Rewriting Adventures (Discovering Genres + Meet Pine Grove!)

One of my big goals for this summer was to reoutline/rewrite my ghost story. The first draft needed A LOT of work. Like, Chopping out whole characters and reassembling them or making a super complicated chart for all of the scenes. 

It was an adventure, to be sure. 

This adventure was also a very good learning experience. I figured out so much about my writing and the writing craft that I decided to go over what I learned while trying to fix this mess of a first draft. 

Genres 

Whenever someone would ask me what genre I write in, I’d always say “A little bit of everything.” For a long time, I loved fantasy and adventure novels. But as much as I loved writing about dragons and magic, I struggled to avoid cliches and come up with an original story.

Then I started reading some dystopian books, and quickly became obsessed with the dystopian genre. So I decided to try writing dystopian stories. But again, cliches hit and I honestly got really bored. I love reading dystopian, but not so much writing in the genre. 

Then I got an idea for a contemporary-mystery-adventure story involving a secret organization named SO (which indeed stood for Secret Organization) This failed quite badly. I enjoyed having a story that took place in the modern world, but I still needed to figure out the messy plot and horrible secret organization. 

After that, I got an idea for a few short stories that were all set in modern times. I decided to use those to learn more about story structure and characters. Some had a little bit of magic, and others simply took place in the modern world. During this burst of short stories, I wrote the first draft of my ghost story. It was messy and pretty nonsensical, so a little while later I embarked on a mission to redo it.

The Ghost Story 

I began reoutlining my ghost story. This story takes place in generally modern times (more on that later) but with a little bit of magic. At the same time, I was reading a lot of magical realism books and fell in love with the genre. 

Magical realism is great because it combines my favorite aspects of different genres. I can set my story in a modern world and have the fun of contemporary writing with magic. I can still keep some aspects of the fantasy genre, which is great! 

Taking Inspiration 

I also started  to track down what books inspired my writing. What books motivate me and inspire me to write new stories? What books do I read, then think “Wow. I want to write a story like this.”

Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech 

You’ve heard me talk about Walk Two Moons a lot. And for good reason, because it is such an amazing, heart wrenching book. Seriously, if you haven’t read it yet, take this as a sign to go read it. 

I’m definitely going to write a blog post diving into the specifics of why Walk Two Moons works so well, but for now we are going to focus on the setting: Bybanks, Kentucky. 

Bybanks is a fictional town set in a real state and country. Having fictional towns is great because it can give a lot of wiggle room for characters and settings. 

After you’ve read Walk Two Moons, go read Chasing Redbird. These two books are very similar (again, this topic is on the giant blog post list too) but Chasing Redbird gives us more time in Bybanks. In that book, readers will see little hints of Sal from Walk Two Moons. This connection has always fascinated me, and I love the idea of having separate standalone books that are still slightly connected.

The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater

The Scorpio Races take place on the made up island of Thisby. Apart from just sounding so cozy, Thisby doesn’t have a specific time period. On the island, there’s running water, electricity, and cars, but no phones or internet or anything like that. It’s slightly vintage-y, but I don’t think a lot of the characters act like they are in the 1950’s or ‘40’s. 

For my recent ghost story, I had to figure out how ghosts would interact with phones and the internet. My ghosts couldn’t interact with humans, but could they talk to people through the internet? 

Then I thought about Thisby, and how it feels modern but doesn’t have phones or computers. I loved the general tone and feel of Thisby, so I decided to recreate it, along with a made up place, because I really seem to hate specifics in my settings. 

Meet Pine Grove!

Pine Grove is my made up town. It is a small mountain town, kind of like Estes Park in Colorado, but smaller. It’s on the route to famous ski hills and hiking, but not many people stop specifically in Pine Grove. It’s a bit run down, but still busy in the summer with tourists driving through to get to the other side of the pass.

I wanted lots of outdoorsy things in this town. Outside of Pine Grove there are many hiking trails and cabins. One infamous trail leads to Pinpoint Lake, where a character becomes a ghost. And one of my favorite details is the mountain named Heaven’s Peak overlooking the whole town. 

My ghost story and Parent Trap retelling both take place outside of Pine Grove in the woods, but I have lots of ideas for stories taking place inside Pine Grove. I am so excited for the stories to come!

Making Your Own Made Up Town (A few things I discovered along the way) 

• First of all, what is it named? Why is it named that? 
• What are its main industries? Have those changed throughout the years?
• What is the size of your town/city? Is it big enough to have bigger stores like Walmart and Target, or so small that there are only random mom and pop stores? 
• What surrounds your town? Are there lots of ranches and farms outside of it or maybe even some smaller towns? Big cities? 
• What is the climate like? How does that affect the industries? 
• Is it older or newer? What is the history of your town? 

And there you have it! You’ve met Pine Grove and all of the adventures it took to make Pine Grove. And now, there are more adventures to come in my fun little small town. What kinds of things have you learned about writing lately? Do you like to world build/town build? If you could make up your own town, what would you name it? Thanks for reading, and I hope you have a great rest of your day!