I loved reading young adult novels when I was a teen. Now, I don't only read YA, I write it, too. One thing I focused on while writing my novels was to make them different. How could I tell a story that had been told a thousand times, without making it sound like something else?
So many YA novels are about finding love, and while this was only a subplot of my novels, it bothers me. I’ve always preferred the books about adventure. To me, reading about someone falling in love is boring, especially if nothing else happens during the books. It's like reading a PG version of a romantic comedy. It's predictable. The storylines are overused, and the characters have no character anymore. It's time for some variety.
You know how it goes. The main character introduces herself as a boring, ordinary teenager. She either has a really close relationship with her parents, or they are super distant and seem really unaware of what their child does (that comes in handy when the character needs to sneak out at night). Then, we see her at school, where we meet her best friend and the evil popular girl with perfect hair, who hates the main character and preys upon her for no reason. If the character and the love interest don’t become assigned to a school project together, or she almost dies and he saves her, they go to a masquerade ball and meet there. Sound familiar?
Let's just talk about that love interest for a second. You know him. He always has perfect hair, a perfect smile, and has muscles that scream steroids. He's mysterious like Edward Cullen, confident like Augustus Waters, and rebellious like Owen Armstrong. He usually starts out being rude to the character, but for some reason, she finds it extremely attractive.
It's time for these characters to die. The Boring Main Character, the Popular Mean Girl, and the Tall, Dark, Handsome, and Mysterious Love Interest need to die (and I don't mean in some heart-wrenching way in the book, I mean in real life. Please don't think I am against John Green's books). These characters existed in the 90s, maybe, but now, they've all gone extinct. It's time for YA authors to let them die out.
Let me pause for a second and do a little disclaimer. I'm not taking this chance as an excuse to bash authors who write about love. I'm not trying to convince you that my books are any better than anyone else's because the main plot is not about finding love. If you love reading YA romance novels, then good for you. I don't.
So, what do we do to fix this? How are we going to kill these characters? If authors want to keep writing the same stories and the same characters over and over again, that's fine. But, we, as young, upcoming writers, should take the opportunity to start a revolution. Don't write what you've seen, "write what you know," as Mark Twain once said.
Write characters that sound real to you. Just because a character is realistic, doesn't mean they are boring. People often think that they have to make characters and plots crazy fantastical and completely unrealistic, just so they are exciting. In all honesty, realistic is better because it's relatable. We can't have sympathy for a main character for being boring, because that's not a character flaw; that's a lazy writer. We can't be excited for that first kiss if the love interest doesn't give us a reason to be excited, other than his looks. We can't hate the popular girl if all she does is scoffs at the main character.
This is all just my personal taste. There really is nothing wrong with writing about a guy and a girl falling in love. I just think it's more entertaining if it isn't predictable. We know they are going to fall in love, but it's more exciting if we can't figure out how until it happens. Those of us who have read novels before should not be able to figure out the ending before we get past the first page. Can we authors at least try to spice it up a little? It's time to throw some curveballs at our readers.
(Hey, thanks for reading my whole article-- or at least scrolling to the end. If you want to check out my books, they're on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Knights-Shining-Spandex-Emily-Bentz/dp/1312441232/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1468545148&sr=1-1&keywords=the+knights+in+shining+spandexhere and here).
