Kami and Margaret in their own words...

Authenticity and the (Young) Adult

We often get asked why we chose to write in the Young Adult genre. The simple answer is, we didn’t.
  The genre chose us.
  We had a story to tell, and we told it. The way we told it, the characters who happened to inhabit Gatlin County, the crises they faced, the things they cared about, the way they felt about a cat or a casserole or a book or an old beater of a car, or a girl – even the things that floated through their minds as they stared at the ceiling – those are real feelings. Our real feelings. As writers, we may not ourselves be teens, but we still identify with them. 
  Why?
  Why do so many adults connect so deeply to young adult fiction? We’ve been thinking about this topic since we first started writing together, mainly because we were both reading YA long before we ever began writing it. In fact, it was only because we read all the same books as the teens in our lives – whether Margie’s daughters, or Kami’s students – that they challenged us to write Beautiful Creatures in the first place.
 We didn’t set out to write a YA book. We set out to write a book. To us, this is what a book looks like. To the voices in our heads, this is what a book sounds like.
 One day, when we were arguing about a book we loved differently (which we like to do, particularly when under a deadline and stuck and stalling) we realized that we love YA because it matches the voice we write in. The voice we write in, it turns out, matches the voice in our head, the narrator of our own (young) adult lives. And the voice in both of our heads is a sixteen/seventeen year-old.
  How old is the voice in your head?
 Ask around, you’ll get some interesting answers. Most interesting is that everyone will know what you’re talking about, the minute you ask. And even more to the point is that no matter what the answer is, it’s always young—way younger than the person hearing it.
 Why is that?
 As writers we can only offer up this, and only from our own experiences; to us, teens are the more authentic version of adults. Whatever they feel, they feel passionately. When they hurt, they hurt deeply. When they struggle, they struggle mercilessly. When they love, they love exquisitely.
  As an adult, when we feel, we remember feeling passionately. When we hurt, we remember hurting deeply. When we struggle, we remember struggling mercilessly. When we love, we remember loving exquisitely. But that isn’t exactly the same, is it?
  We want to feel it again – to capture what we were, what we lost.
 So we write to remember and we write to feel how things feel again. We write to become authentic, as real as the characters in our books. To become, if not found, unlost.
  Maybe our (young) adult readers read to feel the same way—to live in a place where, just for a few hundred pages, memory grows back into experience. The where and the when our teen readers already possess.
  There’s a moment in Beautiful Creatures when Lena Duchannes is told, “Claim Yourself.” To us, that’s what reading young adult fiction is about. Your voice, handed back to you.
  Don’t be afraid to hear it.
 Claim Yourself.