by Stephanie Morrill
Stephanie writes young adult contemporary novels and is the creator of GoTeenWriters.com. Her novels include The Reinvention of Skylar Hoyt series (Revell) and The Revised Life of Ellie Sweet (Playlist). You can connect with her on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and check out samples of her work on her author website.
Don’t forget – today’s the last day to get your entries turned in for the “I’ve never been the type” contest. When the contest is over, it’ll be a few days before the finalists are listed, and then another few days or week until the winners are announced. And I do my best to get results email to everyone as quick as I can.
A writer emailed me to say, “Sometimes my stories feel like they have kind of a similar… theme? plot? I’m not sure how to explain it but I don’t know if it’s just me or it really is kind of repetitive. What would you do if that happened to you?”
Well, this has happened to me. Late in my teens, I realized that all my main characters in all my stories were basically me, with some improvements. Me but funnier, me with better hair, me but smarter. The results were stories that read flat, that lacked oomph.
When I realized that I’d basically been writing the same character over and over, I decided to try being intentionally different with my main character. The result was the creation of Skylar Hoyt in what became my debut novel, Me, Just Different. (Ha, irony!)
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I wasn’t so worried about making Skylar look different than me (though, obviously, she does.) My biggest concern was making Skylar different in her core. I wanted her reactions to problems, her view of the world, and her values to all be completely different from mine.
The result, even from the first draft was a book that had a BIGGER feel to it. A, “This is going to be the book that gets me published” kind of feel. (Even still it needed massive rewrites and a couple of book surgeries before it was publishable. But there was a quality in this manuscript that made me willing to do that, when I hadn’t been willing before.)
I thought it was going to be hard to write from the perspective of someone so different from me, but instead the writing felt fun, liberating, and exciting. My experience with writing Skylar in The Reinvention of Skylar Hoyt series has encouraged me to continue pushing myself out of my writing comfort zone.
If you’re wanting to brainstorm beyond your typical characters, plots, settings, or themes, I would make two columns. On the left, I would make a list of what you typically do. My list would have looked like this: