Category: Writing (Page 10 of 72)

Why I Included Abortion in My Young Adult Fantasy Novel

September 21, 2020 / Katie L. Carroll

I wasn’t planning on bringing attention to the fact that abortion plays an important role in my latest young adult fantasy novel ELIXIR SAVED. It’s a little bit of a spoiler for one of the storylines, but it also felt like bringing attention to it would come off as me taking a controversial topic and using it to market my own book, which is not my intent at all. So I was content to be confident in my choice to include the abortion because it was right for the character and the story, but I would let readers come across it organically.

Then the real-life stories started to get to me. Things like the vice president visiting places that call themselves women’s healthcare centers but are actually anti-abortion facilities that lie to women about healthcare (see “Mike Pence to visit women’s health clinic that falsely ties abortion to breast cancer” by Betsy Klein). There are the allegations that ICE has been forcing hysterectomies on people being held in their detention centers (see “Whistleblower Alleges ‘Medical Neglect,’ Questionable Hysterectomies of ICE Detainee” by Rachel Treisman). Then the news broke on Friday of the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (see “Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Champion of Gender Equality, Dies At 87” by Nina Totenberg).

All of this on top of years of states passing laws—some of which were later
overturned by the courts—that eroded access to birth control and reproductive
rights for women and people with uteruses.

I am firm in my belief that abortion is healthcare. Denying people who seek safe and affordable ways to manage their sexual health, including abortion, is denying them agency over their own bodies. It’s a tool of oppression that has been used against women throughout history and is more about control than it is about saving lives (see “Abolishing Abortion: The History of the Pro-Life Movement in America” by Jennifer L. Holland and “The Pill and the Women’s Liberation Movement”).

So when I was continuing to develop the matriarchal world in the second book of the Elixir Chronicles and an unwanted pregnancy became a storyline, there was no question about whether that character would have access to an abortion. I put a lot of thought into what her decision would be, but the access part was never an issue.

I also don’t think it’s inappropriate for birth control or abortion to be in a young adult novel. Some teens are having sex and certainly most of them are thinking about it. Some teens are on birth control. Some teens have had abortions. I hope any teens—or any person for that matter—who read ELIXIR SAVED feel safe using it as a starting off point to discuss and understand reproductive rights. They deserve to be educated about it.

So this is me using my blog as a platform to say that I support the right to choose for anyone with a uterus, and one of the ways I’m showing my support is by having abortion as a right in my young adult fantasy novel.

What The Fibonacci Sequence & Sunflowers Can Teach Us About The Writing Adage “Show, Don’t Tell”

September 14, 2020 / Katie L. Carroll

I’m going to start today’s post by telling you something.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the Fibonacci sequence (really, haven’t we all…no?). Basically, if you start with 0 and 1, it’s a series of numbers where the sum of the two previous numbers add up to the next number in the sequence: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, etc… (0+1=1, 1+1=2, 1+2=3, 2+3=5, 3+5=8, etc…).

It’s a tidy little pattern, and with some easy arithmetic (at least in the beginning), you can figure out what the next number is. In a world that seems to be getting more chaotic by the minute, I like the predictability of the pattern.

On graph paper, you can connect the opposite corners of boxes that are the size of each number and you get the Fibonacci spiral. Let me show you that.

By Jahobr – Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=58460223

It’s a neat little mathematical trick, but you’re probably thinking, so what? It’s a bunch of numbers that form a pattern. Well, there are lots of applications in real life that use this sequence, like computer algorithms. But the ones I’m most interested in are related to nature (for further reading see “How are Fibonacci numbers expressed in nature?” by Robert Lamb).

Take the sunflower. Let me show you this sunflower I grew in my yard.

Notice the spiraling pattern of the seeds in the center of the sunflower. (Have you guessed where I’m going with this yet?) Turns out in most sunflowers–it is nature after all, so with many outside factors, it’s not true for every sunflower–the number of spirals correspond with the Fibonacci sequence. From pine cones to spiral galaxies, this pattern shows up in so many places in our universe.

Yet, there’s a lot more to sunflowers than understanding the pattern of it. What do they smell like? What sound do they make blowing in a late summer breeze? What does it taste like when you pop open the shell of a roasted seed to get to the salty crunch in the middle? What’s a situation where you might think of a sunflower and what emotions might that evoke?

There are as many answers to the above questions as there people in the world.

Now think about if I just showed you the image with the Fibonacci spiral and didn’t tell you about it at all. Or if I just told you about the pattern and didn’t give you a visual. And what if I didn’t add in the bit about the sunflowers? Or what if I did include the part about the sunflowers following the pattern, but I didn’t ask you all those other questions about them?

All this telling and showing is what helps me to figure out the world. Knowing the math behind the nature adds yet another layer to the flower that makes me appreciate it even more. The sunflower helps me understand the Fibonacci sequence and vice versa. In nature writing, all this might be important to include, but in prose writing, it’s probably not.

Sometimes seeing a thing makes more sense than having it explained. But sometimes having a thing explained makes you see it in a whole new way. Finding the right balance between the two and understanding what your end goal is makes all difference in what to include in your writing.

Here, I included a lot. Even though the old writing adage is “show, don’t tell,” I wanted to explain the Fibonacci sequence by telling you about it and showing it in visuals, which included the sunflower. I also wanted to inspire you to think deeper about the sunflower. I suppose you could say I wanted to be academic in the beginning and move into the more poetic as we went along.

For a novel, you certainly don’t want to explain the Fibonacci sequence when describing a sunflower. Unless maybe your narrator is a scientist or a mathematician and that’s important to how they see the world and express themselves through it. But for most narrators that won’t be the case. So to strike the right balance, I find it’s best to see the world through their eyes. What aspects of the sunflower would they observe given their state of mind to convey something important about them and the story?

Also what does the reader need to know and care about? Perhaps simply telling them a thing is a sunflower is enough (sometimes I think as writers we can get too caught up in the showing) and you don’t need to immerse them in experiencing the sunflower. The reader can conjure the image themselves with just the word and no showing is necessary. Or perhaps not. Maybe this is a moment in the story when you really do want to take the time to show them the flower and all that it means.

How do you decide? Of all the above stuff I wrote about sunflowers and all the things about sunflowers that I made you think about, what’s important? The answer to that is it’s all relative. It all depends on who is telling the story and what the person who is reading it is supposed to get out of it. And I’m afraid that is only something you, as the writer, can answer.

New School Year & New Book Teaser

September 1, 2020 / Katie L. Carroll

First off, I know a lot schools started back this week (in one form or another), so I wanted to send good wishes out to all the teachers, parents, and students embarking on this new school year. My kids don’t start until next week, and I’m having a lot of feelings about it, many of which I’m keeping close to the chest because I want to stay as positive as possible for the kiddos. I wrote a post about change back in 2015 and find much of it is relevant to the year 2020.

This was the school year where all three kiddos were supposed to have some form of formal schooling. The year where I would have a little more time to write. The fact that this isn’t happening is a small thing in comparison to a lot of other problems, but I’m still trying to allow myself to feel some resentment about it without wallowing. I’ve had a ton of writing ideas lately, so at least my creativity is flowing again.

In bookish news, I have a secret project I’ve been working on. Some of you may already know this one, and it’s getting a second life! It’s a project I’ve been working on in the in-between spaces. I was stuck on it for a little bit, but now that I’ve solved a particular problem, it’s well on its way. I don’t have the timeline pinned down yet for a release. Maybe I’ll just do a surprise release with it whenever it’s done.

Here’s an adorable teaser image for it that I cannot take credit for as it was done by an illustrator. I’ll let you know all the details soon!

What have you all been up to lately?

WIP Update: Witchy Middle Grade & a Fear of Asking for Help

August 17, 2020 / Katie L. Carroll

After pushing last fall and winter to get ELIXIR SAVED ready for publication, I was planning on taking a break in the spring to read and fill up my creative well. Then all the pandemic stuff happened, the kids moved to distance learning, and I didn’t get a chance to fill up the well.

I got to a point at the end of the spring when I felt like I would never figure out how to get back into writing and still felt totally burnt out. But I was also itching to get working on this witchy middle grade book I’d started last fall when I did an Unworkshop at the Highlights Foundation (you can read about that amazing experience on my post “Highlights Foundation Unworkshop: A Little Creepy, A Lot Productive”). I’m the type of writer who needs breaks, but when the itch to write comes back, I get antsy. It’s like my body is reacting to my brain’s need to write.

And I really love this witchy middle grade I’ve been working on. It’s about breaking up with toxic friendships, middle school bullying, historical and modern witches, crows, painting and art, mourning the loss of a loved one and how that process never really ends, and a Halloween night corn maze. I even got a crow t-shirt for my birthday to really get into the creative spirit of it.

So I thought about what would help me get back into it and came up with the idea of an accountability buddy. Having someone to check in with where we could be like “Did you get your words in this week?” would make it so I would be letting them down if I didn’t do my work.

A thing you may not know about me is that I’m not very good at asking for help. I hate the idea of putting people out for my benefit…even if it’s not necessarily an inconvenience to them or maybe it’s even something they would enjoy or benefit from. This avoidance of asking for help isn’t something I consciously do; it’s more like it’s in my nature not to bother others. Most of the time I don’t realize I’m doing it (or not doing it as is most often in these situations).

Anyway, I was super nervous when I reached out to one of my writer friends about being accountability buddies. I tried to be totally casual about it, prefacing it with statements like “only if you’re interested and have the time.” I didn’t even suggest the writing together (virtually, of course, because of the pandemic).

It turns out, she was totally on board with it (and I never should have been nervous about reaching out to her in the first place). She had been getting up early in the morning to write before her daughter woke up and asked if I’d be interested in joining her in those early morning session. Which I was super excited about!

Except for one thing…so something else you might now know about me (you’re just all learning so much about me today!) is that I am 100% not a morning person. Before kids, I used to sleep in on weekends until 11:00 and stay up all hours of the night reading or writing. On the other hand, my husband and our two older kids are early risers. I think I’ve had to wake up the kids to get ready for school maybe once. They have a clock in their room, not to wake them up with an alarm, but to let them know when it’s 6:30 a.m. and they’re allowed to get out of bed. They are my alarm clocks!

But, I could see how getting up early would allow me to get back to writing. And if my friend was already doing it, then it wouldn’t be an inconvenience to her at all. That’s why three mornings a week, my phone alarm rings at 5:30 a.m. and I roll out of bed to get my tea ready in time for our 5:45 writing sessions.

I’m not gonna lie and say it’s gotten easy the more I’ve done it…I still hate waking up that early and it feels totally unnatural. (It helps that it’s at least somewhat light this time of year.) But it feels so good to get all those words on the page before breakfast. My word count for the witchy MG is over 35,000 now. I’m past the muddy middle and working my way towards the end. Plus, it’s really fun to write with someone else and to spend at least a few minutes chatting together about our writing projects and life and stuff.

Once school starts back up again, it’s going to be a little trickier to do these early morning sessions (and it’ll be darker in the mornings), but I’m going to try for at least one morning a week. So keep your fingers crossed for me! If I can get this first draft done by the beginning of October, I will have drafted this novel in less than a year…which would be a first for me.

The Different Strengths of Female Characters: A Study of Anna and Elsa in Frozen 2

July 27, 2020 / Katie L. Carroll

Long-time readers of this blog know I’ve been writing about female characters for years and even did a wholes series of “Females in YA” posts. Some topics I’ve covered are unlikable girls, the Bechdel Test, and the feminist world in my first YA fantasy ELIXIR BOUND. One topic in particular I enjoy talking about is the different ways female characters can be strong (see “Females in YA: Part 5 Strong Female Characters”).

Frozen 2, which was the last movie I saw in theaters and is quite popular in my house right now (the whole Frozen franchise really…as evidenced by the requested Frozen Fever cake I made for my 3-year-old’s birthday earlier this month), is a really good example of the different kinds of strengths female characters can have.

Let’s take a look at Elsa. She embodies what a lot of people think about when it comes to strong female characters, à la Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games series or Sarah Connors from the Terminator franchise. I’m talking about the butt-kicking, weapon-wielding type. Elsa is powerful and so full of magic she literally cannot control it. These characters are seen as extraordinary and labeled as strong, often in a way that marks them as different from other female characters. Almost as if implying that women are inherently weak, especially since strong isn’t used nearly as often to describe male characters because it’s assumed of them.

These strong female characters certainly have their weaknesses; they wouldn’t be very interesting characters if they didn’t. Elsa can be distant to the people she loves, she has trouble accepting help, and she fails to recognize her own limitations. A character without such flaws is boring and has nothing to overcome internally.

In general, though, the power of characters like these women is in your face and often of the physical variety, so they get the descriptor of strong. Not to say that they aren’t mentally strong, too, (which they absolutely are), but their most obvious displays of strength are physical. These characters are clearly not to be trifled with. They go on adventures and quests. They face dangers and conquer them. I love these types of strong female characters!

But I also am quick to note that this isn’t the only way a female character can be strong (and this is true for male characters and we definitely need male characters to show different types of strength, but that’s for another post). That’s where Anna comes in.

There’s a running joke in the Frozen franchise about how Anna is ordinary. When she calls herself ordinary in the first Frozen movie, Hans (her love interest at the time) agrees by saying, “That’s right, she is.” When Anna shoots him a wounded look, he adds, “In–in the best possible way.” In Frozen 2, Olaf recounts the events of the first movie and describes the sisters by saying, “One born with magical powers, the other powerless.”

Anna is also openly affectionate, is not afraid to be silly, and is all too aware of her powerlessness. She has her moments of physical strength (justifiably punching Hans in the first Frozen movie after he’s betrayed her and Elsa), but I don’t think she would be described as a strong female character in the way Elsa (or Katniss or Sarah Connors) is.

Warning about Frozen 2 spoilers….

Yet one of the biggest examples of an act of strength in the entire Frozen franchise is performed by Anna in Frozen 2. Having come to the realization that her sister has sacrificed herself for the truth and clutching Olaf as he flurries away to his death, Anna lies on a dark cave floor and just wants to give up. In the song “The Next Right Thing,” she sings:

I’ve seen dark before, but not like this
This is cold, this is empty, this is numb
The life I knew is over, the lights are out
Hello, darkness, I’m ready to succumb

By the end of the song, Anna has found the strength within herself to make her way out the cave and has vowed to save her kingdom and the enchanted forest. Despite facing the darkest moments of her life and personally being done with it all, she gets up and moves forward (not on…there’s really no moving on from something like that). Then, despite the heartache and depression and physical fatigue, she proceeds to anger the Earth Giants so they throw boulders at her as they chase her to the dam that she is trying to get them to destroy. Now that’s a show of strength!

I’m not trying to take sides on whose strength is better. None of Anna’s strengths diminish Elsa’s, and vice versa. The point is that there are many different ways for characters (and people) to show strength and to be powerful. Let’s not limit our characters–male or female–to one type.

This is something I thought a lot about when working on the characters in the Elixir books. I wanted there to be strong female characters in every sense of the word. So if you enjoy stories about sisters and strong female characters (and ice palaces!), I encourage you to check out the award-winning YA fantasy ELIXIR BOUND and its standalone sequel ELIXIR SAVED.