Fountain of Knowledge

Slang is key, but it has to be used properly, and in my experience reading YA fiction as a teenager, "properly" means "sparingly."

Words like "totes" aren't going to be around more than a year -- remember when people used to write "bootylicious" in stories for young adults, particularly college age kids? Yeah. That's so dated now. Conversely, words like "cool" have been consistently used by teenagers since my parents were that age.

There are a couple ways that skilled authors used slang. One is by using only usages they really understand (examples: "cool," "that sucks," "dissed") and avoiding pieces of slang that they don't quite grasp the meaning of (examples: "baller," "tap that," "whacked"). Usually this is the best approach for people who don't have teenagers or want their pieces to be readable for a long time. I don't "that sucks" going out of fashion any time soon, whereas "whacked" pretty much already has.

Another involves really going all out — reading the stupid Oprah articles about "slang your kids don't want you to know" and surfing through Urban Dictionary and peppering every piece of dialogue with slang. This can appeal to certain swaths of YA readers by seeming hip and modern, but it dates your story or novel and often can't be pulled off quite right, even by the best writers. (See Hautman, Pete.)

Finally, a few brave writers pull a "The Wire" and completely fabricate all their own slang for novels. This works mostly for authors who are writing about a segment of the population that most YA readers don't know a lot about. For instance, there are many, many writers whose novels feature characters from low-income urban areas. Some try to make their dialogue authentic, while others create their own, knowing savvy readers will notice their mistakes. It's a suspension of disbelief issue -- can you believe the characterization of the narrator, for instance, as an abused, drug-addled teen prostitute if she uses the word "boss"?

As I've said before, it really all comes down to authors knowing what they can pull off. I am not a "write what you know" proponent, but I am a "know what you can write" proponent.

Lorien