Book about character's odd stepfamily, specifically his interactions with his stepsister, how can I emphasize MC's emotions?

Question

I am writing a book now about a main character who believes that his stepfamily is odd, or not as normal as his biological family. His stepsister in particular, who he cares for deeply but doesn't quite understand her. The family's abnormal nature gets more apparent when MC is drafted to the Detroit Tigers and has to leave the country (they are foreign) to accept the contract and begin play in Low-A. His family starts looking at him as a whole different person now, and they don't speak to him in the same way. His stepsister starts acting borderline romantic towards MC after not having seen him for around 7 months (the length of the Minor League season).

Essentially, I am looking for pointers about how to emphasize how MC feels about all this, which would be a combination of suspicious, anxious, and at the same time, he welcomes his stepsister's affection, but he sees her as a sister and nothing more, nothing less. I'm having a hard time emphasizing all of these at once.

Answer 1

... all ... at once.

That's your problem there. You are seeing one huge task instead of breaking it down into smaller steps.

1. List everything that you need to have in that part of your story: every aspect of every person that you want to incorporate.
2. For every aspect, figure out the way it develops.
3. Take a piece of paper or a spreadsheet software or a plotting software and visualize the parallel development of these aspects as well as the actions and events that are going on at the same time. Every row is one aspect.
4. Now take every column of that spreadsheet and outline a scene in which all those stages of all those aspects are present.
5. One outlined scene at a time, write that part of your story.
6. Done!

Here's how J. K. Rowling used the same approach for Harry Potter to map out the parallel throughlines (her spreadsheet is transposed, she uses columns for every aspect and the rows represented one moment in story time):