Stephanie here! We have contemporary YA author McCall Hoyle with us this week on Go Teen Writers!
I loved McCall’s The Thing With Feathers that came out last fall. This is the story of sixteen-year-old Emilie Day, a girl with epilepsy leaving her safe, homeschooled life for high school on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. For the first time, Emilie must navigate classes, cliques, and crushes, all the while keeping her epilepsy a secret. It’s wonderful!
Let’s get on to today’s panel question!
Where does a story start for you? Is it with a character? A situation? A concept? A topic? A scene? Is it always the same or does it change?
Sometimes, something in the news catches my eye, or I read some nonfiction article or scholarly article and think what if this happened to me or someone I know?
More often, my story ideas start with an emotion, and a lot of those emotions come from my teenage experiences. I also teach high school and middle school and spend a lot of time with teenagers–probably more time with teenagers than I do with adults. I see and hear and feel what my students are struggling with emotionally in their own lives. Oftentimes, their struggles hit a nerve and remind me of how I felt when I was that age. I love to write about how differently human beings deal with a similar situations.
Most of my stories deal with grief in some way, shape, or form and how people deal with it because my father’s unexpected death seventeen years ago was the greatest life-changing event I’ve ever experienced. It was the most emotionally painful event of my life and an event that taught me a lot about myself, my family, and people in general.
But my historical fiction varies so far. The Lost Girl of Astor Street was a concept: Veronica Mars meets Downton Abbey, which morphed into more of a Veronica Mars but in the 1920s story.
Within These Lines was born from a topic, though. I listened to a podcast about the Japanese American concentration camps during World War II, and I wanted to write about it.