9 Tips on How to Write a Book for Young Adults

Studying craft is a great way to learn how to write a book for young adults. VCFA’s Writing for Children and Young Adult’s MFA program is designed to give you the tools you need.

 

By Karis Rogerson
April 3, 2025

 

Writing a compelling Young Adult book can be a challenge—a fun challenge, but a tricky one nonetheless! Every year, more than 35 million YA novels are sold. These books are geared toward tweens and teens, an audience who deserve to see themselves accurately reflected in the books they pick up.

So, how do you make your teenage characters feel authentic? There are a lot of ways to answer that question. You could probably write an entire book and just talk about that. But today, we’ll break down a few essential tips you can use to write a book for Young Adults: 

• Craft compelling teenage characters
• Capture an authentic teenage voice
• Bring the story home with a hopeful ending

Write a believable teenage main character

It’s important to note the difference between a main character that is believable and one that is likable. The word choice was intentional here: teen readers are sophisticated enough to enjoy a character with some moral complexity. Characters that are morally perfect and unflawed become unrealistic, and a young audience will turn up their noses at that just as an adult audience would.

In an essay for Writer’s Digest, award-winning YA author Anthony McGowan describes this complexity as “marbling.”

“…give your central character some serious flaws,” McGowan writes, emphasizing the need for the balance to be weighted toward likability and a central goodness even in the face of flaws. 

“If you can take that person on a journey, in the course of which they realize the flaws in their own character and heal those flaws while also defeating the monster—heck, perhaps only defeating the monster because they’ve healed those flaws—then you have a character who has earned the love of the reader.”

Another important consideration when developing your novel’s protagonist is their age. While some novels for adults can have a teenage or child as a main character, YA novels very rarely have an adult protagonist. 

Finally, dialogue is a great way to create characters that read authentically as teenagers. 

To create great dialogue, consider utilizing one of the tips provided by editor Alexandra Cooper for Epic Reads’ blog. Cooper indicates that a key way to think about dialogue is as a way of showing the differences between your characters.

She says: “You can also make use of gestures or mannerisms along with the dialogue, which helps paint a fuller picture of a character without bogging down readers in descriptive passages.”

Here’s an extra tip: in addition to characterization, dialogue can do double duty by furthering the plot. One line can reveal character and push your story forward, doing the work that might take multiple sentences of exposition. 

 

So you’ve got a teenager with some believable flaws who is still more good than bad, whose dialogue serves to propel the plot. The next hurdle to overcome is ensuring that your protagonist reads authentically as a teenager. The best way to reveal your character is through voice. 

 

Capture an authentic teen voice

Voice is one of the most ephemeral craft elements, one that can be as hard to accurately describe as it is easy to get wrong.

In an episode of the podcast The Write Way of Life on voice, award-winning YA author Emily X.R. Pan said, “[Character voice is] that interior sense of what slang do we default to, what language do we default to, what way do we string our words along, the emotionality of it.”

Voice is hard to define when done well, and glaringly obvious when something is awry. As Pan said, it’s crucial to think about the minutiae of your character’s speech—not just the actual word choice, but the sentence structure and the weight of the words. 

Later in the same episode, Pan discusses the fact that a character’s personality and goals will affect their voice. There are differences and nuances between the way a character speaks and the way they think. 

Characters might come across as strong and ambitious in their dialogue in order to achieve their goals, while their interior monologue can show readers they are anxious about the outcome of their request. This is a tool you can use to hone in on character voice. 

Voice is every word that a character speaks or thinks, the very way they describe the world around them, and in order to write a compelling YA book, the voice of a teenager needs to feel authentic.

In a blog post for Smells Like Teen Spirit, fantasy author Nisha Tuli said one of the highlights of YA as a category is the voice. “[Teenagers] have big personalities and bigger emotions to go along with their wild internal thoughts,” Tuli said. “The best YA characters leap off the page.” 

Here are some practical tips and prompts for discovering your character’s voice:

• Place your character in a setting and situation outside the story you’re writing. The more unexpected the situation, the better. The point here is to challenge your character and see how they react (what they say, what they do) in a surprising situation. 
• Explore your character’s past. What made them who they are today? Who influenced them, and how? 
• Choose a secondary character and write from their point of view—and their voice. How does it differ? How is it similar? Do you learn anything new or surprising about your main character’s voice? 

In addition to creating a character whose complexity is believable, YA authors must find a character and authorial voice that reads authentically. Once these first two things have been accomplished, it’s time to think about the next big step: the ending.

 

Ensure you nail a hopeful, not-trite ending

Endings can be tricky to nail, but when done right, they wrap the whole book up. They can change a reader’s entire perspective—on the story they’ve just read, but also on life. 

When it comes to YA specifically, it’s crucial to nail the right type of ending. As author Shivaun Plozza wrote for Writers’ Digest, ”I’ve long held the opinion—a widely shared opinion I think—that literature for young people should always end with hope, with a sense that the world goes on and that the chance to make it better is always within our reach.”

Character arcs can be a great way to showcase hope in a YA novel’s ending. In a craft essay for Dabble, writer Abi Wurdeman says, “If all is not well with your protagonist by the final page, at least demonstrate a transformation that helps the reader envision a brighter future.” 

Change is an engine for hope—despair breeds in stagnation. 

Showing a character has changed and can change is a great way to instill hope for the future in the ending of your YA novel. 

The point is not that YA books need to showcase a fluffy, bubblegum-pink view of the world. Just like characters need to be flawed, complex, and believable, so do the circumstances authors put them through. But writing with the audience in mind means recognizing that authors have a high responsibility to their teen readers to not harm them. 

A hopeful ending, even one that’s bittersweet, is a way to show teen readers that there is always hope in the world—no matter how hard things get.

Ready to start writing your young adult novel?

There are, of course, many other things to keep in mind when writing a novel for young adults; this one blog post cannot comprehensively overview every piece of advice or knowledge there is about the wonderful world of YA literature.

A degree in Writing for Children & Young Adults from VCFA can help bridge the knowledge gap and take your writing up a notch, ensuring you leave at the end of four semesters with a tool belt positively crammed with tips, tricks, and tools for writing young adult novels. Reach out today and learn more about VCFA’s writing programs and how their esteemed faculty can help you level up your YA novels. 

 

VCFA’s Writing for Children and Young Adult program has been instrumental in giving authors the tools they need to write, like Lyn Miller-Lachmann. She graduated from the MFA program in 2012 and was recently awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Young Adult Literature. Her time at VCFA planted the seed she needed to write her award-winning book for young adults. 

 

Karis Rogerson
Author & Podcaster
karisrogerson.beehiiv.com | karisrogerson.com

Karis Rogerson is a writer, reader, and podcaster who was born in South Carolina, raised in Italy, schooled in the German Black Forest and Kentucky Bluegrass, and now lives in Brooklyn, on Lenni Lenape land. She has an MFA in Writing for Children & Young Adults from VCFA and her fiction is represented by literary agent Eric Smith. Karis writes queer romance for all ages, as well as poetry, personal essays, and select journalism. She’s a co-host of the podcast The Write Way of Life.