Young Adult Fiction

This one will be kind of short. I saw a meme the other day about someone complaining that they were older than all of their favorite literary characters. That got me thinking and I realized that I too am now older than most of the literary characters I read while I was growing up. Then I paused to think about it for a bit and I realized that it was largely dependent on the era in which the literature was written.

A lot of the great works feature characters that are older. For example, Abram was 75 when he set out from Herran. Odysseus was probably 40 or so during the Odyssey. Washington was in his 40s and 50s during the Revolutionary War. In the Lord of the Rings, Frodo was 50, Aragorn was 87, Gimli was 139, Boromir was 39, Merry was 36, Pippin was 28, Samwise was 38, Legolas was probably a couple hundred years old and Gandalf was probably a couple thousand if not more. Don Quixote is around 50. Winston is 39 in the 1984 novel. I could go on, but you get the point. A lot of the classic works feature characters who are middle-aged.

Yet if we look at modern series, we see something interesting. Harry Potter covers Harry’s life from the age of 11 to 17. Will from the Ranger’s Apprentice is 15 at the start of the series. Luke Skywalker is 19 at the start of A New Hope. Katniss is 16 at the start of The Hunger Games. Bobby is 14 at the start of the Pendragon series. Bella Swan is 17 years old at the start of Twilight. Max is 14 years old at the start of the Maximum Ride series. The list here could go on and on as well. At this point, the trend is pretty clear. A lot of the newer stuff features characters that are younger.

I’m guilty of this too. In the Swift City Chronicles, Cesar and the gang are all in their teens and 20s. The same applies to The Voyage of the Pervicacious which is dropping in June. The main character there is around the same age. The next book I have on deck follows a character from high school to his 30s. The book after that follows the cast of characters from the age of 5 to about 20. The book after that features a lineup with characters all in the 18 to 22 range as well.

So why is this the way that it is? Why are the classics written with older characters whereas the new stuff has all these pesky young adults? I have a few theories. The first one is that the age of the characters is necessitated by the stories being told. This is why my characters are all the ages they are. I needed Cesar to be out of high school, so he wasn’t a potato, but I didn’t want him to be a complete adult. That would have deprived him of some prime character development as he grows as a person to accept an ever-increasing amount of responsibility.

My second theory is that the age of the characters is influenced by the age of the author. This could apply to my own characters since I’m older than most of them now. However, it falls short. After all, Tolkien wrote Gimli who was 139 but he passed away at 81. That edge case aside, I suspect authors have an easier time writing characters that are younger than them.

My third theory is that the shift to these young characters is a marketing decision. The classics were written to tell stories. I don’t believe they were optimized to maximize sales. These more modern books, I can’t say the same thing about. It could be that the shift to younger characters is to maximize the relatability for younger readers.

It looks like young people have more free time than middle-aged people but less free time than old people. So perhaps the younger characters are to take advantage of these young readers who have more free time to spend reading.

My fourth and final theory for now at least is that writing young characters makes the most sense because most people can relate to the characters. If you’re old, you can relate to when you were young. However, if you’re young, you can’t really relate to being old as well. So writing teenage characters could potentially maximize the amount of relatability across all age demographics.

At any rate, those are just a couple of theories. It’s interesting all the same. I don’t think I’d be able to really write a book based on market demand. In my case, the stories kind of just come to me. I think they would be interesting to explore and then I will write about them. There isn’t a ton of control over my end of things. I look forward to seeing how this trend holds over time. Maybe we’ll see older characters start to make a comeback. Only time will tell.