Touchstones in Lena’s Subplot

As I mentioned, when it was time to complete Lena’s story, I reminded myself of my targets for The Ever Afters, and then I reviewed what I already had in Lena’s story, looking for what I could develop further.

Regarding a big-deal villain to defeat

What I already had were giants, and during her own Tale of “Jack and the Beanstalk,” Lena had been truly unnerved by only one of them: General Genevieve Searcaster .

So, I took this as an opportunity: Lena needed to defeat General Searcaster, the only sorceress-giant known to fairy tale history. So, I decided that Lena also needed to have magic, way more than any other human in the fairy tale community. (I could have chosen for Lena to defeat General Searcaster with her courage, wits, and magical tools alone, but since that was what Rory was doing with the Snow Queen, it felt more interesting to give Lena magic.) 

Another Touchstone: Sorcery.

As I mentioned, in Of Giants and Ice, had already set up the world of the Ever Afters. One of the details already established was that humans didn't have any magic of their own. So, I needed a way to let a human develop magic that fit inside the constraints of the world. 

Again, I searched through Of Giants and Ice, looking for something I'd already had that I could develop further, and I found...SORCERY.

I'd mentioned sorcery, or a sorcerer/sorceress, just three times in Of Giants and Ice, but one of the instances noted that the main villain, the Snow Queen, was a sorceress. Another instance was General Searcaster herself.

That meant two things:

1. Sorcery was already important to the main conflict of the series, to this fictional world, and two of the main villains.

2. My narrator Rory knew very little about sorcery, which meant that I could still shape and mold it in a way that would support Lena’s character arc.

This is the touchstone equivalent of striking gold. 

I hadn’t yet completely thought out how someone became a sorcerer or sorceress. However, there was a mention of General Searcaster removing an eye for magic’s sake. 

Inside this fictional world, it would potentially make sense that General Searcaster would pluck out her eye to become a sorceress. So, I added a few more details on how someone became a sorcerer to the Of Witches and Wind manuscript: If you lost a body part and magic replaced it, you became a sorceress (or sorcerer). The more important the body part, the more magic you would wield. That provided an explanation for why General Searcaster lost her eye, and it also laid the foundation for what needed to happen to Lena. 

With that detail added, I identified two very specific puzzle pieces I needed in order to complete out Lena’s subplot: 

• Lena needed to become a sorceress by losing a body part, the more integral to her daily life the better.

• Lena also needed to develop enough courage to trust her ability to take on a villain as powerful as General Searcaster.

An Adult Lena Could Hone Herself against, especially around Rules

Lena truly loves rules. She has loved them from the very first chapters of the very first draft of the very first novel in this series. In the beginning, her love for rules was only supposed to be a fun and funny way to convey information: in times of potential danger, Lena would start quoting the rules to her classmates to remind them how to stay safe and also to keep herself calm when she was a bit nervous. That allowed me, as the author, to share all sorts of information that Rory, the narrator, didn’t yet know.

The Director also loved rules, but since she wrote the rules, her relationship to them was different. She was the enforcer. To her, rules were no laughing matter. Enforcing rules was the way she knew how to keep the young people in her care out of harm’s way.

In Of Giants and Ice, there was no conflict between the woman who made the rules and the sixth grader who quoted those same rules when she was nervous. But also present in Of Giants and Ice were a couple details that showed Lena had the potential to bend the rules: 

• Lena spent the money her family entrusted to her on Madame Benne’s spellbook, i.e. on something that might help her dream come true, rather than on the safe bet, which would have been the Table of Plenty her family had decided to purchase.

• Lena befriends Rory, the narrator, whose relationship to rules is to bust them wide open, sometimes unintentionally.

This set-up is a workable touchstone. It’s vague—potential conflict with the Director over rules—but it’s juicy. You can do a lot with that, especially since both Lena and the Director are often thrown together at Ever After School. 

Puzzle Pieces So Far

To recap, here are the puzzle piece I gathered for Lena’s subplot, from the touchstones in the existing material and the targets of the planned material: 

• Lena’s inventing, with her absent mentor, Madame Benne, and her assistant, Melodie

• Losing a body part in order to become a sorcerer

• Her eventual showdown with General Searcaster

• The courage needed for the above

• Potential conflict with the Director over rules

I also needed an overall arc to bring all of these together. But what?

In the context of the Ever Afters’ world, the obvious choice was to give her another Tale. I’d already given her two—the one that drove the outer conflict in Of Giants and Ice and another which I’d already foreshadowed. (For more on how I determined those, you can read about it here.) I was sure that the right Tale would allow me to weave all these puzzle pieces into it—if I could find it. There are literally thousands of fairy tales.