Something's Wrong With the Different Realms

Nine: Check-Ins and Advice

She narrowed her nose and took out her notes. "I'm sure you two saw some of the notes I wrote about your grammar mistakes. Let's take a look at your document...."

We nodded our heads as Ms. Valance opened the document that contained our book.

"Good," stated Mrs. Valance, "you guys paid attention to the notes that I made and corrected most of those mistakes."

Jasper and I glanced at each other and smiled, then heaved sighs of relief. Our editing had certainly paid off.

"Okay, now let's move on to the general plot of your story. Let's see..." Mrs. Valance flipped open the portfolio again and then looked at her laptop. "Your story doesn't have a plot as it's based on your actual lives. That means your story is character-driven and your book is literary fiction. So your story not having a super detailed plot is fine. I'd probably still roughly plot out the direction of your story following the plot mountain."

"Okay," I nodded my head.

"Anyway... because your story is character-driven this means that you should probably have a fully developed character chart. Let's look at it...."

Ms. Valance hmmed for a full minute before she spoke again. "You have enough information on your characters but it's still a little lackluster. You only described certain things about their appearance, personality, relationships, and character development. To make a literary story work, you need to dive into your character. You need to think about how their relationships influence them instead of just listing them down. You need to fully analyze your character's emotions and really think about what you want your character to achieve. Tell you what, since your book is based on your lives, why don't you add something to the book that you think is unnecessary. You never know if it'll reveal something about your character and add to their development. Besides, it'll help you increase your word count as well. What do you think?"

"Our lives are so boring though, we're not really going through anything. I don't see how writing about my character eating dinner with her parents based on actual dinners I have with my moms will help with the novel," I blurted the first thing that came to mind.

"I can attest to that," said Jasper.

Ms. Valance shrugged and smiled, her brown eyes crinkling. "Just give it a try. You never know if the thing you think is useless will actually turn out to be useful. Who knows, maybe you'll enhance your story and make it even better."

"Okay," grumbled Jasper.

"Anyway, overall, you guys did a pretty great job. As of right now, I think you're on the track to a low A. Once I finish all my notes and feedback, I'll email it to you, okay? And if you ever need any help writing your novel or anything, just email me. Okay?"

"Got it!" I said.

"You guys may go now. You can spend the rest of the period working on your novel or finishing any overdue assignments."

We got up from our seats. "Why don't we work on the novel?" suggested Jasper.

"Sure," I agreed.

It had been a week since the check-in with Ms. Valance. During that time, I had added a bunch of meaningless scenes to my character's chapters. I even provided some of my own random thoughts when I felt like it. I didn't understand how it would build my character yet but at least the word count was increasing drastically. Jasper had added his fair of scenes as well. And after slacking off on our novel for some time, it felt great to be back on track.

I was at home adding some of my random thoughts when I received a ping on my phone. I glanced at it, expecting some sort of Gmail notification or a text from my parents but to my surprise it was Jasper. I opened it thinking that he'd like to schedule a session with me so we could edit our parts together. It had been some time since we'd done one of those outside of class.