The second one sounds more interesting to me. If it’s up for a vote that’s my choice.
You’re getting a lot of belligerent snark in this thread, which is probably annoying, but one thing people do notice from your GD posts is that you don’t seem to care about writing in such a way that you will be understood. Remember, people cannot read your mind. You have to make things clear to your audience. If your book is confusing and impossible to follow and people have to guess at what you mean your book will be a failure both commercially and artistically.
Also, yes, please quote the people you are replying to.
This, of course. Yes, you are writing fiction-but if the historical background is wrong and the reader finds out, said reader will be too distracted to become emotionally attached to your characters. You mentioned adding paranormal/fantasy elements to your stories, which is all very well and good…as long as the non-fantasy elements of the story are still somewhat accurate. In the Harry Potter books, notice how the author kept the details of Muggle life accurate? If it was “just fiction” why did she bother to come up with the concept of “Hogwarts”, a place mystically hidden from the mundane world? It would have been much easier to place it in London and call it “Oxford” and claim that this “Oxford” was a school for kids with magic talents. The trouble is, people know what the real Oxford is and how it operates, just as they know(or can easily find out) what the Circus Maximus was and how it operated. Proper suspension of disbelief in fiction involves tweaking here and there, and only when necessary.
I don’t really want to be a spoil sport, or be unduly negative, but I don’t think I’d choose to read either of them. I have read quite a few YA novels, and I suppose I’m getting tired of them. Neither of your story ideas have anything unusual or interesting enough for me to choose them over the myriad other stories out there.
My biggest complaints (about YA stories in general): predictable story lines, plot holes, or characters acting stupidly.
What is the idea that sets these stories apart from all of the other YA novels out there? I guess I’d like to see very intriguing ideas, but neither of these has anything new that I can see.
Hmm… maybe I’ll write a YA novel about a kid born through atificial insemination, who has the opportunity to meet up with his half siblings around the country. Maybe even with the donor… It would be like the adopted-kid-finds-birth-parents/siblings, but with that new angle, a twist. Developing the characters of the siblings and how their environments have influenced the differences among them seems rich with possibility.
Here’s a secret to all creative work: all ideas are terrible. The premise of Super Mario is a fat vaguely Italian-American man who is also a plumber eating mushrooms to become big and save a princess from a spiky turtle. The Fault in Our Stars is watching the story of two kids with cancer slowly die.
Some ideas are extra terrible, to be sure, and you need to be an increasingly good writer to even think of attempting them (“this is my alt history book about how Hitler was misunderstood”), but even good ideas are nothing. You need to do something. You can never predict how good your idea is until you sit down and try to execute it. And most certainly, you will not predict becoming the next Harry Potter or Hunger Games or Twilight. The next big YA book is probably going to be about a boy who makes friends with a sentient toilet and fights an evil poison oak tree. Okay, probably not, but you’re not going to get very far simply trying to cash in on a cool premise. You can make amazing works out of terrible premises and terrible books out of amazing ones.
So pick either idea, write the book, realize what you wrote is absolutely inconceivably terrible, ask yourself why it didn’t work, and then revise it until it works. You can make a good or a terrible book out of either premise. Publishers may add on additional constraints, but a flimsy two line premise is a starting point. A great starting point, but worthless until you write it.
Now, there may be a caveat that your two line premise needs to be a bit good, because even if you crapped out Tolstoy-caliber work you may alienate publishers with a sufficiently bad or non-mainstream premise, but when you have two relatively standard premises like this, it’s kind of coin-tossy when we don’t know how you’d execute each one. Especially since your two-line summary will likely deviate from your initial two-line premise.
A lot of us are saying which premise sounds cool, but when it comes down to it – who knows? You need to crank out a chapter, a character outline, something, before anybody really knows how it will turn out.
Now I’m off to go continue overengineering my design documents and not listen to my own advice.