How to Write a Dystopian Young Adult Trilogy

The idea of the dystopian post-apocalyptic universe has been around since George Orwell discussed Big Brother in 1984. Recently, however, the adaptation of these dystopian young adult series into movies has become massively trendy in Hollywood (see: Hunger Games, Divergent, The Maze Runner, etc). While I enjoy many of these books, we have to go ahead and admit right now that these series are all pretty much the same. I know that I have little room to speak as a lover of Sci-Fi/Fantasy novels, which don’t exactly break new ground with each release, and I am not saying that these books/movies are not enjoyable; on the contrary, I often enjoy them despite clearly no longer qualifying as a member of the authors’ target audience.

These series typically contain several mutual elements: a reluctantly heroic protagonist, an occasionally forced love story, an evil and oppressive but functional governing body, and a common plot scheme. Trilogies also seem to be the primary means of telling these stories, with an occasional prequel or collection of related stories mixed in there. Since this will be my seventeenth blog post, I am basically a professional writer at this point and am totally qualified to advise future authors on how to write their own dystopian young adult novel trilogy.

Trust me, I’m a professional.

The Three Things It Took Me Years to Realize that I Learned From My Little Brother’s Death

First off, apologies for another late Wednesday post; the personal gravity of my topic this week has caused me to spend a lot more time planning, editing, and revising (PDREPing, as it were). This post is something that I feel inclined to share, especially given the emotions and feelings that I know many of my friends are currently experiencing. There is also the fact that yesterday my little brother, Alex, would have turned 27. It’s been just over eleven years since he died in February of my senior year of high school. Being a stereotypical man who invented the wheel and built the Eiffel Tower out of metal and brawn, I bottled up a lot of the things I was experiencing at that point, so I am still processing them to this day. I attempted to throw this stuff in a list, but so many of the feelings and ideas are intertwined that it became complicated to differentiate the points. So I guess you should hold onto your butts, because here we go…

I promise there will be no Velociraptors…this time.

1. No Matter Your Age, Death Ages You Further

I was seventeen years old when my brother died in a car accident. I can tell you almost all the details about that day from the CD I was listening to in the car (Powerman 5000…leave me alone, I was in high school) to how long I was in class before being pulled out (less than fifteen minutes) to the way my little brother looked in the hospital. I wasn’t allowed to see him until after my parents arrived at the hospital, despite the fact that I got there almost an hour before them. I still remember what I was told by my father and a coach that I respected greatly: this has made you a man.

It sounds melodramatic, but was more than a bit true. I forced myself into a stoic portrait of all the manliest men that I had seen in movies and on TV. You know the scene in which a man turns from a situation and the camera catches a single tear fall from his eye? That is what 17 year old me thought I was doing. That also meant reading a eulogy at my brother’s funeral, acting like I was not destroyed by the situation, and bottling away all shows of emotion that I could possibly hide. It wasn’t until I arrived at college that I realized how much I really had been changed by the situation. I certainly don’t claim that I was the model of maturity throughout my college years, but I felt as though I carried an extra weight throughout those years. My ability to compartmentalize the situation helped me, but not everyone is me…