Idea Garage Sale: When Queen Bees Collide

Got up this morning in one of those weird states - physically robust for once, but inexplicably wanting to cry; then it was game day and I got over it, but I haven't had a lot of brain with which to pick through garage sale ideas. However, part of the point here is to demonstrate that it doesn't matter. You don't have to be inspired to have an idea, even a viable one. You can do them off the cuff.

So, let's walk through this. Story = Conflict + Character. If you want a plot you have to add Resolution, but we don't need that right now, we're just after the Story Idea. That's a little broad, though, so we have to set parameters.

Age group? YA. Y not?

Genre? Contemporary, because that's harder for me than fantasy or historical but requires less research.

Protagonist? Female. Name's Annie (because a little girl who visited the other day is reading Anne of Green Gables). Just moved to town - cliche but for a reason. New town and school and situation means a whole new set of problems and very little need to create backstory. Downside for me: I'm an Air Force brat. Any new kid in town I write risks being just like me.

So she's not like me, how? She is not the middle child of three, she is not a bookworm, she gives a care about her school's social hierarchy.

But why does she give a care? If she values status for its own sake I'm not going to like her - I loathed those girls. If she wants it because it's easier to get along if you have a certain place in the hierarchy, then she wants a lowish place, and that's fairly easy to come by if you're enough not like me.

So why does she care?

Because her twin sister Diana does. Diana is a queen bee and the dominant twin. Annie's comfy place is in her twin's orbit.

So, where's the conflict, and why is it primarily Annie's conflict rather than Diana's? Fighting over a boy is RIGHT OUT. The minute I see best friends, much less sisters, fighting over a boy on a book jacket, I put it down.

Well, obviously the person with the vested interest in keeping Diana from assuming her rightful place as Queen Bee is the current Queen Bee. Whose name is...(pulls down baby name book, opens at random, and puts finger down on a page of male names. That's no good. Try again.) Gabrielle.

Gabrielle is black. Don't ask me how I know that, it's enough that it already makes her different from 90% of popular girls in American fiction. I pulled that statistic out of thin air, but you know what I mean. This isn't the 60s, though, so the fact that she's black can't be made a big deal of on its own. She has to be individual. Not the nasty enemy Queen Bee with whom we're all familiar. She has to be someone who we can understand becoming popular, someone who isn't mean by nature but can play high stakes high school politics. She has to be an attractive character.

She has to attract Annie.

There we go. That's Annie's problem. Her beloved sister, on whom she is emotionally dependent in this new situation, is deploying her as a foot soldier in her war against this dazzling girl that Annie's falling for. It doesn't have to be a coming out story, but it will inevitably be a story of internal identity conflict, a conflict of loyalties, and also a story of external, interpersonal conflict. You want a real eye-for-an-eye savage popularity contest as your action track. You want a political thriller. You want the choices Annie makes to be hard, the reader to back Diana and Gabrielle alternately, to have at least one scene that makes her wince in recognition.

And all that, of course, is the hard part. The idea - pfft. That took half an hour from conception to this sentence.