A question I get asked a lot from
reviewers of For Steam And Country is: Is it weird to write from a
first person perspective of a sixteen year old girl?
The answer is yes. It took me several
passes to actually dial in what Zaira Von Monocle’s perspective
would be, and I had to work extremely hard to get her to the point
where she’s the fun character in For Steam And Country that my
advance readers tell me they love.
I’m going to give a little peek
behind the curtain as to my learning as a writer, and my process as I
came up with all of this, in hopes that it is both interesting to
readers, and potentially helpful to newer writers.
When I first conceived the novel, I
knew that I wanted to write a Steampunk fantasy, to create a fantasy
world of kingdoms and airships, alchemy and swashbuckling, high
adventure that most books in the steampunk genre had shied away from.
Most books in the genre either went going something darker and
grittier, or dipping further into romance. I also wanted to make it
somewhat YA (I consider the finished product a tweener between YA and
regular fantasy, though it’s perfectly suitable for all ages),
which I thought would allow me to take a lighter tone.
YA fantasy novels take the first person
perspective more often than not, allowing for a real sense of feeling
like you’re inside the head of the protagonist, or at the very
least sitting across from them while you take high tea. A recent
trend has them in first person present, which makes people really
feel in the action, but I didn’t want to go that far, as it’s
very few and far between I read a book in the present tense that
doesn’t annoy me.
I actually had this plan to write in
the first person perspective from the onset, getting to worldbuilding
and character creating. In keeping with YA, I wanted to keep the
protagonist young, and also to the market, having a female
perspective seemed the way to go. I looked at the idea and thought,
“wow, do I really want to write a 16 year old girl in the first
person?” It sounded pretty daunting, and like it required a lot of
work to keep realistic. Once I looked at the job from that
perspective, I viewed it as a writing challenge to myself.
Very little gets me motivated like a
challenge, competition, even if it’s something as small as posing
the question to myself if I could pull something off. In fact, a lot
of my best work comes out of such challenges. It sounds silly, but in
writing, self-motivation is about the most important skill you can
learn. It’s hard to go through scenes, especially some of the
heavier ones, and it’s much harder to edit. If you have other goals
that trick yourself into feeling like a game, then you’ll more
often than not breeze through something that seemed at first like a
chore.
And this turned out hard to do, not in
the sense of it took me a long time to write--I actually had so much
fun with this world and with these characters that I breezed through
my first draft-- but when I went through it the first time, the
character didn’t come across as a good protagonist at all.
In my figuring this out, I observed
teenagers, and tried to remember what it was like to be a teenager
myself. Frankly, I found teenagers to be a bit rambunctious, acting
without thinking, and extremely low in self-confidence (for the most
part, there’s always exceptions). And I wrote my character as such.
In my early submissions drafts that I sent out to agents and
editors, the character whined a LOT. She was combative, teasing her
love interest a bit too hard. Honestly, it felt very realistic to me
from what I’ve seen of a lot of teenagers, but those behaviors
grate on a reader if they’re too pronounced, and I found that many
of the editors didn’t connect with the character because of that.
I later learned the value of connection
over realism in writing, something I wish I would have learned a lot
easier and sooner. Readers want to see some flaws, some mistakes, but
they don’t want that to be overwhelming, don’t want to find a
person annoying. And in a heroic adventure, some of those life quirks
need to be toned down rather than be presented as too realistic.
I let the book sit for awhile, wrote
Star Realms: Rescue Run, and released that to quite a bit of
fanfare. When I looked at this novel again, I saw it was close, but I
needed to push that perspective character to the next level. I
thought of who this character was, and how it would have shaped her
so she’s different than just a normal teenager. Zaira’s lived
mostly abandoned, on her own except when the neighbors checked in on
her. She’s had to work for herself, farm for herself, wash her own
clothes, cook her own meals for a couple of years now. That’s a
pretty hard life to have 14-16, and one that requires a lot of work.
As such, she’d be tougher. The whining had to go. She’d also have
a very strong sense that she could do anything herself, including
going in and doing things like flying an airship (minor spoiler, but
I think you probably figured out that airship flying occurs by this
point!). That has negative effects like stubbornness, which provide
for some good conflict that a reader can relate to more. With those
major facets of her personality in mind, I rewrote the book. And this
time, everything clicked.
Even though there were heavy rewrites,
I flew through this last pass because I made a character that was
compelling and fun for me. And that’s what it takes to make
something compelling and fun for a reader.
Authors often strive too hard for
realism, to the point where it makes a lot of works bland and boring.
Something that we can’t connect with because we’re not wishing we
were in that person’s movie. And that’s what the author has to
create. We as readers want people to rise up and be heroes, to meet
challenges, to exceed expectations. That’s why we escape into
fantasy in the first place. Realizing that changed my world, making
Zaira Von Monocle into the farm girl-turned-hero that she ended up
being in For Steam And Country. She’s still got her inexperience,
but her wide-eyed sense of wonder and being willing to take on big
challenges makes her a fun protagonist. I hope you enjoy reading
about her as much as I enjoyed writing her.
Jon
Del Arroz is the author of the Alliance Award nominated and top-10
Amazon bestselling Space Opera, "Star Realms: Rescue Run."
His second novel, "For
Steam And Country,"
is just out. He hails from the San Francisco Bay Area, is a guest
contributor to the Hugo Award-nominated Castalia House blog, and
regularly posts to http://delarroz.com. Twitter: @jondelarroz Gab.ai:
@otomo
Amazon: http://bit.ly/forsteamandcountry
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