I'm trying to figure out where I stand on swearing in YA novels. This was never an issue in my mystery novels. If a character needed to say something he/she said it the way I figured that character would talk. But with YA it's different. At least I thought it was.

Before I wrote YOU, I had assumed that things like swearing and really described sex were not allowed in YA books. That's because I had never read one. Since then I 've read enough to prove how wrong I was, and some of the YA books I've read say and show more than my adult mysteries. So I guess if I wanted to, I could be as specific and explicit as I wanted. Thing is, I don't want to.

Some YA authors I respect are fond of saying that authors owe it to YA readers to be brutally honest with their writing, and that includes swearing as much as teens swear (which more than adults) and describing the sex in detail. While I agree that we have to be honest, I don't see the need to be brutal about it. I'd like to think I'm talented enough to say what needs to be said without saying it, that I can realistically  describe action without showing it. In YOU I limited myself to words you routinely hear on mainstream cable TV shows. I alluded to sex in a way that even a casual reader could figure out what happened without the exact details. In Fall From Grace (coming in May), there's a scene that's a lot more explicit than anything I've written for the YA market, but it's still up to the reader to piece together exactly what's going on. And in the book I'm working on right now, the whole plot centers around a picture that I describe without ever saying specifically what we're looking at. Is this a lame cop-out? Am I being less than brutally honest with readers? Am I protecting them from something they don't need to be protected from? Maybe.  

There's another reality that my esteemed author friends forget to mention--the ones who are the most adamant about 'keeping it real' and being 'brutally honest' are also major big-time best-sellers. They have a huge reader base and name recognition (trust me, you know the names) - they can afford to write the way they want. Guys like me, with one book out there? I can't afford to alienate a single establishment market (libraries, school districts, teachers) who, like it or not, often refuse to purchase/stock/use a book that contains a single use of a word or act that violates some community standard. It's not censorship per se - I can write whatever I want and no one is preventing kids from reading my stuff if I did write like that. But at the same time, these libraries/school districts/teachers are  free to decide what they want to buy and if they have decided that they won't buy works because of the content - and I know this in advance - then it's up to me to decide where I stand on this issue. And for me that means respecting this reality and writing in such a way that's acceptable to the gate keepers and that's still exciting for readers. Would my writing life be easier if I just put it out there the first way it came to mind? Sure, but nobody said this was going to be easy.

Now would I say something different if I were a big-time, best-selling author? I hope I get the chance to find out.