Natalie

I really feel like talking about some of the background of 'Natalie' that goes on inside my head. She is a girl with a lot of issues and, although I've, fortunately, never had the experience of being abused, I wanted to put a lot of my emotions into her and make her really come alive. And I also love exploring the dynamic of relationships between people.

For example, Natalie and Amy have a very interesting relationship. I wanted to create for Natalie a girl who was almost the polar opposite of her. Natalie is a very white girl, she has her issues, but she's sort of a cookie-cutter looking girl, very pretty and soft, but she looks like a girl who would be very popular. Amy is much darker looking, more exotic with dark hair, dark skin and dark eyes. She's not a girl who is typically beautiful, she has more of a unique, awkward beauty to her. And she's very opposite to Natalie in the family dynamic; she gets practically no attention, wheras Natalie got attention, but it was the wrong kind and there was way too much of it. I wanted Amy to be a very supportive character, who ends up needing that support right back at the end. And I wanted her situation to be one that was very hard for Natalie to understand, because she would have killed for a family dynamic like Amy has.

Natalie's relationship with her mother is also a very interesting one. There's a lot of resentment and anger and frustration brewing within Natalie toward her mother. There are a lot of moments where she just doesn't understand how her mother could have let happen the things she let happen. But inside that anger toward her mother, there's a bit of anger at herself for not being able to stop it, even though she was very young.

In all my stories, I like to include people who have influenced my life, for better or worse, and Natalie has a large number of these people. I'm not particularly good at coming up with original characters (I've actually written several of these abuse stories, and this is really the first one I thought was worthy of posting), so I tend to use people I know as models for my characters. Janet, Josh, Aidan, Allan, and even the teacher that is seen from time to time all have a bit of people that I know. I actually had a bigger plan for said teacher in this story. She had her base in my high school history teacher, a woman who played a big role in my sophomore and junior years of high school. She really tried to drag me out of the tunnel of depression with very little success, I didn't make her attempts very easy and I really resented her, at the time, for trying to help, I really just wanted to be left alone to deal with my issues myself. Anyway, I really had a bigger plan for this teacher in the story, but I thought it would be just too much to write. Not that I couldn't do it, I thought there would be too much going on, too many relationships to uphold. In real life, its much easier to have so many people that you can talk to and rely on for support, but writing it is more complicated because one more person can be so much more information and just overwhelm the reader. I just decided it would be too much.

I'm hoping to wrap up Natalie within 2-5 more chapters, I really think that should take care of finishing it up. However, that is what I was telling myself two chapters ago, I was telling myself that in two chapters I would be done, but that just hasn't happened yet. I'm taking her back to counseling, which I have had problems with in the past. Crazy women psychologists who made my life miserable for two sessions each. And I wanted to resolve that for Natalie as well, I wanted her to find the right guy to talk to just like I have. And there are some other things I wanted to resolve as well. I'm not into spoilers, I'm not willing to tell you what's going to happen, because I kind of consider that a promise, and I've been known in my life to change my mind about an ending, which I've already done twice now, with Natalie.

This is the first story that I've really taken my time writing. With previous projects, I always give myself a deadline and then I rush to complete it. With Natalie, I promised myself that I would take my time writing it. And by no means do I consider what I've posted the final word. I still think this story has a lot of much needed editing and piecing together and added details, but my second draft, I thought, should go up so I could get some feedback on it.

Well, it was wonderful to talk about this story with my non-existent fans! I'm hoping, someday, I'll have access to a scanner so I can share my character sketches of Natalie to you all. I am a little behind schedule on the next chapter, the infamous chapter ten. I always consider the tenth chapter of any given story as a sort of a landmark, it shows me how devoted I am to a particular story. 'Natalie' is--I call her my baby. It's one of the stories I have always longed to write a certain way and this is the closest I've ever come to it. I've written several stories very much like this, with the same idea and the same characters, but with 'Natalie' I found the right approach.

Lizzie Arlen