Too long for Middle Grade
Frances from What the Fran posted yesterday about editing and prose, and how they enjoy long, flowing, possibly convoluted sentences to get lost in. It reminded me of my own preferences with writing and reading. I love that longer style too, with long lines weaving around meaning like a snake around a branch before reaching the final punctuation. Shorter sentences feel choppy to me. Incomplete. Like there's something missing. Which is why I can't write for a Middle Grade audience.
I have a MG project, tucked away somewhere in my hard drive. It's a side story from a larger urban fantasy1 project, and I had originally brainstormed the project to write for my mother a few years ago, as a surprise. She loves the world of the project, which is tied to libraries and imagination and has been in my head since I was roughly 16. The MG project looks at one of the younger side characters, an apprentice of sorts to the main character in later books, and gives him an age-appropriate companion and adventure away from the watchful eye of his mentor, from the perspective of a new-to-the-hidden-world character. It's supposed to be short and cute, a little departure from the main project's darker, more adult stories. And I can't write it because my authorial voice and choice of prose style is too long.
I tried. I started writing, got maybe a few pages in, and realized the whole thing wasn't going to work because I could already tell that the prose was too grown-up for what I was trying to write. And no matter what I did, I couldn't fix it. So, like I tend to do, I bought a whole stack of MG fantasy books (used, of course) to try to learn the style, stuck them on my bookshelf, and promptly forgot about the whole thing. Oops.
Someday, I want to get back to it. I love the world and the characters, and I think having a very different project like this is good for my writing. It just may be a few years before I feel comfortable making the attempt again. So my poor Vivie and Dong-Jun languish in the back-burner pile, waiting for me to learn how to write for a much younger audience.
fantasy genre + mystery genre in a contemporary Earth urban setting is my definition of the genre. Other people have other variations of the genre, and it's often conflated with paranormal romance, which is fantasy genre + romance genre in a contemporary Earth setting, usually with vampires or werewolves or other supernatural creatures.↩