The The NSW Writers' Centre

James Roy – On YA

February, 2011

Despite his initial reluctance, James Roy is now the author of twenty books for young people, including two Children’s Book Council Honour Books, Captain Mack and Billy Mack’s War, and Town, which won the NSW Premier’s Award (Ethel Turner Prize) in 2008.

I Accidentally Wrote a YA Novel

There is one question guaranteed to draw a stern response from most people who write for children and young adults: “Do you have any plans to write a real book?”

It’s not always couched in those words. Sometimes it’s a little more subtle: “Do you plan to write a book for adults at some stage?” Implicit in this is the misconception that writing for younger audiences is not only easier than writing for grown-ups, but that any writer for young people who has aspirations of being taken seriously will, at some point, need to come to grips with “proper” themes. You know, grown-up stuff.

My answer to this question varies, depending on how charitable I’m feeling at the time, but usually I smile and shake my head and answer in the negative. “Writers are like cricketers,” I sometimes elaborate. “You have fast bowlers, leg-spinners, off-spinners, medium pacers, opening and middle-order batsmen, all-rounders, wicketkeepers, each with unique and common skill sets, but every one a cricketer.”

That’s when the questioner usually backs slowly away, murmuring something about it being “just a question”.

The painful and honest truth is, I once shared that view. When I first started taking my writing seriously, I wanted to be Terry Pratchett. Only problem was, I wasn’t very funny. Nor did I read a lot of fantasy, apart from Pratchett, so that should have been a clue… Then I wanted to be Kurt Vonnegut, or perhaps Tim Winton. The problem there; I didn’t have very much to say that readers of Winton or Vonnegut would want to hear.

It didn’t stop me trying, however. Whatever I lacked in ability or perspective, I more than made up for with naivety and blind optimism. I completed a 90,000 word fantasy comedy that wasn’t funny, then plunged headlong into Almost Wednesday, a novel about Charlie, a young man of sixteen, whose best friend Becky (also sixteen) disappears from their Tasmanian fishing town in the first paragraph.

Oh, such hopes for that book. I didn’t expect it would be the next Cloudstreet – after all, Winton wrote four books before he hit the big one – but it was supposed to be a proper book. A literary book. A savage examination of small town politics, a study of who we are as Australians, et cetera, et cetera.

I procured an agent, who sent my manuscript to a couple of places, without success, before sending it to Leonie Tyle at University of Queensland Press. Leonie Tyle, the children’s and young adult publisher. That’s right, the kids’ publisher, not the real publisher.

I have to admit, I did feel a little insulted. I didn’t want to be a kids writer, or a YA writer. I wanted to write proper books, the kind I could be properly proud of.

Then, once I was over my shock, I considered the evidence. The protagonists in Almost Wednesday are both sixteen, the issues they face are sufficiently angst-ridden to qualify as teenage fiction, and… well, I’d dipped somewhat into my own adolescent self for inspiration.

Fact is, I’d never stopped to think that many of my favourite classic books would, if published today, have been young adult fiction. Of course The Outsiders and Catcher in the Rye were at the forefront of the fledgling YA industry before it had a proper name, but it could be argued that other classics – Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, Pride and Prejudice, To Kill a Mockingbird, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Romeo and Juliet – they all make a strong case for inclusion within the YA canon. Consider Hamlet, which ticks off many of the standard YA criteria. Dead dad – check. Mother whoring it up with her brother-in-law – check. Main character introspective and borderline emo; girlfriend so nuts she ends up in a pond; a best friend so cool it hurts – check, check and check. Is it just me, or does Hamlet read a little like a John Green novel?

None of these writers accidentally wrote stories about young people. They chose their characters, they chose their situations, they saw that these stories needed to be told, and they didn’t baulk at the idea of using young people as the central drivers of those stories. I’m sure they were unapologetic about it. And now, after a bit of an early minor hiccup, so am I.