A tight-knit community of young-adult writers who belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has yielded smashes like “Twilight.” But religious doctrine can clash with creative freedoms.
A tightknit community of young adult writers who belong to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has yielded smashes like “Twilight.” But religious doctrine can clash with creative freedoms.
To Laurel Scott, a senior from Sachse, Texas, the book’s main characters — Jolly, a 17-year-old single mother of two, and LaVaughn, their 14-year-old babysitter — seemed rather adult. Their lives were difficult, and yet, when they got upset, they didn’t let their emotions erupt. “Neither protagonist acted like what I would expect a teenager to act,” Scott said. “The story just didn’t read to me like a Y.A. novel.
The literary scene in Utah fosters a workaday approach to fiction writing, akin to that of the songwriting rooms of Nashville, Tenn., and it has produced some juggernauts. Stephenie Meyer, whose “Twilight” series has sold over 100 million copies, is a Latter-day Saint and BYU graduate. So is science fiction and fantasy author. His Kickstarter campaign to self-publish four novels he wrote during the pandemic raised more than $41 million last year.
If outsiders regard sci-fi and fantasy as incongruous with the faith, many writers who are church members don’t. “Fantasy is often a way that you can explore ideas of, you know, trust in something bigger,” said Rosalyn Eves, an author of several Y.A. novels that blend fantasy and romance with historical fiction. “I’ve always felt like religious faith and belief in miracles is not all that different from magic in some ways.
Every author said that a key reason Latter-day Saints tend to write for teenagers and children is a church-encouraged distaste for explicit material that can be found in adult fiction. They prefer to write books that are “clean” — the church’s term for content without graphic sex or violence. It’s one reason Mull sticks to middle grade, he said: “I’m like a little kid that way. I like an old-timey classic adventure story.
George Q. Cannon, a writer from England, was among the first Latter-day Saints to arrive in the Salt Lake Valley, in 1847. He became the church’s chief storyteller in the West. He edited the Deseret News in Salt Lake City. He started a weekly church newspaper in San Francisco. Deseret’s main imprint publishes Scripture, church curriculum, inspirational guides for missionaries, self-help, biographies and histories. Shadow Mountain, the general trade imprint, has a different mission: to publish “values based” fiction and nonfiction that may appeal to readers who don’t share the same faith.
Shadow Mountain has had more than 10 books on one of The New York Times’ bestseller lists. Many are by Mull. Another is “The Romney Family Table,” a cookbook by Ann Romney.Since the “Twilight”-fueled boom of the 2000s, it has become more common for contemporary Y.A. to contain sex and violence. At The King’s English, a popular independent bookstore in Salt Lake City, steamy novels like “A Court of Thorns and Roses,” by Sarah J.
In fact, six of the authors contacted for this article responded that they were no longer active in the church. Mette Ivie Harrison, a writer who said her work was flagged by a church committee, in Syracuse on, Aug. 24, 2023. A tightknit community of young adult writers who belong to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has yielded smashes like "Twilight." But religious doctrine can clash with creative freedoms.said the church’s opposition to gay rights was one of many factors.
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