How To Write A Best-Selling Young Adult Novel in Ten Steps

[NOTE: This is actually a repost of an old post from my old blog, Holmes Hideout, which I wrote at the end of 2012- literally. Going back through it, I find it still contains some humourous value in it and felt it’d be a shame not to share it with a newer audience. It also sheds some startling light on the phenomenon of YA novels that was so massive in those years (not so much now except perhaps in film- the new trend is superhero movies/reboots/remakes/shared universe franchises. Nonetheless: enjoy]. 

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If you follow my 10 steps, you will easily be able to write a young-adult novel catered to meet the requirements of readers in the 21st century: 

1) Create an uninteresting, meek female protagonist who’s very insecure about themselves and co-dependent, not to mention complete helpless damsels-in-distress 24/7. 

NOTE: exceptions CAN be made but nobody gives a damn because three-dimensional characters are alien to this genre! 

2) Create a male protagonist who seems to spend all his time at the gym because he’s built. He will fall in love with the female protagonist because that’s what is expected of the genre and because he’s clearly got no one better to fall in love with. In this genre, insecure boring females are the Queens!

 

3) Male protagonist should be perfect and flawless with- this is VERY IMPORTANT!- an endless amount of patience to have nothing better than to listen to the female protagonist whine constantly. Why is this important? Because that’s what your targeted demography (i.e. 13-50 year old women) wants. They are not there to read about a flawed male protagonist- that’s what boyfriends and husbands are for!

 

4) Make your male protagonist a supernatural being. Like a vampire. Or an angel. Or a werewolf. Bitches love supernatural beings. Even if said being is a 110 years old trapped in a teenager’s body. It is not considered as pedophilia.

 

5) Create ANOTHER male protagonist! This guy will most likely have been a friend of the female protagonist since the beginning of time and is usually (gasp!) secretly in love with her. He’s got to be a nice guy and a perfectly legitimate choice for a girl to fall in love with; yet in the end, he will get kicked in the nuts because he’s not bad-ass like the main male protagonist.

 

6) Now create a love triangle between the female protagonist and the two male protagonists- even though the reader ALREADY knows that the girl is going to choose the supernatural bad-ass perfectly muscular male protagonist. Because pointless love triangles with predictable outcomes are a MUST and completely unclichéd, trust me! No requirements necessary to make it interesting.

 

7) Spend the next 500 odd pages describing how perfect the male protagonist is. If you’re a little more creative, you can add in a little plot to make it seem “exciting”. NOT a must!

NOTE: keep a thesaurus with you at all times when writing scenes involving the male protagonist so that you never run out of adjectives to describe how perfect he is. 

 

8) Don’t stop at one book. Create a trilogy. Better than a trilogy, make it a quadrilogy (that’s four in a series). And your fourth book should be very big- because in case the books are adapted into films, the final book can be split into two films even though it’s highly unnecessary but will be done in “the name of the fans who are clamouring for more”. 

 

9) Give your books mysterious and obscure titles, preferably after times of the day, like ‘Morning‘, ‘Afternoon‘, ‘Evening‘ and ‘Night‘. The titles don’t have to make sense. 

10) Watch as the books become best-sellers and tarnish the good of literature as we know it, while the film adaptations win all the MTV Movie Awards each year. 

 

NOTE: if you can- by some miracle!- make your books appear to be “metaphors” for abstinence, then you’ll seem a little more credible as an author to the oblivious fans. The intelligent ones will see through the facade immediately.