Last week, Heather Howland (managing editor from Entangled Publishing) conducted an amazing online workshop. Here are some key points she stressed when writing kissing or sex scenes in YA stories:
- Avoid the cliches we are now seeing A LOT in YA stories. For example, the tugging of the lower lip during the kiss. Many of these things are found in adult novels and are not true to the teen experience. Heather rolls her eyes whenever she reads them in manuscripts. She’s probably not the only one.
- It’s all about the emotions. With adult novels, there’s more emphasis on the mechanics of the kiss or sex or everything in between. Not so with the teen experience. Make sure you have the visceral reactions (no clichés please) and lots of introspection. The focus should be on the introspection (something I still need to work on) and not on the choreography.
- Avoid being graphic with the naming of body parts (I can’t list them here because this is a PG-rated blog, but you get the idea). There are incidences when it’s okay, but this is when the character is viewing the act in a clinical sense. Most of the time, you want to avoid this. Examples used were Forget Me by Jennifer Ecols and The Anatomy of a Boyfriend by Daria Snadowsky.
- Write for teens. Don’t write steamy to make adult readers happy. Remember, the teen experience varies when it comes to sex. Someone who has never gone that far might be uncomfortable if you get too descriptive.
- Study how other authors do it (well). Below are a few of the books Heather used excerpts from to demonstrate her points. In the lecture (which I can’t do here), she explained why each excerpt worked.
Going Too Far by Jennifer Echols
Shadow Kiss by Richelle Mead (this is the third book in the Vampire Academy series)
Looking for Alaska by John Green
Divergent by Veronica Roth (the class wasn’t all about sex)
Obsidian by Jennifer L. Armentrout
If you have a chance to take a workshop from Heather (like Sex in YA), I highly recommend it. She’s a great instructor. Someone had a question about rape in YA, and Heather delayed her originally scheduled lesson to post on the topic. She also accepted anonymous excerpts from our WIPs and gave feedback on them. That alone made the course worth it. We all learned a lot from reading her explanations on why things worked and why they didn’t.
What cliches are you tired of seeing in YA or romance?
(This workshop was offered through YARWA, the YA chapter of the RWA).
(Geez, I’m dreading to see what google search words bring people to my blog now!)
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Update on the course I mentioned last week: Students will be refunded since the instructor is unable to finish the course due to health issues. Hopefully she gets better soon.