Melanie Hooyenga On Creative Inspiration

Inspiration is a funny thing. It can come to us like a lightning bolt, through the lyrics of a song, or in the fog of a dream. Ask any writer where their stories come from and you’ll get a myriad of answers, and in that vein I created the WHAT (What the Hell Are you Thinking?) interview. Always including in the WHAT is one random question to really dig down into the interviewees mind, and probably supply some illumination into my own as well.

Today's guest for the WHAT is Melanie Hooyenga whose time travel series, The Flicker Effect, tells the story of Biz, a 17-year old who uses sunlight to travel back to yesterday, and her sports romance series, The Rules, follows three teens as they navigate love and sports.

Ideas for our books can come from just about anywhere, and sometimes even we can’t pinpoint exactly how or why. Did you have a specific origin point for your book?

My latest release, The Trail Rules, is the second in a series about girls in Colorado trying to figure out life while spending every free minute skiing, mountain biking, and snowboarding. The idea for the series was sparked during the 2014 Olympics. We were buried under 100+ inches of snow and I decided it’d be fun to write about a girl who was not only a skier, but a freestyle skier—meaning she does tricks and flips that I could only dream of attempting. The second book takes place in late summer/early fall, and since a lot of skiers and snowboarders mountain bike in the off-season, that’s what my main character does. The main character in book three, which comes out October 2018, is about a skier who’s learning to snowboard.

My earlier series, The Flicker Effect, came to me in lightning bolt fashion. It’s about a girl who uses sunlight to go back to yesterday, and it was sparked by the sun flickering through the trees while I was driving. Out of nowhere the idea popped into my head: What if there’s a girl who, when the light does this, she goes back to yesterday? And a trilogy was born.

Once the original concept existed, how did you build a plot around it?

The Trail Rules is a companion novel to The Slope Rules, so while readers have already met my main character Mike (Mikayla), I wanted to dive into what makes her hopes for the future and what makes her happy. At the end of book one, life has come together for her and she thinks she has everything she wants (spoiler: she doesn’t), so I had to figure out what would have to change to make her question her decisions.

I knew her boyfriend would teach her how to mountain bike, and from there I decided to introduce a new group of friends who would encourage her to be her true self. There was a lot of school drama in book one around Mike’s former BFF, so that continues (and leads into book three), plus her parents are cracking down for her to figure out what she wants to do with the rest of her life.

Have you ever had the plot firmly in place, only to find it changing as the story moved from your mind to paper?

Funny you should ask, because that happened with The Trail Rules. I’ve always been an outliner, but I keep things pretty loose to allow myself and my characters the freedom to explore the story. But Mike totally threw me for a loop when (minor spoiler) she fell for the boy who was just supposed to be a distraction. I had to rewrite the outline for the second half of the book to allow the new relationship to grow. The plot-based parts of the story didn’t change much, but having to switch gears on the love interest definitely surprised me!

Do story ideas come to you often, or is fresh material hard to come by?

In the past, I really struggled with ideas. I need to know how a story ends before I can start writing, so unless I could see my way to The End in the notes phase, I didn’t consider it an Official Idea. My first published book, Flicker, was the first in a series, so I had the next couple books all plotted out. I got the idea for The Slope Rules when I was starting Faded, so I dove right into that next. This is really the first time I get to choose my own adventure.

As I’ve written more, I’ve learned to let my mind wander to tickle out ideas. I have a background in advertising and marketing, so I love brainstorming and seeing where a seemingly crazy idea can lead.

How do you choose which story to write next, if you’ve got more than one percolating?

This is a very timely question, because I’m struggling with this right now. I have two very different ideas for novels—one’s a light-hearted road-trip New Adult and the other is a darker, more psychological thriller YA—and every time I talk about them, I change my mind on which I want to write next. I finally settled on the darker one, which will be perfect since the days are getting shorter and I love writing when it’s dark and gloomy out.

I have 8 cats (seriously, check my Instagram feed) and I usually have at least one or two snuggling with me when I write. Do you have a writing buddy, or do you find it distracting?

YES. My miniature schnauzer Owen, who, by the way, is way more popular on Instagram than I am. Depending on where I’m writing, he’ll snuggle against my side or at my feet, but most of the time he sleeps on what I call his princess pillow (a weird leopard-print pillow from my single days that he’s adopted as his own) next to my writing chair in my office. He’s excellent at sounding out plot points and never judges me when I laugh at my own jokes.

As for human writing buddies, I don’t have a regular routine of writing with others but I do have lovely critique partners. For NaNoWriMo, I typically go to at least one write in and I find a room full of clacking keyboards inspiring, but for the most part I write alone.

How To Write Unlikeable Characters

Today's podcast episode features a roundup of guests and topics for the month as well as my thoughts on how to write unlikeable characters. The transcript is below, for those who prefer to read their writing advice.

Likeability is a factor that writers worry about a lot -  I would argue, more than they need to. Ask yourself about some great characters that you truly love to watch… then ask yourself if you’d want to be friends with them in real life.

My answer to the likeability question is to worry less about whether your character is likeable and more about whether or not they are interesting. Your audience doesn’t have to LIKE your character to want to know what he or she is going to do next.

Interestingly, male characters can get away with being unlikeable much more easily than females. The anti-hero has long been a topic of conversation, and to give you some slightly dated examples I’ll point you to Sawyer from LOST and Darryl in the first few seasons of The Walking Dead.

Unlikeable male characters get a bit of a pass as likeability isn’t a huge factor for men. Are they charming or funny as well as being, kind of an asshole? Then they’re probably okay. Or are they just all out raving assholes, and that’s interesting?

There’s a reason why Glen Garry Glen Ross is one of the most quoteable movies of all time, and it’s not b/c everyone is likeable.

But unlikeable female characters have a tougher row to hoe b/c they’re women. They’re supposed to be… nice. A girl who isn’t nice is automatically going to be considered unlikeable. But, let’s be serious – how interesting are nice people?

My advice is – don’t worry about likeability. Worry about your characters being interesting.

Some examples of unlikeable women from classical literature:

Lily Bart from Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. Lily passes up true love in the pursuit of a higher station. Poor but gorgeous, all Lily has going for her is her looks – and she’ll use them to move up the ladder. Watch Gillian Anderson nail this part in the movie from 2000 if you want to see an unlikeable woman you can’t look away from.

Catherine from Wuthering Heights is also overly worried about propriety over love, and she’s also a little… okay, yeah, she’s kind of a bitch. But she’s an interesting bitch. If you’re not into reading classical literature I get that, so my movie rec for this one is the 1939 version with Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier. You’ll buy these tortured soul mates – and while you might hate Catherine a little, you’re also going to get where she’s coming from... which might actually be the whole point.

Becky Sharp from Thackeray’s Vanity Fair is the original nasty woman. Happy to use anybody that will be her tool, Becky climbs to the top and you will admire her cunning, even if you absolutely hate her.

Want some more modern references?

Turn on HBO and watch Sharp Objects. Amy Adams is nailing the role of Camille, who is quite frankly, a huge shit fire of a mess. She makes bad decisions, she does some really questionable things, she drives drunk – she’s ALWAYS drunk, she’s carved half the dictionary into her body. Want to be her friend? No, you don’t. But you do want to know why, don’t you? Why is she such a mess? Who cuts words into their entire body, and WHY?

You don’t have to like her, you just have to be curious about her.

Succession, another HBO show, is a great example of bankable unlike ability. The entire cast is made up of assholes. Huge, raving assholes. And you cannot wait to see what they’re going to do to each other next. Sharp writing and some amazing comedic moments make you want to know what’s going to happen next to this group of filthy rich spoiled adult kids who can’t even make their own coffee because they don’t know where the help keeps the coffee beans.

Yes, that’s an actual scene. And you want to watch it now.

Another example – and keep in mind, Game of Thrones were books first – Cersei Lannister and Sansa Stark. Cersei is downright hateful, and Sansa is easily dislikable, but both of them have reasons for being the way they are… reasons that become clear over time.

Keeping you invested in them until you understand their motivation is part of the trick of finding empathy with an unlikeable character. But, empathy with an unlikeable character will take time to build – and, I would argue, is not always necessary.

The Twitter follower who asked me this question used Sasha from This Darkness Mine as an example of an unlikeable character that was hard to look away from – which I appreciate. So ask yourself, why? She’s horrible, truly. But she’s also very, very goal driven. And that’s something you are invested in, drawn into, by dint of her narration. You might not be rooting for her (although, I bet you are), but you do want to see what’s going to happen because she’s so DRIVEN that you become wrapped in her goals – whether because you want to see her fail or succeed doesn’t matter to me at all – you’re still going to turn those pages.

In the end, the way to deliver an unlikeable character is not to worry too much about making them likeable or unlikeable – just make them interesting.

Shannon McFerran On Gender Roles

Inspiration is a funny thing. It can come to us like a lightning bolt, through the lyrics of a song, or in the fog of a dream. Ask any writer where their stories come from and you’ll get a myriad of answers, and in that vein I created the WHAT (What the Hell Are you Thinking?) interview. Always including in the WHAT is one random question to really dig down into the interviewees mind, and probably supply some illumination into my own as well.

Today's guest for the WHAT is Shannon McFerran, author of Synchro Boy.

Ideas for our books can come from just about anywhere, and sometimes even we can’t pinpoint exactly how or why. Did you have a specific origin point for your book?

My daughter joined a synchronized swimming club when she was eight. Her pool had a big dive tank, and an Olympic length lane pool, and a smaller pool for lessons. I’d sit up in the bleachers on a balcony overlooking the pool deck and watch the daily drama playing out with all the different water sports. When my daughter told me that a boy had come to one of the synchro club’s practices but didn’t come back, it got me wondering what it would be like if a guy joined this sport and stuck with it. What might happen in that environment?

At the next practice, I was thinking about it, and the character of a racer came to mind—it was Bart. While I sat there thinking about his story, I started hearing bits of dialogue between him and a buddy, dialogue about trying synchro, and the initial conflict began. When I drove my daughter home from that practice, I sat in the living room jotting down the lines of dialogue that started the story in a notebook while my husband and daughter were doing something else—I just wanted to catch it all. What he was like.

That was in 2014. I was working on a middle grade novel at the time that I couldn’t admit was a dead horse, so I kept flogging that but really wanted to start this story about the synchro boy. In 2015, I dropped the other novel and started writing more than notes, that was also the year FINA accepted the mixed duet for international competition—something that male athletes in the sport had spent years waiting for.

Men came out of retirement to compete at the Worlds that summer in Kazan, and then the community started to get excited, because surely this meant the event would be included in the next Olympics. I started researching the history of men in the sport, and followed Bill May, the American champion, and his story made me so much more enthusiastic than I already was about Bart’s story—because there was a real-world guy who loved the sport and dedicated his life to it and now there was this massive hope that he could have his dream—and go to the Olympics.

I’ve always had a fierce belief that strict gender roles oppress boys and girls. To tell a young boy that dolls are for girls, or you wouldn’t want to read that book, it’s about a girl… or tell an older boy to stop crying, man up—this leads to the de-valuing of sensitivity, and emotion, which the world genders as female. So it’s a de-valuing of the feminine.

Boys need equal access to what society calls “girl” stories, or “girl” forms of expression, in order to embrace their whole person. Yes, things are changing—but not everywhere, not at the same pace. So I looked at the barrier for boys in this heavily feminized sport—even if that barrier is being broken in competition, there’s still a heavy social barrier—and I saw an opportunity to tell a story that would speak to that. Writing Synchro Boy, for me was about writing a fun story—and I had a lot of fun writing it—but for me, it was also an act of feminism.

Once the original concept existed, how did you build a plot around it?

At the heart of the story is the mixed duet event—the only one men can compete in internationally. So what dramatic conflict is there in putting Bart and his duet partner together, under that kind of pressure? Well, if your duet partner drops out, you can’t go on by yourself. You need to be in it together.

The thematic elements were there in the concept from the start—the gendering of the sport, and the obstacles that throws up for Bart. What happens if you join a female-gendered sport, as a guy? Bart came to me as someone very driven, and knowing what he wants, but he was also a character who didn’t want anyone to judge him for what he was doing, or have people think it meant he was less of a guy. And that’s pretty straight-forward. But what would make that even more complicated? What if everyone made judgments about Bart’s sexuality because of his choice to join synchro, but he was still exploring his own sexuality and resisted defining himself in a limited way? And what if he was angry that people though his sport would have anything to do with his sexuality?

And because synchro is a sport with a structure of competitions that happen throughout a year-long season, that presented a structure, an external arc. So I worked with those three ideas—the pair dynamic, Bart’s uncertainty about his sexuality, and the competitions—and the plot came together. Then, 2015 happened, and the drama of the event hitting the world stage entered the story as I was writing it—it was very exciting.

Have you ever had the plot firmly in place, only to find it changing as the story moved from your mind to paper?

Absolutely. And again, after it’s on paper. I’m Queen of Multiple Outlines.

In my mind, Bart did a lot of addressing the reader. I guess it was like he was telling me the story, and I was listening—so it felt like he had an audience, if that makes sense? As I got the story down on paper though, there was a lot less of that, until there were just a few asides. In the end, my editor had me take those out, since there were too few to really have them work.

In my mind, the antagonists in Bart’s story really came from outside of his club—but then when I started writing it, the parental and sports official resistance that he’s up against took a back seat to the conflicts with the girls he swims with, which was a very good change!

Do story ideas come to you often, or is fresh material hard to come by?

A story usually shows up for me as soon as the one I’m working on is “solved.” As I’ve got the story down from beginning to end in a workable first draft, I start thinking about the next one. It might just be characters, a setting, some dialogue… but I’ll start mulling it over when I’m not revising the last one. That hasn’t happened with my current work in progress, so I started to worry that maybe it’s the end of ideas for novels for now—but then I just started over from the beginning on that novel, so I guess it’s not solved. I just have to trust something else will come when I’ve got this one down properly.

How do you choose which story to write next, if you’ve got more than one percolating?

I tend to get grasped by a single story idea and then I get obsessed with it—I don’t think about others—not with YA fiction, anyway. I used to write essays and I always had a bunch of ideas that would fight for my attention, and I would work on a couple or more at once. Maybe that’s why I never went far in that genre? Perhaps the split focus wasn’t good for my writing.

I have 5 cats (seriously, check my Instagram) and I usually have at least one or two snuggling with me when I write. Do you have a writing buddy, or do you find it distracting?

Your cats are adorable, and my daughter would be very jealous! She’s always pushing for more cats… but ours is cranky, and does not play well with others—so she will remain a solo feline. She shows up on my Insta feed quite a bit, too.

I prefer writing alone. Sometimes my cat gets between me and the keyboard, which I interpret as a cue to take a break. Sometimes my dog naps nearby, and that’s lovely.

I do have a critique partner who is also a colleague at my day job! So Leanne and I go for coffee and talk about our stories. Through some happy quirk of fate, we’re both debuting our first YA novels this fall.