Post History
In a comment to my post here, Cyn mentions wishing to avoid implying that the characters might all die, because she's writing for a mid-grade audience. Which made me wonder. I remember reading Th...
#4: Attribution notice removed
by
System
·
2019-12-12T21:57:37Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/43738 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#3: Attribution notice added
by
System
·
2019-12-08T11:25:15Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/43738 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
In a comment to my post [here](https://writing.stackexchange.com/a/43731/14704), Cyn mentions wishing to avoid implying that the characters might all die, because she's writing for a mid-grade audience. Which made me wonder. I remember reading _The Hobbit_ when I was nine or ten - in the mid-grade range. There's danger there - the orcs, the dragon, the more orcs - they would gladly kill the whole party. And I cried when Thorin died. But I also loved the book, in part _because_ it touched me and made me cry. At the same time, there's a difference between a character dying (a single confined event) and a persisting sense of danger maintained throughout a story. Then again, would a child even sense the danger? I remember being very confident that whatever the characters faced, whatever the odds against them, _of course_ they'll make it and everything would be fine. (Thorin dying was quite a shock.) **What level of threat is appropriate for mid-grade literature?** Danger of _what_, how much danger, how can it be expressed? (While the idea for the question came from a specific comment, I do not mean to imply that any particular writer should necessarily write things one way or another. I'm trying to understand the whole issue.)
#1: Imported from external source
by
System
·
2019-03-19T00:46:44Z (over 5 years ago)
Original score: 13