Middle Grade’s Got Heart

by literary agent Joanna Stampfel-Volpe

When I was in 4th grade, I was determined to save the environment. I created my own nature magazine, I started a club at school (well, during recess–it wasn’t official or anything), and I even petitioned for aide. Yup, that’s right. Nine-year-old Joanna petitioned the local government for aide. I distinctly remember going to a town meeting with my two best friends and my best friend’s mom. I had written out an entire speech. My mom let me wear my red cowboy boots because I thought they would make me look important. And when it came to my turn to speak, I stood with my speech in hand. My fingers were trembling. And I gave an impassioned reason as to why we needed to save the environment, and to do so, we would have to start in our very own town and clean up all of the trash in Brady Park.

I often get asked by writers what the biggest difference is between Middle Grade and Young Adult. There are a number of answers to this that I would agree with, but to me personally, the biggest different is the “heart.”

I’m not talking about romance or highly emotional scenes (all genres can have that). I’m talking about that feeling that you can have only when you’re too young to have experienced adulthood yet. When you think, no–you know–that you can make a difference. You can change the world (and when I say world, it can be the world at-large, or the world in a more insular way…whatever “the world” is to the character).

Just look at characters like Lucky (The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Patron) and Bud (Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis). Their worlds may be small, but they’ve taken their destiny into their own hands by going on their respective missions. They’ve set out to change their world. Lucky responds to the signs of a “Higher Power” and decides to run away when she is worried that her guardian no longer wants her, and Bud escapes the orphanage and hits the road to find his father during in this Depression-era story, and he is convinced he knows just where to find him. They both set out determined and convinced that they could do these things–that they can change their worlds.

The funny thing is–they do end up changing their worlds. Though not how they initially imagined. You guys will just have to read those stories to find out.

When you reach a certain age or experience certain events, your view starts to change. You start to realize your limitations as far as changing the world. You start to realize that you might not be able to change it, but you can certainly find your place in it. And that is when the shift starts to move to a young adult sensibility. Who am I? Where do I fit in? This doesn’t mean that you can’t be a part of or the leader of great change, but there is a more realistic sense of how it can be done.

Of course there are those rare book series in which we get to see the characters actually grow from one stage to the next. If you’ll notice, Harry’s motivation and how he battles Voldemort changes over time. At first he’s excited for the adventure of Hogwarts, scared of the danger, but he goes in head first with a bit of reckless abandon. As the series progresses and definitely by the end, his fight against Voldemort is more calculated. He starts to realize what the defeat would mean and what his role would have to be in order to do it. And he understands the consequences of his choices. He became more adult.

I never did get the help I wanted to clean up Brady Park. But my dad did take me there with rubber gloves and some garbage bags and we did as best we could ourselves.

But 10 years later, in college, I joined a service sorority. As a team, we joined other hard workers in soup kitchens, family clinics, animal hospitals, women’s shelters–and we did our part in changing the world. So just because I didn’t get to save the environment at nine-years-old, doesn’t mean those experiences haven’t stayed with me and shaped me. And in a way, I’m perpetually that little girl.

I hope that never changes.

Joanna Stampfel-Volpe has been a bookseller at Barnes & Noble, an editorial assistant with independent publisher, Blue Martin Publications, and has worked as an assistant and junior agent at FinePrint Literary Management before accepting a full-time agent position with Nancy Coffey Literary & Media Representation in January of 2008. Since then she has sold a number of exciting projects, including Kody Keplinger’s The DUFF, Allan Woodrow’s The Rotten Adventures of Zachary Ruthless, Lee Nichols Haunting Emma novels, Veronica Roth’s Divergent, and Erica O’Rourke’s Torn series. Nancy Coffey Literary is a full-service agency and active members of SCBWI, RWA, and AAR.