"Instead, if there is one truism of successful Y.A., it’s that the book’s unrelenting emphasis must be on character and event, and not the brilliance of the author’s viewpoint."

Eliot Schrefer, at the NYT:

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.

Well worth a read. Self-deprecating and smart and thoughtful and funny.

Comments

[Jackie Parker]

Best quote ever. I might love him now.

[Jackie Parker]

Also: "A reading experience I dread is to invest hours in a heralded and beautifully written book, only to have the curtain pull away and reveal that the novel’s purpose all along has been to serve as an elaborate proof of the writer’s specialness, that the pen kept writing long after the content ran dry."

[Jackie Parker]

But then he refers to YA as a genre and I fell out of love.