I know quite a bit about story, and I want my YA novels to overdeliver on reader expectations. Most authors would say, avoid tropes and cliches and give readers something fresh.
That rarely works in popular fiction.
Or entertainment of any kind. I’m watching the Goosebumps movie right now. It’s a meta-story, about lots of other stories, but the entire thing is still constructed based on classical story architecture; something YA fiction is remarkably consistent about. Other genres can stray towards more innovative plotting.
YA fiction uses tropes. The Goosebumps movie has to introduce all these tropes quickly, while being chased by monsters. There’s a lot of similarity between my books and The Goosebumps movie, but I wanted to make a checklist before I forget.
Protagonist moves to new town.
Mother or father is missing.
Meets a boy or girl next door with a secret.
The boy/girl has a luxurious house that looks like a mansion.
They explore someplace fabulous/get taken to a magical place.
There’s a goofy sidekick for comic relief.
There’s a disapproving and scary mother or father that’s controlling (but turns out to be not so bad).
There’s an antagonist who plans to cause chaos and hurt people, who must be stopped.
There’s a MacGuffin (something they need to do – in the Goosebumps movie, they must find the RIGHT typewriter before Stine can write a new story and recapture the monsters.
They are being chased, but stop for little flirty moments. Accidentally brush up against each other, flirt, but then something scary happens and they’re interrupted.
The girl/boy has a supernatural secret, there’s something different about them. The hero finds out and is surprised.
They have to go on a journey (through a cemetery).
Big confrontation in public, at a school dance, when everybody else can see how awesome they are, and that only they (the weirdo misfits) can save everyone.
Moments of heroic self-sacrifice for the person you love.
The plan you thought would work gets foiled by the enemy, and they run.
Everyone else finds out that the girl/boy is a freak. “Yes, I know, but I don’t care,” says the hero.
They distract the enemy with a decoy and trap. They win a battle and celebrate, but the main antagonist survives.
The return to that special, magical world before, but now it’s overrun with monsters and violence.
The “passing the baton” scene, where a veteran monster-killer hands the main weapon off the the new hero and tells him to finish the story.
The “hero at the mercy of the villain” scene, where the hero faces his darkest fears and is helpless.
The hero realizes that, to save the world/accomplish his mission, he has to give up the Thing He Wants (probably the new love interest). “Maybe if I hold on tight enough-” “You have to let go.”
They win… but the hero/love interest dies. The price of victory was the hero’s happiness.
The hero/love interest comes back; the hero is happy and fulfilled.
Ends with a twist; the hint that the story isn’t over, that some new villain is out there.
For the past couple of years I’ve been talking about buying a castle to run as a writer’s retreat.
That dream may be a few years off, but from 2016 I plan to spend at least several months living and writing out of castles full-time. So I decided to host a giveaway and invite authors to come and join. During Nanowrimo 2016, I’ll either rent a whole castle for a month, or stay in a nice castle hotel.
And I’m giving away one of the rooms. This contest is for:
authors or want to be authors
people who participate in nanowrimo (but it’s OK if you haven’t)
primarily fiction authors (but it’s OK if you want to write non-fiction
people who can take a month off and get to Europe next year (travel isn’t included in the prize).
This contest is just to test the waters, and I’ll see how things go based on demand. If we rent a whole castle, I’ll probably run another giveaway later for another free room.
To enter, click here.
PS) It may not be the castle pictured, but that’s kind of what I’m going for. It will be remote, comfortable, spacious and possibly cold (November in Europe, after all). No distractions, no responsibilities, just writing every day and working on a publishable book.
A trick for vivid description in first person: let the narrator imagine things that are not really there, so readers see the mood of the scene even when it is not literally in it.
The first week of Nanowrimo is finished and I’m 25,000 words in. This is the first time I’ve been writing fiction consistently, and I’m learning so much about the process.
But there’s one thing I’m really having fun with, that feels like an epiphany to me, and I wanted to share it. It might be common for you already. Or maybe it hasn’t really been talked about before. I wish I had a clever name for this process, but I can’t think of one.
But the thing I’ve been doing (and loving) is planting imaginary (untrue) images in my books, to characterize the setting and mood of a chapter. This has probably been done mostly via metaphor or analogy. You can sneak them in to theme your chapters. For example…
“She said, swaying like a serpent before it eats its prey”
… would work in a chapter that’s dangerous or scary or violent. But it would be a really bad analogy in a normal, non threatening chapter.
Describing the scene through your narrator
I’ve been going much further, however. Since my novels are all first person, and my main character is telling the story, I can just describe everything through the imaginative lens of the narrator.
For example, I’m writing a scene where the protagonist goes to a Halloween party. She has a mask, but is wearing plain, boring clothes (because it doesn’t make sense for her to have a fancy dress). But I want readers to see her a certain way, even though I can’t actually put her in a ball gown, so I do this:
My dark hair is tied up with this bird’s nest of a bun that holds the mask onto the top of my head, with tangles and spikes and long feathers jutting out to the sides. I wished I had an amazing black cocktail dress like I’ve seen in fashion magazines, with sequins that glittered in the moonlight. I imagined the long tails floating silently behind me, hovering just above the cold November dirt, as I drifted, like death, among the gravestones.
That’s a half accurate depiction. Many parts of the setting, and her clothing, aren’t actually in that scene, but I can serve them up anyway and put them in reader’s minds. They will see her in that dress that she’s not even wearing. They will see fog and moonlight even though there isn’t any. But that’s good: I want them to feel that chilly gothic atmosphere.
Try it in your own writing
If you’re writing in first person, try it out: interpret the world through the mood of the scene through the eyes of the protagonist. The logs look like dead bodies. The clouds look like fluffy white bunnies. The limbs of the trees are reaching out to strangle me. If you’re writing in third person, you can still do a lot of this, but you become more obvious, the more you try to manipulate reader emotions with calculated use of metaphor and analogy.
