School’s out! Spring is making way into summer, which is one of the best reading and writing seasons for YA authors. Teen bookworms all over the country are ready to toss the textbooks and cuddle up with some new YA reads. At SparkPress, we’re ready for the Best Writing Summer Ever, and are kicking it off with this SparkPress YA author roundup to help you get ready for summer. Check out these tips from some of the best and brightest in YA Fiction. They’ve got lots to say.
Colleen Oakes
best-selling, award-winning author of the Wendy Darling and Queen of Hearts series
Colleen dishes out three tips on creating YA characters, including how to craft realistic teen reactions, and why you should embrace girl power—not all teenage girls are “throwing shade in the hallway.”
About the Wendy Darling series, fall 2015 & 2016:
Wendy Darling takes readers far beyond the second star to the right and straight on till morning. It is the story of a girl loved by two men—the steady and handsome bookseller’s son from London and Peter Pan, dashing, charming, and dangerous. From the cobblestone streets of London to the fantastical world of Neverland’s many secrets, readers will love watching Wendy’s journey as she grows from a girl into a woman, and realizes that Neverland, like her heart, is a wild place, teaming with dark secrets and dangerous obsessions.
Sandra Kring
best-selling, award-winning author of Running for Water and Sky
Sandra Kring shows how important it is to never talk down to your YA readers, and reveals her 5 most important tips sure to help give your characters’ thoughts, feelings, and emotions a boost. Our favorite gem: “Remember, it’s not about how YOU thought as a teen, but how it felt to be a teen.”
About Running for Water and Sky, spring 2016:
They say that right before you die, your whole life flashes before your eyes. But what they don’t say is that the same thing can happen when your soul mate is dying. After spending most of her 17 years being shuffled between families that don’t want her, Bless Adler has no intention of opening her heart to anyone. And then she falls in love with Liam Reid. Her new friend, Maylee, convinces her to go see a local psychic―and the woman’s glimpse into the future is anything but reassuring: Bless’s absent father, drunk and bitter. A frantic crowd gathered at the beach. Liam lying in a pool of blood, a gun at his side. Now Bless has 14 blocks to reach Liam on the shores of Lake Michigan. If he’s still alive, she’ll beg for him to fight for his life. If he’s not, she’ll say good-bye to the first person who made her want to fight for her own. Edgy, intense, and emotional, Running for Water and Sky is a story of the elation and angst that comes with love, and the challenge of learning to trust when betrayal is all you’ve ever known.
Brady Stefani, author of The Alienation of Courtney Hoffman
Finalist in the First Novel category in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards 2016
How far will you push your character? Brady reveals his 6 tips for creating internal conflict in teenage characters, including how to develop realistic dialogue, and the importance of a teen character finding balance between rejecting their parents for not being perfectly supportive, and accepting them for being human and vulnerable.
About The Alienation of Courtney Hoffman, spring 2016:
Fifteen year old Courtney wants to be normal like her friends. But there’s something frighteningly different about her—and it’s not just the mysterious tattoo her conspiracy-obsessed grandfather marked her with when she was a child. “Mental illness is a slippery slope,” her mother warns her. And the last thing Courtney wants to do is end up crazy and dead like her grandfather did. But what about the tattoo? And the alien scouts who visit Courtney in her bedroom at night claiming to have shared an alliance with her grandfather? And her new friend Agatha’s apocalyptic visions? They have to be connected. Courtney has a mission: untangle her past, discover the truth, and stop the apocalypse before anyone from school finds out she’s missing.
Jessica Stevens, author of Within Reach
As a debut author who snagged a blurb from Hollywood actor James Marsden (The Notebook? Enchanted? Anyone?), it would be wise to check out Jessica Stevens’s four tips on how to make your YA characters authentic. Whether it’s ensuring characters are identifiable (as the author, it’s your job to create characters to help guide them and show them it’s okay to be who they are), to breaking down your character’s backstory, these tips cover all your YA writing bases.
About Within Reach, spring 2016:
What if, after you died, you had a chance to come back? Fix the one fatal mistake that turned everything around. One more chance with the one you left behind? Dying wasn’t on sixteen-year-old Xander Hemlock’s summer to-do-list. Finding ways to spend more time with his girlfriend, Lila, was the most critical thinking he planned on doing. That was before he found himself trapped in a realm of darkness with thirty days to convince Lila he’s not dead, well, not completely.
Melissa Clark, author of Bear Witness
Are you able to communicate the teen voice from multiple YA characters? Melissa Clark offers advice on how to capture the voice of YA characters, and make your teen stand out from any other character in the book without being cliche. Hint: it’s all in the art of observation.
About Bear Witness, spring 2015:
Three years after witnessing the kidnapping of her best friend Robin, Paige Bellen is expected to continue on with life as usual. Now, with her closest friend out of the country, a messy relationship with Robin’s boyfriend, and a family that handles her with kid gloves, Paige isn’t sure if she’ll ever be able to move forward in life. Bear Witness explores the aftermath of a crime in a small town, and what it means when tragedy colors the experience of being a young adult.
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