How to Write Stories With Hope in YA Fiction
I’ve long held the opinion—a widely shared opinion I think—that literature for young people should always end with hope, with a sense that the world goes on and that the chance to make it better is always within our reach. To be honest, it’s not an opinion I’ve ever thought deeply about; I just accepted it as a given, like the grass is green and the sky is blue.
(How to Write Disaster Stories Infused With Hope.)
But when sitting down to write The Worst Perfect Moment I had cause to interrogate this belief. How am I supposed to leave a lingering sense of hope when writing about a 16-year-old who dies before her story even starts? Compounding my crisis was the fact that I wrote this book through a pandemic, through political and social upheaval, through the growing impact of climate change. How was I supposed to offer hope to my readers when, looking at the world around me, I could see very little?
Writing The Worst Perfect Moment was a process of renegotiating my relationship with hope, both personally and professionally. And by the time I’d typed ‘the end,’ I had worked towards three important discoveries about how to write stories with hope for young people even in the midst of troubled times.
Hope should be authentic
When I teach creative writing I often talk about cause and consequence: Everything that happens and every choice your characters make have consequences. These consequences are the driving force behind the plot, spiraling out of control and compounding your protagonist’s troubles until it all comes to a head in the climax.
If a story’s end feels unsatisfactory, it might be because the climax and resolution don’t feel like a natural and authentic consequence of the events preceeding it. If your protagonist has vanquished a great evil at significant personal cost, for example, it would feel strange to end with no acknowledgment of that pain.
I think of hope in a similar way: Every consequence will either tarnish or give greater luster to the story’s sense of hope. Like a teen Scrooge, my protagonist, Tegan, is thrust into key moments from her past on a journey of self-discovery. But while A Christmas Carol’s ending full of redemption and good will feels authentic to the story’s events, such an ending wasn’t authentic for Tegan. Because the discoveries she makes about herself and her relationships with family and friends are too bittersweet to leave her with unadulterated hope. Ending The Worst Perfect Moment was therefore about judging the level of hope that felt authentic to her journey.
Hope should be complex
Story endings where all conflicts have been fully resolved, good has triumphed, and everyone is free to live ‘happily ever after’ have never sat well with me as a reader or a writer. It’s partially a matter of personal taste but it’s also because I’m too cynical to forget that life is more complicated than that. Hope, in particular, is a deeply complex feeling.
In the first few months of the pandemic, for example, when we all worked together making sacrifices to help slow the spread, I felt such love and hope for humanity. But when people began to prioritize their individual needs over the collective good, at great cost to some of our society’s most vulnerable members, I fell into despair. And yet, there I was, still desperately looking for a way I could instill hope in my story because my sense of hope had never truly died. There was space inside me to feel a multitude of emotions, including hope.
So while there is certainly an argument to be made for literature as escapism, where readers leave their troubled real worlds behind and disappear into make-believe worlds where the perfect happily-ever-after is possible, I can’t help feeling that messier, more complex depictions of hope and happiness are vital too. Because that complexity tells your readers, it’s okay to feel despair, to worry for the future, to struggle to maintain your sense of hope. Hope takes work. It tells your readers that even in the messiest, darkest, most complicated situations, hope can still exist.
Check out Shivaun Plozza’s The Worst Perfect Moment here:
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Hope is necessary
This is the big one. Perhaps I’m naïve, perhaps there’s too much optimism inside me despite my outer cynic. But even after struggling to find a way to instill a sense of hope in The Worst Perfect Moment, despite the world I see around me, I still think hope is one of the bravest emotions to feel and I still believe it’s paramount for books written for young people to contain some semblance of hope.
I think of it like this: If I see someone drowning, I’m not going to say, ‘Oh isn’t that an awful thing to happen’ and do nothing more about it. No, I’m going to throw the lifesaver, I’m going to do everything in my power to help that person to shore.
So while I can see that the world around me is a dumpster fire, I’m not going to shrug my shoulders about that. And I’m definitely not going to turn to the young people who will inherit this mess and shrug my shoulders at them either. I’m going to throw a lifesaver. I’m going to show stories where there might be plenty of messy grey areas and all might not be well at the end but there is hope. There is always hope, even if it’s the smallest spark.
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