BETWEEN WORLDS: BEHIND THE SCENES (CHAPTER 1)
Taking a look back at Chapter 1 of Between Worlds
One of the first things I pictured with this novel was dropping the reader into the action from the jump. The championship game was really vivid in my mind from an action standpoint. I knew I wanted the team Azeil was on to be down, for him to have had a strong game, and for him to come off the bench.
What grew over time was the relationships he had with his teammates. Eventually, I started to pour a little bit of myself into Azeil, who is a mixed-race teenager at a preppy high school who simply doesn't fit in. You can see that when his teammates are reacting to him as he's having this big game of his career. Instead of cheering him on and excited at still being in arm's reach of winning the championship, you get this coldness from them because he's stealing their moment.
While I never played basketball growing up, I knew what it was like to come from one world and exist in another even though people looked at the color of my skin and didn't see that. Those who didn't know my background assumed I was stepping into an identity that wasn't my own. That I was fake or a poser. And it hurt and it was confusing. Because I didn't know where I belonged. Those who knew my background easily accepted me and pulled me in -- for the most part. There were still those that looked at me as an outsider.
As an outsider, I never felt like I knew where I belonged and while there were those who were accepting of me, there was still coldness from so on both sides of the fence. It is something that really messed with my head growing up and became difficult to undertand how I fit into everything. So I painted those relationships with his teammates in that same vein, as an outsider because on paper he doesn't fit in from both his class and his skin tone with those he goes to school with.
The other key relationship I wanted to demonstrate in this opening chapter was that between Azeil and his mother. Growing up, from day one, there was one person that had been in my corner no matter what and that was my mother. She saw me, she believed in me, she championed me, she coached me, etc. I wanted to show that relationship here because it was a vital part of my growing up and for Azeil even more so because his father isn't in the picture and his only person to lean on is his mother.
What's to come is the aftermath of that shot and the impact it has on both sides of the coin, for Azeil and for those he faced off against at Langston Hughes.
Hope you enjoyed it.
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