What is so moving about the Narnia stories is that, though Lewis began with a number of haunted images … he never wrote down to, or even for, children, except to use them as characters, and to make his sentences one shade simpler than usual. He never tries to engineer an entertainment for kids. He writes, instead, as real writers must, a real book for a circle of readers large and small…
– Adam Gopnik, ‘Prisoner of Narnia’, The New Yorker
I’ve spent a lot of time reading, and some time thinking about, the kind of fiction that is sold as ‘young adult fiction’ at the moment. The above quote, which comes from a New Yorker article about C.S. Lewis, is as good an explanation about writing ‘young adult’ fiction that I’ve heard.
