Writing Around the Thing in Fiction

In A Wish with Wings, my newest middle-grade novel, the main character, Evan, is an impatient person. She is always on the move, having mud fights, going fishing, climbing buildings and being loud and using her imagination. But then her dad is in a salt dome collapse, and she is forced to wait—something she hates. There is nothing she can do but wait and see if he will be okay. In the meantime, she finds an abandoned egg and brings it home to see if she can save it. More waiting. She has no idea when or if it will hatch. She just has to wait and see.

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And the egg doesn’t do anything! It’s literally just sitting in its incubator. How do you write a story where one of the main components just sits there? For the entire book?

For me, it starts with character. All my books started life as simply a character and a situation. For Nowhere Better Than Here, I had a girl whose town was slowly sinking. Gus and Glory started out as nothing more than a girl and a bloodhound who maybe solve a few mysteries. And with A Wish with Wings, the idea was a girl whose dad is trapped in a salt mine.

I’m a runner, and when training for a marathon, I first determine my end goal. Then I work backwards, creating workouts that will get me to that goal. I am also a teacher, and I do the same thing when I create lessons. I think about what I need the students to know and be able to do by the end of the unit, and then I work backwards, creating lessons that will get them there depending on where they started.

I do the exact same thing when writing a book. I cannot start writing until I know where I need my character to end up. I think about how I want my character to grow and change over the course of the book, and what she ends up learning, either about herself, the world, or both.

Only a very small amount of this is accomplished in a first draft. I learn who my character is through the writing of that first draft, so her journey, her growth, what she learns about herself, are all things I have to do in layers, revision after revision. Small moments, small shifts in character, will build over time until the story ends up where it needs to. The more I spend time with a character, the more ideas I have about how to get her where I need her to be by the end of the story.

I know many writers see their stories very cinematically in their heads, and I of course can also visualize the story as if it’s happening. But more than that, I can feel it. I build my story around what a character is feeling more than what she is doing. Often the emotional reaction I want my character to have comes first, and I figure out what in the story triggers that.

When you are crafting your story, you want your main character to grow and change. If you are writing for children, as I do, I believe you want your character to learn something by the end as well. I feel very much that middle-grade stories are about characters figuring out who they are and who they want to be. The plot elements you have in your story should help guide the character through that journey.

So yes, the egg in A Wish with Wings just sits there. And yet Evan interacts with it. Reacts to it. Learns from it and grows through her relationship with it. In writing the egg plot, I had to think about what Evan would need to do in order to help it hatch and what conflicts might arise in her efforts to keep it warm and safe. But I also had to tie it into her dad’s storyline. As I was plotting, writing, and revising, I worked on making those plots intertwine. I did this by tying it into her emotional journey. As Evan grows, her actions grow with her.

A Wish with Wings is also a story about truth—the truth we owe ourselves and the truth we owe each other. Likewise, writing is also very much about truth. While we are writing fiction, the truth of human experience is something we all hope we can convey, even in our most fantastical stories.

When I sit down to write, I’m not trying to teach a lesson or moral. Stories that seek to do that usually fall flat because they don’t feel true. More often than not, I’m simply writing to my younger self, giving her a truth—and a story—I wish she’d had at that age. Sometimes I’m even trying to remind my current self of that truth!

Even though we are crafting fiction, what occurs in the story must feel true to the world and the character we have created. If we can do that, then our readers will want to follow that journey, even if the journey includes a lot of waiting. And an egg that sits very still.

At least, I very much hope so.

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