Well, I finally finished the partial of my next YA, and I sat down to read it yesterday. Surprise! It wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. That doesn't mean it was great either. It was just good. The bare bones are there, and I have some good lines, and my scenes move for a change. The biggest problem right now are my characters. I haven't delineated them enough.
My main character, yeah, she's all there. I mean my supporting characters, the ones who if you're not careful, can take over a book. Not there yet with that. So the next step is take a step back and really look and who these people are, and how they related to my main character Hagar. What role and purpose do they serve in her life, and what do they possibly want? Can I fit in a tiny subplot for them? Probably not, but I don't want them to be cardboard cutouts either. They need to have hopes and dreams even if most of it doesn't make it into the story.
I also have to watch out that I don't make Hagar's nemesis the generic bad girl/bitch ala Mean Girls. Kristen has to be fleshed out as well. One of my favorite bitches is Nicole on Popular played by Tammy Michaels Etheridge. At first glance, Nicole just seems like the head cheerleader bitch who stomps all over the unpopular kids at Kennedy High. However we learn that Nicole herself was once unpopular until she lost weight and turned things around. Ironically she's now treating people the way she once was treated. She finally gets her comeuppance in the second season.
Chris the guy Kristen and Hager both have feelings for also needs more personality. I'm thinking of making him not only dyslexic both also the son of the principal of the school they both attend. St. Agnes Academy is one of those really small private schools that you find in most big cities, sort of like my old high school.
My graduating class was a high of 34 students compared to the year before when there were only 13. 19 girls and 15 boys, and 3/4 of the class had known each other since we were six years old. By the time we graduated we were sick of each other. That's something else I need to emphasize in the book. Small schools can be very claustrophic, everyone knows everyone else's business, you've all dated each other. It's almost like being on reality TV, or living in a fish bowl.
I hope to give the reader a glimpse into a private school world that's different from the Gossip Girl/IT Girl world. We weren't necessarily focused on status in my school. How much money someone's family had wasn't part of the equation and since we all wore uniforms, so one was focused on who had the newest Fendi bag, so our obsessions became each other in a way. Who was dating whom, what your SAT score was, where were you going to college, what did you do over the summer, that sort of thing.
My school was run by an Episopalian order of nuns. Yes, not all nuns are Catholic. That was a shocker for me too. For the first year I went to St. Hilda's, I was confused about whether or not the school was Catholic and if I was Catholic. I think I had just seen The Sound of Music to, so that was my impressions of nuns. We actually had a sort of a Julie Andrews nun at St. Hilda's, Sister Regina, who played the guitar and taught us songs like 'Frankie and Johnny' and the 'Wabash Cannonball'.
I guess what I'm getting at, is that I need to map out who everyone is at St. Agnes from teachers down to the janitors, as well as all the major and most of the minor characters that are going to be in the book as I have them so far before I start my editing process.
Fortunately the editing won't take that long since I just to need to really slot in some character tags and traits.
Thanks for stopping by!
EKM
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