Dark Matter Zine readers expressed interest in what I’m learning as I wend my way through my Professional Writing and Editing degree. For ‘writing YA’ (not the name of the subject but it SHOULD be), below are the readings for dystopia week. If you’re too cool for school, just do my weekly reading with me. 
Erin Bowman – Is it Dystopia?
Erin links to the following:
- Katie Anderson’s “Are you living in a dystopia?” flowchart that Katie made for Maureen Johnson.
- Robison Wells’s “What is dystopia?” series; unfortunately, it appears Katie’s evil overlords got to Robison because the link no longer works.
- The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan as listed on Goodreads. It sounds a bit like Shyamalan’s The Village. I liked The Village: it was about the human condition and perceptions of reality. Also about utopias, dystopia and consequences.
- The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins as listed on Goodreads. This is to illustrate Erin’s argument differentiating post-apocalyptic novels versus dystopian novels while pointing out that some novels have a bit of both.
- Wither by Lauren DeStefano as listed on Goodreads
Erin even has her own flowchart but by the time I enlarged it to try to read it, it was too blurry to read. Apparently it’s good, so good my writing teacher showed the class.
Extract from Feed by MT Anderson
Feed is a YA novel written before we all had newsfeeds in Facebook and Twitter, so Feed was predictive and still is, as Feed‘s feed is intravenous, or at least intra-brain-eous. Simmone Howell says Feed has the best first line of a novel: “We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.”
Iunno — I prefer Jim Butcher’s “The building was on fire and it wasn’t my fault.”
Writing Dystopia
This is an informative blog defining dystopias and giving advice about constructing your story.
Teens and Dystopias by Scott Westerfeld
This is a blog relating Uglies, Scott’s popular novel series, to the dystopia genre while explaining why teenagers feel displaced, identifying with outcasts and identity issues.
