Saturday, July 9, 2011

A Question & Conclusion! TWSB: Day 9

Today is the last day of the Teen Writers Summer Blogfest. It's been fun - although I have missed a few days, so in the next week or so I'll probably go back and fill a few gaps in.

Anyway, today is nice and simple. The blogfest participants have received a few questions to answer, regarding middle-grade and teen fiction. I'm just going to answer one. So here goes:

Middle grade novels are defined as books for the 8-12 age range. Do teens still read middle grade fiction as they get older (for example, Harry Potter is an example of middle grade that's read by teens and adults) or are they naturally attracted to books with older themes and characters? Is it uncool to still read middle grade as you enter your teens?

Naturally, when you get to being a teenager, you begin to break away from middle-grade and children's stories, and venture more in the YA and adult's literature. But even so, I still enjoy reading middle-grade, because I find that they are more simple than YA stories - which is not to say that they are simple, it's just to say that they are not so complex that you get lost (as a teen, yes, sometimes I do get lost in fiction written for older audiences). For example, like the Harry Potter series, the Inheritance Cycle by Christopher Paolini could be classed as middle-grade, but it still captures older audiences as well. If the writer can achieve this effect, then I don't see the problem with teens reading such stories.

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So, the Teen Writers Summer Blogfest comes to an end. I'd like to thank Brittany from Hills and Corkscrews for being an excellent host, and also all the other blogfest participants. Thanks for a great week!

11 comments:

  1. Wow you scared me for a second... where I live it is still the 8th! I agree about middle-grade... I still love reading it. :D

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  2. I don't read middle grade much, but I think I should. I feel like it's extremely imaginative, where as YA is reasonably imaginative.

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  3. I wrote four paragraphs discussing MG, adult's, clichés, christopher paolini and Harry Potter. It got deleted, thanks dial up.

    Summary was Last 3-4(debatable) harry potter books are not MG (in my opinion)

    MG tends to be heavily clichéd

    MG that is successful tends to take a cliché and bend it's rules so it's easy to digest but still original, ie eragon + first 3 harry potters

    the older you get the less you can stomach MG - you crave the depth of adult's fiction the more depthful your thinking becomes.

    -Chris Hastie (teehee)

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  4. Thanks so much for answering one of my questions! It's so cool to get a teen's perspective :) I've loved reading all the teen posts during this blogfest, and wish you the best of luck with your writing.

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  5. Great answer, Nick, and thanks for participating! :)

    I like both MG and YA but I disagree with Chris- MG is not necessarily cliched. I know there are cliched books out there but that's not a characteristic of the genre.

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  6. @Gracie: That's right - New Zealand, leading the world into the future :P

    @Madeline: I agree. MG really needs to satisfy more imaginative minds, thus: more imaginative fiction.

    @Chris:I think that MG is less varied, due to the fact that kids probably don't want to go too far out of their depth into something they aren't familiar with. That might be why it seems cliched. I agree that it becomes harder to read MG as you get older, but as I said, if the author can keep your attention, fine, go for it.

    @Jess: No worries!

    @Brittany: Thanks, it was fun :)

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  7. Um, I would never call Eragon and the other Inheritance books MG. The writing style is much more complex, the vocabulary is larger (I was looking up words when I read it at age 13), and it has much more violence, sex (albeit implied sex), and darker themes than MG. The main character is also fifteen, which would be an unusually old protagonist for MG fiction.

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  8. Mmmmm ... it's debatable I suppose. Paolini certainly has readers, though, within the MG-age range.

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  9. I think that has more to do with the maturity of the readers than the subject matter.

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  10. Well, the age ranges for MG, YA, etc. aren't set in stone. A mature 10 or 11-year-old could be reading Eragon just as well as a 16-year-old, even when most 10 and 11-year-olds are still reading MG fiction like Percy Jackson.

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