Hello, dear readers, and welcome!
Well, I had another post planned for today (which you'll be seeing next week instead now, sorry), about writing and "Rear Window", but due to the recent shall I say shift in the New Adult interest, I felt the need to present you with this post today instead.
I hadn't planned on writing any more of these posts, but now it looks like I might write more, after all! The landscape is changing as far as New Adult goes, and I like to give my two cents...or should I say ten cents? Can it be more because I'm an author? I don't know...onto the post!
Today I'm here to talk about what NA really is, and why it's important as a category (also, see my post: What Is New Adult Fiction?).
You may have noticed that NA is being talked a lot about on Twitter at the moment (or was a few days ago), one of the things that prompted this post. Recently, Publishers Marketplace added New Adult as an official category, which created a big buzz, and now NA has more of a spotlight than before. Now, more people than ever are wondering just what this New Adult thing is, and I'm here to hopefully answer that in an all-inclusive way, since a lot of the answers I've seen have reflected:
"It's YA with sex."
"It's about the steamy 20s."
"It's college aged kids."
"It's heavier romance than YA."
"It's another word for chick lit."
There have, of course, also been answers that reflect mine, but I haven't seen enough of them.
Why am I the expert? I'm not. I'm just an author who loves the themes in NA, but I am also part of a community of authors who all agree on one thing: NA is more than romance.
New Adult at its core is about the transitional years between childhood (teenage years) and adulthood, those years where you are an adult, but really have no idea how to handle adulthood yet -- or some idea, but you're still getting the hang of things. New Adult is about furthering your education at the university, getting your first job, getting used to responsibility, defining your beliefs, and yes, it can be about characters plunging into the scary world of more serious relationships. In the end, it's all about discovering how to be an adult effectively, and the trial and error that goes along with it.
NA is a category, not a genre as it's sometimes being portrayed. Categories are used to place books so that they meet reader's expectations (hopefully) right off of the bat. Some you may be familiar with are:
Fiction vs. Non-Fiction
Adult vs. Children's Lit
and now
New Adult vs. Young Adult vs. Adult
If you're looking for a book that isn't real-life, then you're going to look in fiction, because you know that fiction books aren't "real-life" -- no psychology books, science books, or memoirs to be found here. Consequently, if you're looking for a book for your young son, you're not going to look in Adult fiction, because he's too young to read an Adult book, which might have too high a level of vocabulary, more complex plot, or content -- you're going to look in Children's books to find Artemis Fowl (one of my personal favorites) for him to read.
Likewise, the New Adult category is here so that when a reader wants to read a book containing a protagonist who is in this transition stage (age varies, honestly, though the "acceptable" range is 18-26; for more on that, see my post: Character Diversity and Adversity), they can more easily find it.
Is New Adult a new thing? Of course not. YA wasn't really a new thing either, the publishers simply made it a category -- not genre, mind you -- so that books about Young Adults were easier to find. New Adult has been around for a while, lurking in Young Adult and Adult fiction, until people started to realize that A) wanted to read more books about this time in life, and B) there weren't enough books about this time in life.
Here is where the drawback comes. There always is one.
You might be reading this, and have already heard that NA is about sexy times, or is all romance, and you might be confused. I can't blame you. Before I really started researching the category, I thought the same thing, because most of the books were (and still are, though a variety is popping up) romance oriented, and to a degree sexually charged. But, I'm here to tell you that that isn't what NA is all about.
Romance is part of life, for everyone. It doesn't matter what age you are, it's always there, in different forms at different stages of life. I do believe that romance is important to NA, though I'm not a large romance (genre) fan, because it is part of life, and at this transition stage quite a few new adults are experiencing their first real relationship.
But, that doesn't mean that there isn't more than romance to NA. Remember when I said it was a category, not a genre? This is where genres come into play within NA.
Under categories, there are "umbrellas", terms that oversee different genres; sometimes they are called genres, and their minions sub-genre, but I prefer the term "umbrella". We'll take one of my favorites, and experiment:
Umbrella term: Fantasy
Genres within Fantasy:
Urban Fantasy
High Fantasy
Dark Fantasy
Epic Fantasy
Contemporary Fantasy
There are plenty more, but I tried to keep the list short.
What I'm trying to say here is that, because New Adult is a category not a genre, it has plenty of space for writers to write more than Romance, and all of its genres (yes, Romance is an umbrella term, too).
So, I bet you're wondering, can we have Sci-Fi NA? Yes! Fantasy NA? Yes! Historical NA? Most definitely! Horror? Thriller? Crime? Military? Post-Apocalyptic? Dystopia? Steampunk? Yes, yes, yes, and all of the others, yes.
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| Via Goodreads |
But -- and here's the real question -- do any of those have to have romance? Can they be NA without sexual content, steaminess, erotica, one night stands, whatever? (Because those are the things that people in their twenties are into, right? They don't think about anything else! I won't rant here, but I'm twenty-two, and the answer is distinctly, in capitol letters NO for me and everyone else I know who is near my age. Please read: Is There Pressure To Write Romance?)
Can a story be NA without romance? Yes! New Adult isn't all romance, all the time. As I said above, romance is a part of NA just as much as it's a part of anything else, but there's more than that to NA.
New Adult is a category with plenty of space for stories that are about the hardships of becoming an adult, within plenty of genres, and there are writers who are penning (and publishing) New Adult stories that are about more than romance. So please, let's lay to rest the idea that New Adult is "for sexy only", and start including everyone -- romance and non-romance -- because there are a variety of stories, for every type of reader.
Why Is It Important?
Who Writes it? Who Is It For?
Now, onto the second part of my post, about why New Adult is important -- and perhaps more importantly, why New Adult isn't trying to shake up literary terms, and say that we should have a category for every stage of life. Also to note: who is NA for, and who can write it?
On the Twitter feed the other day, I noticed "New Adult vs." popping up quite a bit, along with speculation of what Adult was to be considered now, and if we needed an age category for every stage of life.
I definitely think that this is a legitimate question...and I also think that the answer is no. Why? Well, everyone goes through stages in life, but a great number of them are gone through when the person is younger. But before you think I'm being unfair, I'd also like to note -- Adult fiction is very broad, and generally encompasses a number of Adult stages already. It's much easier to find an Adult book dealing with a certain problem than it is to find a book for someone who is younger. Adult books have less constriction for writing, too, and can pretty much be about anything, because they are Adult, and censorship and such is pretty much gone.
So, why is New Adult important? Why shouldn't we just move onto Adult fiction? That is a good question.
Being in my twenties, I like the idea of New Adult, because I can relate to it -- what the teens are looking for in Young Adult, what middle schoolers look for in Middle-Grade, and so forth. New adults haven't matured fully yet, to where they feel comfortable with adulthood. We're not old enough to look back and remember anything but high school, and how much it sucked. We can't draw from past adult experiences to tell us what to do, or where to go. While reading up is great -- I do enjoy Adult novels -- it's also nice to have someone you can relate to, who is going through similar issues as you, instead of you wondering what it's like to have that much experience at being an adult.
If (hopefully) New Adult comes to focus on the issues that are prevalent in this time in life, I think it's a good thing -- something that is needed, stories where the reader can get direction and relation. It says that people who are in this stage of life are important, not getting looked over as we struggle forward. It's a place for issues to be brought up and addressed in a "safe" way, so that we can see through another's eyes as they fight the same issue we might be fighting; we can see how they handle the new, adult situations we're being faced with.
So, is NA a fad? At the moment it is in a way, but I think it's a fad that becomes less than such. I think this category in literature has a place, and I think that there are readers out there who definitely can take something away from these types of stories.
Is NA trying to make the category system complex? No. I think that Adult literature is fine just as it is, and that adding NA to it only made it so that people who are experiencing these transitional issues can easily find books that suit them, and that they want to read.
That being said, who is New Adult for? Who is writing it? I feel the need to stick up for the guys here, because they're being seriously overlooked.
Along with the idea that NA is another word for "chick lit" comes the idea that NA is only for women, and only being written by women, and that simply is not true. There are plenty of great guys who are writing NA as well, and plenty of reading men who I'm sure would like to discover stories about this time in life (+Matthew Turner is running a New Adult Man campaign, in fact). Yes, at the beginning NA was very female-dominated, a lot like YA, but that is changing -- so please give a thumbs up to the men, because they are working hard at writing, too.
New Adult is an exciting place to be, and has a lot of potential to become something great, with plenty of genres, themes, and writing styles.
