I think what confused me most about the original tweet is that word, “need.” I can see what you’re saying about the pitching context, but viewed in terms of story content, it almost felt like asking, “Does this story need to be what it is? Why isn’t it something else?”
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Replying to @fozmeadows
That is part of what I’m saying, though: I think it’s useful to interrogate why the story is the thing it is, and to consider if it could be something else. You learn things about the story that way. It helps it find its true form, so to speak.
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Replying to @hannahnpbowman
Granted, yes, but from a writer’s perspective, if this is a first response to *all* YA stories, it comes across less as a reaction to that story’s potential specifically and more as a particular agent’s reluctance to work with that genre/demographic.
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Replying to @fozmeadows @hannahnpbowman
To put it in comparative terms, if a male agent had tweeted that women’s fiction was largely unsaleable and that it was better to look for cross-market appeal by asking if those stories should be more male-centric, I think you’d see the issue with the premise.
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Replying to @fozmeadows
I do, although I don’t think the situations are exactly comparable. But yes, I was giving the kind of advice I would give a client: “this seems to me likely to be harder to sell as YA. Could it be adult which would be easier, or does it ‘need’ to remain YA?”
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Replying to @hannahnpbowman
It’s a point of pragmatism, certainly. But I’ll confess it’s the type of pragmatism I personally cringe at when expressed in those terms. It gives me war flashbacks to my most hated high school English teacher, almost solely because of whom I didn’t do English at uni.
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Replying to @fozmeadows
I think this is the line agents have to walk (between pragmatism and finding the true vision of the book)! And I trust that authors who don’t find my advice helpful will ignore it. So definitely don’t feel that you have to agree with me about any of this!
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Replying to @hannahnpbowman
I don’t feel I have to agree, and I do appreciate the conversation. But my last agency experience did not end well, I’m struggling to get myself back in the game, and if I was personally advised right now to change so I’m an easier pitch, honestly it’d make me want to give up.
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Replying to @fozmeadows @hannahnpbowman
Particularly for writers who are marginalised along any axis, who already fear rejection because they’re “not commercial” or “not conventional” enough, or who’ve been rejected that way, I’d gently suggest this type of pragmatism does more harm than good.
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Replying to @fozmeadows
I need to think more before deciding if I agree that it does more harm than good, but I really appreciate the conversation and you raising this point.
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At the very least, I think, it can do more harm than good to *some* writers - maybe most, maybe not - but who and why is going to depend on the story, why the author wrote it and, crucially, what *they* want it to be in that context.
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Replying to @fozmeadows @hannahnpbowman
For instance: “I wrote this story as YA because when I was fifteen, I needed to know that people like me existed in the world and could have adventures.” If that’s the authorial intent, asking to give up that need for a better pitch is going to feel like self-erasure for profit.
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Replying to @fozmeadows @hannahnpbowman
I think I’d summarise it as: where the mainstream lacks diversity, then pragmatism to succeed *easily* as mainstream is going to count as erasure. There are diverse exceptions in the mainstream, but they get there because people fight to put them there.
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