Food for Thought: Writing for the Young Adult market


I visited Locus Magazine's site and found Cory Doctorow's July article concerning the Young Adult (YA) market. I was reading through it and found the following paragraph:

Writing for young people is really exciting. As one YA writer told me, "Adolescence is a series of brave, irreversible decisions." One day, you're someone who's never told a lie of consequence; the next day you have, and you can never go back. One day, you're someone who's never done anything noble for a friend, the next day you have, and you can never go back. Is it any wonder that young people experience a camaraderie as intense as combat-buddies? Is it any wonder that the parts of our brain that govern risk-assessment don't fully develop until adulthood? Who would take such brave chances, such existential risks, if she or he had a fully functional risk-assessment system?

Perhaps this is why some books that we read in our adolescence resonated so strongly with us - they struck a chord that resonated with the issues and difficulties that we faced, consciously or subconsciously. I know that the stereotypical SF/F adolescent power fantasy would certainly resonate with these youngsters - is that an untapped local market here in the Philippines?

2 comments:

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Will said...

i remember that UP Press released some young adult publications, the ones that explicitly said something like they're really for the young adults. I'm not sure how much of a success those publications became.