Hi friendly readers! Welcome to a series called the Atro-City Analysis, where I dissect my own book and tell you what I did really think of when putting words to the page, and what was done the way it was on purpose. I'm totally familiar with analysing books in school and hearing classmates say 'well the author didn't actually think of ALL of that', and to an extent, sure, some things can be a coincidence. However, as an author myself, there's a surprising (and random) number of things I DO think of- some of which I don't ever expect anyone to know unless I tell them, so here's a shameless post about some of the things I actually did think of, starting with, of course, the main character.
Kayla Stevenson:
I chose Kayla Stevenson to be my hero carefully and deliberately, which comes with a measure of irony because I designed her specifically to be the least Chosen One she could be. As a kid reading books a lot of the main heroes had that quality that just made them heroic, and it frustrated me because if I wasn't the daughter of a god or a wizard, it seemed like I wasn't capable of going on any adventure any time soon, and so I wanted Kayla to be the hero in every unconventional and non hero way I could make her so that it illustrated that absolutely anyone could be a hero if they wanted.
Her name.
Kayla Stevenson, 5 syllables. 2, 3. The number of syllables that sounded least hero like to me. (Compare it to Harry Potter, or Percy Jackson or Peeta Mellark…and yes I've since found hero's that have the 2.3, but at the time there weren't many I knew of, but I was 13 I wasn't all knowing!). I chose her name and the way it sounded to be genuinely the least heroic thing I could think of.
Her hero storyline.
Did Kayla want to be a hero? No.
Did she step in to save her town heroically? No.
Did she tell them she'd do their work to save them? No.
Kayla Stevenson became the hero because she slipped in the rain and fell into a door. That’s it. She didn’t want to be involved in the hair brained adventure she ended up on, and she had no noble intentions of taking one for the team to save her town. She wanted nothing to do with any of this, and made it very clear and was swindled into going anyway.
And here’s another reason that she’s portrayed as the most unlikely hero, and it’s actually a reason and a trick I’ve come to notice 7 years later when I was having a flick through the book- and interestingly enough, it’s not something I consciously chose to do, but have only realised I’ve apparently done later:
Does she have the ‘personality’ to be a hero?
Kayla’s one biggest statement, even when she’s just been thrown out a window and is hanging on for dear life, is “Don’t call me Kay” to her best friend. She’s snappish sometimes, impatient, and spends most of her time thinking in her mind rather than talking out loud, never knowing what she should reveal. This means that she ends up at one point in the book completely alone and embarking on part of her journey with no back up because she quite simply didn’t tell them enough about what she wanted to do. In short, she has the opposite personality to be a hero, and yet, despite all odds, she is the hero because her waspish annoyance with the situation does not dissuade her stubbornness that she will finish what she started, even if she was loath to start it in the first place.
Do I even actually like Kayla?
Yes! Of course I do. She's got her faults, being snappy and short tempered sometimes, but she's a good friend, and a good daughter. Half her actions are motivated by trying not to insult her family, or leave anyone behind, and when it comes to narrating a story, she's brutally honest and sarcastic, able to add her own insertions to the story which create a little bit of brevity in amist some harrowing situations:
"I'd like to say we heroically hacked out way through the enemy and made a brave escape, but that wouldn't exactly be the truth"
and
"The wind was knocked out of me as Julie landed butt first on my stomach (not a fun experience by the way)"
Are two particular favourites of mine from Atro-City The Flood (Available to buy!).
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