Writing digital culture into the young adult novel

This article investigates how creative fiction writing has responded to the problem of representing the multimodal landscape of digital culture in young adult literature (YAL). Twenty years ago, Dresang’s theory of Radical Change presented a new breed of digitally engaged YAL that addressed changes in thinking about digital technologies and how young people interacted with them. Nikolajeva predicted the phenomenon three years earlier arguing for YAL coming of age as a literary form. In this article, I argue for the necessity of this work to continue, from the perspective of author-practitioner, and for the importance for authors to develop an expanded writing practice that foregrounds formal experiment that both reflects and critiques the thematic concerns and practices of digital culture. I begin by presenting some context for the work, in the form of a brief discussion of formal experimentation within selected YAL, and then go on to discuss my methods and approaches. This creative writing practice research has been undertaken during the course of Ph.D. study that has explored combining dramatic and multimodal writing techniques into a traditional prose fiction text, in this case a novel, aimed for YAL readers.