I actually didn't grow up watching 'Degrassi,' but I saw the commercials and knew the characters. I didn't realize that Drake was the guy from 'Degrassi.' I had to piece it together and go, 'Oh! He's Aubrey Graham.'
Maisie Williams was my first choice to play Wolfsbane when I heard about the 'New Mutants' movie - but in comic books, I can keep the New Mutants adolescent for decades and have as much fun writing them at the end as I did in the beginning.
The cliché I tried to avoid was I hated "teenage sidekicks." I always figured if I were a superhero, there's no way on God's earth that I'm gonna pal around with some teenager. So my publisher insisted I have a teenager in the series, because they always felt teenagers won't read the books unless there's a teenager in the story; which is nonsense.
The only thing that makes a book YA is that it is about teenagers, and it is written in a very conventional, non-artsy, non-pretentious way. YA is not the place for the oblique or the cryptic. If it is in any way experimental in form, it is not YA.
If 'Jingle Belle' harkens back to anything, it's sort of the Harvey Comics. Not really 'Archie,' but more of a teenage version of what Harvey Comics would have become, with the type of fantasy wonderland of her and her various friends.
The label YA actually means nothing except that the protagonists, or some of them, are young. Publishers like it because it is a secure marketing niche. But the cost of security is exclusion from literary consideration.
Of course Stephen King doesn't believe in teen novels. I've started to suspect he doesn't even believe in teenagers.
Teen fiction should be about teenagers - no matter how many arguments there are about what YA lit should be, this seems like the one thing we can all agree on.
In a lot of teen movies nowadays, you just get the rote six stereotypes like the jock, the cool guy, the nerd, the hot girl, the girl who cares, and the girl who has glasses and is supposed to be ugly but is actually beautiful.
I think when you're looking for scripts or for characters around your own age, a lot of the times they don't have the kind of responsibility that is usually seen in parts that are older for you.
