#writerbr

Part 1-- Roadkill outline

Wip: Ava Adore

The plot of Ava’s adolescence, so far. 

Warnings: Cancer, death, depression, child abandonment, divorce, child neglect

Ava’s grandmother is diagnosed with cancer

She will die slowly and not without hope. Ava’s grandmother is a cancer survivor, only to have it come back again. Ava’s mother is insistent that her mother will get better, because she did before.

Ava’s mother leaves her father

Perhaps it was the stress of her sick mother that finally caused her to break, or perhaps it was a long time coming. But finally she snaps after a violent argument with her husband over her refusal to accept their adopted son Eli. She takes her daughter Ava, but leaves Eli. Like her mother told her, he is not blood.  

Ava and her mother move in with her grandmother

Suddenly under the care of two women, Ava is the center of her mother and grandmothers world. She misses her father and brother, though the toxic words of her mother and grandmother make it hard to preserve her good memories.

Grandmother gets worse

Even as it becomes very clear she will not get better it never really occurs to Ava’s mother that the grandmother is going to actually die. It is a year or so tug of war between life and death, that is especially painful as Ava, who still very young, has to gain the understanding that her grandmother is going to die, even as her mother holds on to the increasingly delusional belief that she will get better.

Ava kisses a boy

Feeling confined by her family struggles, Ava attempts to go outside her comfort zone and kisses a boy from her school.

Raquel

The introduction of Raquel should come right at the death of her grandmother. Ava meets Raquel outside of school, school being a place where she is very much a loner and outcast—mostly by choice and a feeling of inadequacy. Raquel is something different, dropped out of high school already and working at the grocery store, which is where Ava meets her. At first it might not seem like much, just someone who pays a little more attention to her than she’s used to from people close to her age.

Ava’s Grandmother dies

All of a sudden, Ava has more freedom than she has ever know as her mother sucks more into herself with grief.

With her mother barely functional, Ava starts taking care of things around the house. At the grocery store, Raquel checks her out. Noticing she does not have her usual motherly shadow with her, Raquel asks questions.

Raquel as a friend

Raquel has her own loss (Her mother was deported). Ava sees Raquel, who is several years older than her, as someone who gets it. In the absence of her mother, Ava grows attached to Raquel. She wants Raquel to like her and Raquel likes having someone who listens. While it may not be immediately clear to Ava, Raquel is struggling with her mental health. While she is very charismatic, and her hints of suicidal tendencies is something Ava never looks too deeply into (because her mother has a tendency of expressing similar desires), there is a feeling of instability to Raquel, a lack of permanence, a desire to leave and go nowhere at all. Its a very one sided relationship, with Raquel only being there for Ava when she wants to be, but even so it is more attention than Ava gets anywhere else.

Ava gets a crush

Ava has never really though much about her sexuality. She never really had the time with her mother and grandmother. She’s has a liked boys before, but never with real devotion. However, when Ava sees Raquel kissing a girl, something is stirred in her-- jealousy. Ava understood that Raquel was more experienced than her, but seeing it in person brings out her own feelings of inadequacy as well as questions about her own sexuality.

To be continued...

Recently, I discussed how to deal with a sagging middle in a novel. Here are a couple more tips that will help you strengthen that middle.

Vary Your Story Sometimes a novel feels dull in the middle because your conflicts are not varied enough. In other words, as the reader is going along, he feels like the novel on page 400 reads just like it did on page 100. Yeah, maybe your character faces death at every turn, but that's all that he faces. We've all read stories like that--tales so filled with action that nothing of import seems to be going on.

Very often I find this in survival stories. You see a tale about a teenager who goes down in a plane in the Alaskan wilderness. As he struggles to walk 400 miles south, he must first battle off a wolf. Then he gets to battle a wolverine. Then he battles a bear. Next he fights off a moose. You get the idea. The whole thing becomes rather episodic pretty quickly.

Romances can be tiring in the same way. Having a heroine who agonizes about a man and nothing else for six hundred pages would just be too much. That's why romances tend to be very short.

In short, no matter what your genre, too much of a good thing is just too much.

So as a writer, you have to wonder, maybe your reader would like something more in this tale. Perhaps it needs a mystery to be solved, a romance, some internal angst on the part of one of your characters--maybe even a character that we haven't seen much of yet. Or maybe instead of just having the protagonist battling the antagonists, now it's time to add a new problem--a conflict between the protagonist and his best friend. In other words, sometimes you need to try some things that you've never tried before in your storytelling.

When you look at conflicts, there are several major categories that you will hear writers talk about. These categories include: Man vs Man, in which a protagonist has a conflict with another person; Man vs Society, in which a character is forced to combat a stifling political regime--or perhaps just an odd family or clique; Man vs Nature, in which your protagonist fights against the natural elements; Man vs Self, in which a character must battle his own inner passions or vices; and Man vs God, a story where a man takes on his creator.

As you look for ways to vary your story, one way to do that is to ask yourself, "What kinds of conflicts don't I have? Should I consider using one from another category?" It doesn't have to be a huge diversion to add this. Maybe you decide, "I'll add a Man vs Nature" conflict, and so as your hero is galloping through the dark to meet the woman of his dreams, his horse trips on a root and throws him in a ditch, leaving him bloodied and battered, and he has to limp four miles to his rendezvous, only to find that his sweetheart has already departed.

In short, varying your conflicts can help, but there are other ways to add variation to your story. You might consider the emotional beats that you're hitting. Do you want to add something different: a little humor, a little drama, wonder, or some other emotion?

Sometimes just describing something that you've never described before can bring a scene some life.

Avoid Closure Another problem that I've noticed is that a middle may sag because you as a writer have closed a conflict too early.

It is a natural human tendency for us to want to solve problems and get along. As writers, we sometimes resolve them too quickly. For example, you want your hero and heroine to love each other, and so halfway through the book you have them kiss and get together. Now, maybe that's all right. Maybe the book will still work, but it's probably literary suicide.

If you've got some conflicts that have resolved halfway through the book, the fact is that you probably need to go and rip out those resolutions. Leave all wounds festering, all hopes unfulfilled, all demons alive and still roaming the city.

But don't avoid closure for too long. If your reader suspects that your characters aren't resolving problems because you as a writer just arbitrarily decided that they wouldn't, you've taken too much time.

Avoid Agreement One other trick that can help perk up a sagging middle is to avoid agreement. It's not that two people are refusing to negotiate a problem, it might be that they see two different problems entirely: Imagine that your character has a longstanding habit of taking his wife out to dinner on Friday night. But his business has taken a severe downturn. Now maybe he imagines that his wife will understand if he doesn't take her to dinner. After all, she's a sensible woman. That's why he married her.

But the wife sees it differently. She might see this as a sign that his love is waning. He's been growing cold and distant for months, preoccupied with business. He's spending more time away from home. This little Friday night extravaganza is all that reminds her of her days as a new bride. She might even wonder if he is having an affair.

So as they begin to talk about dinner, the husband might say, "Let's not go out tonight." To which his wife replies, "Are you sleeping with your secretary?" Bam! They can legitimately have an argument where neither sees the point that the other is trying to make.

Writers: Why do you you write?

If you're like most of us, there are upwards of fifty answers you could give, all accurate. But most of us also have an ultimate answer too.

To write something that will get someone through a difficult time because they can hang on to your story. To escape from something and take joy in the act of crafting your imagination into something. To convince your readers of an important truth. So that one day you can stumble across someone liveblogging your book. To prove something to your family. To introvert. To extrovert. For devotion, or to glorify God. To make your sister proud. Because you're head over heels in love with a fic scenario, and no one has written it yet, so you must do it yourself. Because your idea might be someone's favourite if only it were allowed out of your head. So that the two people you allow to read your writing will key smash. So that your daydreams will stop driving you crazy. To challenge yourself to do something you never have before. To light a single candle rather than curse the darkness.

Cassandra is wondering, what happen to her soap and shampoo. Mossy convinced Pebbles, that every night Cassandra bathes herself with lavender candy bar. Unfortunately, lavender soap 🧼 is not edible. Cassandra's pet rocks always getting into trouble.

This is an excerpt of my current WIP. It's the first few paragraphs of chapter two, which is the first chapter in Lilin Blakewoods POV. I hope you enjoy reading this!

The tree that once stood tall a few yards ahead of me exploded at the base and came tumbling down. That was the first time I had managed to make an explosion like that with my magic. It had taken me quite a long time to even manage that, since I wasn’t that good at magic. I had been training all my life, and still I could barely do anything with it. If I wasn’t good at sword fighting, then I’d be useless.

“Good. Now do it again,” mother said, pointing to another tree.

I was supposed to be able to cause those explosions quickly, and I would have been able to if I had any skill in magic, but each time took me a minimum of ten minutes. I had to train harder to be able to do the simplest magic within a few minutes. If I couldn’t even do that, how did I expect to fulfil my duty? All these years of training and the only thing I could do easily was put a fireball in my hand…

“We don’t have all day, do it again!” mother yelled, pointing to the tree again.

Some people shiver when they hear the word 'nanowrimo' uttered on the internet, but I'm here to help you conquer your fear and make it work for you! 

Want to hear some handy dandy tips and tricks for making NaNoWriMo work for you? Check out my blog post!

I cover topics such as:

Setting attainable goals.

Making checklists and productivity games.

Writing faster.

Accountability.

Other writing advice.