‘I Need To Learn – Am Learning’: How To Use Inexperience To Craft A Young Adult Voice

In considering ways to craft a Young Adult voice, Elizabeth Train-Brown asks: what role does inexperience play?

Abstract

What is it that separates the young adult voice from the adult voice in prose? Both might engage in alcohol, sex, crime, war, violence. Both change, grow, love, fail, fall apart. And yet there is a distinct, gut-driven sense of when we’re reading (or writing) the wrong voice. Through a practice-based methodology analysing the evolution of my drafting process and using extracts from my YA novel Bleed, and informed by a close reading of Rainbow Rowell’s Carry On and Suzanne Collins’s The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, I argue that one of the crucial elements that truly shapes a young adult voice in prose is inexperience. While young adult narrators may be approaching the same experiences as adult narrators, they are (usually) approaching them, if not for the first time, then without the depth of long experience, which gently codes narrative voice, tone, and language choice. Young adult narrators confront these experiences with all the bravado of someone who has never failed and all the anxiety of someone who has never succeeded, and this is an insight I would like to offer to other authors.