Ask the Author: Maggie Stiefvater
Answered Questions (54)
Maggie Stiefvater
Hi Baylee, gosh! Was it perhaps the Owlcrate edition of Call Down the Hawk? It had this letter inside:
"I still remember one of the most terrifying moments of my life.
I was a spitfire college student with bad social skills and a worse attitude. Every day I commuted 1.5 hours to school...until I found a shortcut. This narrow road cut off a corner and rejoined the main road later. If you went twice the speed limit, you could shave off 15 minutes.
It was a bad idea.
I did it all the time.
One day, I glimpsed another car ahead of me on this normally empty road. Stranger still was that it was identical to *my* car. Same make, model, color. And when I caught up at a hairpin turn, I saw that the driver was a slight young woman with hair just my color, in a ponytail just like mine. Squarish shoulders, just like mine. Drove just like me.
Suddenly I was terrified.
What if I caught her eye in the mirror and she had *my* face?
I hit the brakes and let her tear off.
Two decades later, I still don't know why it scared me so bad. I do know that the moment I got home, I started writing a story, and that you are holding a box with that story in it now.
I hope you like it.
urs,
Maggie"
"I still remember one of the most terrifying moments of my life.
I was a spitfire college student with bad social skills and a worse attitude. Every day I commuted 1.5 hours to school...until I found a shortcut. This narrow road cut off a corner and rejoined the main road later. If you went twice the speed limit, you could shave off 15 minutes.
It was a bad idea.
I did it all the time.
One day, I glimpsed another car ahead of me on this normally empty road. Stranger still was that it was identical to *my* car. Same make, model, color. And when I caught up at a hairpin turn, I saw that the driver was a slight young woman with hair just my color, in a ponytail just like mine. Squarish shoulders, just like mine. Drove just like me.
Suddenly I was terrified.
What if I caught her eye in the mirror and she had *my* face?
I hit the brakes and let her tear off.
Two decades later, I still don't know why it scared me so bad. I do know that the moment I got home, I started writing a story, and that you are holding a box with that story in it now.
I hope you like it.
urs,
Maggie"
Maggie Stiefvater
I am ankle-deep into my second standalone novel for adults, a project I'm truly obsessed with. It leans into something I adore writing: a complicated group of friends. I'm hoping to be hip-deep into it by the time I hit the road to tour for THE LISTENERS and THE RAVEN BOYS graphic novel this summer.
In the background, I'm also continuing to help shape THE DREAM THIEVES into graphic novel form (with artist Sas Milledge), working on a magical short story for an anthology, and waiting for SHIVER to hit the big screen (it finished filming at the very end of 2024).
In the background, I'm also continuing to help shape THE DREAM THIEVES into graphic novel form (with artist Sas Milledge), working on a magical short story for an anthology, and waiting for SHIVER to hit the big screen (it finished filming at the very end of 2024).
Maggie Stiefvater
Hello!
In a nutshell: YA tends to be a more intimately scaled, coming of age story told in an immediate way (in present day action rather than using flashbacks or subtext). As in any category, there are better and worse examples of YA on the shelves, but there's nothing inherently less literary about the category.
However, I think most critics' pushback to YA novels come from them selecting extremely commercial YA titles instead of literary titles. YA has a very heady genre pedigree (mystery, thriller, fantasy, etc), which means that a huge portion of titles use genre conventions and won't really bear up under literary scrutiny . . . and weren't meant to! They were meant to be excellently crafted entertainment. (I wrote a very long piece on what I think the differences are between YA and adult fiction here: ).
Most criticisms of YA I see involve someone holding up some extremely frothy genre-based series title and comparing it to, say, LINCOLN IN THE BARDO. That's just not fair—an adult genre novel also wouldn't bear up in a literature class, and was never meant to.
So making sure those discerning readers find truly literary YA is crucial. You'll lose their faith if you present them with something that doesn't bear up under study.
The other thing I'll say is that, as a largely commercial writer*, I believe in excellence in entertainment, and the study of how we entertain jazzes me up to no end. Depending on the YA you're hoping to thrill these readers with, you might have better luck engaging with them from that angle: hey guys, Maggie Stiefvater is in the business of engaging your emotions in the Raven Cycle, tell me how you can tell who the protagonist is and how big the stakes will be. What cues does she give to the reader about the level of darkness and reality she'll be engaging with? etc.
*my only literary title on the YA shelf is ALL THE CROOKED SAINTS—the others are straight-up entertainment. Or at least I hope they are. :)
I hope that helps!
In a nutshell: YA tends to be a more intimately scaled, coming of age story told in an immediate way (in present day action rather than using flashbacks or subtext). As in any category, there are better and worse examples of YA on the shelves, but there's nothing inherently less literary about the category.
However, I think most critics' pushback to YA novels come from them selecting extremely commercial YA titles instead of literary titles. YA has a very heady genre pedigree (mystery, thriller, fantasy, etc), which means that a huge portion of titles use genre conventions and won't really bear up under literary scrutiny . . . and weren't meant to! They were meant to be excellently crafted entertainment. (I wrote a very long piece on what I think the differences are between YA and adult fiction here: ).
Most criticisms of YA I see involve someone holding up some extremely frothy genre-based series title and comparing it to, say, LINCOLN IN THE BARDO. That's just not fair—an adult genre novel also wouldn't bear up in a literature class, and was never meant to.
So making sure those discerning readers find truly literary YA is crucial. You'll lose their faith if you present them with something that doesn't bear up under study.
The other thing I'll say is that, as a largely commercial writer*, I believe in excellence in entertainment, and the study of how we entertain jazzes me up to no end. Depending on the YA you're hoping to thrill these readers with, you might have better luck engaging with them from that angle: hey guys, Maggie Stiefvater is in the business of engaging your emotions in the Raven Cycle, tell me how you can tell who the protagonist is and how big the stakes will be. What cues does she give to the reader about the level of darkness and reality she'll be engaging with? etc.
*my only literary title on the YA shelf is ALL THE CROOKED SAINTS—the others are straight-up entertainment. Or at least I hope they are. :)
I hope that helps!
Maggie Stiefvater
Fair question: for fifteen years, I’ve been publishing YA novels. Why change?
Fraught question: for fifteen years, charged debates have swirled around YA, its detractors declaring it brain-rotting id-candy dragging down all of literature, its defenders declaring it life-saving, genre-bending work every bit as nourishing as adult literature.
Fickle question: YA is a new and changeable category. I know even as I write this post that the landscape will look wildly different in a few years.
But let’s give it a whirl anyway.
A BRIEF, SIMPLIFIED HISTORY OF YA
YA = Young Adult. It has its own section now, but that’s a fairly recent phenomenon. When I was a teen, bookstores had Children’s and adult, which was further split into Fiction, Horror, Romance, and Mystery/Thriller. Libraries sometimes had a Teen section, but only for contemporary novels covering thorny issues. They were Good For The Kids.
By the time I entered the scene (2008), though, stylized story-telling had begun its intrusion into Teen, creating an crunchy, hybrid category where foster children sometimes did battle with actual demons, teens with alcoholic parents sometimes spent time cavorting with the fey, and teens who said the word ‘condom’ sometimes had a romcomesque whirlwind adventures in New York City. It was a place for stories a little too gnarly to belong in Children’s, but too story-driven and teen-focused to belong in adult genre.* The stakes were low, and the community was small. Back then, it was still possible to easily keep up with every new release in the YA category.
* Genre = Horror, Romance, Thriller/ Mystery. As opposed to Literature = General Fiction.
For the longest time, teen books were released in paperback (like my debut!) because that was what teens could afford, but by the time my next YA was published (Shiver, ‘09)(which is currently filming in Vancouver, a decade and a half later, how bizarre is that?), things were a’changing for the odd genre-benders. Adult fantasy and romance readers were flocking to YA, drawn to both the shared online spaces and a category that, like theirs, was no stranger to taboo or identity. And as LGBTQ+ politics came of age, those looking for novels that tackled heady issues of identity found a whole shelf devoted to it . . . now, with magic. No more sorting through endless titles looking for a book that matched both your social values and your story-telling priorities. These stories now had a label, and it was YA. Good for You, fun to read. YA was becoming a chimera of Tough Issues, Teen Protagonists, Character-Driven, Speculative Content, Progressive Ideals, Genre-Bending Content, Optimistic, Forward-Looking, Queer-Coded, Romance-Friendly. Teens were reading it, but a generation of adults who had been starved for story-forward, speculative work were reading it too. TV/film was catching up to these trends, too, realizing that we were entering a Time of Magic. And heavily-online YA was deeply in touch with these visual media. YA fandom bled into television fandoms like Supernatural and Buffy, on top of that, folded in fandoms from web series like Homestuck and Japanese media like Attack on Titan.
*speculative = science fiction/ fantasy/ magical elements.
Montage time: Harry Potter became a smash success that saw many adults crossing the aisle to read children’s books. Twilight became a smash success that saw many adults crossing the aisle to read teen books. YA authors and genre fandom moved into the same places online, ensuring quick, expensive adaptations of crossover hits like HUNGER GAMES. The chimera added another tendency—Camera-Ready—and suddenly the genre became something else:
Rich.
By 2012, more than half of YA novels were being purchased by adults, most between the ages of 30-44. Publishers welcomed it, because adult money meant that YA books could be released in hardcover, recouping publisher expenses more quickly. Authors welcomed it*, because they were often between the ages of 30-44 themselves, which meant they didn’t have to ask themselves “What do teens want to read?” Heck! They could just write what they wanted to read. YA had grown up.
Before YA’s coming of age, Romance was the largest category (over half of all trade paperbacks sold in 2006 was romance). Between 2008-2017, YA subsumed many of them, just as it had lured in many a fantasy reader (and, in ‘18-20, many a thriller reader). But as YA became older as a category, it developed conventions of its own, a new chimera that came from everything it had taken on as it grew. It was now often synonymous for first-person, action-rich, romance-heavy, character-driven, politically progressive, trope-aware, intimate in scope . . . with a beautiful cover. It had become a genre, not a category.
This led to tough uneasy discourse. What about the Good For The Kids Mandate? A complicated several years of marketing 17 Year Old #BookBoyfriends to All Ages ensued, the product of trying to create a genre both for teens and also for the adult YA buyers. No wonder folks looked in from the outside and wondered what YA was up to. My publisher would promote my tour schedules on an account called ThisIsTeen, and then I’d hit the road and sign thousands of books for rooms of people over thirty.
Because of this and because of over-purchasing new titles, YA began to falter, like a muffin with too much baking powder (like chick lit or streaming services)s. Teen readers grew up and went elsewhere; readers who were already grown up followed YA authors into other adult categories, embracing whatever part of the chimera they’d liked the best. Adult fantasy, romance, thrillers. Fourth Wing’s smashing success? Would have belonged to YA eight years ago. YA had done its amazing, transformative work and helped changed all of genre fiction for good. Those values that made YA great no longer were exclusive to its shelves, so readers were free to leave.
I was free to leave.
BUT THAT’S NOT WHY I LEFT
Here’s why I left.
Reason one, less important: I left because, by 2018, I realized that I was mostly writing for adults, and so, I didn’t see why I shouldn’t be writing about adults.
Reason two, more important: I left because, by 2018, I wasn’t reading much YA. The category had changed, the world had changed, I had changed. My reader priorities were different. Although I do enjoy the game of writing for audiences who are not-me (see: all my middle grade titles), I prefer the selfish work of writing books I’d be pulling off the shelf if I weren’t, you know, the person who wrote them. Maggie Stiefvater’s favorite author? Maggie Stiefvater.
But unlike many YA authors, who flowed fairly seamlessly into adult Romance, Fantasy, and Horror, I wanted to move into the category I was now reading: General Fiction. Ye olde Literature. Otherwise known as the category that has most often thumbed its nose at YA, and been thumbed back at. Not a lot of YA authors make that move, and for obvious reasons; adult genre shares a lot of DNA with YA. Adult Fiction mostly stayed out of the evolutionary pool.
This is where the conversation often gets unpleasant; in some circles, it’s considered gauche to imply there is any difference between YA and general adult fiction. YA Detractors have so thoroughly dismissed it as unimportant trash that YA Defenders must make much of its literary merit and equality with adult literature. Generally, I find it a flat conversation that erases the best part of both categories, as well as ignoring YA’s chimera status: there are YA novels that are the prose equivalent of Buffy and YA novels the prose equivalent of Interstellar, works with different priorities that would never otherwise find themselves lumped together.
But lump them together I shall, because there is a difference, and it remains strong enough that readers are generally faithful to one or the other. More than ever, the YA label still curates a specific reading experience. Something adult Fiction is not, and vice versa.
I set out to study this difference in earnest after making the decision to shift to adult Fiction—a several year process. I began by dutifully reading my way down lists of the top bestselling novels of the last fifty years, removing those that had only made it big after a film adaptation or other non-literary cultural influence. I outlined other people’s novels. I picked apart paragraphs word for word. I looked at structure—who used it, who didn’t. I was looking for what these disparate titles had in common. I was looking for what they did that YA did not.
Volume, for starters. Not just in titles, although that was true: YA is such a young genre that there are many, many more adult fiction books to study. But also in sheer sales numbers. The adult fiction pool is a much bigger ocean to swim in, and its tentpole titles sell at numbers that most YA can’t imagine. With those numbers come a commitment to broad accessibility, which looked far different than I imagined it would. All of it looked much different than I’d imagined when put under the microscope, actually. After spending years on the bestseller list, I was delighted to discover that there was so much about writing that I had yet to learn. I was a newbie once more. Exciting. Terrifying. Wonderful.
SO WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?
Commitment to Specificity:
When I told one of my writer friends that I was moving to adult, she told me the difference between adult and YA fiction was that adult readers were reading to learn something. I don’t think this is true of all adult readers, but I do think it touches on a broad truth of general fiction, which is that it must be as true as possible. As correct in the observed details as possible. Not that YA is untrue. Only that adult fiction seems to generally signal of a density of specificity. It is not that adult readers are there to learn something; it’s that they expect you to know a lot about the people and settings and topics you’re presenting. There’s an expectation of being shown the unfamiliar about the familiar and the familiar about the unfamiliar. The people are drawn portraits of real people. The settings are real places, full of rich, unique detail. Every gesture is unusual and delicately observed. There is no faux history; the carriages really work, here, because you know so much about them. Because YA and genre fiction is story-forward, this kind of specificity can not only often take a backseat, but has to take a back seat. Too much specificity blankets the plot beats and makes the book feel “not YA” or “unlike your usual mystery.” Why is Tana French considered a non-genre mystery writer? Because of her commitment to specificity. It’s a trade-off; reality and story are opposites.
Tell, Don’t Show
“Show, don’t tell,” is one of the most enduring writing adages. It’s meant to help keep the story immersive, to make certain the reader experiences the characters’ feelings with as much immediacy as possible. These are huge priorities in YA and genre fiction; this is why these categories share so many story-conventions with film. Often, the actual writing is meant to disappear entirely so that we can inhabit the main character and forget the hand of the author entirely. In general fiction, I discovered less of a preference for this immediate storytelling. Instead, these novels emphasized the guiding hand of the author. Vast swathes of stylish telling-not-showing help tie together seemingly disparate events and far-flung timelines, unifying all the components into a single, thematic, intentional volume.
This difference between the categories is sharp enough that my editor and my agent, without consulting the other, both flagged an early chapter as out of place. It was a charming, intimate chapter that followed the characters faithfully from minute to minute, demonstrating plenty of action, making sure you felt exactly what they felt. The chapter had no room for the commitment to specificity, because show, don’t tell, is an inefficient storytelling mechanism, best suited to intimately-scaled stories. My immersive YA pedigree shining through!
The chapter was so out of place beside its more structured neighbors that I had to entirely rewrite it. I believe I kept a sentence.
Meaning, Magic, & Metaphor
And finally, I discovered that general fiction often uses one thing to talk about another thing. If the author is thinking about how dreadful his experience playing baseball was, he might write about bankers. If the author is a banker, she might write about baseball. There’s something alluring about metaphor; like myth, it allows us to make specific experiences universal. The stories become bigger on the inside; here is a story that looks like it is about a boy in a boat with a tiger, but it’s about so much more than that. General fiction doesn’t always have something to say, but it tries.
Thank goodness, too, because otherwise, there would be no room for magic in this category.
This was the most daunting aspect of moving to general fiction, as opposed to adult fantasy. Because of the category’s commitment to specificity and truth, there’s not generally much place for wizards and ghosts and demon babies, because most people don’t have lives actually filled with wizards and ghosts and demon babies. Even when general fiction is dramatic, it is starting with aspects of real life; it’s just amplifying them. It’s why general fiction usually only gets a ghost or two. Maybe a miracle. Most people have a ghost story or a miracle to hand. We’ll accept one of those in general fiction. Everything else, though, sort of breaks the category’s other rules.
But. But. BUT. Because of general Fiction’s affection for metaphor, some speculative elements can sneak in. They must mean something else, and they must feel true, and they must follow rules that feel like they belong to the real world. They must feel more like myth than magic. You really must be saying something with the speculative elements to get away with them. Your magic system must be firmly anchored to real world analogs—the more the magic breaks the rules of our world, the more likely you are to slide into Fantasy.
Fifteen years in, I debut
I find it amusing but apt that THE LISTENERS is called my adult ‘debut.’ How pleasant and strange to be stepping onto the stage afresh at age (*checks Wikipedia*) 43. But that debut represents nearly as much work as my original debut, so I’ll take it. Years of asking myself how much of my old writing could I bring forward and still signal adult fiction?
The answer was both more and less than I thought. THE LISTENERS is an intensely Stiefvatery book that took me every bit of two and a half years to draft. That commitment to specificity is a monster! A beautiful monster, but a monster nonetheless. That’s a metaphor, by the way. There’s no actual monster.
So there you have it: did I have to change anything when I moved from adult to YA? The monsters.
Fraught question: for fifteen years, charged debates have swirled around YA, its detractors declaring it brain-rotting id-candy dragging down all of literature, its defenders declaring it life-saving, genre-bending work every bit as nourishing as adult literature.
Fickle question: YA is a new and changeable category. I know even as I write this post that the landscape will look wildly different in a few years.
But let’s give it a whirl anyway.
A BRIEF, SIMPLIFIED HISTORY OF YA
YA = Young Adult. It has its own section now, but that’s a fairly recent phenomenon. When I was a teen, bookstores had Children’s and adult, which was further split into Fiction, Horror, Romance, and Mystery/Thriller. Libraries sometimes had a Teen section, but only for contemporary novels covering thorny issues. They were Good For The Kids.
By the time I entered the scene (2008), though, stylized story-telling had begun its intrusion into Teen, creating an crunchy, hybrid category where foster children sometimes did battle with actual demons, teens with alcoholic parents sometimes spent time cavorting with the fey, and teens who said the word ‘condom’ sometimes had a romcomesque whirlwind adventures in New York City. It was a place for stories a little too gnarly to belong in Children’s, but too story-driven and teen-focused to belong in adult genre.* The stakes were low, and the community was small. Back then, it was still possible to easily keep up with every new release in the YA category.
* Genre = Horror, Romance, Thriller/ Mystery. As opposed to Literature = General Fiction.
For the longest time, teen books were released in paperback (like my debut!) because that was what teens could afford, but by the time my next YA was published (Shiver, ‘09)(which is currently filming in Vancouver, a decade and a half later, how bizarre is that?), things were a’changing for the odd genre-benders. Adult fantasy and romance readers were flocking to YA, drawn to both the shared online spaces and a category that, like theirs, was no stranger to taboo or identity. And as LGBTQ+ politics came of age, those looking for novels that tackled heady issues of identity found a whole shelf devoted to it . . . now, with magic. No more sorting through endless titles looking for a book that matched both your social values and your story-telling priorities. These stories now had a label, and it was YA. Good for You, fun to read. YA was becoming a chimera of Tough Issues, Teen Protagonists, Character-Driven, Speculative Content, Progressive Ideals, Genre-Bending Content, Optimistic, Forward-Looking, Queer-Coded, Romance-Friendly. Teens were reading it, but a generation of adults who had been starved for story-forward, speculative work were reading it too. TV/film was catching up to these trends, too, realizing that we were entering a Time of Magic. And heavily-online YA was deeply in touch with these visual media. YA fandom bled into television fandoms like Supernatural and Buffy, on top of that, folded in fandoms from web series like Homestuck and Japanese media like Attack on Titan.
*speculative = science fiction/ fantasy/ magical elements.
Montage time: Harry Potter became a smash success that saw many adults crossing the aisle to read children’s books. Twilight became a smash success that saw many adults crossing the aisle to read teen books. YA authors and genre fandom moved into the same places online, ensuring quick, expensive adaptations of crossover hits like HUNGER GAMES. The chimera added another tendency—Camera-Ready—and suddenly the genre became something else:
Rich.
By 2012, more than half of YA novels were being purchased by adults, most between the ages of 30-44. Publishers welcomed it, because adult money meant that YA books could be released in hardcover, recouping publisher expenses more quickly. Authors welcomed it*, because they were often between the ages of 30-44 themselves, which meant they didn’t have to ask themselves “What do teens want to read?” Heck! They could just write what they wanted to read. YA had grown up.
Before YA’s coming of age, Romance was the largest category (over half of all trade paperbacks sold in 2006 was romance). Between 2008-2017, YA subsumed many of them, just as it had lured in many a fantasy reader (and, in ‘18-20, many a thriller reader). But as YA became older as a category, it developed conventions of its own, a new chimera that came from everything it had taken on as it grew. It was now often synonymous for first-person, action-rich, romance-heavy, character-driven, politically progressive, trope-aware, intimate in scope . . . with a beautiful cover. It had become a genre, not a category.
This led to tough uneasy discourse. What about the Good For The Kids Mandate? A complicated several years of marketing 17 Year Old #BookBoyfriends to All Ages ensued, the product of trying to create a genre both for teens and also for the adult YA buyers. No wonder folks looked in from the outside and wondered what YA was up to. My publisher would promote my tour schedules on an account called ThisIsTeen, and then I’d hit the road and sign thousands of books for rooms of people over thirty.
Because of this and because of over-purchasing new titles, YA began to falter, like a muffin with too much baking powder (like chick lit or streaming services)s. Teen readers grew up and went elsewhere; readers who were already grown up followed YA authors into other adult categories, embracing whatever part of the chimera they’d liked the best. Adult fantasy, romance, thrillers. Fourth Wing’s smashing success? Would have belonged to YA eight years ago. YA had done its amazing, transformative work and helped changed all of genre fiction for good. Those values that made YA great no longer were exclusive to its shelves, so readers were free to leave.
I was free to leave.
BUT THAT’S NOT WHY I LEFT
Here’s why I left.
Reason one, less important: I left because, by 2018, I realized that I was mostly writing for adults, and so, I didn’t see why I shouldn’t be writing about adults.
Reason two, more important: I left because, by 2018, I wasn’t reading much YA. The category had changed, the world had changed, I had changed. My reader priorities were different. Although I do enjoy the game of writing for audiences who are not-me (see: all my middle grade titles), I prefer the selfish work of writing books I’d be pulling off the shelf if I weren’t, you know, the person who wrote them. Maggie Stiefvater’s favorite author? Maggie Stiefvater.
But unlike many YA authors, who flowed fairly seamlessly into adult Romance, Fantasy, and Horror, I wanted to move into the category I was now reading: General Fiction. Ye olde Literature. Otherwise known as the category that has most often thumbed its nose at YA, and been thumbed back at. Not a lot of YA authors make that move, and for obvious reasons; adult genre shares a lot of DNA with YA. Adult Fiction mostly stayed out of the evolutionary pool.
This is where the conversation often gets unpleasant; in some circles, it’s considered gauche to imply there is any difference between YA and general adult fiction. YA Detractors have so thoroughly dismissed it as unimportant trash that YA Defenders must make much of its literary merit and equality with adult literature. Generally, I find it a flat conversation that erases the best part of both categories, as well as ignoring YA’s chimera status: there are YA novels that are the prose equivalent of Buffy and YA novels the prose equivalent of Interstellar, works with different priorities that would never otherwise find themselves lumped together.
But lump them together I shall, because there is a difference, and it remains strong enough that readers are generally faithful to one or the other. More than ever, the YA label still curates a specific reading experience. Something adult Fiction is not, and vice versa.
I set out to study this difference in earnest after making the decision to shift to adult Fiction—a several year process. I began by dutifully reading my way down lists of the top bestselling novels of the last fifty years, removing those that had only made it big after a film adaptation or other non-literary cultural influence. I outlined other people’s novels. I picked apart paragraphs word for word. I looked at structure—who used it, who didn’t. I was looking for what these disparate titles had in common. I was looking for what they did that YA did not.
Volume, for starters. Not just in titles, although that was true: YA is such a young genre that there are many, many more adult fiction books to study. But also in sheer sales numbers. The adult fiction pool is a much bigger ocean to swim in, and its tentpole titles sell at numbers that most YA can’t imagine. With those numbers come a commitment to broad accessibility, which looked far different than I imagined it would. All of it looked much different than I’d imagined when put under the microscope, actually. After spending years on the bestseller list, I was delighted to discover that there was so much about writing that I had yet to learn. I was a newbie once more. Exciting. Terrifying. Wonderful.
SO WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?
Commitment to Specificity:
When I told one of my writer friends that I was moving to adult, she told me the difference between adult and YA fiction was that adult readers were reading to learn something. I don’t think this is true of all adult readers, but I do think it touches on a broad truth of general fiction, which is that it must be as true as possible. As correct in the observed details as possible. Not that YA is untrue. Only that adult fiction seems to generally signal of a density of specificity. It is not that adult readers are there to learn something; it’s that they expect you to know a lot about the people and settings and topics you’re presenting. There’s an expectation of being shown the unfamiliar about the familiar and the familiar about the unfamiliar. The people are drawn portraits of real people. The settings are real places, full of rich, unique detail. Every gesture is unusual and delicately observed. There is no faux history; the carriages really work, here, because you know so much about them. Because YA and genre fiction is story-forward, this kind of specificity can not only often take a backseat, but has to take a back seat. Too much specificity blankets the plot beats and makes the book feel “not YA” or “unlike your usual mystery.” Why is Tana French considered a non-genre mystery writer? Because of her commitment to specificity. It’s a trade-off; reality and story are opposites.
Tell, Don’t Show
“Show, don’t tell,” is one of the most enduring writing adages. It’s meant to help keep the story immersive, to make certain the reader experiences the characters’ feelings with as much immediacy as possible. These are huge priorities in YA and genre fiction; this is why these categories share so many story-conventions with film. Often, the actual writing is meant to disappear entirely so that we can inhabit the main character and forget the hand of the author entirely. In general fiction, I discovered less of a preference for this immediate storytelling. Instead, these novels emphasized the guiding hand of the author. Vast swathes of stylish telling-not-showing help tie together seemingly disparate events and far-flung timelines, unifying all the components into a single, thematic, intentional volume.
This difference between the categories is sharp enough that my editor and my agent, without consulting the other, both flagged an early chapter as out of place. It was a charming, intimate chapter that followed the characters faithfully from minute to minute, demonstrating plenty of action, making sure you felt exactly what they felt. The chapter had no room for the commitment to specificity, because show, don’t tell, is an inefficient storytelling mechanism, best suited to intimately-scaled stories. My immersive YA pedigree shining through!
The chapter was so out of place beside its more structured neighbors that I had to entirely rewrite it. I believe I kept a sentence.
Meaning, Magic, & Metaphor
And finally, I discovered that general fiction often uses one thing to talk about another thing. If the author is thinking about how dreadful his experience playing baseball was, he might write about bankers. If the author is a banker, she might write about baseball. There’s something alluring about metaphor; like myth, it allows us to make specific experiences universal. The stories become bigger on the inside; here is a story that looks like it is about a boy in a boat with a tiger, but it’s about so much more than that. General fiction doesn’t always have something to say, but it tries.
Thank goodness, too, because otherwise, there would be no room for magic in this category.
This was the most daunting aspect of moving to general fiction, as opposed to adult fantasy. Because of the category’s commitment to specificity and truth, there’s not generally much place for wizards and ghosts and demon babies, because most people don’t have lives actually filled with wizards and ghosts and demon babies. Even when general fiction is dramatic, it is starting with aspects of real life; it’s just amplifying them. It’s why general fiction usually only gets a ghost or two. Maybe a miracle. Most people have a ghost story or a miracle to hand. We’ll accept one of those in general fiction. Everything else, though, sort of breaks the category’s other rules.
But. But. BUT. Because of general Fiction’s affection for metaphor, some speculative elements can sneak in. They must mean something else, and they must feel true, and they must follow rules that feel like they belong to the real world. They must feel more like myth than magic. You really must be saying something with the speculative elements to get away with them. Your magic system must be firmly anchored to real world analogs—the more the magic breaks the rules of our world, the more likely you are to slide into Fantasy.
Fifteen years in, I debut
I find it amusing but apt that THE LISTENERS is called my adult ‘debut.’ How pleasant and strange to be stepping onto the stage afresh at age (*checks Wikipedia*) 43. But that debut represents nearly as much work as my original debut, so I’ll take it. Years of asking myself how much of my old writing could I bring forward and still signal adult fiction?
The answer was both more and less than I thought. THE LISTENERS is an intensely Stiefvatery book that took me every bit of two and a half years to draft. That commitment to specificity is a monster! A beautiful monster, but a monster nonetheless. That’s a metaphor, by the way. There’s no actual monster.
So there you have it: did I have to change anything when I moved from adult to YA? The monsters.
Maggie Stiefvater
June 2025! That's when my first adult novel, THE LISTENERS, is coming out with Viking Books.
You might have noticed there was quite a long gap between projects . . . I was writing and learning and researching and learning some more. It was very important to me that if I moved to adult fiction, it wasn't just because I was writing the same books but with older characters. I wanted to really celebrate the differences between YA and adult.
To me, the biggest difference between fiction for teens and fiction for adults is that the latter has read more books and met more humans—(they've had time; they've been alive longer)! Teens are reading every kind of fiction for the first time, having all sorts of experiences for the first time, building early layers of understandings as they read about kinds of people they may have never met before. Adults already have calcified layers of literary and personal understanding, which makes them react to subversions of tropes and nuanced portraits of humans in a different way. Time lends many readers a sophistication that teens are still practicing.
I wanted to learn how to lean into that difference, while still maintaining the wonder and interpersonal magic of my YA works. I wanted to create a book that would work on multiple layers; as a love story, a fable, a snapshot of history, an examination of class and leadership, a painting of a region close to my heart. THE LISTENERS is that book. You guys will let me know how I did. :D
You might have noticed there was quite a long gap between projects . . . I was writing and learning and researching and learning some more. It was very important to me that if I moved to adult fiction, it wasn't just because I was writing the same books but with older characters. I wanted to really celebrate the differences between YA and adult.
To me, the biggest difference between fiction for teens and fiction for adults is that the latter has read more books and met more humans—(they've had time; they've been alive longer)! Teens are reading every kind of fiction for the first time, having all sorts of experiences for the first time, building early layers of understandings as they read about kinds of people they may have never met before. Adults already have calcified layers of literary and personal understanding, which makes them react to subversions of tropes and nuanced portraits of humans in a different way. Time lends many readers a sophistication that teens are still practicing.
I wanted to learn how to lean into that difference, while still maintaining the wonder and interpersonal magic of my YA works. I wanted to create a book that would work on multiple layers; as a love story, a fable, a snapshot of history, an examination of class and leadership, a painting of a region close to my heart. THE LISTENERS is that book. You guys will let me know how I did. :D
Maggie Stiefvater
Hallo! If you're in the UK, I believe you can find the ebook on Google Play (nope, I don't know why it's like that, Scholastic UK, who holds the rights, might have more info! Happy reading . . .
Maggie Stiefvater
Ah, I'm glad you're interested in them! But with the final book in the Dreamer Trilogy, I'm closing the book on the TRC world (that's a pun! get it??), a decade after the first book in the Raven Cycle published. It's been a wild and rewarding ride, but for many reasons, it's time for it to be done.
My next book will be an adult standalone title completely unrelated to anything else I've ever done. I'm excited about it! I'm sorry to not have more exciting news for TRC fans, but I hope you will enjoy rereading it for years to come.
My next book will be an adult standalone title completely unrelated to anything else I've ever done. I'm excited about it! I'm sorry to not have more exciting news for TRC fans, but I hope you will enjoy rereading it for years to come.
Maggie Stiefvater
The Dreamer Trilogy, a spin-off series that follows the Lynch family from the Raven Cycle, is probably what most would consider new adult.
Maggie Stiefvater
You're very kind to ask first! Please cross-stitch away, and tag me on social if you finish something you're proud of so I can see it! :D
Maggie Stiefvater
The easiest way to do this is order her copy from the independent book store I work with—I stop by frequently to sign copies of all my books there, which they ship all over:
I hope she loves it!
I hope she loves it!
Maggie Stiefvater
Mitsubishi Evos! (I wrote about one of them back when I was writing for Road & Track: )
Maggie Stiefvater
First of all, thank you for having so many Stiefvater books in your library! And secondly, yes, that should be possible! One More Page is a great little independent bookstore, and one of the great things about them is that there's a human on the other side of every single interaction. (sometimes that human is me, personalizing your books). :D
Maggie Stiefvater
I spent quite a bit of my youth in the highly religious South, and all of it in a Catholic family, and I always found it bemusing as a young reader that religion went . . . sideways in a lot of fantasy. No matter how realistically drawn other aspects of the story were alongside the magical elements, people's relationship to religion got either erased or made into a cartoon, a ghoulish stereotype to disprove or defeat. It felt odd to not see all sorts of portrayals in books: in real life, everyone had some kind of relationship to religion. They had it, or they judged it, or they were running from it, or they were searching for it. As an adult, I feel like it doesn't matter as an author if you do or don't believe in a god(s): you have to believe in religion. It is the practice of other people believing in something, and they do it no matter how you feel about the source material.
But it was hard for me to find in fantasy novels as a Catholic kid. It felt to me as if fantasy authors were saying that magic rendered religion obsolete. Even series like The Chronicles of Narnia, which of course are written by the extremely religious Lewis, placed the Christian God deep in allegory, which once again erased recognizable religion. They didn't talk about going to Mass or confession or Wednesday Bible reads or any of the things everyone I knew dealt with.
So the inclusion of the Lynch brothers' religion is two-fold. For starters, it's just real, and I always want my characters to move through a real world as much as possible. I was going to say "growing up in the South, I learned religion and the reactions were everywhere," but that's an untrue statement. I lived all over the country and religion and its footprints are huge everywhere.
And secondly, I wanted to keep religion intact in a fantasy world to talk about how someone's belief can and can't weather the introduction of new information — isn't this also real? 카지노싸이트, sexuality, sin: religion and faith have to decide if these are assaults that cancel each other out or merely complexities to fold in. In TRC, magic gets to be all those things. What is the fantasy genre for but to talk about real problems, but in metaphor?
Ronan in particular has to struggle with his faith, wondering if his particular magic and his sexuality render his God obsolete. Does his god hate him? Does his god not exist? Is RONAN a god? If he is, what value does a capital G God have for him? Does Ronan still have to go to Mass with his brothers if he stayed up late burying a magical monster's body? Doesn't every religious teen have to go through this process, even if they all come out with different answers on the other side?
As far as it springing from personal experience, I'm no longer Catholic, and I'm no longer religious, but I am deeply spiritual. I don't really talk about my spiritual beliefs or my sexuality in public, and I'm going to keep it that way, but I am quite comfortable saying that the process of living through the Church and religion up through my twenties has shown me pretty much the range of goodness, hypocrisy, obsession, rejection, wonder and horror that is fairly specific to religion, and it seems likely I'll be writing from that place of personal experience for a long time.
But it was hard for me to find in fantasy novels as a Catholic kid. It felt to me as if fantasy authors were saying that magic rendered religion obsolete. Even series like The Chronicles of Narnia, which of course are written by the extremely religious Lewis, placed the Christian God deep in allegory, which once again erased recognizable religion. They didn't talk about going to Mass or confession or Wednesday Bible reads or any of the things everyone I knew dealt with.
So the inclusion of the Lynch brothers' religion is two-fold. For starters, it's just real, and I always want my characters to move through a real world as much as possible. I was going to say "growing up in the South, I learned religion and the reactions were everywhere," but that's an untrue statement. I lived all over the country and religion and its footprints are huge everywhere.
And secondly, I wanted to keep religion intact in a fantasy world to talk about how someone's belief can and can't weather the introduction of new information — isn't this also real? 카지노싸이트, sexuality, sin: religion and faith have to decide if these are assaults that cancel each other out or merely complexities to fold in. In TRC, magic gets to be all those things. What is the fantasy genre for but to talk about real problems, but in metaphor?
Ronan in particular has to struggle with his faith, wondering if his particular magic and his sexuality render his God obsolete. Does his god hate him? Does his god not exist? Is RONAN a god? If he is, what value does a capital G God have for him? Does Ronan still have to go to Mass with his brothers if he stayed up late burying a magical monster's body? Doesn't every religious teen have to go through this process, even if they all come out with different answers on the other side?
As far as it springing from personal experience, I'm no longer Catholic, and I'm no longer religious, but I am deeply spiritual. I don't really talk about my spiritual beliefs or my sexuality in public, and I'm going to keep it that way, but I am quite comfortable saying that the process of living through the Church and religion up through my twenties has shown me pretty much the range of goodness, hypocrisy, obsession, rejection, wonder and horror that is fairly specific to religion, and it seems likely I'll be writing from that place of personal experience for a long time.
Maggie Stiefvater
Twenty years ago I would have had a different answer to this question, and probably in another twenty I'll have a still different one.
But for now, having read hundreds of authors and thousands of books, I find that what makes a book good to me is originality and specificity. I want to hear a story told in a way I haven't before, or be taken to a place I haven't seen before, or shown a corner of a culture that I haven't ever noticed. I want to see characters or places or situations drawn with such specificity and accuracy, even when turned into metaphor, that I can tell the author is working from real life and real truth, not making a copy of other things they have read or seen.
I want to read a thing I haven't read before, and as most big readers will know, that gets harder and harder the more you consume.
It means every year I become both a more adventurous reader and a more choosy one, paddling off into further genres to fish for books I might not have tried years before. It also means I am far more merciless at throwing them back.
Does that make an author or story good? It makes it good for me. For now. And as a writer, I firmly believe you are what you eat, or rather, you are what you read, and so I like to think my adventures serve to keep my own stories fresh, too.
But for now, having read hundreds of authors and thousands of books, I find that what makes a book good to me is originality and specificity. I want to hear a story told in a way I haven't before, or be taken to a place I haven't seen before, or shown a corner of a culture that I haven't ever noticed. I want to see characters or places or situations drawn with such specificity and accuracy, even when turned into metaphor, that I can tell the author is working from real life and real truth, not making a copy of other things they have read or seen.
I want to read a thing I haven't read before, and as most big readers will know, that gets harder and harder the more you consume.
It means every year I become both a more adventurous reader and a more choosy one, paddling off into further genres to fish for books I might not have tried years before. It also means I am far more merciless at throwing them back.
Does that make an author or story good? It makes it good for me. For now. And as a writer, I firmly believe you are what you eat, or rather, you are what you read, and so I like to think my adventures serve to keep my own stories fresh, too.
Maggie Stiefvater
You can always order signed & personalized copies of my books from One More Page Books, an independent bookstore in my state who ships worldwide:
Happy birthday to your friend. :)
Happy birthday to your friend. :)
Maggie Stiefvater
You're awfully kind! Right now, "Opal" (a longish-short story that follows the events of the Raven King) is available in the UK only on GooglePlay. I hope that helps! :)
Maggie Stiefvater
After two days, the scratch on her palm still hadn't healed; after four days, the edges of the wound grew angry and red. After a week, pale fingers reached out from inside it.
Maggie Stiefvater
It's true that I did not get a creative writing degree. I did try, once, to take a creative writing class at my college, but they told me my writing wasn’t promising enough and turned me away. I wasn’t crushed. I was a writer and I was going to learn how to write no matter what.
A few years ago, I was having my blood drawn for a physical, and the lady drawing my blood asked me about how I became a writer (because everyone enjoys a little career chit-chat as their life blood swirls into a collection of tubes). Did I go to school for it? Did I take classes? How did I know about the business? Was it anything like the X-Factor? As I tried to explain my process, she grew more convinced it was a happy accident and I realized that it sounded an awful lot like I just decided to become a writer and then got magically published in a cosmic lottery.
This, of course, does not happen.
And I think what I should have told her is this: You don’t need a creative writing degree, but you do need a writing education.
These are not necessarily the same thing.
The thing modern education has gotten really wrong is this: ignoring the fact that there are 4,000 ways to competency. 100,000 ways to competency. One million ways to competency. One of the dumbest things ever decided was that a piece of paper with a college name on it made one person’s skill set better than someone else’s.
That piece of paper often means something. But the lack of it often doesn’t.
It’s convenient to put your average muggle through four years of college and expect that they’ll come out the other side equally educated in a specific field, ready to join the workforce. But if you take 50 teens who all want to be history majors, for instance, and put them through four years of college, at the end, you will not have fifty equally-educated graduates. Because some of them will be slackers. Some of them will be naturally talented teachers, but terrible at remembering dates. Some of them will excel at research, but only about 14th century Scotland. Some of them will be great public speakers, but terrible writers. Some of them will be have spent their childhood learning everything that college was going to teach them and will emerge no more clever or skilled than they were at the beginning.
And some people will skip college and go on to be more successful than any of those grads.
How? How!? My sister read and chatted with me about OUTLIERS: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell. In it, he talks about the 10,000 hour rule — he postulates that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert in any field. I think this is key. You need to learn everything you can about not only writing, but reading, and everything you can find out about the industry and business. I would say that 10,000 hours of writing sounds about right. But I think that there are lots of ways to accomplish those hours. You can self teach. You can apprentice. You can take classes. You can workshop. You can get a writing critique partner. You can steal someone else’s brain. The only thing that is standard-issue about a writing education is that it must happen in order to be successful. If you want a piece of paper saying you did it, that’s your business, but no one else’s.
Here is my education. I found it this week while I was looking for my social security card. It was a folder of some of my writing from before the age of 17: each of those pieces of paper represents a novel I wrote back then. I spent several hours every
evening writing, and when I wasn’t writing, I was reading, and when I wasn’t reading, I was living — riding horses, showing dogs, having a band, making trouble. You have to have something to write about, after all.
I reckon before I post this, I should emphasize that I have nothing against degrees in Creative Writing. If you think you need one to keep you motivated or to structure your education, go for it. But it’s not the way I learn. And I’d wager in some cases it can do more harm to an introverted creative person’s psyche than good. But the most important thing is: they’re pretty much invisible when it comes to getting your book published. Your education, however you manage it, is the process: the book is the result. Agents, editors, readers: they don’t care how you got there, just that you did.
A few years ago, I was having my blood drawn for a physical, and the lady drawing my blood asked me about how I became a writer (because everyone enjoys a little career chit-chat as their life blood swirls into a collection of tubes). Did I go to school for it? Did I take classes? How did I know about the business? Was it anything like the X-Factor? As I tried to explain my process, she grew more convinced it was a happy accident and I realized that it sounded an awful lot like I just decided to become a writer and then got magically published in a cosmic lottery.
This, of course, does not happen.
And I think what I should have told her is this: You don’t need a creative writing degree, but you do need a writing education.
These are not necessarily the same thing.
The thing modern education has gotten really wrong is this: ignoring the fact that there are 4,000 ways to competency. 100,000 ways to competency. One million ways to competency. One of the dumbest things ever decided was that a piece of paper with a college name on it made one person’s skill set better than someone else’s.
That piece of paper often means something. But the lack of it often doesn’t.
It’s convenient to put your average muggle through four years of college and expect that they’ll come out the other side equally educated in a specific field, ready to join the workforce. But if you take 50 teens who all want to be history majors, for instance, and put them through four years of college, at the end, you will not have fifty equally-educated graduates. Because some of them will be slackers. Some of them will be naturally talented teachers, but terrible at remembering dates. Some of them will excel at research, but only about 14th century Scotland. Some of them will be great public speakers, but terrible writers. Some of them will be have spent their childhood learning everything that college was going to teach them and will emerge no more clever or skilled than they were at the beginning.
And some people will skip college and go on to be more successful than any of those grads.
How? How!? My sister read and chatted with me about OUTLIERS: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell. In it, he talks about the 10,000 hour rule — he postulates that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert in any field. I think this is key. You need to learn everything you can about not only writing, but reading, and everything you can find out about the industry and business. I would say that 10,000 hours of writing sounds about right. But I think that there are lots of ways to accomplish those hours. You can self teach. You can apprentice. You can take classes. You can workshop. You can get a writing critique partner. You can steal someone else’s brain. The only thing that is standard-issue about a writing education is that it must happen in order to be successful. If you want a piece of paper saying you did it, that’s your business, but no one else’s.
Here is my education. I found it this week while I was looking for my social security card. It was a folder of some of my writing from before the age of 17: each of those pieces of paper represents a novel I wrote back then. I spent several hours every
evening writing, and when I wasn’t writing, I was reading, and when I wasn’t reading, I was living — riding horses, showing dogs, having a band, making trouble. You have to have something to write about, after all.
I reckon before I post this, I should emphasize that I have nothing against degrees in Creative Writing. If you think you need one to keep you motivated or to structure your education, go for it. But it’s not the way I learn. And I’d wager in some cases it can do more harm to an introverted creative person’s psyche than good. But the most important thing is: they’re pretty much invisible when it comes to getting your book published. Your education, however you manage it, is the process: the book is the result. Agents, editors, readers: they don’t care how you got there, just that you did.
Maggie Stiefvater
Audiobooks get made when an audiobook publisher asks to buy the audiobook rights to a book and the author agrees to their terms. I'm fortunate enough to have an amazing relationship with Scholastic Audiobooks (which is a separate entity from my print publisher, Scholastic Press, even though they share a name), and they've been wonderful supporters of my Scholastic books since Shiver. Lament and Ballad, my two first novels, recently came out as audiobooks as well, many years after their publication.
Maggie Stiefvater
Unfortunately (well, fortunately, really) I am grossly outnumbered by readers and so had to close my inbox years ago as I was spending hours a day trying to keep up with emails.
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