I've been frantically outlining my story lately, and while I'm happy with it overall, I have some areas that are causing me grief. Before I launch into them, here's my basic premise, copy-pasted from the synopsis thread:
Even the few friends that sixteen-year-old Charlotte Gaines has made over her last three years at her remote boarding school wouldn’t describe her as a particularly nice person to be around. Bitter and cynical, she spends her days and nights acquiring and selling everything from foodstuffs to alcohol and condoms to her classmates—anything to keep her busy until the end of high school, when she fully expects her life to collapse and for her to fall back into the depression and impotent anger that defined her life after the death of her brother years ago.
However, Charlotte finds an even more compelling distraction from the past when she meets a withdrawn violin prodigy named Elliott. In the process of saving him from a group of their less savory fellow students, she sees that his upper body is covered in scars.
Suspecting bullying or abuse, Charlotte finds herself increasingly preoccupied with the highly intelligent, but frustratingly optimistic Elliott, who ignores his present problems and keeps himself focused on an ideal future studying music. Even as his troubled relationship with his parents and her long history of antagonizing other students and breaking school rules comes back to haunt them, the two form an unsteady friendship. However, as their lives begin to crumble both from trauma in their pasts and their mistakes in the present, Charlotte becomes more and more convinced of her belief that both love and happiness are temporary, and life doesn’t get better.
I'm probably going to run into more as I keep writing, but here are the two ones driving me insane today:
-I'm struggling to figure out where Elliott's scars exactly come from. Back when I first imagined this, I defaulted to physical abuse from his parents, but that idea presents problems. To give a bit of backstory, one of the parents is a failed violinist (I'm thinking the mom, but it could be the dad), and at least for much of his life, they had an unhealthy obsession with pushing him to succeed where they couldn't. Elliott's skills capped out at some point, so they largely view him as a disappointment in the present and have given up on him, but pushing him to succeed and hone his craft early in life could give them a motive to abuse him.
The issue is that I can't think of a single remotely believable means of abuse that would actually leave the kind of scars I'm thinking of (scars likely from something edged or sharp, running up his arms and covering his chest and perhaps a bit of his neck), and the scars are already playing a moderate role in the story. Plus, although he wears long-sleeves and undershirts in the present to cover it up, the parents would have to be idiots to physically harm a young child in that way because someone would notice the wounds/scars sooner or later. I considered some kind of accident, perhaps connected to the parents and his violin-playing, but I have no idea what form that would take.
-Elliott's character arc is much muddier than Charlotte's is at the moment. Part of what I found compelling about the pair of them is that they're exact opposites in some crucial ways. Elliott begins the story living with his eyes on the future and his dreams of studying music, ignoring the fact that is life is passing away in front of him and that he's fundamentally not happy in the present. Charlotte no longer even pays attention to the future or cares what will happen, instead living a frequently self-destructive life that is defined by her inability to move past the death of her brother (she's essentially suffering from complicated grief, where her feelings of loss and anger have remained years after the fact). In other words, neither of them are living their lives firmly in the present, with Charlotte obsessed with the past and how it informs her own nihilistic philosophy, while Elliott waits for a better future that never quite comes.
I don't know exactly what to have Elliott doing in the second half of the story though. In all the sections I've outlined so far, Charlotte wrestles with her own grief, her self-destructive and antagonistic tendencies, and later on her feelings for Elliott. She cares for him almost as a replacement for her brother at first, but becomes increasingly troubled by romantic feelings, as she believes that both romantic and platonic relationships--and especially high school ones--are largely pointless because they fade away and you're always left alone in the end. All that lends itself to her making choices and developing as a character, both in good and bad ways, but Elliott is proving trickier.
In the first half, he's learning with Charlotte and her friends essentially how to loosen up a bit, stand up for himself and others, and live more in the present instead of the future (I should note at this point that this I will keep this from turning into a stereotypical manic pixie dream girl story if it kills me), but once that's over, I don't know where to take his character next. I thought about having him swing to the opposite end of the spectrum and become self-destructive in some way, perhaps confirming Charlotte's belief that she drags other people around her down and is a bad influence, but I don't know.