Hi, this is me, taking a moment out of my busy day packing to comment on the latest controversy in the young adult community.

Grady Hendrix and Katie Crouch have done something unique even in the world of blogging in this slate.com article, which is to disparage the worlds of commercial and literary writing in one breath. I doubt this was their intention, but take a look at this paragraph:

Katie, having come out of an M.F.A. background where the rule was that good writing requires rumination, pain, and the slow loss of your best years, fought the craziness at first. But readers in Y.A. don’t care about rumination. They don’t want you to pore over your sentences trying to find the perfect turn of phrase that evokes the exact color of the shag carpeting in your living room when your dad walked out on your mom one autumn afternoon in 1973. They want you to tell a story. In Y.A. you write two or three drafts of a chapter, not eight. When kids like one book, they want the next one. Now. You need to deliver.

So, see, they’re implying that readers of young adult literature don’t care about quality of prose. But they’re also implying that, LOL, literary writing is this sort of overwrought practice where you focus on trifling matters to the detriment of the story.

People are getting all up in a tweet about this, sending Ms. Crouch suggestions for lit-styled YA. That’s not a wrong-headed idea, because I’d say that this article shows a certain ignorance about the many writers who do care about quality of prose. Like my buddy Kirsten Hubbard, or Patrick Ness, or Meg Rosoff, all of whom, I’m sure, are quite capable of crafting a transcendent description of the Berber in their parents’ dens.

But I think there’s an interesting discussion to be had here, one buried beneath the breezy tone. Namely, there are differences between approaches to writing in the young adult and MFA writing worlds. I know, because I was once an MFA student, too, and now write for teens.

• Length of time expected to produce a book – In my graduate program, writers were expected to produce one hundred and twenty pages (a novella, incomplete novel, or several short stories) over two years. In the young adult writing world, book contracts dictate that writers produce roughly one book a year. In the MFA world, if a book isn’t working, you’re expected to revise it until it does—for years, maybe. In the YA world, if a book isn’t working, you’re expected to write another.
• Focus on the economics of the writing life—Most young adult writers I know (myself included) are aiming for the golden ring of “being a full time writer.” That means that you are contracted to write enough books, and are bringing in enough royalties from your backlist that you don’t need to do anything else to pay a living wage. In contrast, most of my cohort from my MFA program has focused their career life on teaching, taking on adjunct positions in the hopes that they might one day get a tenure track job that will let them teach creative writing classes, write, and take sabbaticals every few years for research purposes. This lifestyle, it’s hoped, is financially supportive enough that writers can take their time to produce books of high quality.

These are very real, practical differences between these two writing worlds, and of course they result in a variety of differences in actual books. For even those writers of impeccable prose ability in YA, there’s likely some focus on producing books that they’re sure will sell. Intrinsically, they have to consider the needs of their audience in order to earn a living.

In the literary world, these audience needs are largely considered secondary. Esteem is important; thematics are important; depth is important. But I’ve seen the primacy of audience demands within commercial writing dismissed. The writer is considered the authority, above and beyond the reader.

I think both models have their problems.

In the young adult world, it’s not unusual to meet writers who have been incredibly taxed by deadlines, absolutely exhausted by the demand that they produce and produce and produce after their first book sells. There’s a lot of insecurity around writing “fast enough.” Some authors draft in weeks, revise in a few small handfuls of months, and while I envy this, I’d be lying if I said I haven’t encountered a few books that felt rushed. The inevitable sophomore slump of trilogies—when the second book in a series is subpar because it was the first produced under a deadline after the writer might have taken years to polish the first—is a side-effect. Crouch and Hendrix are wrong that readers don’t notice these things. Teenagers are astute. A casual perusal of goodreads should have disabused them of any notion otherwise. The truth is, even commercial art takes some time to do well, and writers deserve the space to do their books justice without running themselves absolutely ragged.

Meanwhile, because of a flooded job market, not to mention the state of academia today (hint: it’s pretty terrible), MFA students of my generation are likely to have to work longer and harder to actually get that tenure track job, and they’re likely to be poorer while they’re working toward that goal. Years of compromised income (have you ever looked at a TA stipend? You might need a magnifying glass) and sometimes onerous debt load leaves many MFA graduates vulnerable to the James Freys of the world, who will promise some money—any money, very very little money—for any monkey who can write reasonably well. And because these students are desperate and no one’s told them why this is a bad idea, they take them up on these offers! I think that MFA programs are absolutely obligated to protect their students from sharks like Frey, and the way to do that is to begin talking about the financials of writing. Book contracts. Query letters. Agents. The truth is, the ability to write without ever caring about income from their words is a luxury that many students don’t have today. It’s time that MFA programs begin embracing Yog’s Law, an adage that’s been repeated in sci-fi circles for years: money flows toward the writer.

Neither the world of academic writing or the world of commercial writing is absolutely flawed—both have their strengths too, of course, be it beautiful prose or meaningful messages or addictive stories or entertaining ideas or passionate readerships. But, buried beneath a sea of condescension, I think Crouch and Hendrix are onto something: these are very different conceptions of the writer’s life, and I think most truly successful writers will ultimately have to craft a career that’s actually a bit of both.

Oh my god, guys! I’ve been so busy! So busy that I half-started a post on Wednesday’s YA Highway Roadtrip Wednesday Topic (because, as someone about to give away all of her furniture, move, and get new stuff–including a new desk; I can’t wait!–I have a lot to say about it!). But alas, it’s been sitting here, half-finished, for two days now. And probably will remain that way.

No loss, I assure you. When it comes down to it, all I was going to say was that I want to get an expedit desk from ikea.

It doesn’t help matters that I’ve decided to go ahead and finally give twitter a whirl. Poor timing, you know? I’ve resisted for years now–seeing the service as redundant in a world of real blogging, facebook, and google buzz (which I love–but no one uses!). But aaall the writing peeps seem to use it, so, since I have a guest post forthcoming on YA Highway, I figured it was time to jump in. My first foray looked promising. And last night, for the first time in a decade, I ended up in what was essentially a chat room with a bunch of real, live, working (and some publishing) writers. Sure, I still think it’s silly to essentially reverse engineer an AOL chatroom–but, damn, I’d forgotten how much I’d loved real-time chat back in the day. It was really exhilarating. I lost 30 minutes of writing time, but ended up feeling pretty inspired and pushing myself to 56,000 words last night, which wouldn’t have happened otherwise. I also got to hear about how Maggie Stiefvater was dancing around her living room to her own audio book. Adorable!

Anyway, Cindy Pon tweeted about an article she wrote over at Supernatural Underground about upcoming trends. The first trend there was “mermaids”–and I wanted to comment and be like, “Yes! Mermaids! Everyone should want to read about those!”

I hesitated, though, because I couldn’t help but think, “Damn, I’m trendy.”

It’s not like I don’t know that I’m writing to an up-and-coming trend. I’ll come right out and say it: I never would have started writing SEAS RUN DRY were it not for an agent’s tweets about how much she wants mermaid manuscripts. But I also never imagined that I’d be the type of person who writes to trends (and here I have to wonder–do any writers see themselves that way at all?). But what Ginger Clark’s tweets did was spark inspiration in me–or not even precisely inspiration, but rather memory. Because I thought, “Man, what the hell kind of story could I write that features mermaids?”

And then I remembered that, at fifteen, I’d started writing one.

I was never a big mermaid person generally. That was my sister, who collected them. They were all over her room when we were kids. Mermaid toys. Statuettes. Pictures. Books. Her mermaid love was so well-known in our family that our aunt bought her a toy mermaid as a get well gift when, at sixteen, my sister got mono–despite the fact that she was far too old and too cool for such things.

In contrast, I was a bit of a tomboy. I liked The Little Mermaid well enough, and even had an Ariel Barbie. But I didn’t play with her all that much. I did play with her tail, though, which was fabric and removable. I had this boy doll, the prince from the LadyLovelyLocks line, and I’d put the tail on him and make him a merman. He’d swim around underwater and have adventures.

Years later, when I was in high school, I stumbled upon a book of short stories about mermaids that had survived on my sister’s bookshelf through the Great Mermaid Purge of 1995. The stories there were pretty dark, and vivid, and sparked an idea in me. You see, we’d been reading The Odyssey in high school, and I felt for Telemachus. As a kid who had lost her own father pretty young, I saw his journey as the more significant one: how he believes, against all hope, that his father is alive, and how he journeys out to find him. I wanted to write my own Telemachus story. So I started writing this Telemachus/mermaidmerman mash-up about a half-human merman who tries to find his human father.

Like most of my writing projects back then, I didn’t get very far with it. But the idea stayed embedded in my mind for years. The merman, named Loril, was a surprisingly vital character. And so when I heard that people actually, you know, wanted to read about mermaids, I initially giggled–but only for a moment. Because then Loril came back to me, fully formed.

The story’s evolved since its incipience, of course. Because back when I was fifteen, I was pretty cheesy. In fact, I recently found the old version of this story buried in the netherlands of my harddrive. And . . . well, here; I’ll share my (unedited, with authentic ninth grade grammar intact) notes with you. They speak for themselves:

Loril Walker: Dead at Seventeen
I. Introduction
A.Loril Walker, age seventeen, is alone in New York City
1. He is hungry.
2. He is alone.
3. He believes his journey to the city is a mistake.
4. He is bitter and angsty.
5. He throws out his copy of “The Odyssey”
6. He is searching for his father.
7. He is different.
a. Emotionally-feels old, tired, weary of life.
b. Physically-has webbed fingers, bright emerald eyes, dark hair. Possible reference to breathing underwater or gilled legs.
8. He wishes to return to the sea.
B. Mazai births a human boy.
1. Mazai is a “creature of the sea” (don’t use mermaid)
2. Her people warned her against this.
3. The other women come to see the new child after his first breath. They are horrified.
4. She further offends her people by naming him Loril. a. Loril-”Song bringer”
b. From an ancient poem- “The moon rose in darkness above the waves and over the golden foam/Young Loril’s song spun red knots into the hearts of old/He took his shell and trumpeted, notes rising to the starry sky/The Gods lie dead in the seaweed, but their spirits would never die.
c. Loril was a hero akin to Moses. He led his people to off the coast of Florida, wrote their laws, and established their civilization as a major sea power. According to myth, he was a musician of the highest ranking whose songs could soothe the sea during a storm. He was brought to the monarch for a minor matter, but when disease struck down all at court accept for him, he took it apon himself to relocate his people.
5. She refuses to give him up. The women warn her that she’ll have to live with the consequences of being the mother of a “legger.”

Oof.

I have no idea what the title was all about, since I’m pretty sure the character was never going to die. And I have no idea what was up with all the angst in the first half (and it’s now set at the Jersey shore, which is a much better choice. Mermen in NYC? Unlikely!) The second half of the outline isn’t that far from some stuff that’s made it into the actual book, though; Loril is still named after a mythic character, and I still rarely use the term “mermaid.”

I’ve also since learned to spell “upon.”

Anyway, I still can’t deny that I’m writing to a trend. If I hadn’t heard that the subject might potentially be a popular one, I wouldn’t have thought of Loril or his story. It would have remained buried in my memory, latent. But so many people buck against the idea of writing trendy stuff. “I don’t write about vampires!” they say, “I write about paranormal romance about rabid foxes! FROM SPACE!” or “I’ve heard the next idea they’re pushing is mermaids–HA! AMIRITE?”*

All I can say is, and I’m sure it’s true of many people writing things they hope will sell someday, even if trendiness was the incipient motivation for writing SEAS RUN DRY, my story is no less important to me for it. Even if it never sells, I’ll be glad that I finally went ahead and wrote it down. After all, I’m not writing about a merman for those big merman bucks (sand dollars?)–I’m writing about a merman because he’s real to me, because he breathes (possibly underwater), and because I thought his story was worth telling.

*I’ll admit it–I laugh too! Snort! Mermen! Redonkulous!