Are you writing a story about a protagonist’s transition from a child into an adult? If so, you’ll love this article.
Below, we’ve shared 5 tips on how to write a coming of age story.
1. Make the protagonist young
Coming of age stories usually revolve around growing up and all the pains that come with it, or they revolve around maturing, i.e. learning to accept who we are and finding our place in the world, along with understanding what we’re doing wrong and whom we might be hurting in the process.
As such, the protagonist in a coming of age story would ideally be on the younger side in years, although they can also be on the younger side in spirit as well. The latter type is rarer (i.e. when a protagonist who is middle-age or older is finally maturing).
A younger protagonist gives you the chance to explore the character’s flaws, as they will be more pronounced. For example, a child, a tween, a teenager, or even a young adult (18 to 21 years or so), would be a good choice for a protagonist.
A protagonist who is older than that will be more difficult to “sell” as an immature person. The readers will already expect a certain level of maturity to an older character, so even if you try to portray them as immature, what you will probably achieve is the protagonist being an unlikeable character who is difficult to empathize and sympathize with.
2. Focus on the inner journey
Coming of age stories are mainly focused on the inner journey of the protagonist, how they react to the world and how important events change them. In terms of plot and agency, the protagonist might not be able to control what happens around them, they might not have physical agency to make things happen, but they will be learning, with each incident, that they can control how they react to these events, and this is where their true agency lies – in controlling their own reactions and how they react to the world around them.
Of course, this does not mean that your novel cannot have any kind of external plot, or that your protagonist cannot have any agency in the story. However, this will depend on what kind of genre you will combine (or not) with coming of age.
When you do not combine another genre (i.e. you’re writing a contemporary coming of age story), then the outer plot revolves around slice of life (i.e. scenes of the normal life of the protagonist), which become emotionally charged due to what they provoke inside the protagonist.
For example, a 15-year-old girl is told by her previously single mother that she got engaged. This means the girl and her mother move in with the girl’s future stepfather, and the girl’s life is changing: she moves to a new neighborhood (or even a new city), and starts going to a new school. The stepfather has children of his own, so now she goes from being a single child to having two stepsiblings. Meanwhile, she struggles to accept the fact that her mother is marrying again. The conflict builds and comes to ahead just in time for the wedding. The way the 15-year-old girl reacts to all of these situations is her inner emotional journey, even if on the outside, she barely has any control over her life (the move, the new school, etc.).
3. Work on the central theme
A coming of age story can have many different themes sprinkled throughout, because growing up and/or maturing can be a process that involves everything from understanding oneself, accepting oneself as they are, to finding one’s own place in the world.
If you try to tangle too many of those themes at once, however, you might find yourself unable to keep things going in a direction that will be easy to follow. As such, you need to decide what will be the central theme of the novel.
If the central theme is the protagonist accepting their own selves, then the inciting incident that sets the protagonist on that emotional journey needs to be related to that. For example, a 15-year-old boy loves to play video games, but his mother does not see a future in gaming as a sport so she forces the boy to become more interested in more physical sports, like soccer or swimming. The boy tries to join a team, but he is not very good at it, and in the meantime, his gamer friends want his help to enter a gaming tournament.
On the other hand, if the central theme is accepting an outer reality, i.e. a parent remarrying, or even the death of a loved one, then the inciting incident will be related towards that instead.
You can have other themes in the story too, but they need to be minor and only serve to support the main theme. For example, for a person to accept themselves as they are, they can also be in situations where they feel like they have found their place in the world. For example, the gamer boy with his gaming friends, instead of his teammates on the sports team.
4. Maintain the conflict
In a coming of age story, the protagonist’s main conflict is with their own self, no matter which theme you are focusing on. Because the goal (accepting oneself or accepting an outer reality) is on an internal level, then the main conflict is also internal.
However, you cannot have the protagonist spend the whole novel arguing with themselves inside their own head. This inner conflict needs to manifest in reality as conflict with most of the other characters in the novel. This doesn’t mean that every interaction the protagonist has will be a conflict and an argument, as that would make for a tense novel and a very unlikeable protagonist.
But, the protagonist should, come into conflict, at least once, with almost all other major characters in the novel. There will be characters with whom they will argue more often than not, for example, a parent, a sibling, or grandparent – with the highest level of conflict, then other characters, like a teacher, another student, and finally, their own best friends.
It is through these moments of conflict that the protagonist will learn where their real inner conflict is, and work on resolving it so that they can repair those relationships in their life.
5. Consider combining with another genre
As we mentioned previously, you can write a coming of age story in combination with almost any other genre. This will enable you to have more of an outer, directly adventurous plot.
For example, let’s take the example with the 15-year-old girl whose mother remarried. The now big family (mother, stepfather, the girl, and two stepsiblings) were taking a flight for a long, extended stay of six months in Buenos Aires. Unfortunately, the plane crashes somewhere in the Amazon. The 15-year-old girl must deal with her inner issues, while working together with her new family to survive in the jungle.
You can set the same characters on a space ship that malfunctioned and got lost in space, and you have a coming of age space opera/science fiction story. Set the same story on an excavation site in Egypt in the 1970’s, and you have a historical fiction/adventure book. Make some mummies come alive, and you have magical realism/urban fantasy (depending on the level of magic used in the worldbuilding).
You can also combine coming of age stories with the mystery genre, by making the protagonist become really interested in solving a certain crime, and the steps they need to follow challenge them on an emotional level to the extent that they need to become more mature in order to solve the crime.
The possibilities of mixing other genres with coming of age are many, and they will all certainly add more entertainment to the story, allow for more humorous moments, and enhance the overall reading experience.