Jan 12 2010
A Boy Finds a Home
Over the weekend, one of my many stories wandering the wilderness found a home!
The story, “Keeli’s Ordeal,” is about a boy in a tribal society who goes on a solitary wilderness quest. It will be appearing in Crossed Genres, an online and print magazine that publishes issues with rotating themes.
One of their themes for this issue was “Child Fiction”–stories with child protagonists but intended for adult readers. That’s exactly how I intended this story–the protagonist is young, but the issues he struggles with and the concepts he sees but doesn’t understand are designed for adult readers.
Which is a very astute distinction. I had thought about it before, but I’ve never seen anyone except Crossed Genres articulate it. Their editors not only understood the story on that level, but they also enjoyed all the meticulous little bits that I built into the character and the world, and they found particular resonance in the ending.
(I did something different in the ending that I’d never done before–nothing revolutionary or uncommon, just a different approach (no spoilers) that I’d never taken. It worked for the story and it worked for them.)
This issue should be appearing quite soon! I will post the date and links as soon as I find out.
4 responses so far
Congrats on the sale! Regarding stories with child protagonists intended for adult readers, I’m into book three of George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” series (perhaps better known as “The Game of Thrones,” the first book in the series). It’s definitely for adults, with a number of explicit sexual scenes, as well as being about 1000 pages per book (!). It has a large number of POV characters, with about half of them children, all heirs or siblings to the various claimants to the thrown. There are a number of other novels that are generally listed as “young adult” because the protagonists are children, and yet they are books for adults as well: the Harry Potter series, Ender’s Game, Little Brother, The Graveyard Book, and Dune all come to mind.
Thank you!
I totally agree about GRRM’s stuff being about children but definitely for adults. Even disregarding the seriously adult things in the adult POVs, the child characters in their own POVs also face very serious things that are beyond what a YA reader would understand or enjoy.
Harry Potter and Ender’s Game, I wouldn’t completely agree. I would say they are universal enough that they work as _both_ YA and for adults. Child readers clearly get a lot out of them, but there is some deeper subtext that makes them also work for adults. Which probably helps those books to sell so great many copies as they have.
I made up the term “Child Fiction” when I wanted to describe a distinct type of story that’s pretty common but had no genre term of its own. I’ve not seen anyone else use it before or since, although everyone who runs across it on Crossed Genres seems to appreciate the distinction. Hey, I’ll take full credit for coining the term if it catches hold!
And yes, “Keeli’s Ordeal” is most definitely Child Fiction. The issue it will be in comes out on February 1.
-Bart
I, for one, think that term is genius.
I also see a lot of it out there, and it’s definitely distinct from YA. Although, like Larry’s Harry Potter example, I think there are works that are both Child Fiction and YA at the same time.
I look forward to this issue! Thanks.