Tag: Why you should write YA fiction

The Appeal of Writing YA Christian Fiction

Writing teen fiction

So glad to introduce a new author to you, Miriam Thor. She writes both YA and contemporary romance. She’s wearing her YA author hat today, writing about the appeal of writing YA Christian fiction. You can connect with Miriam with the links in her bio at the end of her post. The floor is yours, Miriam!

Every one of us was a teenager at one point. Chances are…it wasn’t pretty, at least not all of the time. Being a teenager means being caught in the middle, not truly a child anymore but still not an adult. For many of us, our teenage years were when we started to figure out who we were and who we wanted to be. We began charting our own course, rather than simply following the one laid out for us.

One of the best parts of reading and writing YA fiction is the chance to explore that dynamic time in a character’s life. Teenage protagonists have so much room for character development, to the point that it would feel almost unnatural for them not to change or grow significantly by the end of the story. As an author, I enjoy taking a character through that journey, telling the story of who my character is at the beginning and how they’ve changed by the end.

In my contemporary YA novel, the main character, Ally Griffin, begins the story as a high school freshman searching for a talent that will help her stand out and praying that God will help her find it. She believes finding it will make her life so much better, and for a short time, she thinks it does. Then, her cousin’s accident turns her life upside down. As Ally deals with the aftermath and all the changes it brings to her family, she realizes that she had her priorities in the wrong place. This helps her grow as a character, getting much closer to the woman she will one day become, the woman God wants her to be.

As much as I have enjoyed reading general market YA fiction over the years, I write YA Christian fiction because I want my characters’ growth to be rooted in their faith in God. As a Christian, I believe it’s important that when we grow as people, we do it with the Lord, learning to trust Him and His timing, following His will. Ultimately, that’s the message I want readers to take away from all of my books.

In my own Christian walk, my teenage years were when I truly started learning to depend on God, even when things were difficult, and to seek His will for my life. During those years, I read a lot of amazing books with inspiring protagonists, but very few of them were Christian fiction. I wish there would have been more books available about characters who were growing in their faith the way I was. It would have helped me as I walked with God through the ups and downs of my teenage years.

I am grateful that the YA Christian fiction market has expanded since then and that I have been blessed with the opportunity to add to it. Teenagers, and many adults, now enjoy the dynamic character development entwined with faith that can be found in YA Christian fiction. 

Here are more blog posts from YA authors.

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During her freshman year of high school, Ally Griffin is determined to find her thing, a talent that will let her gain praise and recognition. Her cousins, Billy and James, have found theirs in sports and music, but Ally has yet to discover something that will make people cheer just for her.

At her best friend’s suggestion, Ally tries ballet. When that doesn’t turn out the way she hopes, she signs up to sing in the school talent show. Thanks to support from James, Ally’s performance goes well, and she thinks she has found her thing at last.

But when James gets into an accident, Ally’s whole world is turned upside down. As she tries to be there for her cousin, Ally wrestles with why God allows bad things to happen and whether she should keep doing her thing at all.

Buy at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple Books.

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Miriam Thor started writing in second grade and never stopped. Her first (unpublished) book was an illustrated picture book about seals that is probably still on her mom’s shelf. Currently, Miriam lives in Alabama with her husband and six adorable cats. Her published works include Listening to the Rain, A Kringle Family Christmas, and a number of short stories. You can learn more about her by visiting her website, miriamthor.com. You can also follow her on Instagram, Facebook, X/Twitter, and TikTok.

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Three Reasons I Write YA fiction

Three reasons I write YA fiction

I started this month’s theme on YA fiction with a post about why you might want to write YA. I’ll wrap up with three reasons I write YA fiction.

My Natural Bent

I can’t fight it. I just seem to think in terms of a teen. In 2017, I was invited to write a short story set in Ohio with a Christian worldview. It could be any genre, any time period, as long as the setting was Ohio. I had the freedom to write any story I chose. I tried writing a humor piece based on a misadventure my sisters and I had during one Christmas when I was in college. As my husband kindly put it, humor is not my thing. I ended up writing “Debt to Pay”, a country noir set in Wayne National Forest and told from the point of view of a sixteen-year-old boy. This was published in an anthology, From the Lake to the River.

Last year, I had another opportunity to contribute to an anthology. Again, it was tied to Ohio, this time to its literary heritage. I changed course and wrote an inverse mystery from the POV of an elitist New York novelist who comes to my fictional Marlin County, Ohio, to plan a crime. This mystery became “Bovine” in Ohio Trail Mix. Writing from the perspective of an adult character stretched my imagination, but I still think I write best from the perspective of a teen or young adult because …

Teens Makes Great Amateur Detectives

A story that has an amateur solve mysteries is already asking the readers to suspend their disbelief. I think it’s easier for readers to do this if the amateur detective is a teen. Why? Because certain behaviors in a teen are understandable. Teens take risks that would make adults looks childish. They also make mistakes that lead to all sorts of plot complications because they are just learning how the world works. An adult wouldn’t commit nearly as many of those mistakes, making the adult characters more believable but less fun.

In my Christmas mystery, “A Rose from the Ashes”, nineteen-year-old Rae Riley comes to Marlin County to discover her father and her mother’s assailant and if the two are the same man. She does this secretly, entirely alone. A forty-year-old digging into family history might try to hire a private investigator. And a forty-year-old would certainly hesitate to confront a possible killer alone at an abandoned house with only a rifle as protection. A teen would think she could do it.

It’s Easier to Make Teens Grow

When creating a main character, writers are advised to make the character believe a lie, spend the story uncovering the truth, embracing that truth, and then the character has grown and changed by the end of the story.

This is fine character development for a stand alone story. But I find it difficult to sustain that sort of structure over a series. Eventually, the main adult character is going to look like dope because he or she has believed so many lies. Not that it’s not true in real life. I just find it hard to pull off in fiction.

But the teen period of life is a time of growth and change already. That makes teens perfect as a series main character. As he learns about life, he changes over the course of the series.

Why do you write in the genre or genres that you do?

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