Are they a flash in the literary pan or an emerging genre?

Publishing trends come and go, but few hang around long enough to become genres in their own right. The evolution of these trends and genres—take the verse novel, for example—is murky at best, hardly linear in its progression, and can often only be seen in hindsight. Moreover, the innovators, the pioneers in these new forms, often respond to their own muse rather than some previously conceived notion of form.

For example, in an interview with Roger Sutton in the May/June 2001 Horn Book, Virginia Euwer Wolff balked at calling Make Lemonade (Holt, 1993) and True Believer (S & S, 2001) poetry because she was not consciously writing in that form, but she was more than happy to credit Faulkner as an inspiration for the multiple narratives of Bat 6 (Scholastic, 1998), which just serves to underscore the tenuous, but symbiotic relationship that is part inspiration, part imitation, and part innovation. We could continue to argue whether these are verse novels, but one thing is indisputable: Make Lemonade opened our eyes to the possibility of the verse novel and made us see that poetry could be effectively used to tell stories. The Newbery Medal was bestowed upon Karen Hesse’s Out of the Dust (Scholastic, 1997) before the decade was over and a subgenre was born almost overnight. A trend no longer, the verse novel has indelibly altered the landscape of children’s and young adult publishing.

So what’s the next verse novel? Which trend now on the horizon appears to be making its bid to become a permanent fixture in the publishing industry? Perhaps the most exciting new trend is the emergence of the script novel, a novel that incorporates techniques of playwriting, screenwriting, or some kind of performance art such as poetry or monologue. The past year saw no less than six books in this mold, varying in the degree to which they incorporated the technique, but all of them exciting and intriguing in their experimentation, especially in juxtaposition to one another. All of these books are memorable for their use of spoken word or writing that closely approximates natural speech and lends a sense of immediacy to the narrative.

Kathe Koja’s Talk (Farrar, 2005) and Sharon Creech’s Replay (HarperCollins, 2005) are fairly traditional novels, but both main characters are involved in school plays, and scenes from those plays are incorporated into the narrative in fairly large and frequent chunks. In addition, Replay has the entire play appended, which not only allows readers to see the script in context, but also serves as an invitation for performance.

On the other end of the spectrum are books conceived and written for the stage. These include Paul Fleischman’s Zap (Candlewick, 2005) and David Almond’s Two Plays (2005), which includes a dramatization of the prose novel Skellig (1999, both Delacorte) as well as an original short play. Julius Lester’s Day of Tears (Hyperion, 2005) represents something in between, a novel in dialogue as the subtitle proclaims, or a reader’s theater script, if you will. Drawing his inspiration from his days as a radio-show host and ostensibly from his research of oral histories, Lester opens our eyes to the possibilities of the script novel as much as any other book that has come before it. The story, with its blend of monologues and scenes, takes wild leaps in time and place, and yet creates an immediacy and a connection with readers.

Linda Sue Park’s Project Mulberry (Clarion, 2005) includes scripted conversations of a metafictional nature between the author and her protagonist throughout the standard narrative. A final novel, Norma Fox Mazer’s What I Believe (Harcourt, 2005)—a collection of poems, journal entries, letters, lists, monologues, and dialogues—may at first glance seem to have little in common with the others, but it is a script novel because the eclectically cobbled form lends itself to performance just as much as the others do.

Why so many this past year? And perhaps more importantly, where have they come from? First of all, plays have always been an important part of the secondary school curriculum. Most of us don’t make it through those years without being exposed to The Glass Menagerie, Romeo and Juliet, Inherit the Wind, A Raisin in the Sun, Our Town, The Crucible, The Miracle Worker, and Anne Frank, to name the most common. Drama productions in middle and high school further introduce students to plays and musicals. Moreover, recent decades have seen the emergence of reader’s theater as a valued teaching methodology in both elementary and middle schools, and there is hardly a textbook that does not feature reader’s theater scripts. High school students have always been familiar with the form and conventions of scripts, but now more than ever, younger children enjoy the pleasures and challenges of the form.

There just hasn’t been much in the trade literature to complement the textbooks. Some of the more notable early offerings have included Paul Zindel’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play, The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1971), which young adult literature has adopted in light of Zindel’s subsequent career as a young adult author, and Donald Gallo’s Center Stage (1990, both HarperCollins), a collection of one-act plays for teen readers and actors, which unfortunately hasn’t generated enough sales for a second volume.

But then, just over a dozen years ago, things started to get really interesting, as a small handful of authors began to experiment with this nascent form, yet further proof of the dramatic transformation described by Eliza Dresang in her book Radical Change: Books for Youth in a Digital Age (H.W. Wilson, 1991). Dresang suggested that growing up in the digitial age has changed the way young people process information and, as a result, has opened the door to new forms, multiple perspectives, and expanding boundaries of subject matter. Certainly, Avi gave us a pair of innovative novels in Nothing but the Truth (1991), a montage of written and oral communications, and Who Was That Masked Man, Anyway? (1992, both Scholastic), written entirely in dialogue, recalling the radio plays of a bygone era.

If we can recognize Avi as one pioneer of the script novel then surely Paul Fleischman is another. Form and performance are twin themes that dominate his body of work, and as he moved from reader’s theater pieces, such as Joyful Noise (1988), Bull Run (1993), and Seedfolks (1997, all HarperCollins) to script novels such as Mind’s Eye (Holt, 1999) and Seek (2001), to a performance-art novel in Breakout (2004, both Cricket), it seems inevitable that he would eventually give us a bona fide play. Zap is a play about plays in which the actors scramble to keep up with the constant segue between theatrical pieces as a mysterious viewer calls the shots by zapping a remote control.

No discussion of formative script novels would be complete without the books of Walter Dean Myers. Like Avi and Fleischman, Myers has always been interested in a variety of forms and genres, and he has given us arguably the most brilliant and sophisticated incarnation of the script novel yet in Monster (HarperCollins, 1999), written in a form that alternates between screenplay and journal entries. Then, too, the multiple voices in his recent book of poetry, Here in Harlem (Holiday House, 2004), lend themselves nicely to a reader’s theater performance. Nikki Grimes’s Bronx Masquerade (Dial, 2002) likewise utilizes poems in multiple voices, but the addition of an emcee further underscores the performance possibilities of the piece, and perhaps points toward the type of experimentation we saw last year in What I Believe.

A couple of years ago we saw a pair of script novels inspired not so much by performance, but by technology: Lauren Myracle’s ttyl (Abrams, 2004), written in instant messaging, and Ellen Wittlinger’s Heart on My Sleeve (S & S, 2004), written primarily in e-mails. And this is to say nothing of the novels that now regularly incorporate some form of Internet correspondence. It’s also prevalent nowadays to use script as a flourish rather than a form, something to embellish a more traditional narrative. Who can forget, for example, the witty imagined dialogue between Melinda and her teacher in Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak (Farrar, 1999), John’s equally sardonic interview of a potential stepfather in Ellen Wittlinger’s Hard Love (S & S, 1999), or, more recently, the philosophical banter between Debbie and Patty in Lynne Rae Perkins’s Criss Cross (HarperCollins/Greenwillow, 2005)?

Children and young adults have a great deal of exposure to conventional plays and reader’s theater and even more exposure to computer-based scripts, such as instant messages and blogs. Their enthusiasm for these new forms is matched by authors, editors, and publishers who are increasing willing and able to deliver them. Many children’s and young adult authors have scriptwriting experience, such as Louis Sachar and Kate DiCamillo, who both wrote screenplay adaptations of their beloved novels, or Adam Rapp, already an established playwright when he embarked upon a second career as a young adult author. At the very least, it’s time to revisit the idea of another collection of short one-act plays or monologues or performance pieces. Script novels, in all their variations and permutations, are exciting and innovative, and dynamic. Will they continue to evolve and meld together into a new subgenre or pass into oblivion? Only time will tell.