A Real Eye Opener
Catherine Ryan Hyde -- March 25, 2008
Writing my new novel Chasing Windmills was a real eye-opener for me. It finally proved to me that the labels we put on fiction fall somewhere short of useful. I had suspected this all along, but thought it was my own odd perception.
Not that my perception isn't odd. I'm sure it is. But there really is something amiss in the notion of "adult fiction" over here (unless it's pornography, as the label unfortunately suggests) and "young adult fiction" over there.
I wrote Chasing Windmills for my YA editor at Knopf. It was half the length it is now, and only in Sebastian's point of view. Sebastian is seventeen. If that's not YA, what is?
I presented it to my YA editor. "This is great," she said. "I just don't think it's YA." Not that anybody knows exactly what YA is. It's something like saying, "Is it literary?" Or, worse yet, "Is it art?" But she wasn't sure teens would universally relate.
Back to the old drawing board.
Meanwhile I was presenting a novel-in-progress to my adult editor at Doubleday. It was very different from its predecessor, Love in the Present Tense. More literary. Less overtly emotional. Which turned out to be a problem. "Not that I didn't like it," she said. "But there's something to be said for giving people what they expect."
Ooh. I hate it when people say things like that. But that's another rant for another article.
My agent was sure that same adult editor would spark to Windmills. I was sure she was wrong. I remembered notes on the edited manuscript of Present Tense. "I'm afraid this sounds too YA." "I just don't want this to sound YA."
"I don't think she'll like it," I said. "Too YA."
But I wasn't flowing over with better ideas.
I devised a plan. I would rewrite it to make it cleanly adult. I would add Maria's point of view. Maria is nearly twenty-three, with two children and an abusive live-in boyfriend. A much more adult story line.
Doubleday published it.
The reviews came in.
PW said, "While this is being billed as an adult novel, its closest stylistic relative is S.E. Hinton's YA classic The Outsiders." Then School Library Journal reviewed it. Classified it as "Adult/High School," and said, "Chasing Windmills will appeal to teens who enjoy realistic fiction and a good story about relationships."
Now it's a YA crossover.
Which raises a real question about our reading-level labels. When I was fourteen, my favorite book (and movie) was Midnight Cowboy. These days I enjoy reading good YA literature, often better than adult titles. Becoming Chloe contains (arguably) more adult material than any of my other titles, and it's YA. Or so it says on the copyright page. It isn't hard to get teens to read adult books, but it sure is hard to get adults to try Becoming Chloe.
I guess I should be happy that Chasing Windmills is both. I just can't help wondering if that isn't true of many, if not most, of the books we read.