Registration fee: $40 (+ GST) non-members, $30 (GST) members.

While good writing is a necessity for any genre, when it comes to writing for teens there are some special considerations:
- how to handle the POV
- why the age of your protagonist matters
- how to nail the emotional landscape
- sex, drugs, violence, and other touchy subjects: what is and isn’t allowed
- avoiding preachiness
- ending with hope
We will look at the differences between middle-grade, young adult and adult novels, and we’ll discuss several issues that teen readers apparently feel adult writers of YA get wrong. We’ll also look at variations in structure, from basic three-act structure to the episodic structure that is an option in coming-of-age novels. Several YA novels turn structure on its head—we’ll look at those as well.

Michelle Barker is an award-winning author and a senior editor with The Darling Axe. Her most recent publication, co-authored with David Brown, is Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling. Her YA historical novel My Long List of Impossible Things (Annick Press) was a Junior Library Guild gold standard selection. Michelle holds an MFA in creative writing from UBC and lives in Vancouver on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations.