Age of characters

If you write erotica, the people need to be over eighteen.

If you write non-erotica, you have more freedom, but you should still excercise caution. Several of my underage character have had sex with each other. You can even be fairly graphic. What you can't do even in like young adult fiction is to write to titillate.

Keep the obvious, graphic stuff to over 18, and you'll make publishers a lot happier with you. It's a legal shield for them and you.

I'm writing a novella right now where the two male MCs fall in love in their early teens. I keep those encounters sweet and laced with some sexual tension, but nothing graphic. The two consummate their relationship when the youngest turns 18, but they are forced apart for political and religious reasons for over a decade afterward.

I suspect in their Stone Age society the two would have been sexually active at 15 or 16. Since that won't fly with my publisher, I have to be creative with the age limitations, and make those into a feature of the slow-burn growth of the relationship.

If the genre is erotica you need to stick 18 and up for legal reasons. Outside of erotica you have more leeway.

Sentosa said:

If this has been discussed before, please re-direct me.

My first point is: I don't write paedophilia, and I very, very rarely include young teens as active participants. So I have no issues there.

When I read publishers' websites or contact them for clarification, the general response is: All sexually active characters must be 18 years of age or older.

On that basis, a significantly large sexually active group is excluded. I refer to those aged 16 or 17. Apart from incest, several jurisdictions have few issues with that age group.

Question: If you have age limitations, what are they?

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I live in America so I cannot speak of other countries. But, depending on which state you live in, a person isn't an adult until they are 18 when they can vote. And yet they cannot drink until they are 21 but whatever. I don't make the laws. lol.

Anyway. depending on the law, anyone younger than the age of consent is considered a minor and cannot consent to sex. And depending on where the publishing company is, they must cover their butts so that they don't get sued for something. So, while it is leaving a group of people out who are horribly sexually active, it's just common sense. They want to make money not loose it because someone picked up a book and found out the character's were very young and decided to sue or something.

Me. Yes. I will not read anything underage or write anything underage. It's problematic legally though writing it hash't been deemed illegal yet. *shrugs*
And does anyone remember when that one dude wrote a handbook on sexually abusing a kid and self published it on Amazon but it got taken down when people realized what it was? I think writing underage feeds into the sickness. You know, when people get sick, they're told to do all these things to get better? yeah, don't do the thing you did to get sick in the first place. Anyway. it's a subject matter I'll never write.

So Skye O'Malley (and the dozens of 1970s-1980s bodice rippers that featured under-18 heroines) couldn't debut today? Random House/Ballantine is still selling the book, which seems to be a bit of a double-standard if they wouldn't take anything similar now.

I tripped over this issue in a humorous way once - created an alien planet with a year approximately twice as long as Earth's (like Homestuck's troll planet sweeps) such that 18 in Earth years would be 9 in the other planet's years - this was a mild recurring joke until I got to a sex scene, then I was like oh, wait... >.> <.< ;

Maryn said:

Actually, in the US the age of consent to sexual activity is not the same as the status of being legally considered an adult, which is 18. Thirty states have set the age of consent at 16 (sometimes with limits on the age of one's partner--it's a lot different if you're 16 and he's 19 than if you're 16 and he's 45). Nine have it at 17, and eleven at 18.

But in the world of commercial publication, the legal ability to consent don't mean squat. If they want all characters in sexual situations to be legal adults, then those who hope for commercial publication had better write it that way, or they're dooming their own efforts.

Maryn, who looked it up

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Maryn you are a fount of knowledge.

Marlys said:

So Skye O'Malley (and the dozens of 1970s-1980s bodice rippers that featured under-18 heroines) couldn't debut today?

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I think Bertrice Small's youngest heroine was in the aptly-titled The Innocent, where she was 14 and the hero was 30.

I could never quite get into that book, mostly because of the heroine's age. Sixteen I might have stomached, but fourteen was just... crossing a personal line.

This is kinda a problem in historical novels when children were married off at a VERY young age. I read a synopsis of Snow White, she was 14 years old.

Some publishers have even stricter rules for certain themes. Mine requires all participants to be at least 21 if they are involved in menage, polyamory or BDSM.

This is a frequent debate in both the erotica/erotic romance quarter and the young adult quarter.

Yes, in real life, teens have sex. Sometimes even preteens have sex. Sometimes it's with a partner of a similar age; sometimes it's with an adult partner, which in real life is almost certainly going to be statutory rape at the very least. But it happens. (I knew a guy who at age 20 was approached by a 13-year-old--whom he'd never met before--for sex.)

In real life, back in the day, people were often married before they were 18, particularly girls. In arranged marriages today, that still sometimes happens.

In real life, teens might have threesomes or swap partners, or experiment with kinks. They pretty much certainly masturbate. They might date more than one person at the same time, whether or not sex is involved; I know that personally, I was aware at about age 12 or 13 that the whole "one person at a time" dating and marriage concept made absolutely zero sense to me. I wasn't thinking in terms of sex at that age, but just didn't see why someone had to be in a monogamous relationship--or cheat on their partner--if they loved more than one person.

FICTION IS NOT REAL LIFE. Most publishers don't want to risk censorship or legal action for portraying extremely explicit, graphic sexual situations with participants under 18. Polyamory is a fine line to draw if it *doesn't* involve sex; one of my YA publishers recently published a book about three boys who form a romantic relationship, but I'm not sure how much if any sexual content it contains. I do know this publisher is very, very careful about depictions of sexual activity in their books, because their goal is to have their books--which are all about GLBTQetc. characters--in school libraries so kids on those spectrums can find them.

Ironically, as I mentioned in a thread about threesomes in the YA subforum here, the head editor of that same publisher told me they would *not* consider a novel I was plotting about a polyamorous relationship among teens; however, based on comments the editor made, I think she was incorrectly conflating polyamory with polygamy of the Warren Jeffs flavor.

But anyway, the point is that what real-life teens do (or did, in the case of historical fiction), and the real-life ages of consent in various states and countries, is pretty much irrelevant to what *publishers* will accept in the *fiction* they put out. Publishers are constrained by what readers and the law will accept, and they'd rather stay far, far on the safe side of that line.

I don't blame the publisher's for trying to cover their asses at all. It's a valid rule.

I usually go for the 18-21 line. If the characters are 18 and it's set somewhere like a high school prom or a summer camp, there may be minors present as side/filler characters to drive the plot in non-sexual scenes, but are never shown or implied to be sexually active or present for sexual scenes.

I think most readers are aware that people under 18 have sex. And that in historical settings accurate ages were well under 18, and 21 was old maid territory. Suspended disbelief works on age of first penetration just as well as it does on all sorts of other things in fiction.

As an aspiring romance author, I generally do not show characters having sex under the age of 18 in the main storyline... Mentioning that they were sexually active in their teens is okay, because it depicts real life a little better, but any underage character's sexual exploits are not mentioned at all unless they are talking to an adult about sex in some fashion. I let the reader assume that if there's a teenage character, they are more than likely sexually active to some degree, and leave it at that unless I specify otherwise.

Better to cover my caboose, if you know what I mean. I'm Canadian for the record, and our laws for consent are similar to those in the States. I think they may vary from province to province though, I'd have to check to be sure.

Not all teens have sex. I lost my virginity in my twenties.

Some of these legalities are throwing me a bit, and my characters just hit an area of confusion for me.

I've read the "do not submits" of a few companies, and minors witnessing sexual acts falls into that category. In one novel I'm working on, however, the two main characters have a lifelong friendship that evolves into much more when they're adults. Their life as they're growing up is integral to the story, and, at one point, they stumble across their respective parents unclothed together. I've used a single sentence alluding to what the parents were doing, and the friends, being only kids, look at each other in confusion and run away. Their only thought is "ewwwww."

It's written no more explicit than this, but I'm unsure if even this violates that no-no rule.

This is the first of likely many questions that may seem rather naive, but that's me in a nutshell

Thank you, Maryn.

I get the warm fuzzies when replies match what I want to do.

In the US, it is a legal grey area. Technically and in some cases it's not illegal. But publishers do not want to Risk the potential of it, and even if it's not illegal and no legal issues may come, it could stir some serious Bad Publicity. Furthermore, it is illegal in some countries - Canada for instance will confiscate a lot of porn at their borders.

If I write erotica involving characters who are under 18, I post them online, because I know no publisher will touch it with a ten foot poll. And since I write with the intention of publication, this means I write very little of it.

To the original question, as to what are personal limits, I won't write anything approaching erotica with characters under 15. Granted the characters aren't human but they've got the same development/maturity in terms of age.

Sentosa said:

Question: If you have age limitations, what are they?

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I don't mess with it. I have one story with an 18 yo male lead in it, and I've made sure he doesn't look like, say, a 16 or 15 yo papered over to look like an 18 yo. '

IE, he's in his freshman year of college, and is often mistaken for an older man in his 20s.

At the moment, I'm planning a story which necessarily involves a backstory of the male lead's sex life from age 15 to 17. I have to skimp over this, removing all explicit details, and no explicit sex scenes. In the present tense of the story, he's 35, but he developed his specific kinks during his teenage years.