When I Was Eight

by Riley Redgate

Like most strange adults, I was once a strange kid. Back in my elementary school days, I had a knack for sleepwalking: I'd end up downstairs a lot, managing our staircase with ease, and sometimes I'd have conversations with people while asleep. One night, my father found me in the hall outside my bedroom, staring at nothing. When he asked me what I was doing, I helpfully replied that I was "looking." Looking at what? I don't know. I didn't elaborate. We chatted for a minute or two about why I was still awake -- it was about 1 AM -- and then I went back into my room. I remember zero percent of this.

Nighttime is when I do my best work. Unfortunately, it is also when I am weirdest. This has always been true. Once, when I was eight, I walked downstairs in the middle of the night, sobbing. My parents asked me what was wrong. My response was, "I just don't want to die!" If I were my parents, I would've been terrified of me. (Note: I have not yet died.)

People wonder why old fairy tales were so bloodthirsty, what with all the violence, cannibalism, etc. I feel like the answer is pretty simple: children are obsessed with darknesses and terrors. I have spoken with innumerable people who tell me they went through a Holocaust fascination phase as a kid (so did I). When I was in elementary school, my fellow students loved this Jingle Bells parody, which is a blood-soaked piece of rewriting if I've ever seen one. And kids, Neil Gaiman says, read his notoriously horrifying book Coraline as an adventure, while adults get nightmares. Let's be honest, though: all you need to do is crack open one of those Scary Stories anthologies to find something traumatizing. Those were always popular at my school libraries.

When I was eight, the ideas of death and pain were everywhere in the media I consumed. Kids' books and movies have a high body count -- dead parents, dead kids, people getting injured all the time. Harry Potter is the poster child for fictional orphaned kids, who have been trendy in literature since Dickens. Kids get devoured by the handful in Roald Dahl's The BFG, and tortured by Ms. Trunchbull in his book Matilda. Part of this is the dichotomy kids' books often draw between good and evil: evil people hurt others, and good people stop that from happening. But there's more there.

I'm still scared of dying, like most people. But when I was eight, the fear of it crippled me. I had huge fears that swallowed me up every night as I lay there, staring at the ceiling. I have a body of experiences now that help me cope with fears based on how my life has gone this far. But when I was eight, fiction was the only way I could understand most fears. Stories make awful things comprehensible to kids. It's an incredibly important part of growing up, understanding what bad things are, why they happen, and how they operate.

Books taught me the best way to beat the monsters, too: keep going. Keep reading to the end of the story. Keep moving forward until something changes, or until you understand. That's why my favorite kids' books, from chapter books to YA, have heavy or dark elements -- these books help readers deal with hard truths, and persistence is always the way to tackle them.

It's understandable, wanting to shield kids from the worst parts of the world. Still, in my opinion, kids shouldn't be sheltered from scary topics. There's a time and a place for everything, obviously, and kids' literature has boundaries that adult categories don't. All the same, loss, pain, and death are part of being alive, from the youngest age, and in my life, books have been the weapons I've used to fight back the fear of them.

Riley Redgate, enthusiast of all things YA, is a bookstore-and-Starbucks-dweller from North Carolina attending college in Ohio. She is represented by Caryn Wiseman of Andrea Brown Literary Agency. Sporadically and with occasional weirdness, she blogs here and speaks with considerably more brevity here.

Good for the Whole Family

by R.S. Mellette

While the publishing world argues over what's Middle Grade, what's Young Adult, and what's New Adult—as witnessed by J. Lea Lopez here recently—I'm asking; whatever happened to "good for the whole family?"

Target marketing has been around long enough that most people think it's the only way it's ever been, but if you take a longer view of commercial art, you'll see that excluding the majority of your potential audience is a brand new concept. Yes, I said "excluding." If you write for, or edit for, or make acquisitions for, or shelf for, one specific age group, then you are limiting your audience. And by "brand new" I mean since the turn of the previous century.

Before radio, movies, television and the internet split audiences into tiny chunks, there were basically two markets: kids and adults. Even at the beginning of these technologies, artists had to create work that would satisfy whoever might receive the signal from the air. Going back even further, when books were expensive to print and buy, one book had to entertain the entire family.

How did they achieve what modern day marketing and acquisitions executives see as the rare and illusive "crossover"? Let's take a look.

Look at Dumas's Count of Monte Cristo and Three Musketeers series. Look at Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped and Treasure Island. Look at anything by Shakespeare, Dickens, or Twain. Each of these cases, and many more, contain certain elements editors and acquisition execs, and store owners should look for:

• Characters of various ages, or the entire life of a character, not just kids
• Sex is left to what anyone might witness in public
• Age groups are targeted by beats within the story, not the entire work

Take a closer look at Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Today we'd call that a YA Romance, or a chick flick, but Shakespeare couldn't afford that luxury. Most of London would at some point or another come to see his plays—old, young, rich, poor, men, women, educated, uneducated, sophisticated, and unruly. He had to keep them all happy or the crowd might riot. If he didn't keep royalty happy, he might lose his head. So he starts with a prologue that says, yes, this is a romance, so ladies settle in for exactly what you're expecting. Then the men come on and proceed to tell crude jokes about how small their enemies' privates are, and Romeo talks about the woman he slept with the night before—though, you'd have to have  knowledge of the carnal type yourself to know what he's talking about. Throughout the story Shakespeare switches from action to romance, from poetry to punnery. He gives each member of his audience something to look forward to.

Now let's look at the book that shall not be named. The crossover so big that it changed the way best-seller lists are calculated. The Harry Potter series.

• Characters of various ages: CHECK
• Sex is left to what might be witnessed in public: CHECK
• Age groups are targeted by beats: CHECK

This isn't rocket science, folks.

Something else that should be considered in marketing for the whole family. Aristotle said that Art should Entertain and Educate. By creating a single work for all ages, not only is your marketing inclusive rather than exclusive, but young minds get a peek into what might lay ahead of them in life. Those of us that are older, are reminded of what was important in our youth, and should probably be important to us again today.

So, if you own a bookstore, set up a BOOKS THE FAMILY CAN READ TOGETHER shelf and see what happens.

If you're an editor, push those YA books that you like as an adult on your acquisitions executives.

If you're in acquisitions, think about including readers, not excluding them.

If you're an agent, keep pushing, we'll get there.

If you're a writer, keep writing, we'll get there.

R.S. Mellette is an experienced screenwriter, actor, director, and novelist. You can find him at the Dances With Blogs film festival blog, and on Twitter.

Censoring Books for Kids

by Jemi Fraser

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I've been teaching MG and lower YA aged kids for a lot of years now. The first day of every school year, I tell the kids that if they don't already love to read, they will before winter break. They always prove me right.

One of the keys to encouraging kids to read is to have a lot of books available. Not just a lot of books, but a wide range of genres, levels and styles. You have to find the 'home run' book for a reluctant reader if you want to create a lifelong reader out of him or her.

In every class there are always a few kids who read way ahead of the rest. Kids who read voraciously and devour every book in sight. These kids almost always read books that are 'too old' for them. In my classroom of 10 and 11 year olds, that means they're reading books most 13 and 14 year olds read.

Is it a problem? Should we be censoring what they read? What they have access to?

For the most part I believe the answer is no. I think parents should have lots of conversations with their kids about what they read and make those choices together. At school I do the same thing. We talk a LOT about books. But to take away their freedom of choice, stifle their interest and curiosity because we're afraid of what they might read? No.

I think most adults would be surprised at what kids read when there is freedom of choice. They don't automatically head to the books that have sex and swearing and violence. In fact, most of the kids avoid these. Even when an advanced reader raves about a mature book, most of the kids totally ignore it. Kids gravitate towards books that match their emotional maturity. They don't enjoy books that are above it. If they're not ready for the book, no matter how popular it is, they just don't read it.

In my class, I've got my books sorted into buckets. The buckets are identified on the front by genre and some buckets by author. They also have labels: At Level, Below Level, Above Level. I explain this indicated reading level and that reading level and subject matter match. They choose their reading material accordingly.

I've taught hundreds of MG & YA aged kids over the years and I've NEVER had a kid read more than 2 or 3 pages of a book they're not ready for. NEVER. EVER. On the other hand, I've had dozens and dozens of kids give up reading certain books because they were 'boring'. You guessed it, those 'boring' books are the ones with the sex and swearing and violence. If they're not ready to read it, they don't.

I think we need to trust kids & teens to make choices. They're much smarter than many people give them credit for.

Emotional readiness and maturity are the #1 factors for kids in choosing books. They make great choices. Trust them.

So, what's your opinion on censoring books for kids?

Trends in MG

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by Jemi Fraser

Trends, trends, trends.

What's going to be next? ... What's hot right now? ... Should I write to trends?

Who knows? ... Varies, depending on who you ask. ... No.

But, it is always interesting to see what your prospective audience is reading. If you find trends over the years in the same audience, you might see something useful.

For years, I've taught middle and upper elementary school—grades 5 - 8. The kids are 10 to 14 in this age group. For the most part, they love to read. I tell them the first day of school that they'll love reading in no time. They always prove me right.

So, what trends do I see? It changes, but here's what's hot in my class (Grade 5/6) in MG this year.

Humour. Kids love to laugh. They like different kinds of humour too: jokes, small smile humour, giggle inducers, I-wouldn't-want-that-to-happen-to-me humour, and laugh-out-loud-until-you-cry humour.

Big hits this year: Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Big Nate, Dear Dumb Diary (these are all series which totally supports Cat's discoveries at SCBWI!)

Mysteries. Kids love to solve mysteries—love to put together the clues to see if they can figure it out before the main characters. Detective and spy stories are popular.

Big hits of the year: Treasure of Turtle Lake, Alex Rider series

Adventure. This is the most popular genre by far in my classroom this year. Kids love to imagine themselves being heroes, participating in adventures. They like big, outrageous adventures that could never happen. They love adventures that happened long ago and those that happen in other worlds. They adore adventure that is something they could actually do under the right circumstances.

Big hits of the year: Dogsled Dreams, Ranger's Apprentice, Lightning Thief, Golden Compass, The Divide, anything by Gary Paulsen. Some of these books are fantasy as well, but the kids tell me the adventure part is why they like them the most.

So, those are the MG trends I'm seeing so far this year.

Are you seeing similar trends? Any suggestions for books my students might like?