I'm currently writing this novel, which mostly centers around a thirteen year girl with a complicated relationship with her parents. Your average 11-16 year old kind of book I suppose. But I've recently decided to extend on another relationship she has with someone just slightly older. He's a sort of aquaintance at first, in a relationship with another male, but he has homophobic parents. He talks the main character through a difficult time and she later pretends to be his girlfriend in front of his parents. However, it turns out that he has some genuine feelings for her and reveals he believes he is actually bisexual not gay. I've had various idea's about how their relationship escalates, but I'm wondering how far I can actually take the physical side of their relationship. Whether I could have it getting to the extent of them sleeping together or whether it should stop at a little touchy feely stuff. Bearing in mind that this is ideally a book for 11-16 year olds and at this point in the story the main character is no older than 14.
I mostly read quite a bit of teen fiction, although I've read some adult fiction as well.
One of the teen writers seem to target those of about 12-14 and the relationships are quite mild in content ie, there might be a lot of kissing and holding hands and romantic speeches but that's more or less as far as it goes.
Another of the teen writers seems to target those of 14-18. In her earlier writing all of her characters were 14-15, and the relationships certainly go into the subject of the odd quick feel and the possibility that it could go further. Whereas two of her later books, may be targeted at the same kind of audience, but deal with college students who are definitely sleeping together.
I've read other teen fiction by other authors the level of intensity in some of the books varies throughout all of them.
The reason why I was asking the question was partially because of all this, but partially because, several times, it's been brought to my attention that I'm being old fashioned by keeping my stories so clean and acting shocked by the idea of two fourteen year olds sleeping together. It's also occured to me, from watching Hollyoaks, that such things do happen at young ages so maybe it could be an interesting subject to write about.
Thanks for all the help guys, appreciate it :)
11-16 is quite a wide age range.
Books that 10-12 year olds read tend to have main characters a few years older than the readers, i.e. 13-14.
Most 16 year olds will probably have read past teen/young adult books and be reading adult books (I don't mean adult as in top shelf in a newsagent).
I think the key is the age of the characters rather than who it's aimed at. Judy Blume's Forever was graphic but it was read by huge numbers of 14/ 15 year olds... the characters were older. There's no way it would have got through the publisher and parent gate keepers if they had been younger.