A YA-focused writing exercise with context explaining what the exercise trains and which authors used the technique
An original reflection connecting the exercise to a real writing principle you can use today
A quote from a literary master to ground your morning in craft, not hustle
A few things worth knowing
Emotional stakes have to come before the genre premise.
The reason Harry Potter works as YA has nothing to do with wands or Quidditch. Rowling wrote Harry as a child who has been systematically told he is nothing, who lives under the stairs and wears his cousin's hand-me-downs. Every reader who'd ever been invisible recognized something in that first chapter before a single spell was cast. Genre elements without emotional stakes beneath them produce fiction that sells for a season and vanishes.
Voice has to belong to one specific person.
Holden Caulfield doesn't sound like a teenager. He sounds like that particular teenager, with that particular obsession with phoniness and that particular grief he can't stop circling. Sherman Alexie's Junior draws cartoons because words feel too limited, and his voice moves between humor and devastation so quickly you can feel the survival mechanism at work. The generic teen voice, broad and fast and broadly relatable, reads like a product. A voice that belongs to exactly one person reads like a person.
The coming-of-age arc costs something real.
Harry can't go back under the stairs even if he wanted to. Katniss at the end of the trilogy has almost nothing left of the girl she was before she volunteered, and Collins doesn't pretend that's entirely a good thing. The final pages of Mockingjay are some of the quietest, saddest in the genre, because Collins understood her character won but also lost something that couldn't come back. Growth in YA is inseparable from loss.
Adults are defined by what they fail to do.
Dumbledore withholds information that costs Harry everyone he loves, for reasons the books never fully resolve. Haymitch can barely mentor himself. In Junior's world, the adults are sometimes good people too broken by their own circumstances to protect him from his. The structural logic of YA: if the nearest adult reliably solved the problem, there'd be no story for the teenager to inhabit.
YA endings resist resolution.
Looking for Alaska doesn't solve the mystery the way the protagonist wants. The ending of The Outsiders loops back to its beginning. The Hunger Games ends with a long, quiet recovery that may never be complete. These books trust their readers to sit with ambiguity, and I think that trust is one of the most underrated things the genre does consistently.
These ideas come from paying close attention to what the best YA writers actually did on the page.
For a deeper look, start with how to write YA fiction.
On YA fiction writing
YA Fiction
How to Write YA Fiction
What Rowling, Hinton, Green, and Alexie understood about the genre that most craft guides skip. →
YA Fiction
Writing Teenage Characters
Four ideas about writing teenage characters that actually changed how I approach the young adult protagonist. →
YA Fiction
Things I've Noticed About YA Fiction Tropes
Sixteen observations about YA fiction tropes and conventions, after reading probably too many of them. →
A sample from your daily email
March 28th
"An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's."
- J.D. Salinger
J.D. Salinger's decades of silence spoke volumes about the price of perfectionism. After the explosive success of The Catcher in the Rye in 1951, Salinger retreated from public view. He spent the next 45 years in his New Hampshire compound, obsessively rewriting stories he would never publish.
A desire to craft work on his own terms that transformed from artistic integrity into creative paralysis. While the world waited for his next masterpiece, he endlessly filled notebooks with drafts that fell short of his impossible standards.
Today's exercise: write the first scene your protagonist remembers from before the story begins. Don't make it dramatic. A kitchen, a school hallway, a specific argument they lost. Let the ordinariness do the work.
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"I've tried every writing course and productivity system out there. This is the first thing that actually got me writing every day. Two months in, I finally started the novel I'd been thinking about for three years."
David M., first-time novelist
YA (young adult) fiction targets readers roughly 12-18, though the actual readership tends to skew older. The defining characteristic isn't content rating but perspective: the protagonist is typically a teenager navigating identity, belonging, and first encounters with loss, love, and institutional power. Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, The Fault in Our Stars, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. The category is broad enough that "YA" tells you more about the protagonist's consciousness than about the genre elements.
The same way you write for anyone who won't tolerate being talked down to. Patrick Ness once said he tries to write for the teenager he was, someone who wanted books that took his challenges and opinions seriously. The assumption that teen readers need protection from difficult truths is what produces bad YA. Writing for this audience means writing at the full complexity of adolescent experience, not watering it down. Teens read phoniness faster than anyone.
A specific want that hides a deeper need. Katniss wants her sister to live; what she needs is to believe that survival means something beyond not dying. A voice that belongs to exactly this character and not to a generic teen archetype. And a willingness to be changed by events rather than simply enduring them. The character who survives without losing anything is a plot device, not a young adult protagonist.
An inciting incident, not an identity. Katniss volunteers for the Games, and the rest of the trilogy is about what that choice costs her. Harry survives Voldemort as an infant, and Rowling spends seven books making him earn what the prophecy promised. The trope fails when being chosen replaces character development, when special is the whole personality. Used well, being chosen sets up the only question that matters: what does it cost?