What’s the difference between Young Adult and New Adult fiction? We explore the life stages, voice, and themes that define each genre, plus publishing news on AI copyright, contracts, and book bans.

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Overthinking Couch Topics:

1. What defines Young Adult fiction
2. What defines New Adult fiction
3. The key differences between identity formation and life-building
4. How voice changes between YA and NA
5. Why authenticity matters in both genres
6. Why New Adult remains complicated from a publishing perspective
7. Common mistakes writers make when writing either category

• Supreme Court Denies Certiorari in Thaler v. Perlmutter: AI Cannot Be an Author Under the Copyright Act | Baker Donelson
• AI-generated art can’t be copyrighted after Supreme Court declines to review the rule | The Verge
• U.S. Supreme Court Rejects Bid to Grant Copyright to A.I.-Generated Artwork
• This book written by 10,000 authors is 'empty'
• Supreme Court Declines Dispute Over Copyrights for AI-Generated Materila
• Unbanned Book Network — We Need Diverse Books
• The Rising Tide of Book Bans in American Schools – UAB Institute for Human Rights Blog

Music licensed from Storyblocks.

Young Adult vs. New Adult: What Writers Need to Know

If you have plot bunnies coming out of your plot holes, it’s time for a writing break.

I've got some important publishing news for you today about copyright laws, AI, and book bans. After that, we’re talking about two closely related genres: Young Adult and New Adult fiction. And if you don't care for these genres, I've got a message for you too.

Both genres focus on characters coming of age, but they capture different stages of that journey. One explores the intensity of the teenage experience, while the other looks at what happens when adulthood begins to take shape.

The teenage years give us first love, first heartache, and the first real sense of who we might become. The early adult years give us independence, responsibility, and the unsettling, or in my case thrilling, realization that no one else is steering the ship anymore.

The Writing Break cafe is open. As an ode to your inner teenager, why not enjoy whatever rot-your-teeth drink you consumed with abandon when your metabolism was high and you knew absolutely everything?

More than 10,000 writers, translators, and publishing professionals recently collaborated on a symbolic project of releasing a blank book. The book is titled The Book Without Words, and its blank pages are intentional.

The project was organized as a protest against the growing use of copyrighted books to train artificial intelligence systems without the permission of the authors who wrote them.

The protest organizers argue that if AI companies continue to train their systems on books without compensating or even notifying the authors, writers themselves could effectively be written out of the process. So, the empty book represents a future where authors are no longer paid, no longer credited, and ultimately no longer needed.

In other words: if creators are removed from the equation, what’s left is a blank page.

The protest drew support from writers around the world, including novelists, journalists, translators, and academics. Many participants say they are not opposed to artificial intelligence itself. Instead, they are protesting how AI companies collect training data.

As we've discussed before, large language models are often trained on massive datasets that include books, articles, and other copyrighted works. Authors have increasingly argued that this practice amounts to using creative labor without consent or compensation.

Some of the writers involved in the protest say the issue is not just financial. It’s about recognition of creative work and the future of publishing. The empty-book protest highlights a growing concern across the industry.

If AI systems can generate books, articles, and scripts using knowledge derived from existing works, who owns the value created from that knowledge? Is it the technology company that built the model, or the authors whose books helped train it? Those questions could shape the future of publishing and the livelihood of writers for years to come.

Copyright law is struggling to keep up with AI technology, and several lawsuits are currently working their way through U.S. courts, with authors arguing that companies developing generative AI systems illegally copied millions of books to train their models.

Organizations like the The Authors Guild have also pushed for new licensing systems that would require AI companies to obtain permission and pay authors before using their work for training.

At the same time, technology companies argue that training AI on large datasets is essential for innovation and may qualify as fair use under existing copyright law.

The courts haven’t fully settled that question yet, but there is one question that was sort of settled recently.

The United States Supreme Court has declined to hear a case that asked a fundamental question: Can artificial intelligence be considered an author under copyright law? By refusing to take up the case, the Court effectively allowed a lower-court ruling to stand. That ruling says copyright protection requires human authorship.

The U.S. Copyright Office rejected the application, arguing that copyright law has always required a human creator. Federal courts agreed, saying that human authorship is a “bedrock requirement” of copyright law.

After losing in lower courts, Thaler appealed to the Supreme Court, hoping the justices would reconsider the definition of authorship in the age of generative AI.

But the Court declined to hear the case.

That decision means the existing rule remains firmly in place: works created entirely by AI, without human creative input, cannot receive copyright protection in the United States.

For authors, artists, and other creators, the ruling has several important implications.

First, it reinforces the idea that copyright protects human creativity. AI can be used as a tool, but the person using it must contribute meaningful creative input in order for the work to qualify for copyright protection.

Second, purely machine-generated work, whether images, text, or music, may not be legally protected at all. If no human authorship exists, anyone may potentially reproduce or reuse the work.

And third, the ruling leaves a huge gray area unresolved: How much human involvement is enough to claim authorship when AI tools are involved?

For example, if a writer uses AI for brainstorming but writes the text themselves, that’s clearly human authorship, but if an AI system produces most of the text or images with minimal editing, the copyright status becomes murky.

Those questions are likely to be the next frontier in copyright law.

Supporters of the ruling say it protects human creators from being displaced by automated systems trained on copyrighted material.

Critics argue that refusing copyright protection for AI-generated work could discourage innovation in creative technologies.

Either way, this case highlights just how quickly the legal system is being forced to grapple with the rise of generative AI.

And for writers in particular, the message is clear:

Human creativity still sits at the center of copyright law, for now.

As AI tools continue to evolve, expect this debate over authorship, ownership, and creative control to appear in courts and publishing contracts for years to come.

I've seen firsthand that publishers are including AI clauses in contracts and on the copyright page of books. These clauses address: whether books may be used to train AI systems; whether publishers can license backlist titles to AI companies; and restrictions on authors using AI-generated text

This could determine who gets paid if AI companies license book data in the future. Behind the scenes, several major publishers are exploring ways to license their book catalogs to AI companies.

Instead of fighting AI training entirely, publishers could sell access to large backlists of books for training data.

Groups like The Authors Guild have warned that authors should watch this closely, because: some contracts may allow publishers to license books without author consent; revenue-sharing structures are still unclear; and once training occurs, the value of the original text may change

AI licensing could become a new publishing revenue stream or a major rights conflict.

Organizations like PEN America and the American Library Association continue documenting record numbers of book challenges in schools and libraries, and they've found that book bans continue to rise in the United States. This is, unfortunately, the same news I've brought you for the past couple of years, isn't it?

Books most frequently targeted still include: LGBTQIA+ stories, race and social justice titles, and sexually explicit or mature YA books.

The downside is that people still want to hurt people who are born different from them. The upside is that banned books usually see huge sales spikes as well as an increase in their cultural power.

Plus, there's a new initiative to fight book bans.

The nonprofit We Need Diverse Books launched an Unbanned Book Network to supply challenged books to schools and support educators in areas with heavy censorship efforts. As the most important humans in the publishing process, authors should not just look away.

Links to all of these news stories can be found in the show notes of this episode. Now, let's head to the Overthinking Couch to discuss the science of being young and reckless and why disliking YA and NA might mean you should be writing them.

The prefrontal cortex continues to develop until a person is in their mid-twenties, with significant changes occurring during adolescence. This part of the brain is responsible for planning, decision-making, and impulse control.

And as we well know, hormonal changes in adolescence leads to mood swings and increased impulsivity as we transition from teenagers into adults.

Young Adult and New Adult fiction spans the ages of 14 to the mid-twenties, the very years when we, as humans, are wildly impulsive, poor planners, and, to say it as nicely as possible, not as smart as we will eventually be. But we experienced and remember these years as a series of life-altering moments, and so authors write them in that same spirit, and we are moved by these stories because of how intense our feelings were then. You know, when we were malfunctioning humans.

We don't want to read stories that say, “Romeo & Juliet had raging hormones and still-developing brains, so it didn't go so great for them. Things might have been grand if they had met when they were twenty-eight.” No, no, no. We push the science aside and just accept that we go through certain things when we're a certain age.

Here's where it gets sticky for me. Some of us had to deal with difficult things when we were children that most people don't deal with ever in their lives. And most of us who did live that kind of reality did so with no one else knowing what we were going through. So while I understand the science behind growing up, some of us experienced childhood on a battlefield, so by the time we experienced normal young adult and new adult moments, we were war-weary soldiers. The mere concept of "coming of age" felt like a fairy tale way of looking at life, as if you had some control over when you got to mature. Even though YA and NA deal with serious life topics, they tend to present a 14- to 25-year-old protagonist who is just now starting to have a hard time. You might be the kind of person who scoffs at YA and thinks, "I wish these would have been my biggest problems back then." If so, maybe you should be writing a book for yourself as a young adult or new adult.

But Rosemi, you might say, there are books about tough adolescence.

Yes, but as Tolstoy put it in Anna Karenina, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

No one has gone through your exact life experiences, and your characters don't need to either. But if you could write a book for your younger self to discover, never knowing that their older self wrote it, what would the protagonist be like? How would you write a book your younger self can relate to without preaching to them or belittling them? What would the antagonists and supporting characters be like? What message of hope would you give your younger self? What did you need to hear or read back then?

You might find that what you wanted was a sci-fi series with loads of space battles. Or you might find yourself foregoing the suffering you experienced to write a story featuring your current family. The one you raised yourself, or maybe even the one you hope to raise in the future. The loving, supportive family you always wished you could be part of. One thing I find interesting about humans, and what has come in handy for all of my life, is our ability to compartmentalize, forget, ignore, and even downright deny what we need to in order to keep going. So, while we didn't all have a John Hughes time of it, we can escape into one if we want to.

I can't say I ever found the right YA or NA when I needed it most. Instead I turned to true crime about bootlegging mobsters. Make of that what you will. But I can only imagine the weight that would have been lifted off my shoulders had I heard Harry Styles sing "Matilda" when I was 16.

As unique as your life is, your words could still be a lighthouse to help young people navigate a turbulent sea and find shelter in which to weather out the storm.

Now, let's get into the ins and outs of YA and NA.

Young Adult fiction, commonly called YA, typically features protagonists between the ages of fourteen and eighteen.

These stories focus on the teenage years, a period when identity is still forming and experiences feel immediate and consequential. YA fiction often explores first love, first heartbreak, first major moral choices, and the first serious encounters with the wider world.

A defining feature of YA is the closeness of the narrative perspective. The story usually stays tightly aligned with the protagonist’s thoughts and emotions, allowing readers to experience events with the same intensity the character does.

Because these characters are still discovering who they are, their emotions are rarely filtered through years of reflection. Everything is happening in real time. When YA fiction succeeds, it captures the truth that teenage experiences may be temporary, but they rarely feel small.

New Adult fiction, often abbreviated as NA, generally centers on characters between eighteen and their mid-twenties.

This stage of life is defined by transition. Characters are stepping into independence for the first time. They may be leaving home, navigating college, entering the workforce, or beginning to build lives separate from the expectations that shaped their childhood.

Where YA often focuses on the formation of identity, New Adult stories tend to explore what happens after that first stage of self-discovery. Characters are not only asking who they are; they are deciding what kind of life they want to create.

Relationships also take on different stakes. Choices about careers, partnerships, and personal values begin to carry long-term consequences. As a result, the tone of NA can feel slightly more reflective than YA, though the emotional immediacy remains strong. These characters are still figuring things out, but they are doing so with greater independence and responsibility.

At first glance, YA and New Adult can look similar. Both genres focus on coming-of-age experiences and rely heavily on emotional stakes. The difference lies primarily in the life stage of the protagonist.

In YA fiction, authority structures are still firmly in place. Parents, schools, and social expectations shape the character’s environment, and much of the story revolves around discovering who they are within those boundaries.

In New Adult fiction, many of those structures are loosening or disappearing. Characters must begin making decisions without clear guidance, often for the first time. This shift in responsibility changes both the tone of the narrative and the kinds of conflicts characters face.

YA stories frequently ask a question of identity: Who am I becoming?

New Adult stories tend to ask a question of direction: What kind of life am I building?

The emotional core of both genres comes from these moments of transition, but the challenges arise from different stages of life.

Voice is critical in both YA and New Adult fiction, though the tone often differs slightly.

In YA, the narrative voice tends to feel urgent and immediate. The character is processing events as they happen, and readers expect the emotional experience to feel genuine rather than filtered through adult hindsight. Teen readers are especially quick to recognize when a voice sounds artificial or condescending.

New Adult fiction allows for a somewhat broader perspective. Characters may reflect on their circumstances with slightly more awareness, but the story should still feel grounded in the uncertainty of early adulthood. These protagonists are not fully established; they are navigating the difficult space between adolescence and stability.

In both genres, authenticity matters more than anything else. Readers connect when characters’ emotional responses feel specific and believable.

From a craft perspective, New Adult is easy to define. From a publishing perspective, it has a more complicated history.

YA has a well-established category in bookstores and libraries, while New Adult has often been absorbed into adult fiction or romance. Much of NA’s early popularity emerged through independent publishing, particularly in college-set romance stories.

As a result, New Adult remains a genre with strong reader interest but inconsistent shelving and marketing within the traditional publishing industry. Many authors writing in this space have found success through independent or hybrid publishing paths.

Both genres come with their own challenges.

In YA, a common mistake is talking down to the audience. Teen readers are perceptive and quick to reject stories that feel preachy or inauthentic. Another frequent problem is writing a teenage character who sounds like an adult reflecting on adolescence rather than someone living through it.

New Adult fiction can struggle when it blurs too closely with either YA or adult fiction. If the characters behave like teenagers, the story may feel misplaced. If the tone becomes fully adult, the sense of transition that defines NA can disappear.

In both genres, familiar tropes are less of a problem than emotional flatness. Readers may recognize certain story patterns, but they still expect characters whose emotional journeys feel distinct and genuine.

Stories about early life transitions resonate because almost everyone remembers these stages. The teenage years are when we begin asking who we might become. Early adulthood is when we begin discovering what those choices actually mean. Young Adult fiction captures the intensity of becoming. New Adult fiction captures the uncertainty of building a life from that discovery. Both remind us that growing up is not a single moment but a series of turning points that shape the people we eventually become.

Before we leave the Overthinking Couch, here’s your writing prompt for the week. Think of a scene about a major life decision, but write it twice. First, write it from the perspective of a seventeen-year-old character. Then rewrite the same scene from the perspective of a twenty-two-year-old character. Pay attention to how the voice changes, how the stakes feel different, and how responsibility shapes the character’s choices.

Next time on Writing Break, I'd like to discuss what you're writing. This is something I promised to do at least a week ago; sorry for the delay on that. And we'll be talking about my favorite genre to listen to while I'm cooking: cozy mystery. Until then, thank you so much for listening, and remember, you deserved this break.

Thank you for making space in your mind for the muse today. Writing Break is hosted by America’s Editor and produced by Allon Media with technical direction by Gus Aviles. Visit writingbreak.com or contact us at podcast@writingbreak.com.