really easy for the themes to start sounding like lessons. And that's usually where this idea of preachiness comes from. It's not from having a strong theme or from tackling big topics, it's more from explaining them or putting them on the page a little bit too directly. So what do I mean by that? Well, themes start to feel preachy when someone like a mentor character delivers a very literal lesson, or maybe when the protagonist or their best friend just outright states the message too neatly, or maybe when the story pauses and kind of explains what the reader should understand. I even see this happen sometimes where every single character seems to learn the exact same lesson and it all adds up to one really obvious point. And the simple way I like to think about this is that things start to feel preachy when the story stops feeling lived in and it starts feeling like an argument for something. So just keep an eye out for that in your own story. All right, now you might be wondering, what happens if I've done this? What happens if I've made my story a little too preachy? Well, the fix isn't to water down your theme. The fix is actually to dramatize it. So what I would do is I would put your protagonist in situations where the theme will cost them something. So you want to let them make flawed choices, let them believe that things aren't fully true yet, let them wrestle with questions instead of immediately arriving at the answer. So as an example, let's say your theme is about using your voice. What I don't want you to do is have a mentor give a speech about why speaking up matters. Instead, I'd rather see you put your protagonist in a scene where staying quiet protects them, but maybe hurts someone else, and then make them live with the consequences no matter what they decide. That's how you show theme in a story. Alright, now on a related note, you might have noticed that a lot of young adult endings contain some kind of hope. So not always a happy ending and not always a tidy one, but usually some sense that the protagonist has grown, they've claimed agency, or there is a possible way forward. As an example, think about the hate you give, right? In that story, racism isn't fixed. Instead, it ends with Star having found her voice and using it. In The Fault in Our Stars, that story doesn't undo grief or make grief disappear. Instead, it ends with Hazel having loved someone and survived loving and losing them. So in both cases, the hope is earned, it's specific, and it feels emotionally honest rather than overly sweet or forced. Alright, so as you're developing your own young adult story, I want you to ask yourself questions like, what's the question my protagonist is wrestling with? And how can I put them in scenes where they have to live the answer instead of just stating it? I also want you to think about what choices you can give them where both options cost something. And think about what an earned specific moment of hope would look like at the end of your story. Because add those three things together, and that's how you write a theme that lands without preaching. All right, so that is secret number four. Themes belong in scenes, not sermons. Now, secret number five, our last one, and this one might be the most important of all. Secret number five is that the protagonist has to feel like someone who is still becoming themselves. So they are not fully formed, they are not fully settled, they're not yet able to look back and say, This is who I am. They are still becoming themselves. And this is why a lot of great young adult protagonists often feel contradictory. They can be brave and insecure, they can be cynical and romantic, they can be desperate for independence and terrified of being alone, they can be loyal and selfish, they can be capable and wildly inexperienced, and they can be certain one minute and unraveling the next. If you've ever noticed this in your favorite young adult stories, I want you to know that these contradictions aren't mistakes. They are part of what makes the character feel developmentally true. Now, what do I mean by this? Well, a teen protagonist is often holding multiple versions of themselves at once. They're holding the child they were, the adult they're becoming, the person their family thinks they are, the person their friends expect them to be, and the person they secretly want to become. And that internal tension is one of the key engines in young adult fiction. And I want you to think about Katniss in The Hunger Games as an example. She's a hardened survivor and a 16-year-old who doesn't know what to do with Pita's affection. She is capable of killing to survive and emotionally walled off in a way that Reeds is fragile. She volunteers for Prim with absolute courage and then doesn't know how to comfort her. Almost every scene in the book shows her being two things at once, and those two things are often in contrast with each other. Now, how does this apply to you? Well, if your protagonist is feeling a little flat on the page, then I want you to ask yourself whether you've made them too settled too soon. So do they already know exactly who they are? Do they make decisions with too much adult clarity? And do they have one clean identity, one clear worldview, and one consistent way of responding to pressure? If so, you might need to layer in a little more contradiction. Let them want two things that don't fit together, let them perform confidence while feeling terrified, let them reject help and desperately want someone to notice they're struggling, or let them make a bold choice and then panic about what it means. All right, now the goal isn't to make them inconsistent, the goal is to make them unfinished in a believable way, because that's what readers come to young adult stories for. They're not coming to your story for a protagonist who already knows exactly who they are, but they are coming to your story to experience someone who discovers who they are under pressure. All right, so that is secret number five. Young adult protagonists typically feel like someone who is still becoming themselves. All right, so let's bring this all together. If you take nothing else from this episode, remember this. Young adult isn't just a tone or a trend or a marketing label. At its core, young adult is about the emotional reality of adolescence. It's the immediacy of voice, the importance of peers, the identity level stakes, the big themes experienced through lived moments, and the protagonist who is still becoming themselves. That's what makes YA feel like YA. Not slang, not surface level details, not a teenage protagonist pasted into an adult feeling story. A young adult novel works when the reader feels like they're inside the experience of being young, being under pressure, and in the middle of becoming someone new. So if you're writing young adult, here's what I want you to do this week. I want you to pull up your manuscript or your outline or even just your story idea and run it through these five lessons one at a time. For voice, I want you to ask yourself, is my protagonist experiencing the moment in real time or are they explaining it from a distance? For peers, ask yourself, who's doing the deepest emotional work in my protagonist transformation? Is it the people their age or is an adult taking over? For stakes, ask yourself, what identity is on the line in my big moments? Why does this feel like the moment to my protagonist and not just a moment? For theme, ask yourself, am I putting my protagonist in scenes where choices cost them something and reflect the theme, or am I having someone else explain the lesson or the bigger theme? And for character, ask yourself, does my protagonist already know exactly who they are, or are they unfinished in a believable way? And if you can answer those five questions clearly, then you've already got most of what you need to write a story that doesn't just have a teen protagonist in it. Instead, it will actually feel like YA on the page. Alright, now here's the thing I want to leave you with. These five lessons aren't a checklist where you go through them once and you're done. They all work together. Voice shapes how the stakes feel, peers shape what the protagonist is wrestling with, the theme shows up in the choices they make, and whether they feel still becoming or already formed shows up in every single line. So you don't have to nail all five of these on your first pass through your draft. You just have to know that they're there and keep coming back to them as you write and revise. And if you're someone who's been listening to this episode and you're thinking, okay, great, all five of these secrets sound really good in theory, but I'm still at the idea stage. How do I take all of my ideas and build out the foundation of my story like you talked about earlier? Well, that is exactly what my Notes to Novel course can help you with. Notes to Novel is my step by step program for developing your story before you draft. We work on your protagonist, your structure, your stakes, your scenes, your plot, your theme, all of it. And once all of those foundational elements are in place, all the young adult specific stuff we talked about today will have somewhere solid to land. To learn more about notes to novel go to savanna gilbo.com forward slash waitlist. One more time, that's Savannah Gilbo.com forward slash waitlist. All right, so that is it for today's episode. As always, thank you for tuning in. I hope your writing is going well and I will talk to you next week.