Today my friend and beta editor, Lauren McKellar, is stopping by to talk about her debut novel FINDING HOME. At the bottom is a great giveaway for you to enter.
I have a confession to make: when I first started writing, I didn’t know what character development was. Sure, it sounded like a good thing, but my novels were full of action. Things happened to my characters; my characters didn’t happen to things.
I have a confession to make: when I first started writing, I didn’t know what character development was. Sure, it sounded like a good thing, but my novels were full of action. Things happened to my characters; my characters didn’t happen to things.
My stories read like something a first grader
would write: Amy went to the beach. A boy
kissed Amy. Amy went to bed.
Okay, so maybe they weren’t quite that bad, but
by no means did they show arc, or growth, or even a basic learning curve. If
I’d thrown poor Amy into a fire, I’m not even sure she would have learnt that
flames are hot, and so she shouldn’t do it again.
It wasn’t until I read a great blog post by the
YA Muses that I realised the true importance of character development, and
what a big part it plays in building a novel. Growth allows you to impart an
overall message. Growth enhances the likeability factor of a character
(depending on the growth in question, of course). And growth adds a perfect
sense of closure to what otherwise could be a quite unsatisfying read.
In Finding
Home, my debut novel from Escape
Publishing, growth was the starting point for my story. I
really wanted to impart a message concerning drinking and young people, and I
knew I’d need strong character development to do this.
At first, I started out with a blank canvas. I
knew I wanted my lead character to move from Point A (uses drinking as an
emotional crutch) to Point B (no longer relies on alcohol as an assist). But
why would she use drinking in this fashion in the first place? What would make
her reach Point B before it was too late? And how do we know that, in times of
extreme stress, she wouldn’t turn to alcohol again?
After a lot of brainstorming, I came up with a
series of circumstances that would let my heroine test herself. She would
plummet to the lowest of lows, learn to trust her friends to try and get out of
the deep, dark pit she’d stumbled into, and then face a situation similar to
the one that sent her spiralling in the first place to truly test her
character.
And this time, when I threw Amy into the
flames, she didn’t get burnt. This time, she took an extinguisher.
About Lauren McKellar
About Finding Home
Moody, atmospheric, and just a little bit punk, Finding Home takes contemporary YA to a
new level of grit...
When Amy’s mum dies, the last thing she expects is to
be kicked off her dad’s music tour all the way to her Aunt Lou in a depressing
hole of a seaside town. But it’s okay — Amy learned how to cope with the best,
and soon finds a hard-drinking, party-loving crowd to help ease the pain.
The only solace is her music class, but even there she
can’t seem to keep it together, sabotaging her grade and her one chance at a
meaningful relationship. It takes a hard truth from her only friend before Amy
realises that she has to come to terms with her past, before she destroys her
future.
Here's your chance to win one of two $5 Amazon
cards, one $10 Amazon card or a copy of Finding
Home.
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