“How Far You’ll Go” and “Shrinking Violet” in Weathering Youth
Because Weathering Youth is my biggest collection to date, I’m grouping the short stories and flash fiction stories in pairs for my posts, based on the way they fall in the collection. This lets me look at the connections between the stories and how I decided to arrange specific stories in the collection!
“How Far You’ll Go” and “Shrinking Violet” are both stories involving schools for kids with special abilities, and aspects of both of them are drawn from my own life. Both also came out of exercises in The Wayward Writer, which had a number of exercises that involved drawing elements of the stories from real world events.
“How Far You’ll Go” is a shorter story written in second person, which follows the life of a young person with telekinesis through a series of scenes, connected through doors, photographs, and friendships. Though the characters aren’t named within the story, I had very clear images of the friends, as they were based on actual friends I had in different parts of my life, with whom I’m no longer in regular contact. It’s a bit of a bittersweet story, in which the protagonist ultimately moves ahead alone.
“Shrinking Violet” takes a completely opposite tack, involving teen girls at a school for students with magical talent. The main character here is bullied by her peers, three girls who bear some resemblance to people I knew in school. There was a temptation in writing this story to have a revenge arc for the protagonist, but it ultimately shook out that she didn’t really need to get revenge, as the bullies sealed their own fate. It still had a level of catharsis for the protagonist (and me), however.
Both of these short stories are exclusive to Weathering Youth, which is available in print and ebook formats!
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