Young adult fiction lives or dies on voice. Keep yours.

Young adult fiction is defined less by subject than by vantage point. The protagonist is a teenager, usually about 14 to 18, and the story is told from inside that age: first love, first loss, first time seeing that adults don't have the answers. The book doesn't look back on adolescence from a safe distance. It happens now.

That immediacy is why so many YA novels are written in first person, often in the present tense. It is a common choice, not a rule, and plenty of successful YA uses third person. What doesn't vary is the importance of voice. A YA narrator has to sound like a specific person of a specific age, not like an adult's memory of being sixteen.

Two practical traps follow. Slang dates quickly, and invented slang or sparing, precise use of real slang often ages better than a page full of this year's words. And because YA readers are often adults as well as teenagers, and the category covers every genre from contemporary to fantasy, series are common: a voice that holds for one book has to hold for three.

1. Train a voice profile from your own writing: 3 to 20 samples, each sample at least 700 words and at least 5,000 words in total. Choose it as the book's Narrative Voice in book settings. Robin's feedback then works with how you write. Free includes one voice profile, Premium three and Pro unlimited.
2. Add your narrator under Characters, with their age and Tone, and their best friend, their ex and their mother alongside.
3. Draft chapter one. Then run Reader Pulse on it (Premium) and read the Opening hook and Closing hook estimates. A preview of how readers may respond, before your first readers.
4. Read the dialogue back with read-aloud. A line a teenager would never say out loud is easier to hear than to see.
5. Find teen readers carefully, through a parent, teacher or librarian, and share a Can comment link with an expiry. Adult YA readers can have their own link and label, so you can tell the two groups' notes apart.
6. If there will be a sequel, create the series on Pro and write the series description Robin reads for book two.

• It cannot tell you whether your slang is current. Only teenagers can.
• There is no sensitivity-read feature. If you are writing an experience you don't share, work with a sensitivity reader.
• A book has one narrative voice profile, so a dual-narrator book cannot give each narrator a separate profile.
• Reader Pulse estimates engagement from the text. It is not a panel of teenagers.