Writing Process of urban fantasy novel “Two Hills”: The Main Idea (part 1 of 10)
What if average people with big problems were given nature-altering superpowers?
Welcome to the first installment of this introductory series. This is a chronicle of the making of the novel Two Hills, an urban fantasy story which was born as a twitter novel. Here I’m going to share the creative process of the novel itself, phase by phase, from the main idea, through character bible, the 5 key plot points and outline.
It all started with…
As I stated before on Medium, I have started about ten or eleven novels from 2002 on. I have finished three. One was a 7-day writing challenge, that produced a 185-pages long historical fiction about painter and art déco superstar Tamara de Lempicka; the second was an autobiographic fiction I penned in the first five months of 2013 and the last one is an apocryphal Oz story titled Prisoners of Oz and deals with a much tougher Dorothy and a bunch of new heroes she personally molded called the Wooden Soldiers.
I had fun writing all three of them, especially the first, but when I started work on Two Hills, it didn’t start as a fiction novel, not even with this title. I wrote the first words of this new story concept, which was then called Lucy and I, as a 140 characters tweet on my main Twitter handle back in early February of this year. Here’s the tweet’s text:
Last night, I was in two places; on the edge of divorce and in Lucy’s car. She laid back on the seat and looked at me. I was a teen again.
Back then, I was going through a very hard time in my life. I had just found a very precious friend in the Lucy I name in the tweet. I met her in the summer of 2016, while I was splitting up with my wife and after Halloween, my affection for Lucy had grown and started to become something more than just friendship. We shared good moments but never got over the edge made of glances, silences and expectations. I soon discovered I was the only one wanting more, so as all soon-to-be-doomed love stories go, Lucy could not care less about me and she made me know, by simply disappearing.
The twit-novel Lucy and I was born in order for me to cope with the disappointment I was experiencing. I also had no job and experiencing ongoing family issues, due to debts and the situation with my ex-wife. So I tweeted the best moments I had passed with Lucy, in order to forget the actual reality of her feelings and loss.
When I started working as a waiter at the Pier restaurant in my hometown as of March, my head started to relieve, as my hands got busier and busier during my long working hours. The thoughts of Lucy slowly floated away from my memory and, as a natural consequence, being it the way I expressed a pain that was fading away, the twit-novel discontinued. It did not lead anywhere, if not diving into the description of the peculiarity of Lucy’s character through several episodes we shared. It was more like a loose memoir than an actual novel. So I decided to stop tweeting by tweet 290 or more and focused on making something else of my idea altogether.
Lucy’s superpowers.
In the last third of the 290 tweets, growing annoyed with the pointlessness of my story (or the absence of it), I started to fantasize on Lucy’s character and myself, so I made up some episodes such as Lucy not getting wet in the rain. She had this special ability which allowed her to create heat waves all around her that made water evaporate before it could hit her.
She used that power to dry the main character’s hair first, and all his clothes soon after. From those details, I started to think about a fiction story and Lucy would be just a part of that; I played with ideas and the following, in a few words, is what came out.
The main idea.
Okay, let’s play a bit. Here’s a pitch:
They got on their first school trip happy.
They came back different.
This one above, could easily sum up the core of the novel, along with the lead of this article. I know something about the novel I will write in November, but not all. In fact, the writing process will take me through the phases of unveiling some important details about the structure of the story. At least some, since most of them shall be revealed during the actual writing of the novel.
The pitch above just came out a few minutes ago, while I was revising this article and will help me get through the secret origins of the place called Giulia’s Gardens, which did not exist when I tweeted the first chunk of Lucy and I, but is pivotal for the development of some of the characters.
What follows is the main idea of the novel, a hint of the outline I will be presenting later:
A thirty-eight-year old man is mending the relationship with his wife after a crisis due to him betraying her with an eighteen-year old girl. Years after, he falls in love with another young girl gifted with superpowers. Lucy, twenty-three, can produce heat waves she uses to protect herself from the rain or to pay lower energy bills. But there’s a downside to this: each time she uses her powers, her cells somehow regress, making her look younger.
Lucy and the MC hang out, get close friends and soon lovers, until one night they are caught kissing in her car by Monia, the girl the MC betrayed his wife years before. Monia witnesses the kiss but also Lucy shrink back to a teenage form, after the heat of the kiss worked on her cells. Monia takes a picture of the two and threatens the MC to expose him, like he was once when they were lovers, causing a scandal in town and him to leave.
Monia’s threat is double: she wants the MC back and also to know the source of Lucy’s powers. In order to keep her quiet, the MC starts to investigate by hanging out with Lucy and asking her questions about her abilities. This search will lead him to a remote and abandoned place in their city, called Giulia’s Gardens. It all started there, years before, when a group of young kids was accompanied by their teacher on a school trip by the Gardens. When they came out, they were not the same anymore. Lucy was one of those kids.
Lucy vs. Monia.
The idea above gave me a much wider range to play with possibilities. The character of Monia gained depth and soon became even more interesting than that of Lucy. Monia is daring, brazen, a self-made young woman and a has a highly erotic personality. At twenty-three, she has the experience of a woman of forty, having passed through various dramatic experiences, but has the impulses typical of her actual age.
Lucy is her age, but she was grown cuddled and protected by her parents and likes to live a comfortable life, without many ups and downs. Her powers are something that happened to her and she doesn’t really mind them being there or not. Sometimes they are also annoying. On the other hand, Monia is deeply attracted to those abilities, when she discovers them and is willing to do anything to possess them too.
Two Hills.
Two Hills is the name of the city where everything takes place. It is a small city, with a resident population of seventy-five thousand. If you run a small business in Two Hills, you are easily acknowledged by everyone there. It is a quite conservative town and people are very stuffy and bent to conspiracy. 80% of Two Hills inhabitants are between sixty and ninty years old. The rest is made of very young people divided in two categories; the ones who will accomodate and grow old in there and the ones willing to escape and grow somewhere else. Lucy represents the first category and Monia the second. Their conflict is pre-existing.
In the next installment.
Now that you have a general idea of the story, in the next part I will delve into characters’ lives; we’ll get to know the MC more, how a sweet but precocious girl named Monia turned into a cold-blooded and overbearing woman and how Lucy got her superpowers. And this is just the beginning of a great adventure. We barely scratched the surface.
Note: this series of articles explores a literary work in progress, hence it’s content is due to constant changes and development in the coming weeks.
You have just read the first installment in the Two Hills novel’s writing process, a 10-part series that analyzes the development of the urban fantasy story I am writing.
Thank you for reading and have a great day!
