Therein lies the joy, I think. We all like to discover a bit, even those of us who are outliners. I want to go a little bit sideways here and talk about your YA fiction.
Yes.
First of all, what prompted you to go in that direction?
Well I read science fiction fantasy. Science fiction fantasy has a very long tradition with juveniles being part of it. We don’t spend as much time distinguishing as some other genres do. I think it’s a great thing that we now have the full-blown YA genre in bookstores.
When I was growing up, it didn’t exist. In my local library, there was no YA section. I would look in the children’s section or in the adult section and I actually found Anne McCaffrey [inaudible 00:04:57]. I asked the librarian about that. She’s like, “Both groups like her.” For me, it’s what do they like? I put it where they like it.
If you go back to the Heinlein juveniles, if you look at Shannara by Terry Brooks, is this a juvenile, is it not, does it even really matter? I’ve always wanted to write for all age groups. Trying my hand at teenage protagonists in a story only about them was very natural to me. Mistborn is about a 16-year-old girl.
Why is it not YA? Because it’s about a 16-year-old girl and other characters who are not and it runs the spectrum. The Rithmatist and Steelheart , which are my two primary YA series, are about focus on a character who is a teen dealing with their life, their problems. That becomes a teen book in today’s parlance.
I think that as science fiction fans see writers, we transcend this, readership transcends this. It’s just a convenient way for us to get a little bit more understanding of the story, what type of story to expect.
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