Trigger Warning: This story discusses sensitive topics, such as eating disorders.
Everything I write has a message that I want to get out into the world. Of course, I want to help people through my writing, but I also want my work to be a physical form of motivation, where my words get readers to ask questions about themselves that allow them to identify what changes they want to make in their lives.
I’ve written twelve novels so far. All of them are in different phases. Some still need to be revised and some are done. All of them have at least a first draft done though. I’m only going to tell you about the five or so that are pretty much done, mean the most to me, or ones I’ve been working on for years and years.
The first one is called, “Just So You Know, I Love You.” It’s a YA romance, but it’s more than that. I wrote it based on the crush I had on one of my good friends in fifth grade through eighth grade. He was a swimmer, and that’s why I made my main character’s love interest a swimmer. He ended up moving away, so with the book, I had the guy move away as well. I took everything I went through and I turned it into a story. It was my first experience with romantic feelings and I wanted to give readers something they could relate to. I made most of it up, but there are definitely aspects of me and my crush at the time in my characters. The overarching lesson in the book is that my main character is never assertive and she doesn’t go for what she wants. She has to subtly fight the patriarchy and ignore the voice telling her only men can make the first move, and she has to realize that she can fight for who and what she wants. My main character’s dream is art, so there’s also a subplot with her discovering what it means to follow her dream and how far she’s willing to go against her own values to get there. The love interest has to learn how to stand up to his alcoholic father and restore family harmony. I didn’t only want my main character to have a character arc – I wanted to focus on the guy as well. In my mind, I was writing a happy ending to what could’ve been with my crush and me. I wanted to show how they grow with each other, but also how they grow independently of each other with their respective dreams. It’s definitely a slow burn and one of those romances you read to find out if they end up together.
The second one is called, “Just Let Me Go,” and it’s the one that means the most to me. An excerpt of it is getting published soon and I’m so excited. It’s all about mental health. Without giving away any spoilers, my book is a YA romance that challenges society’s lack of openness when it comes to mental illnesses versus physical illnesses. Readers often get to see romance books about physical illnesses like cancer, but very rarely do they get to read stories about mental illnesses. It’s even rarer that readers get to see cancer and mental health themes in a story together to show how mental and physical problems are a package deal. My novel shows the significance of comorbidity in this context. I struggled with my mental health a lot in high school, so my main character has a lot of aspects of me. She goes through similar things, though not the same exact things. I gave her a more snarky personality because that’s how I wish I was when I was going through the things I went through, and it’s a more attractive personality to readers. When I write something so sad, it’s so important to use humor to balance it out. The love interest has a lot of humor to help with this balance. When I wrote the first draft, it was like a diary. I had to rewrite it from scratch. The first time, I had to get out my feelings. The second time, I was ready to write a fictional story based on my experience. Writing the book honestly saved my life, it really did; it got me through so much. I strongly recommend journaling or writing. I find that I prefer writing fictional novels because I can get out my emotions without having to relive all the specific details I don’t want to. I can escape myself and face myself at the same time.
The next one I will talk about is called, “I Love You More Than Me.” This one has an excerpt published already. It’s about a high schooler who has this checklist of all the high school “milestones” she has to hit at certain ages. For example, she has to lose her virginity at age 18 and have her first kiss at age 16. Comparing myself to other people in high school who were experiencing things before I did is why I wrote this book. I wrote this to show that it’s okay to go at your own pace. You don’t want to have done everything by the age of 30; there’s still so much life left to be lived after that. There’s so much pressure to do certain things by certain ages. I personally had a lot of mental health struggles during high school; I was nowhere near ready to be in a relationship. I was still working on my relationship with myself, and yet I still felt weird that my first relationship was at age 18, the summer after high school. In society, a lot of people feel like they’re constantly behind, but what people never tell you is there are people who don’t have their first kiss until age 28. And there’s nothing wrong with that! That was my goal with this novel – to show what societal pressures can do to someone. When you speed up your life, especially when you’re in high school, it ruins your ability to get to know yourself. If you speed up your own coming-of-age story, there can be consequences on your identity and self-confidence. Everyone is going through something different, everyone is different, so why do we expect everyone’s life to follow the same trajectory?
The last two novels I’m going to talk about have to do with disordered eating and eating disorders. I struggled with disordered eating severely in high school. I was proud of skipping meals and lying about eating, so proud. To get through it, I wrote books. The first one is called, “Dear BulliMIa.” I purposefully capitalize the “MI.” Throughout the book, my main character is writing letters to men in her life and to other people and things in her life that she uses as distractions to avoid her urge to binge and purge. She’s in recovery, and she always keeps herself busy and avoids herself in order to keep herself from going back into the dark place she was in before. It isn’t until the end that she writes herself a letter and a letter to her eating disorder, and that’s why the title looks the way it does. It’s a book about recovery in general and shows how it’s okay if it isn’t linear.
The last novel is the one I’m revising right now. It’s called “An Hourglass Doesn’t Break, It Shatters.” It’s dystopian. The plot is too complicated to get into here, but basically, it goes against the appearance ideal and the media and shows how just because society tells us to look one way doesn’t mean it’s healthy or that we should follow it, or that we have to. A lot of dystopias attack the government, and this attacks cultural expectations of beauty, it attacks the corporations that aren’t FDA approved that get money all based on people’s insecurities about their bodies. It’s definitely the hardest book I’ve ever had to write. I’m not used to worldbuilding as much. It’s my first dystopian novel. It means so much to me. I use so much of what I’ve learned about capitalism in my literary theories English class and what I’ve learned in the MSU Peer Body Project. My goal is to help more people want to reject the appearance ideal.
I have other novels I’m not going to mention in-depth here. I’ve written horror, fantasy, and toxic Christianity in the context of being discriminatory toward the LGBTQ+ community, and I plan to write one about gun violence as well. The bottom line is that writing novels is how I get through life. And someday, I hope my novels are able to help other people as they’ve helped me. There’s so much in the world I want to help improve, and for me, it just so happens that I’m most effective at doing it through words.
Even if you hate writing, I urge you to find out what your outlet is. It’ll come to you if it hasn’t already.