Some Normal Guidelines While Writing YA

Now, the title of this post might be a bit misleading, because I'm just pointing out some tropes that seem to rule/govern YA writing and also posting about some books that totally break the guidelines. Remember that most great books do break the guidelines, but they generally have some reason to do so.

1. The main character should be a boy. Unless you're writing specifically for girls, this is something that you may have come across/read about somewhere. Girls will read books that have boys as main characters, but not the other way around so much. Of course, The Hunger Games disproves that to some extent, but most people seem to say that if you want to reach a large general audience, you should go for a male main character.

2. People always read up. Remember how old you were when you read a specific book. Generally, you probably don't read about people younger than you. It's generally reading about characters a few years older. While it's true that most people read up, it's not that they won't read down. I read books where the characters are younger than me sometimes. Sure, it doesn't happen usually, but it's not an impossibility.

The main thing to consider while determining your main character's age is that an older age will result in a different tone for the book. Also, people at different ages behave differently.

3. YA books are always thin. Most people would suggest you to that YA books should be between 40-50k words in length, but this rule gets broken so many times that it isn't even necessary for me to put too many exceptions. You'll probably hear of a lot of people who managed to get their books sold to an agent at around 75k words even. Concentrate on your story more than your word count.

Just remember that these are considered rules for a reason. If you have a good reason to, feel free to break them. But if you're trying to change the world of publishing, I would say that you should probably try to get published first, and then write something truly revolutionary. 

How Thick Will My Book Be?

Another thing that I often see on forums, and is generally misunderstood is just how thick people expect their books to be. A lot of people have the idea that a thick book is generally better and they won't even open up a book unless it is at least half an inch thick, while a smaller minority prefer the opposite.

But like I've been saying on my posts on word count, you really shouldn't bother with this. Get the story done first, and then you can cut out anything you think might be unnecessary.

But to give you a really rough idea, well, if your book has x number of pages in standard manuscript format, then that's a good approximation of how big your book will be.

So, a book of 50,000 words should have around 200 pages. But for YA it's usually much longer. For one, a book's page is much smaller than that of a standard MS word page, but double spacing is also removed. The size of the text is also kept larger in YA books so the average words per page is a bit shorter, usually in the 200-240 range. This can make a 50k book around 250 pages.

But the thing is that you shouldn't dismiss your book because you think it's short, and don't worry about how thick it is. Your publisher will decide all that. And, another thing, books are generally much longer than you think they would be. A 40k book might seem short, but it can actually take a lot of time even for a fast reader (I consider myself a fast reader, so I think I know what I'm talking about) and you shouldn't burden yourself with unnecessary worries about length.