Lara Zielin

I’m back, blogger than ever. Now that the wedding and honeymoon have faded to the background, I can focus on DONUT DAYS and my next novel. More details about that soon.

But first, I wanted to get into the details of some of the things I had to change about DONUT DAYS before Susanna deemed it sellable-slash-publishable. And one of the main things was my main character, Emma’s, relationship with her parents. I should broaden this and say her relationship with her family, but I’ll focus on the parents right now.

Here’s the deal. If you’re writing YA, the only way you get out of fleshing out a kid’s relationship with their parents is if the kid has parents who die (Harry Potter), or the kid leaves their household to go on a great journey (Ella Enchanted). Otherwise, you gotta go there.

Why? Because even the most rebellious of teenagers must function, at least somewhat, within the boundaries of home (and school for that matter, but that’s another blog).

In my case, I kept telling readers how my main character, Emma, had real issues with her parents, who were evangelical preachers. They talked to everyone, she complained, but never to her. Problem was, I didn’t show that to be the case in the book (the age-old problem of telling not showing). There was never a scene in the book where Emma and her parents’ awkward communication style was illustrated. So, I wound up writing a scene in a church basement where Emma and her mom are getting ready for a church thrift sale, and Emma asks her mom some tough questions, which her mom summarily evades.

My point is that most all YA characters must interact in meaningful ways with their parents (or a parental figure) in a novel, or the author risks a disingenuous structure.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 5th, 2007 at 8:10 pm and is filed under editing, writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.