As Miss Ackerley gestured grandly towards her interior decoration, Sir Corliss recalled with a start Theodora's rather unsettling habit of placing a possessively plump hand on his arm (sometimes it was other appendages) at unexpected moments. He tried to extricate himself from her grip discreetly but to no avail.From a middle-grade incarnation of my novel
Back when I first started writing ELIJAH’S CHARIOT (or whatever the hell my work-in-progress will actually be called), it was a middle grade novel. I found the old file again and got a little nostalgic. There are some stylistic differences between YA and middle grade, but what I like about my middle grade incarnation is the archness of the voice. I feel you can maintain a slightly more objective distance from characters in middle grade, as opposed to YA, which is about intense emotions. (Gaah, FEEEEEEEEEEEELINGS again!)
The themes I still wanted to explore in this incarnation of the novel were pretty much the same: imperialism and racism, parental legacy, and growing-up, but what I like about this draft was how easily magic realism comes to the voice.
That is not the excerpt. The excerpt is from another scene, but it made me laugh. What appendages, you may ask? Well, that’s for adult readers to surmise and child readers to overlook.
Another example of killing your darlings! What about you? Any darlings you’ve killed but still amuse you?
I don’t know if it’s a darling, exactly, but I’m cutting this and rewriting it to convey the same emotional ending to the scene but without the (not-very-believable) cliché of crying without knowing it:
“I slipped back into the shadows, unable to watch anymore. Carefully I entered the tunnel, sliding my staff in with me, then I turned around to pull Mother’s cabinet back into place. As I hurried to catch up with Violet and the others, I felt something wet on my hands. How strange, I thought. This part of the cave never leaks.
Then I realized it was me. For the first time in years I was crying. And I didn’t know how to stop.”