RTW: The Story Love List

Road Trip Wednesday is a blog carnival, where YA Highway’s contributors and readers post a weekly writing- or reading-related question and answer it on our own blogs. You can hop from destination to destination and get everybody’s take on the topic.

This week’s prompt was: Inspired by Stephanie Perkins’ poston Natalie Whipple’s blog, what is your novel’s “Love List”?

According to The Great and Powerful Ms. Perkins, here’s the function of a love list:

Whenever I begin a new project, I also begin a list called “What I Love About This Story.” I start by writing down those first ideas that sparked the fires of my mind, and then I add more ideas to it as I discover them during my push through early drafts.

With that in mind, here are a few things I love about my story:

A boy with an accent

Grief

Air that smells like chocolate

Memory loss

Buzzed hair

Overcoming disability

Candy necklace

Electroshock therapy

Childhood friends

Cliffs overlooking a lake

Guilt

Red plastic glasses

Creepy hospital

Sacrifice

Stargazing

And because I basically have a love list in my mind, where I store parts of scenes, I thought it’d be fun to give you love lists from two different perspectives, too. So the first is what I love about my story in songs that capture a moment, a scene, a chapter, or the whole book. I’ve added keywords from above if they pertain to this musical love list.

Overcoming disability, memory loss:

Grief, guilt:

Creepy hospital:

Creepy hospital, sacrifice:

The second is a visual love list, with any word tags from above.

A boy with an accent, buzzed hair:

Stargazing, cliffs overlooking a lake

Creepy hospital

What’s on your love list?