Mini Thought- Teen fiction and the art of the addiction *Re-Upload*

(Written and Published  Jun 16, 2015)


With the boom of Suzanne Collins’ the Hunger Games trilogy, books and films alike, teen fiction seems to be more popular than ever.
There are countless volumes of angst-ridden adventurers emerging from the wood work receiving both praise and condemnation both. Prominent examples being that of The Fault In Our Stars, The Maze Runner and Divergence respectively, taking queue from Collins’ success to leap from the page to the silver screen.
However, are these books any good? Or are they more generic clap-trap cycled out on the incredibly formulaic conveyor belt of young-adult story telling?

These have such cliché tendencies many must wonder why people are still wasting their hard earned money on them, and the answer is simple, these writers have mastered the art of the addictive read, employing a great number of techniques in order to make their shallow plots seem like the next Shakespearean masterpiece.
Impressions go a long way. Sometimes the idea of a book being a certain genre or having a certain concept allow the reader’s own imagination to fill over any gaps in plot the author neglects or the skilled writing they do not posses.
For example the incredibly ominous nature established in the premise of The Hunger Games, being that of a gladiatorial child death match over food, makes one’s brain ignore the fact that the games themselves do not begin for eleven chapters, and the fact that Collins’ poor descriptive skills can possibly do justice to such a spectacle is easily overlooked by the mind due to the ten chapters of build-up that specifically state that these games are an abomination of unimaginable horror. It is almost as if her creation of an unimaginably disgusting concept is used as an excuse for her to be unimaginative in her execution of said premise.
 Romance is a massively cheap reason to keep reading, the more contrived the better. The abuse of the “love triangle” in modern media is near astronomical. From Twilight to City Of Bones, all an author needs do to is add an element of reader-community interaction is slap a massive romantic choice in the first or middle book in their series, either as an initial establishing premise or to revitalise a dying plot.
People enjoy arguing and fighting, and thus allowing for any kind of division instantly allows for increased publicity to ones book, the peak of this probably being the enormous Team Jacob versus Team Edward campaigns being established.
Even simple romance is vital in the addictive nature of such books. The romantic pairing will be established within the first few chapters or lines, yet the writer will find any number of reasons as to reduce their time together, so as to only allow for tiny amounts of romantic development per chapter. This trickle effect makes the reader feel inclined to keep reading, even if not to the end of the book at least until the romance is either confirmed or abolished. Yet again the writer will never fully establish any kind of permanent arrangement until the final text in their series in almost all cases.
However, this alone would lead to readership feeling cheated, or like they are only getting half a story, this is solved with careful expansion of scale.
Scale is one of the most important tools to any page turner, and is a prominent feature of almost all teen fiction series. The expression “bigger is better” springs to mind, as a key means to draw people into any story is to up the stakes. Did the hero save the city? Well now he is saving the world! Did he save the world? Well now he is saving the universe! This shallow change allows for the plot to repeat once more, yet this time on a galactic stage, clearly shown in such texts as Anthony Horowitz’s the Power of Five series, growing from a tale in Yorkshire, to a global race to the ends of the earth to fight strange evil gods, or that of Twilight’s escalation from its cliché love triangle to that of an all out wars in the later books.
This increased size of the adventure, normally along with a slight increase in size with each volume – for example that of J.K Rowling’s Harry Potter – make the reader feel more gratification with each completed book, with the simple consistent writing making it an easy triumph, thus dragging a poor innocent reader into this addictive world of the so called page-turner.
This malevolent entity known as teen fiction knows its boundaries, as if the plot becomes too vast they will lose the final spell that drains the everyday reader’s pocket, relation to the characters. The easiest way for a writer to get away with terrible writing is for the employment of first person points of view in their teen fiction, major players in this field being James Patterson’s Maximum Ride series or that of the ever expanding mythological based books emanating from Rick Riordan.
This allows for clever dialogue to be replaced with pop culture references and youth slang, along with being able to clearly outline the main character’s thoughts and feelings. This easily allows for the reader to gain the impression of their having a deep understanding of the book, while this is impossible as all interpretation is clearly present on the surface with little to no depth to even explore.
Many prefer to use a third person point of view, but to the same effect in the majority of cases, despite the external viewer status this narration will almost always have narrow focus on the single main character in their struggles etc. The only real advantage to this presentation of events is that it escapes the mind numbing repetitive “I”, which drowns many pages of The Hunger Games even mid child blood bath, ruining much of the horror that the authorial intent would desire to convey.
Love them or hate them, teen fiction is far from thoughtless, as shown here it’s a calculated money making machine, playing with our perceptions, the dark concepts of dystopian realities used to create the impression that the reader is highly intelligent for getting through it, while the lax untaxing writing allows universal accessibility and reducing any real reward for their completion.
The repetitive nature of the universal teen fiction plots will continue until the addictive feeling’s effects wear thin, and at that point we will all jump from the recent craze of bleak alternate futures and love triangles for the next great craze to sweep the nation.