A
while back, I saw an author of adult fiction tweeting about how hard it was for
her to go from writing for adults to young adults. I thought back to when I had
written Messages from Henry, a novella for young adults. That story began as a 1500 word short story
for a short story contest. I didn’t win, but I decided to expand the story
anyway. It’s a story about a homing
pigeon, Henry. He has special abilities.
At
that time, I didn’t have internet service in my home. I would take my laptop to
a local library for that. It’s a very small library in West Fork, Arkansas with a population of
approximately 3000. I got to know many of the young library patrons. I thought
to myself, the best way to find out if young people like my story is to ask
them. I asked many of them if they wanted to read it. They could hardly wait.
Some of them got printed copies, and others got email copies.
One
of these people to read it was a male eleven-year-old child prodigy. His mother
read it first, to ensure it didn’t contain bad words or adult material. She
loved it. Once the child read it, he told me he felt I should write a series,
and make them picture books. All of the young people got back to me and said
they couldn’t wait to read more about Henry (the pigeon hero). They all had ideas as to where they wanted
Henry to go, the people they wanted Henry to save, and all of them begged me to
never kill Henry.
So,
you see, there are unique ways all of us authors can conduct research, and find
Beta readers. If you write for children or young adults, try this. Go to the
young people and see what they think. Ask them what they would have happen next
in your story, which characters they like the most, things like this. One thing that shocked me was that those I
asked to read my story looked up to me. They had just met their first author
face to face.
I’m now writing a sequel for this book.
Unfortunately, the young people won’t be reading it. It’s being written for
adults only. Henry goes to England!
You
can find Messages from Henry here: Amazon UK: http://t.co/srMAL7 US: http://t.co/6ncPTIZ smashwords http://t.co/WCIy6Pj
Goodreads http://t.co/N1i0OLa
My blog is here: http://scarberryfieldsforever.blogspot.com