In August last year, I started writing a book called The
Choices We Made. It is now May, and it has been nine months and I still haven’t
finished writing it. I could have written three
books in that time, had I not been in school. But alas, preparing for GCSEs is
time-consuming (as is spending hours on Facebook).
Normally, when I begin writing a book, I have no idea where
the story will go; I just write and hope for the best. This approach worked
with CONSEQUENCE. I started writing, and the characters and storylines
followed. When I began writing, all I had was Persephone , Greece
With AMEND, it was different because it ran on from
CONSQUENCE (with a thirteen-year gap). The same storylines were there, giving
me the foundations I needed, so all I really had to do was form the character
of Melinoe.
TRANSCEND was rather interesting in terms of method, because
my ideas changed a lot from what they
originally were. You see, by this point, I was beginning to run out of
interesting storylines. Then I had this dream that gave me an idea so insane that
I had to use it. Then I got another really insane idea. And suddenly I had
solved my problems.
It was different with The Choices We Made, because I
actually planned before I started
writing (shocking, right?). I got this notebook, and wrote this long list of
everything to think about when creating a world, and then I created the world
of my book. I had designed most of the world by the time I started writing The
Choices We Made, and this made the setting a lot stronger, and left me free to
just write.
Writing The Choices We Made is a different experience to
writing CONSEQUENCE or any other of my books. In my trilogy, a lot of my
characters are impulsive, a fuse just waiting to be lit… But Katerina, the main
character in The Choices We Made, is entirely different. There’s this
complexity to her emotions that I haven’t really written before, and I think it
makes this book far more mature than my previous works.
Katerina is in control of her emotions in a way that would
be impossible for, say, Phoenix ,
but this is damaging for those around her. Katerina isn’t heading in a good
direction… she has so many issues around control, and around the lack of
control she has over herself. A lot of her personality has stemmed from her
history of eating disorders, depression, and self-harm. As a result of this,
she is constantly in fear of not being able to take command of herself, not
being able to take responsibility for her own life.
A recurring theme in the 27,900ish words I’ve written so far
is Katerina’s fear of ‘the emptiness’, and her feeling of ‘standing on the edge
of an abyss’. Throughout the book, she is subconsciously searching for something
that can fill that emptiness, but when she does find it – or, to be more
accurate, him – she soon discovers that even that isn’t enough, and constantly
denies herself the chance to heal.
Katerina falls in love with Ansel, who is the
supposedly-dead son of the Kamea (king) who was executed seventeen years before
the book begins. But when Katerina finds herself working for the Djator
(president/dictator) who plans to have Ansel killed, she must make the choice
of where her loyalties lie.
Katerina is deeply in love with Ansel, but she does not
believe that it is love; she will not even admit to herself how she feels. At
one point, it says ‘I never loved him, but the feelings I felt were much
stronger than love.’ And at another point she believes that the two of them
have been possessed by the Gods, and that her feelings are ethereal,
otherworldly, and not something as simple as love. By thinking of him like
this, she turns him into an addiction, a drug, a thing she can’t allow herself
to have.
Even at this point, Katerina is still on Ansel’s side, still
fighting for his safety, but as the book goes on, her humanity and compassion
slowly begins to ebb away, replaced by coldness and selfishness. When Katerina
finds out a shocking family secret, her fear and anxiety boils over, and she
can’t cope any more, her last remnants of strength are gone, and she has been
cut down to the very core.
Katerina ends up on a rooftop, ready to jump, and it’s the
Djator who talks her out of it, the Djator who saves her from herself, and
consequently, she switches sides. Her feelings for Ansel don’t change, but her
loyalties do. The Djator can give something Katerina has never had: power. And as a result of this, she
becomes the worst version of herself, eventually becoming a dictator and
alienating herself from the people she cares about.
In The Choices We Made, I have used religion and politics
and culture to create a world for my characters that is more true to reality than,
say, the world of CONSEQUENCE. As humans, we are made up of more than just
ourselves – we are made up of the world we live in, too, and this is a fact
that I sometimes overlook when creating “realistic” characters. Using means
such as religion, I can put Katerina in a position that is a closer mirror to
reality than the lives of characters in my other books.
Katerina has religious beliefs, she has political beliefs,
she has been influenced by the culture she grew up in, and she has her own
opinions as well as this. Katerina has a conscience, she knows the difference
between good and bad, and she makes her decisions in spite of this, because at
the end of the day, she is a person, and people often make the wrong choices.
I think that perhaps the reason I have taken so long to
write this book – other than school getting in the way – is that The Choices We
Made and I are both maturing, and we grow together. The older and wiser I get,
the better the book gets. When I started writing this book, I was not in a good
space, and it was my therapy. But then I felt like I could only write it when I
was really miserable – which made the first chapters really dark and powerful –
and so when I was happy again I didn’t really write much.
But I started writing again, and I began to see that the
bleak nature of the book wasn’t really all that interconnected with my own
feelings of bleakness, and that the two had just happened to compliment each
other. The truth is, the reason I love The Choices We Made so much is because
it is bleak, and it is desolate and dark and somewhat
hopeless, but overall, it is just like all my other books: a story about the
things that make us human, and things that eventually come to break us. And
perhaps the overall message is not so bleak after all…perhaps the overall
message is that no matter how broken we are, there is something in the world
that will make us care enough that we can put ourselves back together.
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