Dear Ally, How Do You Write a Book

by Ally Carter

  I’m not sure why that is. I think it has something to do with the fact that I’ve already described all the characters my favorite way … in the first book. And I’ve already said all my favorite things about the world … in the first book. And I usually used a lot of my favorite plot devices … in the first book.

  And then I have to write a whole new book not using any of my favorite things! In short, I have to write a whole new book that is exactly the same but totally different from the first book. And let me tell you, that is easier said than done.

  I think that’s why there’s one rule that almost every series follows to some extent: With every book, the world gets bigger.

  This is really, really important. Every book should be bringing new characters and new places. Every book should bring new conflicts and new challenges.

  I mean, can you imagine Harry Potter if every single book took place at Privet Drive and Diagon Alley and Hogwarts? If there wasn’t a new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher every year? I don’t think it’s a coincidence that book one saw Harry getting on the Hogwarts Express and book two had him arriving at school via a flying car. I like to imagine J. K. Rowling was sitting down with a cup of tea, thinking, I’ve already described this bloody train! So she (in a stroke of genius) got him to school in a totally different—and very exciting—way that both allowed her to write something totally new and different and served to introduce one of the big questions or mysteries of that novel (why couldn’t Harry and Ron get onto the platform?).

  You can’t expect to keep going back to the same places and involving the exact same people time after time, book after book, and not run out of gas in the tank—and not run out of conflict.

  So as you think about where you want your characters to go in your series, try thinking about that literally. What new places do you want your characters to see? Who do you want them to meet? What kinds of new experiences and fresh characters can you add to the mix along the way?

  Keep expanding your world and you’ll keep expanding your options as a writer.

  The only way I would recommend ending a book in a cliffhanger is if you already have a very well established career and fan base and, frankly, if you already have that next book under contract.

  There have been so many successful series in YA fiction that, I think, most readers assume all series are really successful. I’m afraid to say that just isn’t true. I know so many authors who had big, awesome plans for big, awesome stories they were going to tell over a whole bunch of books, but many of them never got the chance.

  And the people who ended their first or second books with cliffhangers … some of those authors have readers who are still hanging because the publisher decided not to publish book three. Or four. Or whatever. It’s really sad.

  My heart goes out to any author or reader in that situation, but those are the harsh realities about this business: Books have to make money. And if they don’t make enough money, publishers won’t be publishing any more of them.

  So, if you can’t have a cliffhanger, how do you end a first book in a way that makes people want to read more?

  Well, really, this starts with writing a good book. Give them characters they’re invested in. Give them a rich, vibrant world that they love. Give them heart-stopping suspense and heartbreaking story lines, and they’ll want to return to your world over and over again.

  You will often hear authors of beloved stand-alone novels talk about how fans are constantly asking for sequels. But The Outsiders, for example, is meant to stand alone. And I’d argue that fans don’t really want a sequel. What fans want is to read The Outsiders for the first time again. What they need is to feel the way The Outsiders made them feel.

  So start by writing a book that makes readers feel so strongly that they crave that feeling again and again. Then, think about how you can

  1.give the reader a satisfying ending to your story.

  2.give the reader a taste of what the conflict in your next story might be.

  Which leads me, I guess, to a pet topic of mine: cliffhangers vs. game changers.

  Honestly, cliffhanger might be the most misunderstood and misused term in all of fiction.

  After all, there are people who still complain that I ended the Gallagher Girls series on such a “cliffhanger” because we don’t know if Zach and Cammie got married, had kids, what those kids’ names were, and where the kids went to school.

  So to a lot of people, cliffhanger means “there is something—anything—that I don’t know.”

  But that’s not what a cliffhanger is.

  If those are your standards, then I’m sorry, probably every book you’ll ever read for the rest of your life will be a cliffhanger.

  A “cliffhanger” actually means that a character is in imminent peril (hanging off a cliff). I can even go with those who say a cliffhanger means that a book/movie/TV episode ends at a point of maximum suspense with the central questions of that book/film/TV episode being unanswered.

  Where I think a lot of people get confused by the term is when the core plotline of that book is wrapped up and then the author—or storyteller—chooses to introduce something that will alter the plotlines of future stories.

  I like to call these game changers.

  For example,

  Harry Potter has just competed in the Triwizard Tournament. We know how his name got into the Goblet of Fire. We know how he survives. We know who dies. But … at the end of the book we also know that the world in which Harry lives is going to be very different from now on.

  Does Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire end in a cliffhanger? No. Does it end in a way that makes you eager and anxious for the next book? Yes!

  But that, my friend, is not a cliffhanger. It’s a game changer. And I love them so, so very much.

  I’ve been doing this for a while now, and this is what I’ve learned: To keep a series fresh, every now and then you have to change the game.

  DEAR MELISSA DE LA CRUZ,

  What are some mistakes to avoid when writing a series?

  Not planning the series from the beginning. I think you really have to know the background story before you plunge into a long series; otherwise, you will write contradictory elements that you will regret in the later books. So I would say always know the big story, the big arc of your series.

  Again, this is going to depend on what series model you’re using. But let’s assume you’re going with the Harry Potter Model (since that’s what most teens are into).

  There is no right or wrong way of doing this. In fact, I’ve done it both ways.

  For Gallagher Girls, I didn’t have a whole lot of time when I was writing book one. And honestly, I was so new to writing that I probably wouldn’t have known how to sit down and plan out a whole series if my life had depended on it. But luckily, I did know enough about stories to know that if I was ever going to get to write a whole bunch of books, I was going to need a whole bunch of conflict.

  So I didn’t plan the whole series out, but I did give my heroine some really big problems that it would, logically, take several years to solve. What happened to her father? Is he alive or dead? What was he working on when he disappeared? What is her mom not telling her? What is her dad’s best friend hiding?

  Those questions had nothing to do with the plot of book one, but they were there, simmering under the surface, and most readers were able to figure out that those were the questions my heroine was going to have to answer eventually.

  When it came time to sell my third series, Embassy Row, I wanted to try it the other way. That time, I knew I wanted to do three books and I had a much better idea of what would happen in each one. Now, does that mean I sat down and outlined all three books at once? No. (But you could certainly do that if it suited your process.) For me, that just meant that I had a really good idea what the big, overarching plot was going to be—that I was writing a story about a girl who had seen her mother murdered and that this would be a series about figuring ou
t exactly who had done it and why.

  When I started out, I didn’t know every single beat of all three books, but I did know how each book would start and how each book would end so that I had some goalposts to shoot for. I knew, in general, what direction the series was going to take, and that worked out well for that series. (Though I wouldn’t necessarily do it that way every time.)

  At the end of the day, much like each writer is different and each book is different, every series is going to be different, too. And you just have to follow your gut, be open to new things, and work really, really hard.

  DEAR SOMAN CHAINANI,

  What do you think is the most important thing to keep in mind when writing a series?

  A series is tricky because you have to stay ahead of your readers. Young readers are exceptionally intuitive; they can sense your patterns, and in the time between books, they often can leap ahead of you in the story, simply by putting puzzle pieces together. As the author, each book has to step up the game so that it continues to challenge young readers—especially since they’re growing in age. At the same time, a series usually has a built-in readership, so it also lets you take risks you wouldn’t on a first book in a series. While writing The School for Good & Evil, I made sure each book has a different genre at its heart—book 1 is a fantasy, book 2 is really an Almodovar-style farce, book 3 is a Western, book 4 a court romance … If I challenge myself as an author, it’ll challenge the readers as well.

  I didn’t really have the time (or, frankly, the know-how) to plan out the entire Gallagher Girls series when I started it. Which is kind of amazing because I truly love how the story turned out. And if I’d sat down with a game plan that I’d written years before, I might have been stuck with that plan in my mind, and I might not have been open to the really cool twists and turns and changes that appeared along the way.

  But in a way, it’s also dangerous. And terrifying. Because this system basically means walking up to a cliff and jumping, trusting yourself to learn to fly on the way down. But I tend to work/write/think better when under pressure, and this was the best pressure possible!

  I always thought it was sheer, dumb luck that I could go back and tie those little throwaway lines (like the one about the circus) into the ultimate story, but now I’m not so sure. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that George R. R. Martin quote about how some writers are architects, planning elaborate cities, and some are gardeners, planting seeds to see which ones will later grow.

  When I wrote that line about the circus—really, when I wrote anything about Cammie and her father—I was planting seeds. I had no idea which ones would grow to be useful later on, but somewhere deep inside me, my gut knew that some of those would matter someday. I just didn’t know which ones—or how—at the time.

  So if you’re working on a series and you don’t know exactly what’s going to happen six books from now, that’s okay. Just be sure you plant some seeds as you go along. You never know when you might need them.

  Series can be like a siren’s song to an aspiring writer. Big stories! Sweeping worlds! Epic love! (Not to mention fame and fortune.) But it isn’t always possible for every series to play out like the author intended, so if you choose to go that route, consider all the business and creative factors that will come into play.

  What kind of series are you writing, and how will you give your readers a satisfying conclusion if you only get to write two books (instead of ten)?

  How are you going to expand your characters’ world in every book? What new places will we see and what new people will we meet?

  And most importantly, where is your conflict coming from? Because if you think conflict is important to a book, let me tell you, it’s absolutely essential for a series.

  You can do it! Just think about it carefully and plan for both the best—and the worst—case scenarios.

  This might be the publishing question that YA writers get asked the most. Which makes a lot of sense. We’re writing for teens, after all, and a lot of them have just figured out that writing is a job. It’s a job they want. It’s a job they want right now!

  So believe me when I say that the short answer to this question is no: There isn’t a certain age you have to be to get a book published. Gordon Korman, for example, published his first book when he was fourteen years old! S. E. Hinton started The Outsiders when she was fifteen. Christopher Paolini was nineteen when a publisher bought Eragon.

  But I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t also say that those cases are pretty rare.

  I also wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t say that I think you might be asking the wrong question. Instead of asking, “Do you have to be a certain age to get a book published?” I think you’d be better off asking, “How do I write a book that’s publishable?”

  Because honestly, publishers don’t care if you’re thirteen. Or thirty. Or sixty. From a publicity standpoint, they’d probably love to discover a thirteen-year-old literature prodigy. They could book you on all the talk shows and get you covered in all the newspapers and magazines. The media loves a hook, and “thirteen-year-old pens novel of the year” is a good one.

  So it’s not that publishers are opposed to publishing teen authors. It’s that … well … first, you have to write the novel of the year.

  There is one guaranteed way of getting publishers to take you seriously even though you’re a teenager: Write a great book.

  That’s it. That’s the “trick.”

  Always.

  Without exception.

  Every time.

  I mean it.

  You have to write a great book if you want to get taken seriously. So that is where your focus should really be.

  But there is a second part to your question (that nobody ever talks about).

  Authors get asked all the time if teenagers can publish books. No one ever asks us if a teenager should publish a book. Which is a really different—and maybe even more important—question.

  Personally, I hate to see teens obsess about publishing. I’d much rather see them super excited about writing.

  Why do I feel this way? Because writing and publishing are two extremely different things.

  Writing is creative. It can be fun, frustrating, exhilarating, perplexing, challenging, stimulating, and very, very satisfying.

  Writing is you in a room with all of your imaginary friends, playing massive games of “what if” …

  “What if Lisa and Bob get stuck in an elevator?”

  “What if Mona and Mindy find out they bought the same dress?”

  “What if the world’s worst magician moved in next door to me?”

  Like that.

  Writing is what writers do. Period. If you write, you’re a writer. It doesn’t matter if you’re twelve or twenty or eighty. If you put pen to paper or fingers to keys or whatever your method of choice is, you’re a writer.

  Publishing, however, is the business of creating, distributing, and selling books. And the most important word in that sentence is business.

  Publishing means taking the work of very few writers and crafting that work very, very carefully and then positioning it in the marketplace in a way that will hopefully appeal to as many book buyers as possible. Publishing means deadlines and nasty reviews and getting edit letters that make you throw up. And then cry. And then throw up again. (Which I’ve done.)

  Publishing means missing Thanksgiving dinner because your book is late. (Which totally happened.)

  Publishing means not seeing your friends because you have thirty-six hours to turn around your copyedits. (Which is inevitable.)

  Publishing means having people you don’t know say nasty things about you and what you’ve created. (Which happens every single day.)

  In some cases, publishing might even mean death threats because people don’t like that this character and that character didn’t end up together. (Ooh … I could tell you stories.)

  So writing and publishing aren’t the same thing. Not
at all.

  It’s like an ACT question: All sunflowers are yellow, but not all yellow things are sunflowers …

  So all writers write, but not all writers publish.

  And that’s okay.

  Just remember …

  Writing is a fun, great, and rewarding hobby.

  Publishing is a competitive, stressful, and complex business.

  So when teens ask me whether or not they can get published at a young age, they need to understand that they’re not talking to me about writing; they’re asking about publishing …

  They’re talking about going pro. And that’s a very different conversation.

  My next-door neighbors have an adorable daughter who is ten. Every day after school, she spends about thirty minutes in their driveway playing basketball—dribbling, shooting, practicing bounce passes off the garage door.

  Do I think this is a good, healthy, positive thing for her to have an interest in? Absolutely.

  Do I think she should try out for the NBA next year? Definitely not.

  And that’s exactly what we’re talking about here.

  Publishing isn’t writing. Publishing is writing at a professional level with professional stakes, pressures, and consequences. And people get hurt.

  So the moral of the story is this, gang: No matter how old you are, write if you’re a writer. Nothing can take that away from you.

  But don’t say that you’re only going to shoot hoops in your driveway if you think you’re going to get drafted into the NBA. Shoot hoops because you love shooting hoops.

  And if you do it long enough and well enough, then you may have a chance to go pro when you’re ready. If you want to.

  DEAR GORDON KORMAN,

  What was your experience like publishing as a teen? Do you have any advice for teens who are looking to do the same?

  I was incredibly lucky to publish my first book so young, and on some level, I totally understood that. Sad to say, though, when I think back to those days, the feeling I remember most is an overpowering sense of impatience. I wrote This Can’t Be Happening at Macdonald Hall at twelve, signed a contract at thirteen, and didn’t have a book in my hand until I was fourteen. All that waiting was killing my preteen/teen self. Thinking about my career today, things aren’t much quicker, but I’ve got a lot more balls in the air to keep myself busy. And of course, as a wily veteran, I know what to expect.