Where Does A Story Start For You? (With McCall Hoyle!)

Stephanie here! We have contemporary YA author McCall Hoyle with us this week on Go Teen Writers!

I loved McCall's The Thing With Feathers that came out last fall. This is the story of sixteen-year-old Emilie Day, a girl with epilepsy leaving her safe, homeschooled life for high school on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. For the first time, Emilie must navigate classes, cliques, and crushes, all the while keeping her epilepsy a secret. It's wonderful!

Let's get on to today's panel question!

Where does a story start for you? Is it with a character? A situation? A concept? A topic? A scene? Is it always the same or does it change? 

McCall: I wish all of my ideas came in a similar way. Then I could develop sort of a plan of attack that I could use over and over again without having to recreate the wheel. The bad news is my ideas come from all over the place, so every story requires something of a new plan. The good news is I never get bored because my ideas come from all over the place.

Sometimes, something in the news catches my eye, or I read some nonfiction article or scholarly article and think what if this happened to me or someone I know?

More often, my story ideas start with an emotion, and a lot of those emotions come from my teenage experiences. I also teach high school and middle school and spend a lot of time with teenagers--probably more time with teenagers than I do with adults. I see and hear and feel what my students are struggling with emotionally in their own lives. Oftentimes, their struggles hit a nerve and remind me of how I felt when I was that age. I love to write about how differently human beings deal with a similar situations.

Most of my stories deal with grief in some way, shape, or form and how people deal with it because my father's unexpected death seventeen years ago was the greatest life-changing event I've ever experienced. It was the most emotionally painful event of my life and an event that taught me a lot about myself, my family, and people in general.

Honestly, I think ideas can come from anywhere, and that's what I love about writing. In real life, I get bored very easily. In writing, I know there's always something new to tackle--something that will make me laugh, or cry, or scare me silly.

Jill: I think for me, it’s a story concept. The ideas always come in different ways, but all my ideas are about a concept. My Blood of Kings series started with a dream about an impostor prince. Replication came to me with a “What if . . . ?” question about a farm that grew the same boy named Jason. The idea for the Mission League was a spy organization that fights against evil. The Safe Lands was inspired by putting the Babylonian Exile in a dystopian future. Kinsman Chonicles was a Blood of Kings prequel about a continent that was dying. And RoboTales are fairytale retellings in a science fiction geared toward boys.

Stephanie: For me it depends on the genre. My contemporary fiction has almost always started with character. With Skylar, I wanted to explore a character who knew she was beautiful on the outside, but felt ugly and rotten on the inside. With Ellie, I wanted to write about a girl who had become invisible to the people who had once been her closest friends.

But my historical fiction varies so far. The Lost Girl of Astor Street was a concept: Veronica Mars meets Downton Abbey, which morphed into more of a Veronica Mars but in the 1920s story.

Within These Lines was born from a topic, though. I listened to a podcast about the Japanese American concentration camps during World War II, and I wanted to write about it. 

Shan: It changes! Every time. An image in my head I want to puzzle out. A concept I’d like to follow through to conclusion. A puzzle I want to see in full. A compelling character. A setting that sings to me. I’ve worked on stories with all of these as starting points. The drafting is often different depending on where I start, and that keeps the writing new and fresh for me.

What about you, writers? Where does a story start for you?