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This is the first in a series about character development for characters in Young Adult Contemporary Fiction. In the series, we'll talk about their drive/motivators, goals, research, and more. These are simply my tips and tricks of the trade. Every writer has a different process, and I want to learn about yours!
Today, we'll talk about my first step in getting to know my characters. --- On Instagram (stephanielogue_writes), I’ve been talking about my characters in The Right Kind of Light and my current WIP a lot. A lot. So much, in fact, that I’ve had people commenting and asking questions about Ginny, Lou, Greta, and Annabella. The questions have all been fabulous (I feel so famous!), but the most thought-provoking question for me, as the author of these four women, is: how did I develop them? Friends and fellow writers: I named them first. Ginny came to me in a hazy idea at an Ed Sheeran concert in 2015. Its the last summer before college, my subconscious said. Missing her best friend. Fell in love with best friend’s ex. Works at a place like Storybook Land. Got it. Got it. Got it. Brett drove us home after I finished fangirling over Ed, and I grabbed the first notebook I found and wrote down as much as I could remember from whatever I saw during “Photograph”. Somehow, even in that moment, Ginny’s name was Ginny. My paternal grandmother’s name was Virginia, and I always knew that I wanted to name either a daughter or a character Ginny. That one was easy. The remaining three girls were…(mostly) easy too. Here’s how Lou, Greta, and Annabella came to be: Lou: As Ginny’s ex best friend, I knew they were polar opposites. The kind of people who would push each other to be their best, and maybe bring out each other’s worst when they weren’t cohesive anymore. She needed a harder name. Something with implied edge. I’m a sucker for a.) old school names and b.) names that belong in a traditional sense to a man or a woman. Louise = Lou. Bad ass, strong, take-no-shit lady. Greta: I knew she was sweet as pie and desperate to find her first love, but with a spine of steel. “Pearl of a girl” is a phrase that I heard in a song lyric a gazillion years ago. I don’t remember what song (and now its going to haunt me all night.) Turned out Greta means “pearl”. Its ALSO an old name. (Double check in the pro column: Greta is a name for a supporting character in a series of stories I wrote in junior high and high school. A tip of the hat to my…self, I guess.) Annabella: AB for short, but only her best friend Ed calls her that. Annabella is a Latina and comes from a traditional Catholic family, so I wanted something respectful but fitting that I could see her parents perhaps choosing. The name means “grace” which is a larger plot point in my WIP. Here’s the thing about characters though: They’re gonna tell you what’s actually up about everything, including their names. Lou, for instance. She’s the most delicate little sunflower I’ve ever encountered in my life, and I have a golden retriever that’s afraid of laundry baskets, empty storm sewers, and open refrigerator doors. When I was writing The Right Kind of Light, I didn’t realize how her motivators would evolve past Ginny. And Annabella: this woman has had two name changes, her direction changed more times than I can recall, stripped of her nickname only to get it back, and her girlfriend’s name changed too – when I realized their names rhymed and that was just too weird in all the “ella”. My only goal for all these four women is that I continue to channel honesty and sincerity into their hearts. Girls aren’t rainbows and butterflies. We’re eye rolls and loud voices and periods. We drink too much alcohol and coffee and we’re vain and go to sleep with toothpaste on zits. We say stupid shit to our best friends, we cheat on our boyfriends, and we hook up in backseats at parties by lakes. But we’re heart, and we’re hope, and I will be damned if I contribute to any conversation about young adult girls and women in college in any way that isn’t as truthful as I can make it. So when I write a line that seems to manufactured or trendy (or wannabe trendy), it hits the slush pile. I can usually hear her, whoever’s head I’m inside at that very second, tell me they’d never say that. And my god, as a writer, its so helpful. Yours in Devotion to Voices in Your Head, Stephanie PS – there’s SO MUCH more to character development. Another trick I like is to make playlists for each book or piece I’m working on. Head on over to my Instagram to learn more.
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I have a three-year-old, that I usually refer to as The Preschooler in social media arenas. He’s charming. He’s particular. He loves making us laugh. He has a gleam in his eye that does not quit, and he’s inherited not one, but two styles of stubbornness from his parents who thrive in their persistence that they are always right.
And he’s not a fan of sleeping alone. He never has been. It’s just the way the cookie crumbles and also – if you complain about your kid wanting cuddles in the night, does that make you a monster? Absolutely not. But it also doesn’t make my crazy for meeting him for his cuddles. It does, however, make me very, very, very doggedly tired. I’m writing this very, very, very doggedly tired. My husband and I trade off on the nighttime cuddles (for we are both greedy for time, even if its unconscious, and also both need solid sleep – it works for us) and last night, it was my night to slip into the Preschooler’s car and bus themed sheet set and hope to god sleep came easily. It did not. I knew it wouldn’t, as I was laying there at 1:30, watching Mr. Star Puppy’s tummy stars circulate on the ceiling in a glowing blue haze without my glasses. But the larger part of my problem was that I was running through my to-do list for today. Work deadlines. This blog entry (the theme of which I couldn’t even remember in my sleep deprivation so I couldn’t even mentally draft it). What are my social media posts this week, again? Wait – are we talking work social media or writing social media? Oh ya – I’m a writer. I need to start Part III of the book. Okay – think about that. MC does this, that, then this….wait, is that in the outline? Oh, crap I didn’t send out the outline for that thing at work. And on and on. And on. And now we’re here. Eight hours later, the Preschooler safely at daycare, me procrastinating putting on pants to go to the office. My head is fuzzy. I was going to write something lovely about a checklist, I think. Say something eloquent about dividing time, slicing days into perfectly reserved chunks of day to get Work, Parenting, Writing done. My god, how I wish it worked like that. But it doesn’t. At least not at this point in my life. I’m also incredibly terrible at flying by the seat of my pants. The second I'm asked to switch directions from whatever I’m thinking about, annoyance flares, and I’m distracted by the burning in my lungs and THEN by whatever took me from whatever valuable headspace I’d been cultivating. It’s a struggle right now. Maybe it’s the weather. Marketing tip: you’re supposed to leave your reader with a Call to Action at the end of a blog or a post. I do it all day, every day, in emails, in verbal discussions, on all my social media platforms. No matter my audience, it seems I’m always yelling down a real or proverbial hall a list of something that needs to be done. Maybe that’s my biggest problem. But you, dear reader – here’s what you need to do after reading this. Look up from your phone. Take a deep breath. One of those deep, life-affirming gulps of air that you can’t believe you had the lung space to house. Cherish it. Think about how fulfilling it feels, rumbling about in here. How cold it was going down, how it forced your shoulders back, how your chin may be tilted to the sky. Think about what makes you whole, even if you don’t feel it. Because as soon as you exhale, and you must for biology and because we can’t live in the divinity forever, you’ll do what I can’t today. And that’s do anything other than just yearn for a nap. Yours in exhaustion and big dreams (and appreciation of the tools to make those big dreams possible), Stephanie  I start with a quote from a guy who was wildly brilliant and cross-sector with that brilliance. So I feel like he knows something about art.
“Art is never finished, only abandoned.” Leonardo da Vinci Uplifting quote to really warm you up to writing today, right? You know that piece you just finished? The one that took up your heart, soul, and brain space for months? Time to abandon it! Okay. Abandon is a big, scary word. And for this writer, not the best fit. Perhaps…transfer its energy. Give it to the community. Time to (and I’m sorry parents) just…let it go. I struggle with this concept. Calling a writing piece done is a complicated endeavor. How do you know when its done? On the flip side, say you know it’s done – how do you leave it alone? Intellectually, I know my piece done. It’s gone through a beta reader – usually more than one, it’s spell checked (ten gazillion times) and if I’m brave enough, its even got my mother’s stamp of approval on it. And yet. I tinker. During intense quarantine last spring, I picked up a short story I hadn’t touched in literally years and rewrote the entire thing to present tense. Once the tense was switched, I had to find bits that had fallen out of sense and shove them back into formation. The word count got tighter, which is almost always a win, but seriously. Seriously? Seriously. I should have been working on my WIP. I could have been washing my hair, getting caught up on overdue tasks at work, or, like, doing dishes occasionally. Rather, I used it as a procrastination tool to skirt around what I should have been doing in that moment. So how do you stop the tinkering?
Listen, we all know that writing and publishing is never entirely done until the ink is wet. Even then – we live in a digital era. Sometimes there’s no ink at all. I promise you that once I hit post on this blog post, I have the liberty to read it again in a few hours, and if I find something I hate, I’ll change it. I’m better at letting go than I used to be. Not perfect, not at all. But who is? Yours in not-yet-abandoned-work, Stephanie Three weekends ago, I spent 2.5 days reading All the Bright Places by Jennifer Niven. That half day was a Monday morning when I took vacation from work, got my kid ready for school, and sent my husband off with my son so I could crawl back into bed and finish the book.
I had to. I HAD TO. But you should know this isn’t a book review. A quick recap of the book, with no spoilers: Violet Markey is a teenager, mourning her recently deceased sister, and struggling with mental health issues that lead to her to the top of a clock tower on her high school campus. Theodore Finch is a classmate, unsettled, unhappy, beautifully-eloquent boy who is also at the top of the tower, toying with the option of jumping. For a brief moment – the briefest - they save each other. This could be another YA book (or Netflix movie, as it is), but … its not. Violet and Theo have stayed with me a long time, longer than a lot of characters stay with me after I race through their pages, appreciate their voices, they’re author’s lyrical words. Finch, and especially Violet, became real to me in a way that I dream of my characters becoming real in my readers heads. And here’s why: They ARE real. As I’ve been out, living my life the last few weeks, I see teenage girls walking down the street near my house, grasping hands over black ice on sidewalks, huddled in Sherpa jackets. Long shiny hair waving along spines, short tight curls sticking up to the clouds, muffled only by beanies. Teenagers in Starbucks, midrifs bare even though its February and South Dakota. Glasses slipping down noses as they drink iced coffee – I wonder what their drink of choice is. Talking with friends, fingertips to throats in laughs, chins pointed to the ceiling as they giggle. I picture the girls in their classrooms, eating dinner with their families, aimlessly texting their dumb, dumb don’t-they-know-how-lucky-they-are boyfriends/best friends/siblings/co-workers. What are the girls thinking? How do they know how to look so effortlessly cool? Someone’s listening to her, right? When she opens her mouth to share the real problems in her head – that dumb, dumb boyfriend, the lost sister, the clueless Mom, the bad grade, the guy who catcalled her on the street where I saw her – somebody’s listening, right? Please, god, someone be listening. Violet has the picture-perfect life on paper. Perfect, cool parents. Friends who will do in the meantime, as she waits for college. A successful website she runs with her sister. And it crashes down in the most tragic way possible. And there at the edge of the world, at the edge of everything, there’s Finch. “The thing I realize is, that it’s not what you take, it’s what you leave.” Violet thinks these words near the end of All the Bright Places. With Finch, Violet visits places all over Indiana for a school project, and part of the challenge is to leave parts of themselves, trinkets, representing head space, memories, jokes. The concept of leaving something behind obviously takes on larger meaning, as it should, and that’s the one large part of this book I can talk about that doesn’t spoil anything. For as much as these girls, these-almost adults need someone to be listening – please, god, someone be listening – these girls also need to leave parts of themselves buried in their friend’s heart, under their mom’s skin, chap stick smeared on a Starbucks straw, cells from their fingertips on shoelaces and on doorknobs as they storm from the room. Violet, I’d say, finds a way to leave pieces of herself behind, mostly in a lot of ways she wouldn’t want to have to do. I have no amount of real understanding of Violet’s struggles throughout this book – she suffers far more than she should have to – but her heart. It’s so encompassing. We obviously don’t see her beyond the last page, but I hope that she doesn’t let anything, or anyone, narrow the path in. |