I’ve talked before about how an author needs to check what their book is saying. Even if you write without any intention of having a message, there may be one, and if you look at it carefully, what you’re saying, suggesting or inferring might not be particularly healthy. In adult writing, it maybe doesn’t matter so much (though I’d prefer it if all authors were socially responsible), but in YA writing, it is extremely important because your works are going to a naïve and often impressionable audience. I’m not going into sex and violence here, but into something much more subtle - beliefs about the nature of things and about what is appropriate behavior. Love and sexual attraction is a common theme in YA, and exploring these things is one of the exciting things about growing up, but what if we pick up misguided ideas about it? If we read many books with the same point of view, why wouldn’t we assume that that point of view was correct? The ‘Twilight series’ had a lot of good things in … [Read more...]