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The difference between YA and Adult fiction is perspective and exhaustion, say authors Veronica Roth and Marie Lu

The Divergent and Red City authors shared how they felt about transitioning from YA to Adult fiction and what separates the two.

Veronica Roth ECCC 2024 — Image credit: ReedPop

News by Trent Cannon, Senior Contributing writer

Published on Mon Oct 13 2025

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Genres in literature are rarely neatly defined. There is always crossover and the blurring of lines, even between literary categories as well-established as Young Adult and Adult fiction. Veronica Roth and Marie Lu know something about both genres, having written both YA and Adult books, and they’ve explained that the real difference between them comes down to the perspective of the main character, as well as how tired they are.

This came from the Veronica Roth and Marie Lu panel at New York Comic Con 2025, where the two chatted about their careers, their books, and their writing process. The topic of transitioning from writing YA fiction to writing Adult fiction came up, and the two admitted they struggled to find the right tone and voice for their characters in Adult fiction. It took both of them a while to figure out and it had to do with how much perspective the characters have.

“When I YA, the limitation of your perspective in life lends itself to this, like, immediacy of story,” Marie Lu explained. “Where, you know, Adult and YA could both be about a young person experiencing the exact same event, but the difference is in YA, at least for me, you’re experiencing everything very immediately. Like, Tris is like, ‘This is happening to me right now,’ you know? These are the emotions gripping me right now. Everything is very present because that's what you experience as a young person. You don’t have the perspective of 40 years in the future to look back on any of that. You’re just experiencing the thing. And I think with Red City, I knew that I was trying to tell a story about, kind of what you were mentioning, like, the ramifications of a thing. You know? The aftermath. The consequences of a decision.”

Veronica Roth added that it also comes from something that only adults tend to have to deal with – that constant fatigue that hits us when we’re grown up. “You know, just like… I think I knew that the adult voice would come from the character’s bitterness. Like, there’s, you know, you can have a sarcastic, world-weary teenager. That’s very normal. But, like a kind of like deep cynicism that comes from fatigue is such an adult feeling, you know? Just, like… we’re all exhausted.”

She’s not wrong there.

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