More Thoughts on Writing MG
Happy New Year! This is the 12th newsletter I’ve written for Substack. A whole year! Thank you for subscribing and joining me for this. I’m excited for this next year and writing about In Springtime and forthcoming projects, writing about the disorienting life of an expat, and answering any questions you might have.
I wrote in my “Updates” last month that I finished the first draft of my middle grade novel. I wanted to write more about what I learned from that. This post gets a bit long so I hope you’ll consider subscribing (if you don’t already) so you can read the whole thing.
1. Everything is connected!
If you’ve watched Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, then you’ve seen the way things can play out when everything connected—the quirky, funny, and often violent way.
MG isn’t quite like that, but I found myself thinking, Everything is connected! constantly. Things had to come back around. Things had to be undone by one thing and put back together by another, and all of those things had to have been in the book before. Nothing could come out of nowhere.
(Not being allowed to have something come out of nowhere—that’s something that irks me in adult literary fiction, because it’s so contrary to life. Things do come out of nowhere! But for the MG world, it didn’t feel like something to push against. I wanted to try to keep everything connected.)
If I wrote in a new character, they had to be part of the whole story. Objects had to appear over and over. Everything took on weight and everything had to be impactful.
People often talk about how poets give more weight to words, but MG writers give more weight to objects. While it feels cliché in adult fiction for an object to take on any figurative significance, it feels magical when it happens in MG literature. I love that.
2. Everything is linear!
Another difficult thing for me. Ha! I love backstory, time-leaping, and time-bending (maybe retelling a small chunk of time many times over).
But this book, this main character, is set on a course, and it felt wrong to ever take my protagonist off of it. Even when she stopped to eat, I felt I had to explain why she would pause at all in her journey. The whole book is marked by urgency and focus.
Though, I am, generally, a more linear writer than most books I’ve read recently. I stick close to my main character and I follow her through a chunk of her life. I don’t tell multiple stories at once, or jump perspectives, or travel through large swathes of time. Or I haven’t yet.
Still, this book felt different. Maybe linear isn’t quite the word I mean. It’s propulsive!
3. Everything is driven by a singular objective!
This has to do with that propulsion. In all of my adult books, there are a zillion things pulling at my main characters. And one of the main problems of their lives is how little they need to do any particular thing. They are wondering about purpose and drive. They are looking for joy and power. They’re figuring out how much validation and appreciation has to do with one’s own fulfillment, if at all. They’re figuring what exactly they do need to do to feel fulfilled. It’s a messy, messy process.