Q&A Excerpt: Greg van Eekhout

Greg van Eekhout was a 2026 guest lecturer for the Your Personal Odyssey Writing Workshop. Greg is the author of eight middle-grade novels and four adult novels as well as many stories published in various magazines and anthologies. His work has been nominated for the Nebula Award, the Andre Norton Award, the Dragon Award, and has won the California Independent Bookseller’s Alliance Golden Poppy Award for best middle-grade novel. He’s taught writing at a number of workshops and conferences, including the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. Greg lives in San Diego with his wife and dogs. Website: www.writingandsnacks.com

In this excerpt transcribed from a question-and-answer session, Greg talks about voice in middle grade (MG) versus young adult (YA) fiction and how to deal with parental figures in middle grade novels.

QUESTION: In terms of middle grade voice versus YA voice, do you have any suggestions for if you find yourself straying voice-wise between those? Do you have any way of telling when you’re going through a story—first draft, say—and you’re like, “Hey, maybe this is more YA, more MG”?

ANSWER: To me, it’s what drives the voice, and that’s the overall general attitude. And YA voice is often cynical. It is often angry because even though teens are less constrained than middle graders, they’re still constrained. What they’re constrained by is society and injustice and oppression. So I feel when my characters—and I tend to write characters that are kind of cynical, or at least ironic and sarcastic—when it starts to edge into cynicism, that feels very YA to me. When it feels still innocent—no, not innocent, but hopeful and optimistic—that, to me, is a core value of middle grade.

Other than that, it’s just vocabulary. And vocabulary—there’s no real way to tell other than gut feeling and feedback from people that read a lot of middle grade, like agents, editors and, if you don’t have those, beta readers who are really well embedded in middle grade.

In terms of vocabulary, I used to do things like try to run Lexile scores to see what grade my vocabulary was at. That used to be a built-in feature of Microsoft Word, and now you have to actually pay for it, so I don’t do that anymore. And I don’t know if that was ever really the right way to go anyway. 

But I would just watch for that, the attitude … For example, eighth graders—when I do school visits and I see the kids on camera or in the class, the sixth and seventh graders are open. They are enthusiastic. They are excited. The eighth and ninth graders, they may be, but they will conceal that, and they will sneer and yawn and manspread. And that is not the kind of thing that middle grade readers do. So if you know teens, and you know middle grade, you will know the difference between middle grade and teen.

QUESTION: You mentioned parents in middle grade novel settings … how do you approach writing parental figures and relationships with children without limiting the kids’ agency in a way that doesn’t allow them to go on the adventure?

ANSWER: Well, first I’m going to point out Sal and Gabi Break the Universe by Carlos Hernandez, and one of the beautiful things about that book is it’s so much focused on families. So the adults—and it’s not just the parents, it’s grandparents, it’s aunts and uncles—they are very, very, very present in the book. And it doesn’t take the kids sneaking around, evading parental restrictions, to get them to take agency. It’s just, there’s things in that book that they have to do because they are forced into that situation, they have no other choice, or they’re the best equipped to do it out of the entire family unit. So you can keep the parents in. You don’t have to obey them. 

In terms of getting rid of the parents, I’ve had everything from they send the kid away for the summer to an eccentric old uncle who’s not really much into supervision and childrearing; that was an easy one. Having a kid being the only human being left alive in the universe; that was very easy. Having the absence of the parent being a problem that the kid has to solve because she was relocated by “the corporation” and now the kids have to go find her—that was really easy to solve.

It got difficult when I wanted the kids to have to evade the parents, but they were parents who were very present in the kid’s life and very focused on keeping that kid protected. And that was a good challenge because finding the balance between parents who are really active in the kid’s life and want to stay that way and kids who really need to break that parental control—that’s when you depend on the old things like crawling out the window at night, putting a pillow and stuff under the blanket. The classics.

So I guess what I’m trying to say: it’s another thing where you can do anything. You can have the parents be present on the page frequently in the kid’s life. But of course, kids and parents—kids and adults—are living separate lives even when they’re together, and that’s a way for the kids to show agency. 

Or just get rid of them. Get rid of every adult and every other human being on the planet. You can do that too. 

So you’ve got lots of options in terms of getting the kid away from the parent. And no matter what, as long as the kid is in a situation where‚ not just they want agency, but because this is fiction, they find themselves in a situation where they have to choose to have agency, even if they don’t necessarily want to. Those are also possibilities. 

NOTE: This transcript has been edited for clarity.