What if YA Were More Like Literary Fiction?

I'll admit it. Lately, I've been losing patience. I've become intolerant. Things that used to seem charming are crawling around under my skin like a bad case of verbal bed bugs.

I speak, of course, of the "look at my verbal backflips" tendency in literary fiction.

What if YA were like that? By which I mean, what if YA were so impressed with the smell of its own farts (or just the sound of its own voice, you pick) that it spent hundreds and thousands of words talking about...nothing?

Even during the not-as-brief-as-it-should-have-been, Jilly-know-yourself-better-dammit period when I was trying to write semi-literary fiction myself, I found the long-winded description tedious at best.

I don't really care about all 73 shades of pink and coral and mother-of-pearl and Orange Julius tinting a sky, causing a character to reflect, boringly, on his own mortality and also his childhood. It doesn't change my understanding of the character, or the story, or the writer's ability, to slog through an entire page of an elaborately-constructed metaphor comparing two women's church hats to multi-colored, feathered Parthenons, marching bravely through time and the line at the post office atop their some-also-overly-clever-metaphor-for-hairs. And there's just never that much worth saying about how that one tree looked.

I don't want to read about those things, even when they're done well; why would I want to write them?

Oh god, I'm gonna have to read about SO MANY NATURE MOMENTS.


Now don't get me wrong, I'm not a for-plot-only reader. In fact, I'm a reader who tends not to care much about plot--I'm mainly invested in character and voice. Like, I enjoyed that one time David Sedaris went on for approximately 152,000 words about his Fitbit.

I'm just a "don't bore me with a.) your mental meanderings and b.) your overly-high estimation of the value of your verbal dexterity" reader.

There's such a thing as being too clever by half, after all. Or too clever by 200%. String enough of those moments together, and my sense of the book exclusively becomes "wow, that's smug."

I'm absolutely certain my irritation with the beautiful-and-boring or the so-smart-but-pointless has been exacerbated by my decision to write in not one, but TWO genres--young adult and humor--that value few things as much as efficiency. In those genres, if a word isn't working for you on at least a couple levels--character revelation and plot, say, or momentum and absurdism--it's kinda slacking. So imagine how much flak a pointless paragraph gets?

This is another of those writing-ruins-reading moments, of course; the more aware I become of flab in my own writing (bearing in mind that I write in extremely lean genres), the more intolerant I become of bloated writing wherever I see it.

Beautiful prose is valuable, yes, but beautiful prose that doesn't tell me anything more about this character, or this story, or this world, or how all of the pretty description is affecting something vitally important within this book isn't really prose at all: it's poetry.

So by all means, wax rhapsodic about reflections of things on the inky surface of night-dark water, and stop the story dead in its tracks to perform an acrobatics routine that amazes with its purpose-defying ability to get us, eventually, to imagine one specific pair of lips as parched tropical slugs, crawling their way around a bite of Cobb salad, which you'll leap off of IN MIDAIR in an effort to make salad and astro-turf ONE!

Just give me some fair warning before you do it so I can skip that bit.