girl, (my upcoming novel is) so confusing

This is my seventh blog post, it has been 134 days since my first one, and this is the first one that will discuss my novel in more detail. I would like to open it with a little re-introduction for any new readers.

Hi there! I’m an aspiring novelist based in Dundee, Scotland. I am writing a coming-of-age story with romance at its heart and a disquieting horror undertone. I’m very far along with my first draft, and November 20 is the date I have decided on sending it to beta readers so that it can be ready for professional release next year, however I choose to do it. I can’t wait to finally share a piece of fiction with you!

As much as I enjoy writing my protagonist, I find myself re-living the feelings I had at seventeen. I’m stuck in a teenage mindset, one I don’t relate to as much anymore but am still able to vividly conjure in my mind. Unfortunately, our bodies struggle to adjust entering adulthood just as much as they do during puberty. Especially if you are a girl who finds herself alone as she has to battle her own body, strange men, and even other girls.

Being a girl between the ages of 16 and 25 is a tornado. Unfortunately for these young girls, the tornado doesn’t come with Cary Elwes or Glen Powell like the ones in the movies. Also, there’s not much destruction. You’re just really scared that there could be. I have embodied this and continue to do so as I stagger around learning about love, money, and turmoil as if I am stuck in the wilderness. Here are some examples of my emotional obstacles:

• I cannot listen to ‘A House in Nebraska’ by Ethel Cain in full because a seven-minute, visceral song about losing your first love is too much to bear when you’re currently with them and deeper in love than it feels possible to be.
• I cried because ChatGPT created a story about me getting cancer and being mourned.
• I used to get angry, now all I do is cry. My will seems to have been defeated by my hormones.
• I poke people until they poke me and I break.
• I don’t love when other people love what I love because they don’t love it correctly (there’s no such thing as correctly loving something, go touch grass).
• I obsess over things to the point that they don’t leave my mind for weeks, then they are gone forever.

I’m sure that these are the last things a man would guess are relatable or normal. It’s not because they don’t respect us, but because their bodies and social structures are absolutely nothing like ours. It’s likely that they’ve seen stupid memes saying ‘she was just a girl’ about killer characters, but not understood that it can actually feel that way. Though I have been personal in my examples, the same rush of hormones causes the same fear of existence, hatred of everything, and general instability in every girl. This is not something you want to experience while you find yourself suddenly reckoning with the big, abstract concept of adulthood.

It’s evident in pop culture that other girls feel the same way. Even one of the most popular songs at the moment, ‘girl, so confusing’ by Charli XCX and Lorde, discusses insecurity in female friendships and body image issues. Struggling, whether that’s with emotions or social issues, is integral to being a woman and often gets in the way of the goals we set. But even just in our biological makeup, there are distinct ways we think that must be taken into account when the narrator is female. This is also true of those who don’t identify as girls, though that involves a whole lot more than I’ve experienced. My point is that being female affects the way you deal with life, so it is something you will have to consider when writing and reading books.

Within my novel, I want it to be a constant question about whether the protagonist’s grudges are valid, and whether everything is as horrible as she feels. She is a seventeen year old girl, one that is about to leave school, finds love for the first time, and strives to feel perfect. I’ve taken care to perfect her character voice using my own experiences of being female, being a teenager, moving on, finding love, and obsessing over self-improvement. I perfectly understand the melodrama she sees on the stage that is the world. But this isn’t the only inspiration I’ve taken.

If you’ve read the introduction on my homepage, you’ll know that I love horror. So, even when I am not writing it, I am always taking inspiration from it. For this book, I have used several pieces of psychological horror as an extreme point of reference for my character’s warped perspective. Shows like ‘Yellowjackets’ and books like Iain Reid’s ‘We Spread’ challenge our trust in the characters, leaving room to believe that none of the scary things they’ve endured have been real. Yellowjackets relies on the characters being starving, scared, and having a schizophrenic teammate, whereas We Spread relies on the characters being elderly. On the topic of Yellowjackets, the characters are also teenagers who have to reckon with the idea that their bright futures are no longer guaranteed, and the food chain in the wilderness is nothing like that of high school. This is something that has had a great influence on the creation of my protagonist… though she never gets stranded in the wilderness. Maybe in the sequel?

For a more mundane example of how stories play with perception, I want to talk about cult-favourite teen movie ‘John Tucker Must Die’. It’s perfectly on-topic as it is about teenage girls and their grudges. In the movie, four girls plot the heartbreak of cheating, calculating school alpha-male John Tucker by sending the protagonist to gain his trust and shatter it on his birthday. The overall message of the movie is that the girls had failed to recognise that their own actions would be as bad as John’s, and he actually has a personality outside of his wrongdoings. A very neat instance of this comes about during the plot-line involving John’s brother who has feelings for the protagonist. John’s brother says (in an act of extreme cringe) ‘She likes vintage Costello, she’s deep’. John, who is known to play different characters with different women, plays ‘Clubland’ in the car with the protagonist and gains some of her respect. Interestingly, we are never explicitly told whether it is just his music taste. It is possible that, because his brother is a Costello fan, he could have liked what he’d heard around the house. It is also quite likely that this is true because, at that point in the movie, he seemed to have come to like the protagonist more sincerely. We will never know if she truly glimpsed his personality, or whether her brief feeling of warmth towards him was just her being ‘tuckered’. I think that was very clever of the film, because it doesn’t try to tell us that what John did to the girls was to be excused, but that he was still a human. He, like a normal human, contains multitudes. There’s no way in hell my protagonist would’ve seen that without undergoing the same journey as the girl in the film. I think she needs to watch it.

As the events of my novel unfold, readers will form their own opinions on whether the spiteful and confused female protagonist has a right to hold her grudges, and they will follow her through her own decisions and discoveries. She has doubts about her rival, her old teacher, the student body of another school, and her parents. She even has doubts about certain friendships. It’s really just everyday life as a teenager. She will be alright, but you’ll have to go on her journey with her to believe it.

Everyone who is good at something has ‘hated’ someone who is also good at that thing. It can be jealousy, but it can also be that person’s arrogance that grinds them down. The love interest of my upcoming novel is arrogant and troubled, but so is the protagonist and she really has to work to understand what they have in common. It’s wonderfully human that, even when it’s as clear as day to the reader, she still struggles to get out of her own head for long enough to understand it herself. My story even goes as far as having her recognise certain things, like how he would fit in at her reform school, and still struggle to understand him.

Everyone who has gone to school has ‘hated’ a teacher. Maybe they’re immature, maybe they’re lazy, or maybe they just call their students out for texting in class. There are many reasons I’ve had and heard for hating teachers. The readers will have to find out whether the protagonist is right about hers, or if they’re just looking out for her. She and her fellow students are unruly, to put it lightly.

Everyone who has gone to school has also ‘hated’ another school. Not sincerely, but one that they blow raspberries at when they see them on school trips or compete with in sports tournaments. Well, in my novel, it’s different. The two schools in my book seem predisposed to hate each other. One is an elite academy, the other is set on reforming delinquents. However, the reader and the protagonist will see parallels in due time. Equally, the students were raised very differently and may just not be the type of people they can get along with.

Everyone who has been a teenager has ‘hated’ their parents. They’ve screamed at them, told them they’ll never understand how they feel, and considered running away. It’s very rare that you’ll find a teenager that doesn’t long for independence. Unfortunately, the world can be so unfair that not everybody has parents who try their best. Is it possible to love your child but still send them to a reformatory school that treats them, as the protagonist claims, like animals?

I want you to know that I am not, in my book or in this piece, encouraging you to forgive everyone who upsets you. I am just asking you not to get so wrapped up in your head that you disregard all humanity in the world. I promise, things are often not that bad. Especially if you’re aged between 16 and 25. Even more so if you’re a girl.

The purpose of this piece was to describe the idea behind my unpleasant protagonist in a sympathetic way. I hope that if you relate to any of this, or it just makes some sense to you, you come to love the journey within my novel. So, to keep the thoughts going, who is your favourite unpleasant teenager in fiction? I personally love Paris from Gilmore Girls, her rant on national television is almost a love letter to every girl who has ever felt inadequate. Returning to the topic of grudge-holders, I’m also a big fan of Rowan from Heartbreak High. What a drama queen he was!

Just a quick note before I go: I’m on Instagram now! The handle is @olivialusk.books