Young Writers Society

I wanted to be published by the age of sixteen until I realized that I was much too young and inexperienced. Now I understand why young writers don't get published. It's because they just aren't experienced, in writing or in life, enough to write a really gripping book. So I'm waiting until I write the best possible story I can before I try and publish. I'm not going to rush it.

YA is what I aim to write for. The thing I like about YA is the fact that the storlines aren't quite as ... engrossed with nitty-gritty details about primary exports and what percentage of the population is goblin.

YA seems to me to be more free with what they write. They can go off on a tangent about something and it's well within the realm of YA. In adult novels, there are higher standards for in-depth detail and epic proportions.

The Bartimaeus Trilogy is YA in the local Wal Mart. Wrinkle in Time is another YA series I like. Artemis Fowl is good. Then you do have your books about the cliques, "Sealed with a Diss" and everything else about high school girls being mean. I don't dig those, though I'd like to read one just to say I did.

I used to read YA books by pulling the new but strange ones off the shelves - the books that looked like they'd been published a few years ago at most but weren't very popular - and read them by the stacks. I stumbled across some very good, gripping books that way, books almost comparable to adult novels. One was a book of interlocking short stories subtitled "twelve brushes with religion" and another told three accounts of death and burial. I'd say both of those books were published in 2000, at about the same time [or just before] the YA market opened up as much as it did and the library started buying books like that.

Now I can't really read YA books much, even if I'd want to; outside of classics that get put in YA and then things like "His Dark Materials" and books by C.S. Lewis and Madeline L'Engle, the language is simple and kind of boring. I don't enjoy reading the words and so I can't get into the story, even if it's good.