Fun with Writing Challenges

[starshipcat]

I now have my latest Odd Prompts writing challenge, and I'm seeing it in terms of the novella I'm working on. And as I'm planning out this segment, I'm seeing one little problem -- how to make it clear that Sierra's parents are dysfunctional, rather than her being rebellious and creating her own problems

Comments

[whswhs]

Some thoughts:

Much turns on whether Sierra's role in this is that of a protagonist or a supplicant (to put it in noir terms, is she the tough private eye or the dame that walks into his office?).

If I wanted to enhance Sierra's credibility as an abuse victim, I might consider having her initially seek help with some lesser issue that points at the big denial of rights, and have a different character figure out how abusive her situation is. One approach would be to have Sierra even resist accepting that what her parents did was abuse.

Alternatively, you could do what I think is called "lampshading": Have the protagonist initially hesitate to believe her story, and then become convinced of its truth by further investigation. This doesn't have to be a matter of prejudice against Sierra; it could be simply professional caution, wanting to make sure of the situation before taking action. If the protagonist voices the reader's doubts, this may work somewhat to disarm them.

[starshipcat]

At the moment, I'm waffling between Sierra and Roger as the protagonist.

I'm not entirely comfortable with using the trope of the abused person having to be persuaded to believe that yes, they are being abused - it smells too much like an obligation to make excuses for the abuse. OTOH, making it clear that she's merely giving lip service to the expectation that she will cover for her parents and show them in the best possible light, it could actually make things worse.

Roger is initially disapproving, but it seems more like a chain-of-command issue in his mind. She's under her parents' authority, so resistance overt or covert is indiscipline. But he's a Navy officer, so he thinks in those terms - and for Toni, it's another piece of proof that he's indeed a post-biological human being, that consciousness is conserved, rather than his just being a very sophisticated simulation.

One idea I'm playing with is to have the first scene introduce Sierra in class, writing an essay on some classic work of literature and struggling to keep it at

[whswhs]

It sounds like this might be a narrative that calls for an unreliable narrator-one who is marked for the reader as being such, of course.

[starshipcat]

The novella will take place entirely in cyberspace, so there's a certain element of unreliability right there.

But here's the new first paragraph:

The third-grade classroom looked the same as it had for the last
fourteen years. Just like Mrs. Hartwell's third-grade classroom had
looked, back in the Before. Sierra knew her classmates were NPC's, but
she wasn't so sure about Mrs. Hartwell

("The Before" refers to her life before the accident that left her in
a life-support pod with cyberspace her only access to sensory input).

[sartorias]

These days YA is FULL ofsnarky-voiced teenage girl protags who rebel and go off on their own. In fact, it's almost expected, the same as present tense voice, either first person or third. Since it's so endemic, it won't take long to establish unsympathetic parents and girl wanting to get out from under!

[starshipcat]

Thanks for the information.

I sure remember how, when I was trying to write YA fiction in the 90's, I was constantly told that the characters had bad attitudes and were making their own problems, and therefore unsympathetic - and then, when I tried to write a character who very clearly had a good attitude, I was told she "needed more oomph." Talk about double-binds.

Strictly speaking, Sierra's not YA. Chronologically, she's 23, but there's stuff going on that involves life-support tech not yet available in the here and now such that her parents argued that her developmental age is forever frozen at the point when she was injured - and in her parents' minds, she will be forever the nine-year-old girl they kissed good-bye on that fateful morning. Or as she puts it near the end, they see her as an NPC in their game, rather than the player in her own.