Think you can’t use this technique in a book for even the youngest of readers? Think again.
However, I did put him on an airplane at the climax of the book just to ensure that he didn’t get in the way.”
#M audio axiom 25 software how to#
He has to step aside in order to let Grace figure out how to solve the problem on her own. No matter how much her father wants to help her, he can’t. “She has a father who is interested in helping her solve the problem she faces in the book, but even though he provides her with some of the information she needs, ultimately the problem is something that only Grace can solve. “In my novel The Dark Divine, my main character Grace comes from a close-knit family that is very involved in each other’s lives,” author Bree Despain says. There is one final way to keep from writing a story where mom and dad solve all the problems-make the problems something the adults are simply incapable of fixing. That’s what makes them human.” Even if your adult characters are werewolves or zombies, they need to be believable and somewhat sympathetic. In other words, give each of your characters a mixture of many good and bad traits. “Maybe it’s not good enough, but have sympathy for your adult characters, even if your younger characters don’t. “They may not know how to help, or they may be misguided, but most of the time, adults are simply trying to do the best they can at parenting, teaching, coaching, etc.,” Salter says.
If this is a technique you plan to use, be warned: There is a balancing act between making your adults part of the problem and inhumanly dense. Why get rid of them when they are an authentic and usable resource?” During teen years, it’s often adults-teachers, parents, coaches-who cause problems. “For the most part, adults are a very real and very constant obstacle to my characters. King also uses adult characters to create and exacerbate problems. Polly’s grandmother in Swoon at Your Own Risk is an advice columnist, but she isn’t helping Polly solve her boy problems at all-she’s only making things worse!” “That way rather than solving problems, the adults complicate them. “I do sometimes have older characters give misguided advice to younger characters,” she says. To Salter, adults can be a great device to mix up the lives of young characters. Underneath it all, the child is actually dealing with the problem of having an overprotective parent, whether by acting out or retracting into a shell where they have some level of control over their life.” “For example, take an overprotective parent who is trying to solve every problem a kid has. “I think children solve their own problems no matter what the adults around them are doing,” YA author A.S. If you simply cannot get the parents out of your story, then make good use of them. It may not be the norm, but it happens in most families at one time or another. Worried such solutions won’t be believable? “So many kids understand what it feels like to fly beneath the radar in a hectic household,” YA novelist Sydney Salter says. Seasonal jobs, job-related travel or a handy high-pressure deadline can all work to keep pesky adults out of the main story line. “Other adults surrounded my main character, but they were inclined to give her more autonomy.”Ĭan’t work a parent’s full-time job into the story? “In Rules, the character’s mother was an accountant, so Cynthia Lord set the story during tax season,” Hershenhorn says. “For my YA mystery Suspect, I sent the father off to a weeklong conference,” Kristin Wolden Nitz says. “This left the main character, Ruth, alone to figure out how to help her younger sister learn to read when their school shut down.”īut you don’t have to leave them alone you can also put someone permissive in charge. “In my book The Lucky Star, set during the Great Depression, I sent dad off to a work camp with the Civilian Conservation Corps, and mom found part-time work,” author Judy Young says.
So you can keep mom and dad busy with what often keeps real parents busy: work.
#M audio axiom 25 software movie#
“In my novel Grace Happens, I kept the parents out of the main character’s way by making the mother so self-involved in her career as a movie star that she left her daughter’s care to a nanny and a tutor who do their jobs and are caring, but not overly so,” YA and children’s author Jan Czech says. If burying mom and dad doesn’t work for your story, there are other ways to get them out of the way.Īdults, both real and imagined, are wonderfully self-absorbed and don’t always notice what is going on under their own noses.
0 kommentar(er)
