On Maps and Detours: Outlining the YA Novel
Final exams have begun on Hawk Hill. As I type this, my Young Adult Fiction Writing students are bent over their blue books, outlining the rest of the YA novels they've begun writing this semester. I hope to send them off into the world with the seeds of something they can keep working on in the future--something that will become a whole novel someday or, at the very least, that novel-in-a-drawer so many writers hang onto--the one they cut their teeth on, the apprentice work that enables them to go on to write another, better novel. In this class we wrote up a storm but we also read four knockout examples of what YA can be and do--John Green's The Fault in Our Stars , Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak , David Levithan's Every Day , and Sara Zarr's How to Save a Life. The students also chose, read and presented on YA novels that spoke to the work they were doing, either thematically or stylistically. That way, in the limited time we had, we could at least ...