Could you give me anything to go on here? I have people saying it's too rotten for adults to read but nobody says why.
After posting that something occurred to me (but I'd still very much welcome more explanatory remarks on this excerpt)
To say that all teens are into rap music and seek it out because it discusses sex, drugs, and violence is on the same level as saying that all women are into shoe shopping (I'm not) or all men are into watching sports on TV (my husband's not). You'll find some teens who seek out books with violent scenes the same way you'll find adults who seek out thrillers and "true crime" books. I had a roommate a couple years ago who read nothing BUT true crime books. But I found them disturbing.
Also, think about the demographics of teen readers... the ones who seek out and buy books to read in their spare time. Most are girls. Most are probably above-average in terms of their intellectual ability. Most are probably not looking for books that are counterparts to rap music.
Regarding your scene in SYW, it's difficult to make a value judgment on a violent scene when we don't know the reasoning behind it, we haven't seen the characters' motivations, and we haven't gotten to know whom to root for. It's like turning on a movie in the middle and seeing only the grisly part. Personally, I'd flip away from it quickly. I suppose you'd have some people who'd say, "Oh, cool!" and keep watching. But for me, violence is not a selling point... not a "hook," as agents would say. The violent movies that I DO count among my favorites --
The Godfather, for one -- are there because they have interesting, unforgettable characters and present difficult moral situations that leave a lot of thinking to the viewer. Last year, I read Khaled Hosseini's novel
The Kite Runner, a brilliant book with several very shocking violent scenes. However, they come later in the novel, and they very nearly break your heart when they happen because you know the characters so well and you've seen them through so much.
Perhaps if you posted your first chapter in SYW instead of the violent scene, we'd get a better feel for your characters and your writing style, as well as a hint of where the story's going.
Where I live newspapers show pictures of murder and accident victims with blood on their faces of their intestines poking out. We show people who are arrested posing with the tools of their crime, often bloody and bruised from their arrest.
Papers are full of pictures of young women as naked as they be shown without seeing nippples or pubic hair.
So maybe this is just a matter of Americans not being exposed to these facets of life on a daily basis? It seems strange, when I hear the kind of music I'm talking about, but maybe it's just a softer culture?
Or I could be totally wrong. I look at this excerpt and compare it to other battle and crime scenes in books I've read and I just don't see what the problem is.
Certainly that kind of violent culture is there if you want to look for it. There are a couple cable channels that seem to give viewers a steady diet of violent movies, and there's one channel that's always showing promos for fighting league match-ups. Police procedurals like
CSI were hugely popular on TV for a while -- and still are, to some extent -- but people seemed to get tired of them after a few years and moved on to serial dramas. There was a fairly dodgy video store down the street from my old apartment that advertised "bum fights" videos. Apparently there's a market for that. (Who knew?) But on the other side of the coin, romance novels are the top sector of the fiction market, and family-friendly movies always do well at the box office. Rap albums sell well, but it tends to be country acts and emo bands and old-timey crooners that sell out big venues on tour.
I looked at your profile and noticed that you work in the newspaper industry; perhaps your view of how much violent imagery people take in is skewed. I say this partly because my husband works in TV news as an editor -- he sees all the raw footage and has to take out the stuff that's tangential to the story at hand, OR that's inappropriate for viewing. Me, I don't watch TV news. I get 90% of my news from the Internet and the other 10% from the radio. We have different views on some issues because of this. Sometimes he forgets just how many more dead bodies he's seen compared to how many I've seen.
But, to wind this back to the topic of crafting YA novels, the usual elements of good and popular novels still stand: you need compelling characters, tension, and stellar writing. If violence, drugs, and / or sex figure into the story, it had better have the other elements first. That goes for YA novels, adult thrillers, mysteries, literary novels...anything, really.
