Inspired? Would you like to see your name on this website and your book up on those bookshop shelves? This is where we bring you a round up of writing tips, ideas and hints.
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by Kit Berry, author of the Stonewylde Series Cross-over novels may seem like a publisher’s dream – higher sales, mass appeal – but in fact they can be a marketer’s and bookseller’s nightmare. Where to put them? Who to pitch them at? I certainly didn’t intend The Stonewylde Series to be cross-over. When I conceived the ideas and started writing, I’d imagined my potential audience to be fairly young. My hero and heroine are only fifteen and fourteen respectively, and I thought that this alone would place the books firmly on the Young Adult shelves. I wrote the books accordingly, with little explicit sex and a fairly straight-forward style. A robust story-line with plenty of action and dialogue seemed appropriate. As a school-teacher I knew what younger readers liked. Somewhere along the line, adults discovered Stonewylde. Parents read their children’s copies, and then recommended the books to their friends. Very quickly it became clear that the books were most certainly not only for teenagers. Waterstone’s re-categorised the series from Teenage Fiction to General Fiction in response to frustrated requests from adults searching for the books. It seems that teenagers will look in the adult shelves for books, but generally grown-ups don’t like having to browse in the children’s section. I came to the conclusion that despite the ages of the main protagonists, adults can always identify with younger characters because we were all there once. The themes of Stonewylde are many, given that it’s a series, as is the cast of characters. There’s something for everyone, from the deliciously iniquitous Magus to the feisty old crone Mother Heggy. The lead characters Yul and Sylvie are young and brave; idealistic and fighting against the odds. We can identify with that. We all remember the sting of injustice at the hand of an adult, and the explosive excitement of falling in love for the very first time. So how does an author go about writing a cross-over novel? I don’t think it can be done. It either happens or it doesn’t. If you cast your nets wide to catch ‘em all, you risk catching nobody. Like writing to a formula, the result would be artificial and stilted. Because I believed I was writing for youngsters, I was careful to tone down all references to sex, which is perhaps the most obvious difference between adult and teenage fiction. Stonewylde could have been very steamy. It’s set in an alternative community in Dorset, where the people have cut themselves off from the Outside World and live life as nature intended. This involves all sorts of sexual practices frowned on in normal society, such as losing one’s virginity during the Rite of Adulthood at the age of sixteen. But I only allude to these practices, and we all know it’s far more titillating to fill in the gaps ourselves. I’ve always been against dumbing down, so I used adult words and sentence structures. One thirteen year-old wrote to me of her excitement on discovering the words “diaphanous” and “horripilate”. A quite literary lady wrote that she found it refreshing to just curl up and enjoy a really good story for a change. So that perhaps is the secret to cross-over writing – don’t patronise your readership by compromising your vocabulary, but don’t over-complicate things by being too clever. Most importantly, write from the heart rather than to the market, so that everything you write rings true to the reader. Give them characters they can love and hate whatever their ages, and a plot that grabs them by the throat, be it tender or wrinkled. You can read more about Kit and the Stonewylde series at www.stonewylde.com    |
| Posted: 04/08/2008 15:29:46 Last Updated: 27/08/2008 15:56:09 |
Chick Lit > Writing Tips :: Cross-Over Novels - Skill or Just Good Luck?