What is MG?

Update: Well, So Far, So Good Recent Reading: Greenglass House by K...

What is MG?

Here’s a post at Kill Zone Blog: MG is for Middle Grade

I think a novel is MG if:

–The protagonist is under fourteen or so.

–The protagonist is a child at the beginning and still a child at the end.

–The novel is shortish and relatively tightly plotted, with relatively little worldbuilding.

And I am at the moment reading a stellar MG fantasy novel, which I will finish soon and then write a post about. But meanwhile, what does this post — which seems sort of out of place at Kill Zone Blog — say about MG?

Most authors define “middle grade fiction” as being written for ages 8 – 12 (third grade through sixth grade), and containing no sexual content or realistic violence. I think that another way to look at it is the intelligence and information processing skills of the reader. “Children” of this age are reaching the age where they can understand adult logic and reasoning. And they are not yet filled with the adolescent hormone-driven physical and sexual attraction that is found in young adult material, and that clouds their thinking.

They differ from books for younger readers in that they are more like adult books, longer, with plot and structure. And they differ from books for YA and adult in that they usually contain no profanity, sex, or overt violence.

This is all very well, but I think “no profanity, sex, or overt violence” is (a) not really true, and (b) not nearly as important as the three points I laid out. It’s the violence that I think is least true. Think of Patrick Lee’s MG thriller Wild Night, which I have mentioned before and in fact discussed at some length. There is considerable violence in this story and it is at least semi-realistic violence. Lee tones the violence down in a bunch of ways, but nevertheless.

It also irritates me no end to have people insist that YA is all about hormones and sexual attraction, but that’s a different issue, so never mind. It’s true, I think, that you aren’t likely to see explicit scenes in a MG novel. Also, I recall Merrie Haskell mentioning that she had to remove a little bit of profanity from The Princess Curse when it was placed with a MG imprint. So I’m mostly thinking about the violence, I suppose. I will just say that there is some violence in the MG novel I’m reading and it’s not all that unrealistic, either, though the tone is reassuring. I mean the overall tone of the story. No one can seriously expect the protagonist or his parents to die, and I think that’s actually the thing about violence in MG novels: whatever violence may occur, the tension is reduced via the tone of the story.

Meanwhile, the linked post says 30,000 to 80,000 words for MG novels, which I guess, but technically The Floating Islands is a MG novel — PRH shows the age range as a tremendously silly and restrictive 12-15 years and one does wonder how reasonable that can possibly be — and I can tell you that this book is over 100,000 words. However, I guess at the very youngest end of MG, 30,000 words is perhaps reasonable. This is about 100 pages, incidentally, and I wouldn’t call it a novel no matter how young the readers might be.

The age ranges given for the novels I’m mentioning seem kind of crazy, by the way. Eight to twelve for The Princess Curse; twelve to fifteen for Islands; twelve to eighteen for Wild Night. Raise your hand if you think any of these ranges actually makes sense when you think about actual real-world kids who like to read. They all seem strange to me. I’d say any age for the first, any age for the second, and twelve and up for the third — depending on how sensitive the kid is. Contemporary setting, kids dropped in a death trap by a murderer who wants to play games, strikes me as a lot more intrinsically disturbing than the other two books, which is why it seems more reasonable to me to put a lower limit on Lee’s book.

But I grew up reading whatever I wanted, pretty much. Age categorization wasn’t nearly as much of a thing at the time as it is now.

Ah, here’s one point that I think is perhaps reasonable:

–As romance isn’t really a thing in MG, close friendships move to center stage.

This is a big plus for MG over YA, which … I wouldn’t say YA has ever been ENTIRELY subsumed into Ansty Romance For Girls, but it sure tends to lean pretty heavily in that direction, and has for at least fifteen or twenty years now. In fact, this leads me to remember another criterion … that’s too strong … another tendency that we see more in MG compared to YA fantasy:

–The main plot in MG is about saving the world.

This is because, once you remove the angsty romance, you have room for something else. That something is very frequently a heroic saves-the-world plotline. Or, I mean, not necessarily the actual world, but something. Something worth saving, and it is indeed successfully saved, because as a rule MG is also upbeat.

–Upbeat or positive in tone.

Nihilistic, grim, ineffectual failure is either rare or essentially nonexistent in MG. I’m striving not to say something really snarky here, but I’m going to give up and say it: Young readers probably have to be trained to reject heroism and favor self-absorption, ineffectuality, despair, and self-destructive narcissism combined with a conviction of one’s superiority. I’m thinking of the Young Werther attitude, which is either really common today or at least seems that way to me. Anyway, MG is far more likely to be positive in tone than any other marketing category, and no doubt this is one reason the best MG novels appeal to vast hordes of readers of all ages. It’s highly noticeable how beloved MG classics can be, and often are. A Little Princess. Five Children and It. Howl’s Moving Castle. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The list is endless, and every single MG classic has a positive tone. I’m pretty sure that’s true.

Oh, interesting — the linked post winds up with practical considerations. Self-publishing is difficult for MG authors — the post doesn’t actually say that, but it lays out reasons why this has to be true: Teachers want books that have won awards; young readers can’t easily buy their own books; young readers can’t leave reviews at Amazon.

Ouch. I don’t know how MG authors handle any of this. I guess I’d suggest taking a real stab at traditional publishing for a good while while investigating possible ways to market MG … and writing MG novels that readers of every age can and will enjoy.