Prompts for writing YA fiction Archives

Last week’s vote on plot resulted in a tie between coming of age story and mystery, so we’ll combine the two. After spending the month voting on the elements of a YA story, we now have the characters, settings, and plot needed to inspire a story. Now it’s up to us writers to run with these basic elements. I’ll list below my take on them. Please put your inspiration in the comments.

Protagonist: Laurel Dixon is 16 and about to start her junior year in high school. She lives with her grandfather on the poor side of a small town in the Midwest. She would like to go to music conservatory after high school but is settling for community college because she doesn’t think she can afford college or succeed there.
Antagonist: Ethan Hall is 17, a senior in high school, and a member of the wealthiest family in the county.
Setting: Midwest city of 20,000.
Plot: Coming of age mystery. Laurel has to learn to assert herself when her grandfather is seriously injured in an attack and left for dead. She’s pretty sure Ethan is behind it because the local police are getting nowhere. As Laurel conducts her own investigation, she discovers there’s more behind the attack than just a bad boy acting bad.

To read all the posts for this month dealing YA fiction, click here.

Thank you to everyone who voted!

Last week, voters found photo #5, the small town, most inspiring, with number #3, the run down house, as runner up. So the primary settings for our YA story are a small town and the poor side of that town. Now you need to choose a plot for these YA characters.

By plot, I mean the engine of the story. What drives the main character? In his book 20 Master Plots: And How to Build Them, Roland B. Tobias describes twenty major plots. I’ll choose six.

Romance
Riddle (Mystery)
Quest (Does not mean fantasy. It can be any story in which the main character is searching for something.)
Romance
Coming of age
Revenge

Of course you can combine plots. Like amateur sleuths fall in love while searching for a missing will, but I’d like you to vote for the main plot. Which do you choose?

Now that we have our protagonist, or main character, and an antagonist, the character who opposes the main character’s goal in the story, we can look at settings. Please choose settings for these YA characters to operate in, and I do mean choose more than one. Maybe they both work at a resort, and our MC lives in a small house on the poor side of town. Maybe they go to the same high school or college and end up working at the same restaurant. You should also decide if the story is mainly rural, urban, or suburban. Such as the college and restaurant are in a small college town. Or the resort is on the outskirts of a large city.

Please vote in the comments below. And for more inspiration for YA fiction, click here.

Last week, I posted four photos and people voted which one they liked as a main character for YA fiction. This week, I’d like you to choose an antagonist for this teen main character. An antagonist doesn’t have to be a villain. It just someone or something that prevents the main character from achieving her goal in the story. So please put in the comments who you would pick.

For more prompts for YA fiction, click here.

Over a year ago, I did this special, story-building writing prompt for the YA (Young Adult) genre, so I decided to use it again. Below are photos of possible main characters. Readers can select a protagonist for teen fiction, and the photo with the most votes is the winner. In the following weeks, readers can choose an antagonist, the genre within teen fiction, a setting, and the main plot, such as quest, riddle, coming of age, etc. By the time we’re done, we’ll have the seeds for a story of teens. Be sure to vote in the comments!

For more prompts for teen fiction, click here.