You might have noticed that we Interrobangs are an opinionated crowd.

It’s true! We have Feelings about Things, and we’re not afraid to share them.

And sometimes–gasp!–we don’t even agree.

Take Sean’s post on Saturday. In it, he posited that Young Adult covers are widely embarrassing, and contribute to an “image problem.” He writes of an imaginary adult reader:

Keep in mind, you don’t know much about YA. (And before you demand that our hypothetical reader become better acquainted with a publishing category before dismissing it, ask yourself how much you really know about epic fantasy or chic-lit or whatever genres you’ve decided you don’t care for.) You don’t know about authors like Justine Larbalestier or Meg Rosoff; there’s a good chance you won’t even realise that contemporary YA still exists, so rapidly has it vanished under a rising tide of badly-written pap.

I certainly wouldn’t blame you for thinking that YA begins and ends with this season’s ‘big name’ paranormal/dystopian romance. Which is exactly why YA has an image problem.

When Sean’s post popped up in my Google Reader, I initially found myself nodding along. Yes, the images he shared were very photoshopped! No, those boys don’t look like teenagers at all! These covers could make teenagers feel bad about themselves. That’s a problem!

Then I reached his gallery of “good” covers–the type he’d like to see in YA. And . . . uh . . .

. . .

. . . really, dude?

Covers serve several purposes. Their primary purpose is to catch the eye of a potential reader. Covers that are bright, flashy, opalescent, and nicely composed all do that. Enticing a reader to pick up a book is the first step to getting someone to buy it.

Frankly, bland, abstract covers–text superimposed on waterlilies (snooze!)–don’t do that too well. So I’m not entirely sure the covers linked above would do much for sales.

There’s a reason these covers work for adult literary fiction, though, and that’s because they convey a certain gravity and seriousness. “Read me,” this book declares, “while drinking tea at your favorite coffee shop. I’ll help you quietly contemplate your life.” Part of this is gravity by association; we know that we’re in for a serious, literary read because this is what serious, literary books always look like.

And that brings me to the second purpose of a cover, which is to make an implicit promise to the reader about the content within.

A reader of paranormal romance should be able to guess the genre from a book’s jacket. Ditto, science fiction, and fantasy, and contemporary, and romance.

For example, this cover is effective at communicating its contents (magical angst, and even more magical horses):

Alas, poor Vanyel! I knew him, Tylendel.

And it’s a safe bet that this book contains some spacey shit!:

These are the voyages of the Starship Hardsciencefiction

Why is it a good idea for a cover to help a book reach an audience already amenable to its contents? Because readers are often fiercely loyal of the stuff they love, and they seek out books that will clearly contain the stuff they love. Hook a reader and they’ll stay with you for many, many books. I speak from experience here–I own more Anne McCaffrey novels than I do books by any other person, all because I saw this book cover when I was thirteen, and was excited by the really, really realistic dragon:

I even have a Pernese dragon tattoo. No joke!

I’m not citing these covers because I think they’re particularly aesthetically pleasing; they’re definitely dated and they all have their flaws. But I hope they illustrate why there’s really nothing wrong about the following covers:

A paranormal romance . . .

A historical fantasy set in ancient China . . .

Tallyho, Steampunk!

I think it’s important to note that people who are passionate about these kinds of books don’t find them embarrassing. I was never embarrassed to read a book with a dragon on it, or with a space ship on it. And most teen readers aren’t embarrassed to read books representative of their tastes, either.

There has been a trend, though, to obscure a book’s true contents. I assume that this is for the benefit of “reaching a wider audience” because it almost always means “removing the embarrassing stuff that literary or adult readers worry will make others look down on them.”

As you can imagine, I find this practice incredibly lame.

Why? Because three years ago, I decided that I wanted to get back into YA. And I wanted to read some great young adult science fiction, because that’s what I’ve always loved. It was not hard to easily find sci-fi when I was a teen. But the only sci-fi books I found (after a preposterous amount of searching) looked like this:

What’s worse, Academy 7 gave no indication it was sci-fi from any of the text on the inside or outside cover. Nada!

And this misrepresentation doesn’t only happen with science fiction. I recently read two absolutely devastating contemporary novels about the implosions of young lives. One looked like this:

The other, like this:

In both cases, people responded in surprise to my reviews. “I thought this book was a lighthearted girly novel! I think I’ll look this up!” Meanwhile, in the case of both Academy 7 and Singing the Dogstar Blues, reviews abound where the reader experienced some sense of dismay in realizing that they’d been tricked into reading a sci-fi novel. As much as I love sci-fi, I can’t blame them. Readers know when they’re being lied to! And being tricked is never fun!

I don’t think the current state of covers in YA is flawless. I think too many covers perpetuate the same body shaming in young girls through the promotion of unrealistic beauty that most teen magazines do. Sure, they’re overphotoshopped. And sometimes the cover model is too old, or ridiculously thin, or wearing a stupid prom dress, or (ugh) the wrong race. I’d love to see covers that reflect teenagers as teenagers really are.

But do I think YA covers are embarrassing?

No freakin’ way.

Mumble mumble mumble. Sorry my microphone sucks! But read these books! They’re nifty!

When I decided I was going to be a Serious Writer way back in 2004, I read a lot of books on writing. I was a communications major in college — I took like, 2 writing classes — and so books were my only form of education on the matter. And having been homeschooled, I knew firsthand that everything a teacher can teach you can be found in a book. So I read books on writing. A lot of them. And I skimmed a lot of them, too.

(Incidentally, I remember being enormously unimpressed with everyone’s favorite book on writing, On Writing. It was a lot of autobiography and a lot of You Will Never Be Good Because Even I’m Not Good. I should probably visit it again now that I understand Stephen King a little better.)

Without further ado, here are the 3 books on writing I’ve found the most helpful. These are the books I didn’t skim, the books wherein I discovered dozens of useful ideas, the books I’ve reread several times.

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Save the Cat!

You may notice the subtitle of this book, which is “The Last Book On Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need.” Having written 2 feature-length screenplays (in the correct format thank you very much), this is mostly true. However, just because it’s an awesome book on screenwriting does not mean it has nothing to do with writing the novel.

There is loads of great advice in here on crafting your story. For instance, let me explain the main gimmick of the book, the “save the cat” device. I’ve used this countless times because I write shady protagonists. When you have a shady protagonist, you have to make that protagonist do something early on, a selfless act, that will let the audience understand that Deep Down This Is a Good Guy. Like someone might go out of their way to save a cat. In House, we don’t care that House is an angry, cruel person because he saves an innocent patient’s life. In The Catcher in the Rye, we don’t care that Holden Caulfield gets kicked out of school for laziness because we see he isn’t “phony.” Robin Hood gives to the poor. Tony Stark is nice to Pepper Pots. Jack Sparrow is a thief and a murderer, but a funny one.

There’s loads of great advice in the “save the cat” vein. I don’t consult this book immediately in my outlining process, but you bet it’s the first thing I go to when something isn’t working.

I’d recommend this if: You’re stuck on plotting or characterization, or you want to make sure that your plot and characters are the strongest they can be, that you’ve explored all your options.

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Bird by Bird

I am a pessimist. Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird was the first book on writing I read that embraced the pessimistic, realist side of the craft. A close second is Norman Mailer’s The Spooky Art, but that was ridiculously hard to get through and I can’t recommend it. (Sorry, Norman.)

This book taught me stuff like the notecard method, which is the most pain-free way I’ve ever encountered of outlining and troubleshooting your story. It told me it was okay to write “Shitty First Drafts” and be jealous of successful, snobby writing friends, and even that ending relationships with said successful, snobby writing friends might be better for me than bad. It showed me it might be okay to write 500 words a day as opposed to 1,000, if that’s all I can handle. The important part is writing every day.

Lots of good stuff here. But don’t take my word for it. *ba dah dah!*

I’d recommend this if: Books and blogs about writing are usually too cheery for your taste.

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The War of Art

I’ve read this book about once a year since I discovered it. This is my war manual. It tells me, in no uncertain terms, that yes, a lot of writing sucks, and yes, it’s supposed to. “Anything easy is not worth doing,” and what’s worse, “Anything easy means you’re probably doing it wrong and sucking at it and art should be a struggle, dammit.”

This book also addresses criticism. I know I’ve gotten criticism that makes me wish I’d stuck it out in front of the TV and never started writing, but this book helped me through those times.

It’s hard to sum up what exactly the advice in this book says. You just have to read it. It’s the best writing pep-talk you’ll ever get.

I’d recommend this if: You sit down to write and you find yourself procrastinating, or you’re having a hard time taking critique.

Sean on Meg Rosoff

Artistic merit is not a guarantor of popularity. Everybody knows this: you know, it, I know it, the critics know it, and the people queueing up all over the world to be overcharged for a ticket to see Gnomeo & Juliet (sorry, Shakespeare!) most likely know it. Everybody complains bitterly that Transformers 2 made millions and millions of dollars while the Scott Pilgrim movie tanked, yet nobody could honestly claim to have been surprised. It almost seems as though there is an inverse relationship between creative or artistic merit and the potential for profit; again, everybody knows this.

But those examples are from the world of cinema, where hundred-million-dollar budgets reign supreme and creativity is a rarified commodity. Surely, you might say, the world of publishing is different? It deals in books, for God’s sake. Books are intellectual. Books are respectable, even, as long as they’re written by the right sort of person and have other right sorts of persons on the cover. Surely books are different?

Well, no, although it seems to be an enduring myth that they are. I’ve come across the idea many times before that a truly ‘good’ book, defined here as something with genuine literary merit (answering a question with a question there, but let’s go with it), will be appreciated and championed by readers even as it becomes a commercial disaster. It feels almost unfair that a really good book could fail to make millions for its author while simultaneously being underrated by readers.

Exhibit A: Meg Rosoff.

Rosoff’s first novel, How I Live Now, was released to massive acclaim and a string of awards. It tells the story of an anorexic American girl who gets sent to stay with English relatives on the eve of WWIII – or at least, the reader is left to assume that the conflict is a third world war, since it’s never explained in any detail. More interesting is the fact that her cousins appear to have supernatural abilities. Oh, and she falls in love with one of them.

So yes, it’s a magic-realist ‘issues’ novel featuring an incestuous relationship at its core, set to the backdrop of a near-future armed conflict. It’s also brilliantly written. I read it when I was a teenager and was completely entranced from start to finish – it may even have been my introduction to ‘literary’ fiction, since I distinctly remember thinking that I had never encountered a book like it before. It deserves its accolades, and the reputation it garnered for its author.

Go and look up How I Live Now on both Goodreads and Amazon. I’ll wait.

You’re back? Good: you now know that, according to the forces of the democratic rating system, the book is of about average quality. It has a solid 4 stars on Amazon (very few widely-reviewed books get less) and a 3.7/5 rating on Goodreads. By comparison, both The Hunger Games and Catching Fire have higher scores on both sites: 4.5 stars on Amazon, and a 4.5/4.05 rating respectively on Goodreads. All three of the main Uglies books also edge it out on Goodreads, although only by a thankfully small margin.

Am I being elitist if I say that How I Live Now is a much, much better book – better written, more important, of greater merit – than any of the others I just mentioned? Well it is, and yet its target audience has apparently decided that it is the worst of the lot.

The second book I’d like to mention is also by Meg Rosoff. What I Was is, again, something of an oddity: its unnamed protagonist is a 100-year old man telling the story of how he fell in love at the age of sixteen. Exiled to a Spartan boarding school on the east coast of England, he sees nothing but mediocrity in store for him until he meets Finn, a strange boy who lives in a fisherman’s hut close to the sea. What follows is a beautifully written and painfully evocative account of their very odd friendship/one-sided romance. The standout scene for me involves Finn and H (as he’s known) taking a kayak out to a submerged Roman fort. Rosoff’s description of the ancient, sunken building has stayed with me since I first read it, and I doubt I’ll forget it any time soon.

I’ll admit that What I Was is not as good as How I Live Now. The plot is meandering yet simple, the main character is not always likeable (although I maintain that main characters don’t need to be likeable in a story like this) and there’s a near-infamous plot twist at the end that almost reverses a lot of the thematic buildup that came before it. There’s also a fairly important side character who I still think was handled very badly. But even if all of those faults were orders of magnitude more serious, they still wouldn’t diminish the strength of Rosoff’s prose or her genuinely brilliant portrayal of obsessive first love. This is the kind of book where plot and pacing almost don’t matter; it is pure emotion on the page.

You can probably see where I’m going with this.

Goodreads average: an unusually low 3.49. Part of this may have to do with the fact that the book straddles the line between YA and ‘adult’ fiction, although people claimed the same thing about The Hunger Games and still showered it with praise. Apparently a book is allowed to cross publishing categories only if it does so unproblematically, retaining thematic simplicity while adding a smattering of violence.

What bothers me more than the not-great ratings from Goodreads users, though, is the fact that authors like Rosoff are practically unknown compared to the heavy-hitters in YA. Suzannne Collins has become a household name by writing mediocre science fiction, Scott Westerfield has become a household name by writing bad science fiction, and as for the paranormal romance crowd…well, let’s not go there.

I’m not one of those people who chide adults for reading ‘kid lit’ and insist that they go and cleanse themselves with some Faulkner every time they accidentally walk through the YA section of a bookstore. No, I’m one of those people who chides adults for only reading the ‘blockbuster’ children’s titles: Harry Potter and the Hunger Games, if you insist, but why not also Meg Rosoff or Patrick Ness?

It’s because both of those authors are still underrated by YA readers as a whole. Based solely on the quality of their writing, they deserve to be up there with the popular luminaries.