Half Childhood/half adult...

SuzyB said:

What would you think if you read a story that was half childhood, and half adult? Because my story is taking a chance and the first half might be about the childhood(teen years) of my characters, to the present.

Any suggestions?

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wow, such far reaching questions! No way can I do them all justice, but my main thought was to start the story as close to the most exciting parts as possible. You can have any combination of story structure that you want--how you construct it depends on the story that needs to be told. My gut tells me that you probably only need to reveal the most intense parts of their lives as teens in order to convey the impact their teen experiences have years later. You don't (i think you don't) want the teen stuff to read like a therapist's file.

Don't stories like this usually scatter bits of the past here and there, and then slowly the pieces start to add up to the puzzle? I'm halfway through the movie THE BIG CHILL right now, and it's unfolding like that (not a book, I know, but this reminded me of that). I guess that's what I personally would expect.

I guess i'd vote for either a chapter or two covering the teen years (or can it be whittled down to a prologue?) OR weave it in like you said. I think if I were writing it, i'd struggle too hard with writing the first half the teen years and the second half the adult years...that might throw a monkey wrench into the story arc.

well, i'm sure other more experienced folks will weigh in. good luck with your decision!

Every adult character will be a product of their childhood just like every person is a product of their childhood. When you meet an individual, say at work, you learn about them and their background slowly. You don't know right away that an adult woman was raped as a young teen but you DO notice that she's nervous around men or doesn't like being alone with a man in a closed office or is vehement about only working with women, etc. Her story will unfold slowly as you get to know her. That may be something to consider. Is it absolutely necessary that the reader know right away what's happened to these people in the past or can knowlege of their background unfold in bits and pieces just as it does in real life?Linnea

When do the main events of the story happen? When they're adults, or childen, or both? Unless you're writing parallel plotlines, with something significant that ties past with present, I'd stick to the adults' storyline. You can certainly refer to their past through any of the ways you mention: dreams, conversations, even a flashback or two. I actually do that in my novel ONE NIGHT IN BOSTON because what happens to the heroine significantly affects every other plotline in the story. But I still wrote it in present/adult time.

Think of a story as the most important challenge in a person's life. That means one limited time period. It starts with a focused problem, continues through the middle with attempts to fix that same problem until it comes to a crisis, and then the problem gets resolved. It is, ultimately, logical, and can be boiled down to a single premise along the lines of "Protagonist wants X (concrete goal), because Y (motivation), but Z (conflict; person opposing the protagonist)."

A story is influenced by the past, but the past is, well, the past, and to that extent is not part of the current story, at least in the sense of being played out on the page.

That's the trick, really -- to figure out what scenes need to be played out on t he page, in full detail, and which can be alluded to with a line of narrative or dialogue, and which can be omitted entirely, except to the extent the author herself knows what happened and knows how the off-stage events affected the character's development.

In other words -- the author needs to know a lot of stuff that the reader doesn't need to know. Go ahead and write the backstory and off-stage scenes if they'll help you, but be prepared to cut them during the next draft.

JD

Look at something by like Susan Wiggs (her contemporary books.) She does the weaving past and present thing together pretty well.