Why I Write: Young Adult

Continuing my summer series on Why I Write.

Last week I explained Why I Write: Fiction.

Today I'll tell you Why I Write: Young Adult (or YA). I didn't intend to write YA when I began. I was reading a lot of Francine Rivers and Deanne Gist back then, and beginners emulate. It's the way of many creative pursuits.

Well into my first draft I began to have some doubts. Was my character too young? Were her problems too juvenile? Were her friends too immature? Near the halfway point, I had a sudden, liberating realization: I was actually writing YA.

This freed me in many ways, and excited me. I have always loved YA. My favorite course in college was Dr. Shively's YA Lit class, where I was reintroduced to brilliant authors like Lois Lowry, Chris Crutcher, S.E. Hinton, Sandra Sisneros, Harper Lee, and L.M Montgomery. I had read their books as a kid, but now, studying them as an adult, their work became something new, fascinating, and wonderful to me.

They speak a different literary language. They're frank, bold, and unapologetically serious about problems that plague young adults.

They don't shy away from topics, or water things down. I love that. They don't talk down to their audience, or assume their young readers need words, sentences, issues, or stories simplified. They respect their audience, and the stage of life their audience is in.

Young readers need that. I needed that.

I was such a confused, love-sick, angst-filled young reader myself. I know this because I left a paper trail of all my confusion and heartache. I desperately needed to know I was not alone. I needed to know God was still real, and he was still near; still active and working in my life and in the world.

It was a time of questioning, and doubting, and seeking answers in the wrong place, and being so darn sure about every single thing I decided was true. It was a time of rebellion, of taking risks, of making mistakes. It was when I realized how important friendship was, and now that I'm an adult, I see how important my choice of friends was.

Most tragically, it was a time when I was obsessed with trying to figure out what would make me happy. The world was constantly shoving down my youthful throat that my happiness was all that mattered. Not my parents, not my future, and certainly not God.

"Do whatever makes you happy," is Satan's battle cry. It's an insidious command that leads to irreparably broken relationships. Young adults are so dangerously susceptible to it. Even faithful young adults.

That's why I write YA.

This question of personal happiness is my character's biggest struggle. It's why she teeters on the edge of a family that expects her to obey, and why she might miss out on sharing in their great destiny on the Mayflower. She believes obedience will lead to a life of misery, and she has an opportunity to leave her family and seek her own happiness. Will she take it? Will her desire for what she thinks will make her happy win in the end? What will become of her if she chooses happiness over duty, sacrifice, and perseverance?

Readers, even young readers, who have much to learn about consequences know the answers. They know her desire for happiness will lead her down a dark path, even though they may despise her father for saying it. They still know.

It's different to see this play out in someone else's life rather than one's own. An observer can see more clearly, with less emotion.

Readers will (I hope) yearn for her to choose obedience, to see her make the treacherous ocean crossing with her family, and watch her persevere with the rest of them in the New World.

And my earnest, constant prayer, is that readers will be encouraged by this story, so that when the time comes for them to choose obedience or happiness, they will be ready, strengthened, and buoyed. Capable of seeing the grand scheme, the next step, the joy to be had in a life of steady perseverance.

Why I Write: Fiction

This is the second installment in my summer series: Why I Write. Today I'll tell you why I write made-up stories about made-up people with made-up problems.

I wrote about the Power of a Story for my other blog, Quills and Inkblotts. The purpose of this piece today isn't to argue the merits of fiction. Rather, to explain why I choose to write it, or more accurately, why I need to write it.

I love conversation. Not idle chit-chat. I hate that. If small-talk were a sport, I'd be the last one picked for the team. Give me an interesting topic (and an interested listener) and I'll win the Olympics of conversation. But, put me in a room with doughnut holes and coffee and five minutes until church starts, and I turn into Socially Awkward Penguin.

Then Facebook was invented. It's a blessing and a curse, isn't it? I've had some great conversations there. I can respond at my leisure, after thinking about what I want to say. I can read over my words a couple times to make sure my meaning is clear (and my typos are fixed). In this way, it's a great tool for the socially awkward to engage in meaningful conversation.

Until it isn't.

A few months ago I came across a wonderful, thought-provoking article on the Magna Carta in the Wall Street Journal. You can read it if you want to (please do!). Turns out, last summer was its 800th anniversary--who knew?

I thought about that article all day, the implication of the document on me as an American, as a descendant of Anglo-Europeans, who are so often thought of as the oppressors by modern...let's say "intellectuals," and how that thinking came about over the last hundred years or so.

I shared the link to the article on Facebook, but not until after carefully planning what I would say about it. I didn't want to come across as a snobbish know-it-all. I genuinely wanted my little Facebook community to be as intrigued as I was by it, to read it, to form their own thoughts, and to have a conversation about it. Of course, no one did. It turns out people have lives!

Having a constantly churning mind and no one to share its ruminations with can be lonely and stifling.

Enjolras had his men of the ABC Society.

William Wilberforce had the Claphamites.

Hannah More had her Bluestocking Group.

I need an outlet too, a more reliable source of conversation than fickle Facebook. So I write fiction. I hold conversations with myself about the beauty of the Pilgrims, about their faith, about God's faithfulness to them, about what it's like to grow up with a father who doesn't easily show love, about being a girl in a patriarchal society, about love, about grief, about friendship, about having faith in a God who feels very far away.

And the voices in my head do answer. They have comebacks I would never have the guts to say. Sometimes they scream and cry. Sometimes they laugh and enjoy each other's company. Sometimes they fall in love.

Sometimes I don't know what I know, or how I feel until the voices have had their say. In some ways it's better than engaging real life people who grow bored, or get offended, or misbehave. The voices are enough. They do more than sustain me--they energize me. They keep me sharp, focused, interested in many things. They demand knowledge gained by research, and excellence gained by revision.

When no one in real life cares about the Magna Carta, or King James, or religious persecution in the 17th Century, or Reformation theology, or being a lovesick teenage girl, the voices do. They care because these things are their fictional lives.

These things are my life. Because I need to have these conversations. Because I write fiction.

"For I am full of words; the spirit within me constrains me. Behold my belly is like wine that has no vent; like new wineskins ready to burst. I must speak, that I may find relief."

Job 33:18-20

Why I Write

It's summer (no stay-at-home-mom of school-aged kids needs this reminder). It has not been a season of prolific creativity and productivity for me. More like road trips, incessant bickering, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. That's okay. I'm forever grateful for these years, and for my presence in them. I'm not complaining. But I do miss writing. It's been weeks since I've had those long, quiet, isolated hours before the screen. All I have time for right now are quick bursts of words, dumped into a blog in the early morning hours before the monsters begin to stir in their lairs.

I needed something easy, something to get the juices flowing, something to get me writing. Writing about writing is about the easiest thing there is for a writer, so here it is: a summer series on Why I Write.

Why I Write Fiction, Why I Write Young Adult, Why I Write Historical, and others are planned and coming shortly.

Today, I'll tell you simply why I write.

1. I enjoy it. 

Every part of it. I love to feel the throb of a story aching to coming out, and the gush of words when I finally put fingers to the keyboard. I love the fine-tuning, the hours spent staring at a paragraph, a line, a word, even when I return to it the next day and decide to delete it.

I also love the hard, intellectual labor, the constant refining, and the continuous learning. I know I'll never know all there is to know about writing, and that knowledge pushes me, awakens me, and drives me.

It gives me something to work at until it's finished. I know what I'm going to do every day, from the moment I wake up.

It gives me purpose. It makes me feel useful to my Lord, who has given me the luxury of time, freedom, and a gift with words.

2. It keeps me close to the Lord. 

Not because I think writing, in and of itself, is so noble and godly a thing to do, but because I'm constantly talking to him about it. Is this a fitting labor? I ask. Does it please You? Take this dream from me if it's not from You, I beg him.

I ask for practical things too: for my time to be well-used, to be kept from distraction, for Him to show me what's missing, and what to cut.

I confess my sin to him: my pride, my shame, my hesitancy, my laziness, my fear of man.

When I get frustrated by what I perceive to be silence, as I often do, I back away from writing. I can't help it. My confidence wains, my work slows, my heart constricts.

And like clockwork, my prayer life dries up.

But I am always (so far) pulled back somehow to the labor of writing, and with it, I return to praying as I should.

I realize anew with every return, that if my writing never amounts to anything in the wide world, if it never yields earthly fruit that I can see, and taste, and spend, it doesn't matter. My writing bears the kind of fruit that matters to God. It keeps my heart tuned to His grace, mercy, and sovereignty.

3. I can't not. 

Writing is quite possibly the most all-consuming activity I could have undertaken. Even when I have to remove myself from the screen and do normal things that normal people do, I'm consumed by writing. I may have a day that's full with bible study, and picking up my husband's uniform at the cleaner's, and shopping for ingredients to make minestrone soup and homemade bread for my friend who just had a baby, but all those things are punctuated by thoughts of my story. Dialogue streams through my mind as I drive. I feel the sun on my character's skin when I feel it on my own. I use my one precious hour alone to unload it all into the Word document, and read it over fourteen times to make sure I like it.


Whether or not God does anything with it, I think, for me, there will always be writing. It's a part of who I am. It's a part of how I function. The tap has been turned on, and it flows constantly for me.



And that's why I write.