The Tight Rope Walk of Edgy Teen Fiction by Sara Grant

When I start a new novel, one of the first things I do is write a one- or two-page proposal. It includes my working title and a movie-style pitch (Willy Wonka meets Jack Bauer – that’s not my pitch, but maybe it should be. A kick-arse chocolatier? Hmmm...). I also create a short synopsis and brief character sketches for my main characters. And I include a few lines about why I feel compelled to write this story. What will keep me interested for the next months and, if it’s published, maybe the rest of my life?

So in my initial musings on what I’ll affectionately call Book3, I noted that my main characters would uncover plans for a horrifying and-yet-to-be-determined event. I wanted said-event to be original, shocking and significant. I considered an idea that came to me after 9/11 – a type of terrorist attack. (An idea that I can’t bring myself to mention in this blog for fear of giving budding terrorists any new nasty ideas.) Beads of sweat began to form on my forehead. Even if I had something interesting to say, a compelling story, and a new twist -- did I really want to add to the culture of fear and violence? 

                  

I'm not sure I can write that book.

Photo by Kristin Smith

Writing edgy fiction for teens can be a tight rope walk. I want to write authentic, issue-based stories that ask difficult questions, but another part of me feels a sense of responsibility to protect my teen readers.

Unlike writing fiction for an adult audience, I’ve also got a series of gatekeepers who stand between me and my reader. Even if I’m comfortable with the issues and antics in my story, teachers, librarians and parents might not be.

And it’s not always the big issues that can off-set this delicate balance. What about characters that don’t wear seatbelts or condoms, smoke cigarettes or drink to excess? I’ve got great ideas for silly pranks that might not always turn out well. I have an obligation to readers to write the most honest and interesting story I can. But I must admit I sometimes feel the desire to write “don’t try this at home”.

The bottom line for me: I’m a storyteller – not my readers’ parents, teachers or ministers. My job is to keep them engaged in the story and, I hope, make them think about something in a new or interesting way. But I have limits and so do my gatekeepers. Writing on the edge is about striking a balance – while remaining true to yourself and your story.

Anyone fancy a tango on the high wire? I think it might be easier than figuring out Book3...

DARK PARTIES -- a dystopian novel for young adults -- by Sara Grant will be published by Orion in October. Find out more about Sara and her book at www.sara-grant.com.

Getting Boys to Read

Edge Writer Paula Rawsthorne asks

“What will get more teen boys reading?”

I don’t want to generalise about the reading habits of teenage boys - I personally know just as many boys who are voracious readers as boys who wouldn’t dream of voluntarily picking up a book.  However, there is no getting away from it.  There are a lot of reluctant teen readers out there and the majority of them are boys. 

Research keeps finding that, after junior school, many boys stop reading for pleasure and seem uninspired by the books they are forced to read in school.  A survey of 500 secondary school English teachers reveals a picture of many boys who simply lose interest in a book if it’s longer than 100 pages (and far less than this, in many cases). 

Pearson’s the publisher, undertook the survey and publicised it this week to coincide with the launch of the `Heroes’ series.  These short books are in genres that particularly appeal to boys and are coupled with a website with teaching resources and group exercises that hope to get boys back into reading.  The wonderful writer, Frank Cottrell Boyce is series editor of ‘Heroes’.  He says, “Our hope is that the stories will be shared and enjoyed by pupil and teacher alike because pleasure is the most powerful motivation.”

I can empathize with these boys.  They may view those longer, literary novels they study in school the way I view `Wolf Hall’.  It’s been propping open a troublesome door in my house since I bought it- Yes!  I know I should read it.  I know Hilary Mantel is a genius, but blinkin’ heck, look at the size of it! 

Some might argue that the use of shorter story books in the classroom is just pandering to kids who should try harder to concentrate.  Some might argue that, no matter what the word count, if a book is compelling enough, the boys will be drawn in and want to finish it.   

But will the introduction of short, boy orientated books lead to more teachers ditching the novels that are considered of greater literary merit, or, is this the way forward to get reluctant boys into the habit of reading for pleasure?  Perhaps one day, like me, it will lead them to purchasing a tome such as Wolf Hall (and using it as a door stop).

Paula Rawsthorne’s thriller for young adults ‘The Truth about Celia Frost’, is published by Usborne on 1^st August.  Find out more at www.celiafrost.co.uk

We all do it! by Miriam Halahmy

Let's face it, everyone falls into the trap - judging others by appearances. If you wore the wrong length white socks when I was a teenager at school, ( we weren't allowed to wear tights!) then you had to run the gauntlet of the pretty popular girls, all down the corridor.
Not even wearing a mask could save you.
But if we only judge by appearances, then we never really get to know other people.

Being open minded, rather than judgemental, getting to know the Other, whether they are someone from another  religion, sexual orientation or just another town, is a rich field to mine in  teen fiction. Edgy fiction is about taking on a challenge and making extra demands on the reader. You might even change attitudes.
 "I didn't know we had immigrants in the UK," commented one teen reader of my novel, HIDDEN, about immigration and human rights. "But I learnt a lot from your book."
Result!

Daniel Finkelstein recently wrote in The Times, that immigration is "won or lost in the playground...by socialising with their British peers, immigrant children soon become British." Socialising is the key word here. We can't get to know someone if we put the barriers up - just because they listen to the wrong music.Or come from another country.

Fiction can tackle controversial and sensitive issues such as immigration more effectively than a lesson just before lunch. By  writing books with  strong, convincing characters and  plots, the edgy issues become part of the landscape of the novel as naturally as the streets or the beach.

 I believe that young people are very interested in the world around them and they like to take on a challenge. After all, growing up is all about taking risks.

Hmm - maybe its time I practised my Free Running moves for the next chapter!

Miriam Halahmy's new novel, HIDDEN, was published in March 2011 and is about two teenagers who rescue an illegal immigrant from the sea and hide him to save him from being deported.

www.miriamhalahmy.com

Sex on the Edge by Keren David

It doesn't always have to be this way

There are all sorts of ways that sex can make a teen book edgy.

There’s rape, and sexual assault. There’s gay sex between boys, lesbianism, bi-sexuality. There are teenage pregnancies - from the boy or girl’s perspective. There’s harassment,  phone sex and prostitution.

There’s underage sex, sexting, porn and stalking. All important topics, all ways in which a dash of sex might get you banned by anxious parents and librarians, talked about by teens.

But funnily enough, these aren’t necessarily the most controversial books, nor the hardest to get published.

No, one of the edgiest ways of putting sex into a novel for teens is to write about a girl who has sex, enjoys it and doesn’t get pregnant, humiliated, diseased or married.

Funny, that.

Keren David's first book for teens When I Was Joe won the North East Teen Book Award 2011. Her next book, Lia's Guide to Winning the Lottery is out in August. Find out more here

Happy Endings

Edge Author Katie Dale considers whether teen fiction should end "happily ever after"...                                             .             There’s no denying that the marriage of Prince William to Kate Middleton is straight out of a fairytale. The story of a normal girl marrying her handsome prince has captivated the world with its magic and romance, as millions gathered round their televisions, camped out on the streets of London, and organized street parties and communal celebrations – a show of national spirit and goodwill seen all-too-rarely these days – to watch and celebrate as the happy couple took their vows before sailing off in their horse-drawn coach (and later a convertible Aston Martin) to their happily ever after. 

A fairytale come true.

As children, all our stories had similarly blissful fairytale endings – the heroine always married a prince and the bad guys were always punished. We needed a happy ending to our bedtime stories in order to drift off to pleasant, peaceful dreams. But what about as we grow up, enter our teens, become young adults? Do we still need our stories to end happily?

Should reading continue to be a form of escapism? A chance to get away from the humdrum problems of our own lives for a few hours and enter a world where everything is happily resolved, leaving us feeling good?

Or, as the settings of our books leave fairyland and enter the real world, is it actually more realistic if they don’t end quite so neatly? Indeed, even the original versions of many of our most beloved fairytales have much grizzlier ends – the Little Mermaid ends up committing suicide when her prince marries another, and Sleeping Beauty finally wakes to find herself raped, and the mother of twins – so as we grow up is it time to stop sugar-coating our stories, and leave the cocoon of happily-ever-afters and false expectations behind, and instead read fiction which better prepares us for the complexities and rollercoasters of real life?

After all, current teen and YA fiction deals honestly and unflinchingly with real, gritty, issues – knife crime, murder, rape, abuse and abortion to name but a few – so shouldn’t the endings be equally realistic and honest? We know that the justice system isn’t infallible, that bad guys are not always adequately punished (if at all), that good people are not always rewarded, that actually people are seldom either all good or all bad, and that even a fairytale wedding does not guarantee a happily ever after. So shouldn’t fiction reflect the real world we live in?

I don’t mean that books should leave you feeling utterly depressed and despairing at the state of the world, but can an ending be satisfying without being “happy”? Indeed, is it sometimes more fulfilling to read a story that doesn’t end quite so neatly and predictably – perhaps the hero doesn’t get the girl, a bad guy gets away, or the heroine dies – but instead leaves us with food for thought and a new perspective on our own, real, lives?

Certainly, some of the most memorable and impactful modern teen novels have endings which are not conventionally “happy”: Before I Die, Before I Fall, Noughts and Crosses, The Lovely Bones, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, and after all, the greatest love story of all time is about two teenagers who end up dead.

Would Romeo and Juliet be as romantic if they’d both survived? What about if Titanic hadn’t sunk, or if John Coffey had got a stay of execution in The Green Mile? Would those stories have had the same impact? What about Casablanca, Love Story, Gladiator, Thelma and Louise, The Crucible or Gone with the Wind?

Are happy endings in fact stories that just haven’t ended yet? Have you ever wondered what happens to the characters after their happily ever after? Do they live blissfully forever more? How realistic is that? And actually, how boring? Even if the heroine ends up with her dream guy in a teen romance, how many of us end up marrying our first love?

And in hindsight, how many of us are actually glad we didn’t…?

What do you think? Do you prefer more realistic conclusions to the books you read? Or do you like your endings happily ever after?

After all, as today proves, every once in a while some of us do end up marrying our handsome prince…

Where do your ideas come from?

Edge author Dave Cousins considers why he is drawn to write edgy fiction. 

Where do your ideas come from? is probably the most common question asked of writers, and one that many will struggle to answer. Not me. I know exactly where my stories originate: a metal box on my desk called the Word Tin. It contains all the words I need, stamped into small strips of metal, like dog-tags. To build a story, I simply delve into the box, pull out a handful of words and put them in the right order – easy. 

The Word Tin: Where the words come from

I’m joking, of course – though the tin is real, and I have once or twice tried the technique. (It produced some interesting if not exactly publishable results.) But where do ideas for stories come from? How do we choose which stories to tell? Does choice even come into it? I certainly don’t sit down and think. ‘Right! Now I’m going to write some edgy fiction.’ Why don’t I tell stories about boy wizards or teenage spies – vampires even? I’m a big fan of Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines series and will happily spend an evening reading about Neutrino-toting fairies, but when I sit down to write, that’s not what appears on the page.

The late great (and edgy) Robert Cormier

For me, Robert Cormier summed it up perfectly when he said, ‘to work for me, an idea must be attached to an emotion, something that upsets, dazzles or angers me and sends me to the typewriter’. The spark that sent me to my notebook to scribble the start of the story that became 15 Days without a Head, came from something I witnessed in a pub one afternoon. A very drunk woman arguing with a stranger at the next table – much to the embarrassment of her sons. It made me wonder what life was like for those two boys, what would happen when they got home. 

It takes time to write and revise a novel, and I find that if the characters and their story don’t mean anything to me, they won’t sustain my interest through the months of writing. If you care, it also brings with it a sense of responsibility, a desire to do justice to the characters and their story, which can be a great motivation – especially in those dark hours encountered with every novel, where the story won’t come and you find yourself reaching for the Word Tin! 

Last week, Bryony talked about edgy fiction dealing with unsettling, uncomfortable ideas. Look at all the Edge story synopses and you’ll find a wide range of tales that have one thing in common: they all deal with realities that are hard to face, things we would rather not think about: knife crime, child abduction, prejudice and torture, abandonment, deception and coercion. 

But these are the subjects that excite and unsettle me, that gnaw away at my subconscious, disturb my daydreams and keep me awake at night – the things that drive me to the typewriter. 

15 Days without a Head by Dave Cousins, is out in January 2012, published by Oxford University Press.

What the heck is Edgy Fiction?

In our inaugural blog post, it made sense to take a closer look at what we’ve called ourselves … The Edge. 

We called ourselves The Edge because, as a group, we write edgy fiction. 

But what is edgy fiction?  Well, for one thing, it is, now I come to think about it, hard to define.

Line up our books and you’d probably struggle to find many points of similarity.  Some are aimed at the ten plus age range, some at fifteen plus and all the points between (and above – why not?).  Some have male protagonists, some female.  Some have love stories, some don’t.  Some are set in contemporary England, some else-where or else-when …

Our books don’t naturally cluster into a clearly defined genre.  This isn’t a blog about ‘paranormal romance’, ‘psychological chiller’, or ‘dystopian fiction’ although some of us fall into these categories (and some don’t).

 

So what is similar about our work?  Why on earth would we think we do fall into a natural group?

What does edgy mean?

Well, you can have ‘an edgy look’ which is modern, contemporary or fashionable

Our books look good, if I do say so myself; we have scored some really great cover art.  But that can’t be all there is to edgy fiction. 

Is edgy fiction modern?  Well, yes, in a way.  But then everyone writing now is technically ‘modern’ and I would categorise plenty of less contemporary writing as ‘edgy fiction’, look at Wuthering Heights for instance.  That’s not modern, but I’d be able to debate that it was quite edgy.

I would argue that edgy fiction has to have a fresh feel to it.  It doesn’t necessarily have to be completely new, but it should have a unique voice, or original tone or approach. 

Then there’s the other side of edgy which is also key to writing edgy fiction.  Edgy can be feeling uncomfortable, tense, unsettled, unsure … the ‘on the edge of your seat’ sort of edginess. 

Then what is unsettling?  It can be horror in the classic sense of the word – why not?  But it should really be something that makes the reader stop and think and carry on thinking for days afterwards.  Perhaps even read on with the light on.  Maybe it makes the reader put the book down for a little while, because the ideas dealt with in edgy fiction are uncomfortable but never boring.    

Edgy fiction encapsulates both of these definitions.  Edgy fiction is fresh, but unsettling.

And that’s what we write at The Edge.  We’d like to think we’re unique voices dealing with issues; everything from hope and redemption to the nature of good and evil, to things with a more specific focus such as immigration or child abandonment.

Our books are fresh and unsettling, gripping and thought-provoking. 

We’re edgy.

Do you dare to read us?

(Bryony Pearce, author of Angel's Fury)

A few related questions for the authors of The Edge:

Q1. Have you always written edgy fiction or do you have other work (perhaps in the back of a drawer) that might fall into a different category?

Q2. What do you think makes your work ‘unsettling’?  What are the key issues that are touched upon in your book or books? 

Q3. What made you decide to deal with these issues and were you nervous about choosing to use these issues in your fiction? 

Q4. Can you give us a quote from your most recent book?  Something that perhaps highlights some of the issue you deal with?

Q5. When is your book available for readers to buy?