Writing Dark Fiction for Teens

I love writing for teens. The Fiction section in YA shelves so many things together. Thrillers sit beside romance; general fiction sits beside rom-coms. What this means is greater genre flexibility and more fluid reading preferences among teens. They’re more willing to try things outside their usual genre preferences, and I adore that about them.

(A Love Song for Historical Fiction for Teens.)

I love a lot of things about teens. I love that they exist in this space of constant tension, pushing back against systems, authority figures, and their own ideals. That tension forms a wonderful stage on which to set some very cool (and, if you’re me, dark) stuff.

Writing for teens is often done by non-teens. As such, we’re essentially writing for another generation, another culture. We have to be willing to step into their space and leave some of our own ideas behind. We should consider issues facing modern teens but also try to stay away from content that might date itself too quickly. It’s a balancing act.

In the darker, commercial horror/thriller spaces, we want to go deep, diving into complex societal issues just like the upmarket fiction market is. That said, we don’t want to be too on-the-nose. The book should stand alone as an entertaining read. I love this about genre fiction, that I’m creating a piece of art that works if you focus or unfocus your eyes.

We can explore deep, meaningful themes in thriller- and horror-genre YA. In fact, I believe the space welcomes it. Horror has always existed to examine the real consequences of a thing, right? It’s where we go to play out the full repercussions of an idea that might seem shiny on the surface but that we sense has something darker at its core.

That said, we don’t want to overfocus on our big ideas at the cost of a reader’s entertainment. The work needs to stand alone without excessive analysis. I like to think that it needs to be interesting, but it also needs to be cool.

I use beat sheets for all my books, so I’m biased in favor of this tool, though there are other outlining methods that are widely used. There are three important beats I like to give special attention to while writing thriller/horror:

Midpoint: This is the moment that changes everything. This should be a gasp-out-loud moment that gives a reader the full stakes, what the characters are really up against. This can look like an unveiling of the true power of the antagonist or the full nature of the fight, or it can look like an event whose consequences change the entire scope of the story. Often, I have to stop and ask myself, what is the terrifying, vast nature of this thing I have created?

Dark Night of the Soul/All is Lost: This moment at the end of act 2 when we’ve lost the fight is so multi-layered. It’s not just about losing the external fight; it’s about losing the battle within that the protagonist has been waging without realizing it. In this moment where we’ve lost our battle with the antagonist, we realize how wrong we’ve been all along. We’ve been chasing our own tail. This is a sad, desperate revelation; we really don’t think we’ll get out of this.

Finale: I love the five-point finale as explained by Jessica Brody. I think the finale needs to bring so many things together in thriller/horror. First, we need a satisfying explosion of this bomb we’ve been building. We need this plot to detonate, and we need to see things face off in exciting ways we hadn’t even dreamed of. It’s also about taking those revelations from our All is Lost beat and activating our protagonist’s new awareness in the fight against the Big Bad. I always write finales with a lot of sympathy for the villain, who is desperate to finally accomplish this thing they’ve been working so hard for.

One thing that makes a good horror/thriller story memorable is the imagery. Think about Carrie and the bucket of blood (and, in The Weight of Blood, by Tiffany D Jackson, the image of the falling cars). We want to be chilled by the things we’ve “seen.” In all my thrillers/horror novels, I spend the whole book building up to the set pieces we get in Act 3. I’ll lay clues, let the antagonistic forces escalate little by little, and think about the scariest possible incarnation of my ideas to make the finale unforgettable.

I love to go dark in ways that speak to a younger audience. I don’t feel afraid to introduce dark content and imagery in the YA space; in fact, I think the age lends itself to raw, gritty exploration of all these ugly aspects of the human psyche.

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