Behind the Scenes | Lila

Picture if you will. I’m in college, taking a writing workshop course. I’m used to writing stories that belong in genres – fantasy, horror, science fiction. Those were my bread and butter. But our instructor has a rule: no genre fiction. She’s looking for stories that focus on characters and how plot is driven by character actions.

So, we get Lila.

Before I Talk about Writing …

… can we just talk about this picture? It brings back memories. I moved from Atlanta in 2010 or 2011, I think. The city has changed so much since then. This picture is from 2006, when I was attending the university, so it feels like a moment frozen in time for me.

It’s weird. It also makes me sad, because my mind tries to fill in the blanks of what was there originally, and it can’t anymore.

Anyway, onto what we came to discuss …

Writing Lila

I wrote Lila for my workshop course. I remember it going through a few iterations. For example, I had wanted to have the “rain scene” where our male lead made his overture. I believe the critique was just that it was over-dramatic. So, I went with something simpler and more grounded in the reality that I’d established for the two characters.

Before we continue, I’ll be discussing plot points about Lila, so spoilers ahead. If you’d like to read it before continuing, you can use coupon code LilaStudy to get it for free here.

Making Health a Thing, but Not a Coflict

One scene has our main character, Leslie, getting ready to go out. I make a point of having her ensure she has her insulin and I think a piece of candy as well. Following the rules of Chekhov’s Gun, she will have to use this before the end of the story (1). Only … I don’t. I remember our instructor bringing this up as something that was technically wrong, but felt right.

I brought up that my intention was to just show what someone with a chronic health condition has to deal with on the daily (I’ve brought this point up before). Out of 365 days in the year, we may only have a handful of days that our health condition causes a problem. We might blessedly have none. For a lot of us, we have more than we’d like.

The point is … whether you have an asthma attack, or a drop or spike in blood sugar, or a lupus flare, your health condition is something you always have to plan around. Even when you’re not experiencing issues from it, you always have to manage it.

For my instructor and my fellow classmates, it was the kind of realism that grounded the story and made it feel real. Our instructor decided she was actually happy that I didn’t make it a conflict in the story and left it to character building. It meant that it didn’t become melodrama or take away from the plot I wanted to present.

Okay, but Who Is Lila?

Lila isn’t a who. Lila is a what. Lila comes from Hinduism and basically means “divine play” (2). I’d taken a theatre course once, and I believe that was where I’d been introduced to the term, though it could just as easily have been in another Literature course. It’s been a long time – I went to school with the Dinosaurs, after all.

If it’s tickling your brain, but you aren’t quite remembering where you’ve heard this … in Western canon, it’s the idea that “all the world is a stage” or life as a performance. Our girl, Leslie, left small town life and small town expectations to go to the “big city” and pursue her dreams to be a dancer. That failed, and she became a waitress in a diner instead.

But she never stopped performing.

Wait … Are You Leslie?

No, I’m not. However, in keeping with “writing what you know” in the way I prefer to look at it, I did borrow some things from my own life. I just … made adjustments to them so I could build a character, story, and circumstances that felt real.

I wrote this story I believe just after my oldest child was born, maybe a little before. So for Warren, I thought, what would life be like for my husband if something happened to me? For Leslie, I thought back to my own experiences attending GSU as a music student in during the Cambrian Explosion. I didn’t finish that degree, and I always regretted that, so I put those feelings into her character and sprinkled in some what if questions.

Leslie isn’t me and Warren and Sarah aren’t my husband and daughter. But they are the what ifs, anxieties, regrets, and hopes that I had about different aspects and periods of my life.

Parting Thoughts

That’s a peek behind the scenes and under the hood at what went into writing Lila. It’s fun getting into how I put a story or characters together, so I’ll be doing this again. If you grabbed a copy of the story, I hope you enjoyed it. If I were going to leave you with a writing prompt, it would be this:

Think about something you’ve written and ask yourself, what aspects of yourself or people around you that you put into the story. Sometimes, we know them going in. Sometimes, we uncover them later, when we reflect on the story.

As a reader, think about a story you’ve read recently, or a movie or show you’ve watched, that resonated with you. Was there something of yourself or someone close to you that you saw in that story? How does it make you feel about the work?

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Citations:

(1) Wikipedia contributors. (2026, May 19). Chekhov’s gun. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekhov%27s_gun

(2) Wikipedia contributors. (2025, October 7). Lila (Hinduism). Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lila_(Hinduism)