First Draft Episode #268: Katharine McGee
Septermber 1, 2020
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Katharine McGee is the New York Times bestselling author of The Thousandth Floor series, as well as American Royals and its sequel, Majesty.
Today's episode is brought to you by Caveday. Caveday leads group focus sessions for a worldwide community every day on Zoom. So Caveday is amazing. Basically you go to Caveday’s website and sign-up for a three-hour window and once you click on the Caveday link and jump into the Zoom call, you see a bunch of other people that are gonna participate with you in the sprints.
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This episode is brought to you by Revision Season. Revision Season is a seven-week virtual masterclass in revising your novel led by Elana K. Arnold author of Prince honor winner Damsel and National Book Award finalist What Girls are Made Of, and more. Listeners to the show might recognize Elana's name, she's been on the show a couple of times and her interviews are absolutely incredible. She's such a warm and holistically spirited person. I can't think of someone better to learn from.
Each week Elana will send a video lecture and a transcript followed by a series of assignments designed to help you put the week's lessons into practice. A weekly live call, recorded if you need to listen later, gives writers the opportunity to ask specific questions. And a private moderated forum provides a space for Revision Season writers to connect with and learn from each other.
Elana's not a casual human and her course is not a casual look at revision. By that I mean, right off the bat, Elana asks for students to begin working with key questions about themselves that will enhance the depth and breadth of their self-knowledge, because she believes that intrinsically improves the depth and breadth of their ability to revise. She asks that students get into the backstory of their story, core beliefs about art, who is art for, and who gets to make it? As Elana says, "Writing and humaning go hand-in-hand."
And the best part about Revision Season is not only will you revise the novel that's in your hands right now, but the tools that Elana will give you along the way are things that you can use going forward in all future projects. I'm lucky enough to be taking Revision Season this time around which begins on September 20th. Elana's already sent me my zero week packet with a video lecture and transcript and three assignments that I can dive into before the course begins.
If this sounds right for you, there's still time to sign up for the next series of Revision Season, which begins on September 20th. Students who enroll before September 7th, get $100 off the price of the course. Learn more about Elana, Revision Season, and sign-up for the course @elanakarnold.com.
Welcome to First Draft with me, Sarah Enni. This week, I'm talking to Katherine McGee, the New York Times bestselling author of The Thousandth Floor series, as well as American Royals and its sequel Majesty. I loved what Katherine had to say about America's castle envy, writing her first trilogy while going to Stanford for business school, naturally gravitating towards big stories, and why you should watch out for chapters seven through nine.
So please sit back, relax, and enjoy the conversation.
Sarah Enni: Okay. Hi Katherine. How are you?
Katherine McGee: I'm so great. Thank you so much for having me.
Sarah Enni: Oh, I'm so excited that you could stop by while you're in town. I was so excited to talk about your books and your process. So let's dive in. As you know, I love to start the podcast at the very beginning. So I'd love to hear where you were born and raised.
Katherine McGee: I'm from Houston, Texas, which is where I currently live and lived there till I was 18. And I was always a reader. I was one of those children who tried to read even before I actually knew how to read. So I used to memorize books and then tell people, like my grandparents, that I was reading a picture book to them, but I would obviously get it all out of order or make up the story. Like I'd get to a certain page and then I would just make up a story based on what the picture was. So yeah, I've always been a reader.
Sarah Enni: So you were always a reader. When did creative writing or creative expression factor into your young life?
Katherine McGee: I started writing, as so many authors did, fan fiction for other people's work when I was very young.
Sarah Enni: Oh my gosh. What was your fandom?
Katherine McGee: So many things. I had two ways of doing fan fiction. They were either corrections of endings that I didn't like. Clearly, I love happy endings and clean resolutions. If you've read my books, you know that. And so there were a lot of series, including His Dark Materials. I rewrote the ending of that to get Will and Lyra back together because... obviously. Which is part of why I'm so scared to read The Secret Commonwealth, I have not read it yet.
Sarah Enni: I haven't either.
Katherine McGee: Because I kind of imagined that my ending was the real one. Even though it's obviously not, I've lived with it for so long.
Sarah Enni: You were living peaceably with your own head canon.
Katherine McGee: Yes! My head canon is a great place to be. Anyone who wants to join me in my world, feel free. And so I'm scared to read the new one where she's an adult and not with Will, because that's what I always imagined. And I often tried to write spinoffs or new books in a series that I loved, but I could never get past the end of act one because when you're starting to write, that's all the easy part, the setup and launching your characters on a journey, but then I could never actually take them on a journey.
So the really amusing thing to me is, did you ever read the Redwall books?
Sarah Enni: So long ago, but yes.
Katherine McGee: I was obsessed with them and they all had the same formula where it was, characters receive some kind of prophecy or journey instructions, and then launch off on this quest. And they always take the form of a poem. Briain Jacques wrote all those different poems. I wrote probably 20 different beginnings of Redwall novels with poems that went nowhere. So I clearly just loved writing the poem.
I've looked back on them and I think, "Where was I taking this?" I don't think I knew at all. They were just poems, like follow the star toward the North sea, and then they just ended. They had a few chapters of setup and a poem. And then I stopped because I didn't know where the story was going. And then I started over it with a new journey and a new poem. So I clearly didn't finish any of my fan fiction, but I had the urge to start writing stories, even if I didn't actually know how to complete them.
Act two is still the hardest part. Even now that I've written four books, or really five if you count the one that hasn't come out yet. The act one and act three are so easy. And then it's all the middle chunk that is impossible to figure out. And that's why people who are writing their first draft and say that they're having problems, and then they fall off, of course they do. Because act two is impossible. And so if you can just push through that, I always tell people, then you get to act three and then it's easy again. Then you have a lot of revisions ahead.
Sarah Enni: I'd love to hear how did going into school and post grad and that part of your life, how was creative writing involved?
Katherine McGee: I stopped writing creatively probably after I was 12 or so. And I think school really took over at that point. I was still writing all the time, it goes back to your earlier point, about whether you can be a writer but not be telling stories. And when you're in school, English classes are mostly focused on the craft and structure of writing. And, of course, the five paragraph essay that we all learned for the SAT and the AP exams.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Which still comes in handy, that structure.
Katherine McGee: Oh yeah. You still need that sometimes. You learn a lot in those classes about how to write on a paragraph-by-paragraph and sentence-by-sentence level and how to craft an argument. And that still definitely comes into play. But no, I was not writing creatively that whole time. Although it's funny, I always thought that I wanted to be either an author or somehow have a job with books.
So actually at a young age, somebody told me that being an editor was a job where you read books all day. So when I was very young, when people would ask me, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" I always said, "I want to be a writer." And then I heard about this job, editor, and I didn't understand anything about it, except that you read books all the time. And I was like, "Oh, I want that job." So I was the weird, like six-year-old where everyone else says, "I want to be a ballerina. I want to be a firefighter. Or even an astronaut." And I said, "I want to be an editor because I want to read books all day. That sounds like the best job ever!" And it never really left me.
Sarah Enni: I read that your college thesis was about castle envy.
Katherine McGee: It had a section on castle envy, yeah. And it is very fun to look back on because I have always been fascinated by royalty. And that comes from the fact that I love history, but I particularly love historical fiction. So I never actually really enjoyed history class that much. Some, a little bit, I would much rather have been in English class.
Sarah Enni: "This isn't quite swashbuckling enough for me."
Katherine McGee: Yeah like, "Where all the stories?" I liked history class more when you were younger. This is something that I think about a lot, especially now that I'm writing American Royals, is history is taught to you as a series of stories. That's why it's fun. I don't know if you ever dressed up in elementary school for... we had something we called wax museum day.
Sarah Enni: Whoa, that's so cool!
Katherine McGee: And you dressed up as a historical character. And we were probably in fourth grade and we thought we were really old and all the second graders would come through and you'd be frozen in your wax museum position. And then you had a little speech that you gave. Sort of like something out of Disneyland, like you unfroze and gave your speech and then you re-froze. And the next group came on.
And so how we learn history at a young age is about characters and stories. And you remember things like Henry the 8th and his six wives. Everyone knows that. Or you remember, you know, Charles, the 1st being executed or you remember like Louis the 14th building Versailles. You remember all of these stories about specific people. And so history is really fun at that age.
And then as you get older and you're at an undergraduate level, it's really big picture. And you're arguing that these broad historical movements and trends and like, how did the economics factor in? And I just want to go back to the narratives about the specific people, because they're so interesting. So yeah, I've always loved historical fiction.
And so my thesis was, well, my thesis was a funny, kind of a mess. I was not supposed to do this since I wasn't a creative writing major, but I tried to write a historical novel. So I started a historical fiction novel, but because I couldn't have turned in something purely creative. And I also didn't finish the novel because I had no clue what I was doing. I really wish I'd known about NaNoWriMo back then. But I think that I fell into the trap that I still occasionally fall into, which is if you don't have deadlines, it's really hard to get things done.
And obviously I did technically have a deadline of like my thesis being due, but I had always been given permission by my professors. It was more like turn in what you have. And then I had to write a whole separate analytical section. So I actually wrote part that was just a paper on historical fiction in America and why Americans read historical fiction? And then in particular, I had a sub-chapter. I'm trying to remember what I called it. I was talking about historical fictions that are about women who are adjacent to men whose stories have always been told.
So Shakespeare's wife, or the wives of Henry the 8th. There has been such a movement in the last 20 or even 50 years to start telling those stories. And I have always found them fun because of course it's like a reclaiming of history, whether it's Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon novels or any of the many novels that have been done. Margaret George did a fantastic one on Helen of Troy about the Trojan War and like taking stories that are traditionally super, super male and finding the female characters and giving them strong voices. And now that feels very obvious to us, but it hasn't always been.
And so that was the chapter that I spent the most time in. And then I did start using this term castle envy because so many of these stories are royal women who never really had a voice and then taking them and giving them a voice in a historical fiction novel. And so I started arguing that these stories are told so much more often than they actually are in foreign languages. And there are some, of course, but I think that Americans have a particularly strong and persistent fascination with royals because we don't have any.
And so if you grow up with royals, I think not take them for granted, but you're very used to them. And perhaps the glamour doesn't feel quite so magical to you because you've seen it. And also I often say that we would be much less fascinated by and obsessed with the royals if our tax money went to support them, that's a huge part. We don't have to pay for them. We just get to look at them.
Sarah Enni: We love celebrities, right? We create our own sort of royalty in that way. And we just get to borrow the mystique and the charm or the mystery of the royal family. And yeah, you're right. We dumped these guys 200 years ago. So now we can just look over the pond and like watch the drama and enjoy that. And that is way more fun than being like, "Should Boris Johnson be talking to the queen about Brexit? I don't know. Is this a good idea?"
Katherine McGee: Oh yeah. If you had to deal with actual political ramifications of it, but the royals are also so fascinating because there aren't many people who are that level of famous anymore who haven't opted into it. Of course there are children of celebrities, there are children of politicians.
That brings you into Red, White, and Royal Blue territory, which is a book that I loved. But for the most part, if you're famous in America, you chose to be famous. You are someone who set out to go on The Bachelor or be a movie star, and you knew exactly what you were getting into.
Sarah Enni: You're often famous for your passion as well, which is so different than being born into a world of what's expected of you.
Katherine McGee: Yeah. And just being famous exactly for your last name and for the family you were born into, which is something you can't control. So I find that particularly fascinating because there are very few individuals left in the world whose identity is truly defined by who they are and the family they were born into.
Whereas I think obviously it's a good thing that the world has become such that everyone gets to decide who they are and what they want to be and what role they want to fill in the world. Except if you're a royal, your options are very limited. And no one sits around feeling sorry for them because they have great lives, but still they are some of the last people who've really, their fate is decided for them before they're born.
Sarah Enni: Right. I would love for you to kind of lead me to, I'm actually not a hundred percent sure how it times out with being an editor and also getting your MBA.
Katherine McGee: People don't usually ask me about the MBA. So let's dive in.
Sarah Enni: I want to know.
Katherine McGee: I was very confused in my twenties about what I wanted to do. That's what your twenties are for though. And that's, by the way, why we have YA literature and new adult literature, if we can call it that. Or literature about young people, because that's a really confusing time. So I graduated college and I knew that I wanted to work in book publishing in some way. I wasn't sure in what context, but I was lucky enough to get a job in editorial. And I edited some amazing young adult novels, including the last seven Pretty Little Liars.
So I took Pretty Little Liars from book... I'd have to check. I'm pretty sure I went from book nine through sixteen. Which was amazing. Sara Shepherd is so fast also, if you think about that, that like in four years I helped her do seven books.
Sarah Enni: That's shocking. Yeah. I mean, that's very impressive.
Katherine McGee: Yeah, she's amazing. And worked actually on Kass Morgan's The 100. I know she was on recently (listen to Kass’s First Draft interview here).
Sarah Enni: She was. So amazing.
Katherine McGee: She's such a delight. And Laura Avery was an author of mine. So I worked with some amazing authors and I was lucky to work on many books that had TV components. And so I, again, always felt like I wanted to write at some future date, but I wasn't really doing anything actively in that moment to try to write until in 2012, I started working on the idea that would become American Royals. It was an experiment for me. I had not written fiction really ever, unless you count that brief historical fiction that I wrote in my thesis which, like I said, it's really not good.
I always joke that someday I'm gonna go back and finish it but really it would just be rewriting it. I don't know what's salvageable in there. That's what first attempts at fiction are for. You just get something out of your system and then you put it in a drawer and lock it away.
Sarah Enni: Yep. Yes. Mine is very locked, very heavily guarded.
Katherine McGee: Very locked, does not need to see the light of day. And I started writing American Royals, but it was a different concept. The world idea was there, but I was watching House of Cards at the time. And I was very heavily influenced by that and felt like it needed to be dark and political and thriller-y. And so I wrote a version that was more like that. It had assassinations, somebody was killing off royals. Who was it? The King had a secret love child who came into play.
I actually only had two chapters. I had Daphne and I had Samantha, so I didn't even have Beatrice narrating at that point. Actually Beatrice was a boy named Thomas and the opening sequence of events was Thomas and his wife get into a Princess Diana style car crash, and Thomas dies and she's in a coma, I think. And so Samantha now is the heir to the throne.
Which, by the way, is pretty much the opening sequence of events of The Royals TV show, which I didn't know because it hadn't come out at the time. So clearly when you're talking about royals, it's always fun to elevate the spare to the heir. There's a reason that that's a story line that we love to revisit. And I wrote it and gave it to my then boss. And he thought it was interesting, but thought that the royal moment had come and gone.
Kate and Will had gotten married in 2011. And he said, "If you'd come to me with this idea four years ago, we could have done a book around the Royal wedding. The royals are over. People in America aren't interested in them anymore. But I'm so glad to know that you want to write, because if you're interested in writing, you should continue and we should find something that you should work on."
So I did still want to write, but separately I was feeling like I wanted a change of pace from my job. I had been there for four years. I really enjoyed it. And I felt like I had learned a lot, but I was at the point where I wasn't learning actively anymore. I was just executing on what I already knew how to do. And it's a really fun group and they're so supportive, but it's a small group and there was not a lot of upward mobility. The people at the top are not leaving. Publishing is hard to get promoted in.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, cause they're great jobs, so no one leaves.
Katherine McGee: They're great jobs. And there are so many people who want them. There are so many wonderful bookish people who want to work with books and it's a small industry and everyone knows each other. So like any lost soul, I decided to take a standardized test. Actually I had already taken the LSAT, so really, I'm a very lost soul.
I had taken the LSAT and decided not to go to law school, but then I took the GMAT and then I decided to put in an application and see if I got in, I ended up getting into school at Stanford. And at that point, I felt like I should just go and see what happened. And I was obviously very lucky to get to go. I, at the time, didn't have a very concrete idea of what I wanted, but I thought that I might start a company, like a packaging company, that worked with authors to help their ideas become books and TV, and came up with ideas in-house.
Or I thought that I would go work in entertainment somewhere on the business side, whether that was at a studio... there was so much, and there still is so much, happening. But especially this was in 2014, right when...
Sarah Enni: Yeah, that was well-timed by you. A lot going on in that time frame.
Katherine McGee: Oh yeah. People were just starting to do original content. Netflix was still new-ish. Amazon had just announced that they were doing original content. So I thought, "Okay, there are all these places that are looking for storytellers and are looking for ideas and they're gonna need somebody who has some business experience to run this.
Because the truth about entertainment is that all the people at the top, for the most part, do have business degrees whether it's an MBA or they studied business in undergrad. It's very, very rare, and there are definitely exceptions, but it's very rare to see people at the very top who came up through the creative path. For the most part, the creative people can only climb so high and then everything is run by someone who has a business mind. And if you watch any TV shows or read books about the industry, and especially about Hollywood, like did you ever watch Entourage?
Sarah Enni: No, I didn't.
Katherine McGee: There's a running joke on Entourage where the creative people are complaining about the suits and they're like, "The suits don't understand this because all they're looking at is graphs and numbers." And like, "We have the brilliant ideas and they don't get it." And so I just sort of thought, you know, I'm in my twenties and not really knowing anything, I thought, "Okay, well I'm gonna go and I'm gonna be a suite, but be a cool one. And I'm gonna be the one who knows what the actual good ideas are and I'm gonna be the bridge between the business and the creatives."
And then I also started writing. And so I ended up selling my first book, The Thousandth Floor during my first year of business school. So that put me in a funny position because I realized... I sold it as a three book deal.
Sarah Enni: Okay, wow!
Katherine McGee: So having only written seven chapters of it, because I sold it based on a partial manuscript. So I then was under contract for the next three years.
Sarah Enni: And an MBA is two years?
Katherine McGee: An MBA is two years. So I wrote most of the first book in the summer between my first and second years. And then again, during the fall of my second year. I was perhaps not the best business school student, but I did not put all of my effort into my optimization and systems modeling class that I could have. That class really fell by the wayside for me.
Sarah Enni: Ah! What a shame.
Katherine McGee: I know. If only I could do pivot tables in Excel, my life would be complete.
Sarah Enni: [Laughing] Okay. There's so much here that I want to get into. I want to come back and explicitly talk about how or if anything that you learned in your MBA, you're kind of applying to your life now as a professional who does run her own business. Oh my gosh. I can't believe you wrote those books while you were going to business school by day. Those are also long intricate books.
Katherine McGee: I look back and I don't know how I did it. Cause I think I'm a lot slower now. I think my books have gotten better and I think that's pretty common, right? Every author thinks...
Sarah Enni: That's the hope!
Katherine McGee: That's the hope. The more that you learn, the better you get and you learn from your own mistakes and you also, if nothing else, understand the process and your own process much better, which is all very important.
Katherine McGee: But yeah, at the time I did have plenty of days where I was in class from 8:00 AM to 2:00 PM. And then I came home and wrote till 10:00 PM. And I wrote on the weekends a lot, and wrote on airplanes back and forth. I was dating my now husband, who at the time lived in New York. So there were a lot of six hour cross country flights.
Sarah Enni: Those could be very useful.
Katherine McGee: And those ended up sometimes being useful. Yeah, no wi-fi. Really getting back to the roots. You know, not writing out in the park with a notebook, but like the next closest thing.
Sarah Enni: You've mentioned that deadlines are useful to you.
Katherine McGee: Deadlines are useful because you have to turn something in. If my editor listened to this, she would laugh and roll her eyes because I haven't hit a deadline in at least two years. I used to be so much better about it. I used to kill myself to hit deadlines because I never can finish by the time... I'm always being unrealistic, I'm over-promising. But in the early days, for the first two books, I pulled my fair share of all-nighters. Where I would just say, "Okay, I have to get it to her by 10:00 AM New York time. God help me, I'm going to do it! I'm gonna stay up all night and drink coffee. I'm gonna have the like 3:00 AM snack."
Have you pulled an all-nighter in a while? You know what I'm talking about? You get hungry again, after dinner. You have your like hummus and carrots at 3 AM and you keep working. And now I've just realized that, first of all, I don't do any good work at that point. And it's not surgery. Nobody's gonna die if we are late for a day and there are obviously repercussions for the book, if you're late, if it's a few days late, it never really seems to hurt anything.
If it's severely late, there are definitely consequences, especially on the publisher side. They miss mail outs. They get to stores either they just leave your book off the mail out, or they send out a separate mail out that costs more. And then your book is more expensive because they had to send it out separately and go through all these different logistics. So it's never good to miss your deadlines, but also I'm at a point where I don't think that pulling an all-nighter and writing some bad chapters that I'm gonna have to rewrite is worth it.
Sarah Enni: How I refer to what you're discussing is time optimist. I am a time optimist, which sounds great. And in practice, it means I over promise and under deliver and set myself up for disappointment and stress myself out. So I'm really working hard to be a time realist. It's my hope and dream in 2020 is to be better about that. Because I recently came to totally the same thing, which is for me, I actually ended up saying like, "7:30 PM. That is literally the cutoff. Anything I do pass that time. I work twice as hard to do half as well." That just is me.
Katherine McGee: Yes. I can't tell you how many times I've written past 7:30 and then the next morning I look at it and I go, "Well, this is all garbage. So glad I stayed up till 10:00 PM writing this. Delete, delete, delete."
Sarah Enni: And you're struggling, you know, like blinking at the screen and you're like, "Was I asleep just now?" It's not good.
Katherine McGee: Yes, it's so much better. I love that rule. And I've been also trying to enforce it. And most of the time I can, but sometimes the fear sets in and the fear is very real. And the fear is useful because without the fear you never finish. But with the fear you can get to this crippling place where you won't leave your computer, but nothing good is happening.
And there are definitely nights where you hit that 7:30 point and it's so much more productive to go watch two episodes of a good TV show or read a book that you love, or go out to dinner with friends and have a glass of wine and not think about writing just to take yourself away from it and come back.
And I love my breaks between drafts, because I used to think that I would keep editing while my editors were reading, because I would think, "There's so much I have to do so I'm gonna send it into them, but I'm gonna continue working on my end because I need to fix this chapter and this chapter." And now I just put it all on a list and I think, "Okay, when I get to my next draft, I will do that. In the meantime, I'm gonna take my week to just not think about this book." And it always ends up benefiting the project to take yourself away and come back.
Sarah Enni: And you do have to kind of enforce it. That's what I learned this year is I had opportunity to take a lot of time off and I was lucky enough to go travel for a while. And I was like, "You know, I'm gonna make a deal with myself. I'm really shutting that off. I'm really taking a step away." But I came back two months later and was raring to go so excited. I had fully switched that lever. And then restarting was like, "Oh, I'm all fresh!"
Katherine McGee: Travel is the best thing for it because you're in new places. Your creative well just gets completely full again.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, totally. I get the sense in just hearing you talk about it, that maybe being at business school, being in those environments where your time is so precious, you're just kind of running at full speed the whole time. Interesting that you started your writing career that way. You didn't have time to be so nervous or precious about it, you kind of just had to do it.
Katherine McGee: Oh yes. And nobody understood what I was doing in school, which is also kind of nice. There's so much benefit and value in the YA community, and writing community more broadly, in person and particularly online and through social media. But there's also the danger, and this is something that I struggle with and I'm trying to monitor, of the more time you spend thinking about what other people are doing and what other people are writing, it's not very beneficial because it creates sort of a stress loop.
And obviously it's so much fun to read other people's work, especially people who you love and that you know personally. It's been such a new thing for me to read people's books and actually know them as a person. That's amazing. You're there with the podcast. You've probably been like that for years, but it's so fun cause you appreciate it on a different level, but it also can get really stressful. And there was something really nice about being in a community and living on campus in a dorm with a bunch of people who had no clue what I was working on.
They knew that I had my own creative project, but there were plenty of people at business school who had their own projects that were starting their own company, or just investing on the side in their stock portfolio or whatever it was. And so no one really questioned it and no one also had anything creative going on. So I was in a completely different atmosphere. Anytime I went out and talked to people, it was about not the book.
It was about, you know, "Let's go plan an adventure this weekend to go hike Yosemite cause we've never done that." Or, "Did you take notes in this class?" And it was all other things. There was something really beneficial about having this protected creative space. There was nothing else in my life going on that had any creative pressure at all. It was just completely the far opposite end of the spectrum. And so I hadn't really thought about that before, but that probably did help.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. And now I'm trying to be purposeful in cultivating those spaces. For me, it's been comedy or things like that where it's still creative, so it's pretty adjacent. But for the next two hours, nobody's gonna ask me about my book and I don't have to talk about it or think about it."
Katherine McGee: I always felt this way on book tour when I traveled with other authors. Because people probably imagine that you go on book tour and you sit around after the event and you talk about your characters and your chapter building. And that is the last thing anybody wants to talk about. I was on tour with Kendare Blake for the last three years. (New York Times bestselling author of the Three Dark Crowns series, Anna Dressed in Blood, and more. Listen to us chatting on this live episode of First Draft!).
Oh my god, two or three. I don't think she and I have ever talked about our books except when we're on a panel together. Because the second you finish it, "Please let's talk about something else. What TV shows have you watched lately?" Anything else.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Oh my gosh. That's so funny. Okay. I have a couple questions about The Thousandth Floor series. So if you don't mind, before we get too much more into it, do you mind pitching that series for us?
Katherine McGee: Yes. The Thousandth Floor is a futuristic love story set in New York a hundred years from now when Manhattan has become one massive thousand story skyscraper. And book one opens in the prologue with an unnamed girl falling off the roof to her death. And as the reader, you don't know who she is or why she's falling off. If she jumped off or if she was pushed, or if it was an accident.
And then the book back-tracks three months and you meet five characters and you follow all their stories as they become more and more intertwined. And then at the end they all end up on the roof and then somebody dies. So it is really fun.
That final sequence of chapters, probably the last 10 chapters of the book where you see each character going up to the roof for different reasons is still, might be my favorite sequence of chapters I've ever written. Because when you're reading it, you kind of think, "It could be her. It could be her. It could be her." And you don't know which one it is until, of course, one person does die.
Sarah Enni: Very cinematic. Yeah. I love that. That's like, in my mind, the favorite part of the movie, right, where you're like, "Oh my God, what's gonna happen?" You've talked in a few places about The Thousandth Floor series being Gossip Girl meets a few things, but I like the Gossip Girl meets The Jetsons.
Katherine McGee: I'm so glad! That's my favorite too.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Because the Jetsons as a particular vision of the future, or of technology. Do you mind kind of explaining that comparison?
Katherine McGee: Yes. So after I wrote my failed attempt at American Royals that I already talked about, I then was looking for a new concept. And I actually don't read a ton of sci-fi. I read a decent amount of fantasy, but have only ever dabbled in sci-fi. So it probably wasn't the most natural place for me to go. And yet I wanted to do something that was a response to all the dystopian fiction that was coming out at that point.
Sarah Enni: This was in like 2014-ish?
Katherine McGee: 2013, 2014. I love The Hunger Games, love Divergent. Those are all fun stories, but they are a very specific type of story about a broken world where the universe has fallen apart. People are treating each other terribly. Children are fighting to the death in arenas. Earth is radioactive.
Sarah Enni: It's bleak.
Katherine McGee: It's always bleak and the book opens and it's very hopeless. And then the character becomes the one spark of hope who then goes to fix this broken world. And it is very much a journey story and a savior story. And that's just a very specific type of narrative. I, obviously, love stories that are a little bit more character driven and less world driven, which probably surprises some people to hear me say, because my worlds are very specific.
I'm so fascinated by the way that people interact and the way that, you know, even just on a very micro level, the way that one conversation can be interpreted by someone one way and by another person in a completely opposite way. And so I wanted to tell a story that was less saving the world, epic adventure, and more just people being people. But then I wanted to show a world that was not so bleak.
And it's funny that I started working on this in 2014 before any of the recent events that have happened. But the more time goes on, the more I think we need this type of story. I did think it was very troubling that we had no books for young people that showed a hopeful future. The more that you read these books where the earth has fallen apart, it almost starts to feel like it actually is going to fall apart. Like it's a little bit inevitable.
Sarah Enni: I was gonna say, or that it's an inevitable conclusion, which is the problematic part, right?
Katherine McGee: Yes. Oh exactly. So I wanted to say, "I'm gonna show you what happens instead of if we all get everything wrong, I'm gonna show you what happens if we get everything right." I do genuinely believe that most people are good. I hope that most people believe that. And that most people try to leave the world a better place than they found it. And if those people outnumber and outweigh the people who don't feel that way, the world should, logically, get incrementally better with each generation.
So what could the world look like if we generally are improving? And what is a future that's sort of black mirror, but hopeful? What is the fun technology version of all that? So really, the only comparison is the Jetsons because it's fun and lighthearted and optimistic, and you see technology, not in a scary threatening way, but actually in a way that is genuinely helping and improving the lives of the people who are using it.
So that was always my goal, was to write a fun glittering, high tech future without killer robots, without clones, without anything that feels dark or scary, but just fun contact lenses that my characters use to instant message each other, and they ride hover boards.
And there's quite a bit of Scott Westerfield's Uglies series in here as well. But again, without the ominous overlord. There's no big, bad. It's just people living in New York in the future. And the evil comes from people being mean to each other, which is how people interact on a day-to-day basis.
Sarah Enni: Right. Right. It's so interesting too, to be in this moment that we're in, where I think there's a lot of discovery going on about how, though technology advances, humans stay the same. Like we are just built to be humans. And we haven't changed in a hundred years as much as computers have.
Katherine McGee: We haven't change since the dawn of time. Stories are all the same. It's all coming of age stories and relationships among people. Whether that's first love, first love gone bad, if you want to go Romeo and Juliet direction. You know, friendship stories, family stories, and no matter where you set them, whether you're setting them in a Shakespearian setting or an ancient Sumerian clay tablet, or, you know, books that came out 50 years ago or books that came out yesterday, they're still the same stories. And we're just dressing them in different ways.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, which is comforting, honestly. I do want to ask a little bit about... It is sort of a big world with, I mean, quote unquote small stories. It's like a human centered story. It just happens to take place in a different, very unique and interesting kind of setting. Which is very cool. And to me it felt like, of course it's Gossip Girl meets The Jetsons, right?
So I would just love to hear about how, or if, you were taking inspiration from the books that you helped edit, which do have the drama, the interpersonal kind of tensions. And it seems like you're kind of pulling from a lot of that same background.
Katherine McGee: I love stories with big casts of characters and I always have. Even in historical fiction or fantasy, I'm a huge nerd. I love when, first of all, I love a big fat book. I'm not scared of page count. So my editors are always trying to cut me down and I'm going, "But I would read a 700 page book, so I don't see what the problem is!" But I love books that have any kind of cast of characters at the front, a map, a family tree, anything that promises, "This is a big rich world. And there's a lot of people in it."
Obviously I do read a ton of single POV books and love those as well, but I just naturally gravitate towards big stories because I think I've always been fascinated by the interplay among people and stories on an epic scale. And how is what one person does having some kind of domino effect that affects a person three degrees of separation away? And they may not have even ever met. And yet you, when you're watching it or reading it, you can see the direct line of cause and effect. So that's always so fun to me.
So the books that I edited, a lot of them had these multi POV, larger cast of character aspects, certainly Gossip Girl. Even though I didn't work on those books, except for the very, very last one, they do have that set-up. And Pretty Little Liars, in particular, is very much known for that because it has the four liars and then the mysterious "A" harassing them. And each of the girls, in each book, on her own story. And yet the stories all intersect and then always come together in some dramatic way at the end. And it's not uncommon in book publishing, but it's also definitely not as common as single POV.
And I always find that interesting. People tend to call out that my book is multi-POV. And when people are reviewing it, they'll often say, "Just as a word of warning, if you don't like multi-POV stories, this may not be for you." Because it is less common. But to me, it's interesting because that's how TV is always told. Which is how TV often differentiates from feature films because movies usually, not always, but usually tend to fall... Harry Potter is a classic example. It's Harry's story. It's Harry's story from start to finish. In the later books, you sometimes get like an ominous prologue from someone else's point of view.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, I love that she was brave enough to start in a different place, but it always snaps back to, and even though Harry Potter has a huge cast, you're very close third with Harry.
Katherine McGee: You're very close third with Harry and the movies stayed very true to that. So it's very rare that Harry's off screen in the movies and you're seeing other characters who are not Harry doing things. Whereas there are very few TV shows that are structured that way. For the most part, any drama or comedy, you're following a cast of characters and the story and all the tension and drama and romance of the story comes from the fact that you follow all these characters and that you, as the reader or viewer, know everything.
So, you know that when two characters kiss and the third character is off-screen and you know that she likes one of these kissing people, you know that there's a love triangle there, and you don't have to actually see all three of them on screen to know that. So in that sense, I think absolutely having edited these books that had multi-POV and seeing how these authors structured the books and wove all these characters together was really helpful to me.
It certainly gave me the confidence to try to do it. I think that's a huge part of writing is just being brave enough to do it, which sounds so obvious, but it's really hard. It's really intimidating to look at a blank page and start writing. So I felt very lucky that I got to see first drafts from all these authors. Seeing even a Pretty Little Liars first draft is far from perfect. And you get to see the ways it improved. So it made you realize, "Okay, I don't have to write a perfect finished book. I just have to write a first draft and then I can go in and make it better."
And it really did help a lot to learn crafting and outlining from these authors who were doing that. So I think all my books are multi-POV. And I always say, "I don't know if I'll ever write a single-POV book." Maybe someday I will, but that is a completely different challenge to meet. Way more than like I could easily go write a multi-POV historical, and I very well might. The challenge of course comes from the fact that I have 25% as much page space as a normal author would to do the relationships.
So I'm trying to build romances and bring characters together and then usually tear them apart again in this then one quarter of what a normal book would be. And so I really have to make sure that every scene that I show is impactful and packs a real punch, like I can't have any filler.
And that's the hardest part for me is, I often write scenes that don't move my story forward but are fun to see and enrich the world. And I think of these series of events as like a Quidditch chapter. In the sense that Quidditch never really moves the story forward. Unless if you want to make a thin argument, you could say it's like towards the house cup points or something.
Sarah Enni: Right. Or it just is an excuse to bring characters together so they can interact like at the world cup, or whatever.
Katherine McGee: Exactly. And if you're following my rule of every chapter needs to move the story forward, you would cut all of Quidditch. But Quidditch is so rich and so fun. Those tend to be the struggles for me, as a writer, I find myself wanting to tell those scenes and to create those moments. Because if I was writing a single POV book, you have to have them, cause what else are you doing for 400 pages?
You need a chapter here and there that's the character internalizing what's happened, settling into the world, having some conversations with people and maybe the story doesn't rapidly accelerate forward. But I just can't afford those because I'm basically writing four books at the same time and then like weaving them all into one normal sized book.
Sarah Enni: Let's jump to American Royals and Majesty. But I'd love to have you bring me from finishing the first trilogy, wrapping up MBA. Where did you go from there and how did you kind of shift into life of a professional author?
Katherine McGee: It's funny. I can't remember specific moments of value change, which is probably a good thing. I feel like that's how writing is, is that you look back on it and it's all a blur. Having not had a child yet, but people say that childbirth is like that. It's traumatic and then it happens and then you have forgotten all the trauma and all you remember are the good things.
So I did work on The Thousandth Floor series while I was still in school. And then the first book came out after I had already graduated. And then by that point I had graduated and my husband and I were married. And so we ended up moving back to Houston where I'm from. And I now live about 20 minutes from my parents, which is the right distance, I think.
Sarah Enni: Yes, that's great.
Katherine McGee: Just far enough that they don't totally swing by unannounced, but occasionally do. And so it was really nice to settle into just sort of writing full-time and realizing this was all that I had to do. And really start to build writing as a business, as we were talking about. I work from home, I have a home office, so I have a first floor bedroom that I basically use as my office. So it's so nice. And I have a whiteboard on my wall and really just, I don't do well in loud crowded spaces, for whatever reason. I've never been like that. When I was in college, I was always the library worker.
I was never the person who could like sit in the middle of the crowded loud student center and do work. It's just not how my brain functions. I especially think because when you're writing dialogue, you really need silence to write dialogue, or at least I do. So if you hear other people talking around you, somehow, all those snatches of words seem to bombard my brain. And I just can't think of the words I'm trying to say, because I'm hearing everybody else's words.
Which, it's not like I'm actively trying to eavesdrop, but somehow the words are just, they seem like they're just coming at me. So I do really need the silence. So I now work from home and it's been really good. I feel like I definitely settled into writing more and try to get a pattern, it's never perfect. But I'm trying to build a routine.
And so as I was finishing up the third Thousandth Floor book, The Towering Sky, I was trying to figure out what comes next. And I had that old, old idea, American Royals. And it's so funny, my old boss who now represents me, still didn't want me to do it. He was so not into it. He kept saying, "I just don't think this idea really makes sense to me. I don't get the, what if of it? I don't think people care about the Royals that much. But if you really want to do it, go for it."
And so I pulled it back out and tried to think about what were the parts of it that were working. And now that I knew myself and had written three books, what is my voice? And what are the stories I love to tell? Which is always a story about young people who are coming into their own. Young people realizing what they want from life, who they are, and who the world expects them to be. And then how their real self comes into conflict with that. And of course, there's nowhere to more starkly show that than a young woman who's gonna be queen.
So in many ways, I mean, I love The Thousandth Floor trilogy and it was so much fun and I had the best time writing it. But because I'm way more of a historical fiction, royalty reader than I have ever been a sci-fi reader, in many ways, this feels more natural to me. This has been easier for me to write because it feels like I'm sort of coming home to the space that I should have been in.
And I've said before to people like, "I was able to write The Thousand Floor, but I was working. I had to really think about every single detail of the setting. And I'm in a sci-fi-esque space. Am I being true to what this genre demands and deserves?" And so a lot of times it felt like writing in French back when I was really good at French. I knew it, I could speak the language and I could do it, but I was not a native of it. And like now I'm writing in English again. And it's so nice, it's so easy
I'm like back in my royal drama space, which is where I've really, I mean, it's just what I read nonstop. So I've read eight bazillion books about Tudor, England. Name it, and I guarantee you I've read it. And I don't mind, like sometimes I read books... I've heard that mystery readers do this. They read a mystery they've already read and it's not until halfway through the mystery that they realize they've read it before. I've definitely done that with historical fiction.
And I'll start a book. And then I go, "Oh my gosh, I read this when I was 18, but I forgot. But here I am reading it again." So it really is a happy place for me. And even though these books are not historical, in so many ways they do feel like historical. And of course I've created a bit of a historical anachronistic obstacle for Beatrice in that she can't marry a commoner.
Which would not happen today, but would absolutely have happened a generation ago. So I mean, you think about Charles and Diana, he could not have married someone who wasn't an aristocrat, and a very high born one at that. So it's off base, but it's not totally off base.
Sarah Enni: It's also like, there's the suspension of disbelief when you're talking about, first of all, because this is speculative anyway. But also when people are fans of this kind of fiction and like women's romance and stuff like that, you're just like, "I know the world I'm stepping into is a place where we're just gonna set up obstacles because they're fun."
Katherine McGee: They're fun! You need obstacles. If they all have their happy ending in chapter one, there would be no book.
Sarah Enni: Yes. Yes. And I think teen dramas do that all the time too, right? It's just like, no one needs to be head cheerleader, but like sure, let's make that the...
Katherine McGee: You gotta be the head cheerleader or why bother? If you're not gonna be head...
[Both laughing]
Sarah Enni: Okay. So I have a bunch of questions about American Royals, but before we get into that, do you mind pitching the series for us?
Katherine McGee: Yes. American Royals I like to think of as a mashup between Crazy Rich Asians and The Crown. It reimagines America in the present day if we were like England and had a Royal family. So imagine what if instead of being our first president, George Washington had become our first King, and then fast forward to modern times. And the Washington's are still our royal family. And the book follows the two princesses of America. One of whom is the future queen and the Prince of America and all of their romances and adventures. And all of the pressure that comes with knowing that someday you will inherit the throne.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Hearing you talk about shifting from a sci-fi inspired world back to the speculative, but really historical fiction feeling story, was so interesting to me because you still have to do an incredible amount of world-building. You did set yourself up with a pretty big challenge. So how did you approach re-imagining our current state?
Katherine McGee: I don't know if this happens to you because I know your book has great world-building, obviously. But it's probably, you may not get this note, but every single book that I've ever turned in, every edit letter that I get always has a note asking for more world-building. So every book in The Thousandth Floor trilogy, every draft, I would turn it in, and my editors somewhere in the note, they'd be like, "And can we have more cool future stuff, please?"
Like, I think they just left that in. And every time they wrote a new edit letter, they just copied and pasted the more cool future stuff note. And so sometimes I get frustrated cause I'd be thinking, "Okay, I've given you so much what more do you want?" But it really does help to have that because then I would kind of push myself to think, "Okay, what corners of the world have we not yet seen? What's something really fun that I haven't shown you yet about life in the future city that I can dig up?"
So that was all my Thousandth Floor edits. And then now that I'm on American Royals, the same thing is happening with royal stuff. Every note I get, my editors ask, "So can we have more cool royal stuff? Can we have like what's some fun, royal settings that we haven't seen yet?" And I want to go, "Okay. You've seen them all."
So the crown jewel setting, for instance in book one, that scene actually didn't originally happen in the crown jewels vault. And then I got that note. And so that was me sitting there and thinking, "What is the ultimate royal place that we haven't yet seen? Okay. We're going like full-stop, ultimate royal world is... we're going to the crown jewels vault and we're gonna see them all."
So it has been really funny that I'm always getting this note and it is actually really helpful to continue getting it because it continues to push me to think, "Okay, there has to be something that I haven't shown yet. And what is it?" And then those end up often being the richest and most interesting settings.
Sarah Enni: So is Majesty... so it is a two book series, is that right?
Katherine McGee: Right now it's only two.
Sarah Enni: Okay. That's a cliff hanger!
Katherine McGee: Maybe someday down the line, there will be a third, but right now it's only two. So I have ended book two in a place that's very satisfying for every character. That said, I know where they're going in the third book. I know where I would take them.
Sarah Enni: Interesting. I love that.
Katherine McGee: But I haven't worked on any beginning documents at all for a third book yet. So we'll see.
Sarah Enni: So since I have an MBA here with me, there is no avenue of life that wouldn't be enhanced by understanding how business works. I think that's a great background to have. And especially since, as you mentioned in our creative field, it can be really challenging, I think, for creative minded people to see themselves as a business, or to think business-like about this job, which does demand so much independent thinking.
So I would just love to hear how not only your experience in getting an MBA, but also in working on the editing side, the publishing side, how you bring all that knowledge and experience to your life as a professional writer now.
Katherine McGee: As far as editing goes, I touched on it a little bit earlier, but I think it definitely boosted my confidence just to see other writers and see their process start to finish. That was absolutely invaluable. And I think it did help so much that I understood more about publishing. The more that I meet debut authors, I think there's so much mystery surrounding publishing. And even when I meet people in my daily life, just friends of my family in Houston, I can't tell you how many people go, "Oh my gosh, you're an author? I never thought I would meet an author."
Because people think that books are these mystical objects created by people who live in a remote snowy cabin somewhere beautiful.
Sarah Enni: Or the streets of Manhattan or something.
Katherine McGee: Yeah, or they are some cool person on the streets of Manhattan. But they don't ever expect to actually just know an author or that they would be like a normal person, which sounds very silly. And then publishing is like a business that nobody understands on the outside.
Sarah Enni: And also how often do we see it represented in movies or TV? It's so off the mark, you know?
Katherine McGee: It's just so off the mark.
Sarah Enni: It's wild.
Katherine McGee: I know, I have many thoughts about Younger. There's so much about it is fun, but it's completely unrealistic.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Agreed.
Katherine McGee: So I do feel very lucky that I got to see behind the curtain. I got to know things, manage my expectations, understand what would happen when the book came out and what I could expect and what was not realistic to hope for. As far as the MBA and the business, I think you kind of said it best, which was that there's something really valuable about thinking that way. It's rare that I sit down and actually remember a specific math formula that I learned or moment in a class. But I think it changed my way of looking at the world and, for better or worse, I was not business oriented at all before business school.
I knew creative stuff. And even at my old job, we actually didn't talk about numbers and anything like that, except in the context of like how much a book had sold for, and occasionally how many copies it was selling, but that was it. And we didn't get into the nitty gritty of it. And it has helped a lot for me to think about everything. Even my contribution as the creative person is a small part of how the book comes to exist and comes to be in the hand of a reader.
Because there are so many people along the way who are packaging it and printing it and distributing it and storing it and dealing with the inventory. And even the small things about when you go to a Barnes and Noble and they don't have it and you get upset, there could be a million reasons for that. And it just helps me to kind of think about the broader picture and how the industry works as a whole and what my small role in it is.
And it definitely also gave me a lot of confidence, which I guess is the same answer that I gave for the editorial one. But I think that any exposure that you can get to a different way of thinking, or especially a business mindset, is really important as a creative person. Because I do think that creative people tend to undervalue their own worth.
Sarah Enni: One hundred percent.
Katherine McGee: And the people who work in book publishing are for the most part, really, really great people. I've never met a mean person in book publishing. They just don't go to book publishing. They go somewhere else. They go to some evil Hallmark movie land where they're like closing Christmas stores. But everyone in book publishing is good and they all want authors to succeed and they all are trying their best, but it's a tough business to be in.
And so very frequently, I think authors are afraid to ask for more money. To make demands of their marketing team. And so I hope that having thought about these things in a very analytical way at school, has both enabled me to ask for more, but to also know when I can't get more. And to know when I should be doing something. And so particularly with the marketing for American Royals, because of the type of book it is, and because it's so fun and hopefully upbeat and a little bit escapist, which we could all use right now.
I think there are so many serious books out and I genuinely love all of them, but you can't read a hundred percent serious books. The world is a dark place. And sometimes you just need to go to an alternate world where we've got a queen and a great tiara and there's some people kissing in palace hallways. It's a really great place to escape to. And Random House, who publishes it, have been amazing at trying to market it in some very creative and different ways.
And that we've relied really heavily on Instagram, which a lot of people do now. But in particular, this book has a great cover. I'm so lucky. I have an amazing cover designer who did a truly fantastic job.
Sarah Enni: And for your second book, they look so good together.
Katherine McGee: Yes. The cover of Majesty is, I mean, I almost cried when I saw it. I was like, "This is beautiful. I want to re-wallpaper my office with this! It's so great." So that has been something that I've been thinking about a lot is, are there ways that we can market this book that are outside of what publishers traditionally do, and how much can I personally get involved? Cause I'm willing to get involved as much as they want me and as much as I can.
So I definitely also am pretty shameless... you know that! So for anyone who's listening, I have been stalking Sarah since 2016. I emailed her when American Royals, I'm sorry, not American Royals. When The Thousandth Floor had not even yet come out.
Sarah Enni: That's right, my god.
Katherine McGee: And I cold emailed you and said, "Hi, I'm an author and my book will be coming out in the fall and I would like to be on your podcast." And so I do think it has, being in school, I had to do so many cold outreaches like that. And you get a lot of no's, so you have to really be okay with people telling you no. And I think, if nothing else, I have no shame, for better or worse, I have no shame in emailing people and just saying, "Hi, this is me. I'm Katherine McGee. And here's my book. Would you like a copy?"
And you can say no. And if you say, no, I'm not hurt, that's fine. Like, that's not your thing. But it has really helped because so many of the amazing things that have happened publicity-wise for American Royals have actually happened because I have shamelessly cold emailed people.
So the book was featured in The Skimm, which was so fun and so exciting.And I've had so many authors, or friends say, "That's amazing. How did that happen?" That happened because I emailed the book editor at The Skimm over and over.
Sarah Enni: There you go!
Katherine McGee: And she didn't know who I was, but I was like, "Can I send you a book?" People usually don't say no to a free book. And sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn't. I also stalked Reese Witherspoon really aggressively. And that didn't work out for me. If anyone knows how to get in touch with Reese Witherspoon, let me know. I tried everything.
But you know, you can't be upset when it doesn't work out. And people say, "Hey, Hello Sunshine doesn't want to hear from you. Go away." That's fine. I'm like, "I tried." So I do think that it has given me a thick skin and that has helped a lot. And that also helps, of course, with the age old review questions. So I try really hard not to see my negative reviews.
Occasionally people tag me in them on Instagram. And I do think that so many readers assume that I'm not reading my own Instagram. And that I've got some kind of... I don't have an assistant. I don't have anybody. Every time something is posted or commented or liked, that was me procrastinating. And so my editor's probably mad, I should be working. But I see those things.
And luckily being in school and being so used to just asking for things and being told, "No." At the beginning of the process, when I saw negative reviews, they did hurt. And now I'm so not affected by them. Now I see them and somebody's like, "I hate this book one star." And I'm like, "Oh, that's too bad. That's just not for them." No piece of entertainment content is for everyone. Not even Harry Potter.
There's always people who are the right audience and people were the wrong audience. And that is honestly the job of, well libraries in particular, and small bookstores and hopefully bookstagram, is to help people find what they like. Because I certainly, I don't like everything. I don't read any thrillers and I know that about myself. So I just don't involve myself in them at all.
But I think that has been really helpful is that like, I hopefully have a more upbeat attitude about it all because being in school and thinking this way and being forced to interact with so many people I didn't know, has just left me with a very relaxed attitude about trying to engage with people and trying to promote myself, which is really uncomfortable. And that's one of the weirdest parts of this job is trying to get people to pay attention to you as a person.
Sarah Enni: That was so much actually great advice. Do you have anything else to give by way of advice?
Katherine McGee: The pieces of advice that I always give are ones that you've heard probably a thousand times, but I can say them anyway. Which is two things, first to any aspiring writers, I always say read a lot. And particularly to read widely, this is something that I still struggle with because as we've clearly established on this podcast, I know what I like. And it's like The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn times 1000. But it's important to be reading things that are outside of your comfort zone. And in particular, are voices that are very different from yours.
I actually try to not read things that are too similar to what I'm writing. Lately I've been taking a step back from all of that royal historical fiction because I don't want it to interfere with what I'm trying to say. So I've been reading all kinds of different things, a lot of nonfiction actually. And overall, I just think that the more that you read and the more different types of things you read, the richer your own voice becomes, and the more full your creative well will be.
So, push yourself to read things that you may not have been initially attracted to, or may not be your first choice. And I think that ends up paying off in surprising ways. And then of course the other piece of advice is to write. And to actually do it and to actually write something all the way through, which is so hard to do. And there are so many authors I know, and friends who are writing, who stall out somewhere between chapter seven and nine, because as we've established, the easy set-up chapters are the most simple, because they're clear in your head, you know who the character is, and you know how to introduce them.
And then taking them on the journey is so hard. And I think that what I call act two, cause I kind of subscribe to this screenplay-esque three act story structure. But act two being the majority of the book. Being the middle 70% huge chunk is really, really tricky and continues to be the hardest part for me. And in particular, what I call the second half of act two.
So from basically from 50% through to like 80% through is so hard.
Sarah Enni: It's a killer.
Katherine McGee: It's a killer because you've gotten a lot of the fun stuff out of the way. And then things are starting to get bad for the characters and you haven't yet resolved them and you can get in a slump. And actually I feel myself getting into it. And sometimes when I'm in that sequence of chapters, because I do write in order. I can't go out of order.
Sarah Enni: Same.
Katherine McGee: I'll feel myself falling into the end of act two slump and I'm like, "What is happening? I can't get out of it. I'm just depressed. And all the chapters seem like they're taking a long time." And it really sounds so obvious, but just write a book start to finish and force yourself to push through the act two slump. Force yourself, to get to act three and then actually have a draft, no matter how bad it is. Even if you have to put placeholder things there and say, you know, in brackets, "Insert transition scene here where character goes from place one to place two."
Just so you have something done and then you can look at it and say, "This is a complete document. This is an actual draft. And then how does it get better?" I think I'm quoting Leigh Bardugo, I think it was Leigh who said, "The first draft is the farthest from what you initially conceived the book as, and then your job in each subsequent draft, is to get the book closer and closer to what it actually is in your head. And what your initial idea was in your head." So that it finally comes out like the way that you always wanted to tell it.
And I've always loved that cause I do feel like that. The first draft comes out and it's the farthest from what you think it's supposed to be. And you're like, "I don't understand. Cause in my head it's perfect! But it's really bad on this page."
Sarah Enni: "I don't know why? How did this happen?"
Katherine McGee: "How do I fix it?" And so you just have to have the patience to push all the way through a draft. And sometimes it takes a really, really long time. But it's worth pushing through all the way.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. And then I think it's also helpful to keep in mind, as you know better than anyone, you can also have help on the way. You can get the book as far as you can do, especially if you are un-agented or don't have a contract yet, it's hard cause it's on you and your beta readers. But at some point you'll sell the book and an editor will help you. And that's huge.
Katherine McGee: Oh, god bless all of our editors and thank them for all of their unsung heroics because these books would be terrible without... mine would be terrible. It's so important to have another set of eyes on it. I'm glad you mentioned beta readers. I don't have any official beta readers that are other writers. My beta readers are my family members, which is dangerous, but also really good because there's no one like family to give you the really brutal feedback.
If you have a really good beta reader who doesn't mind being that way, then it's fine. But I'm wary of giving the book to close friends because friends usually just want to tell you what you want to hear. My sister will tell me, "Oh, this was awful and this was awful. And why is this...?" It's like when you go dress shopping or swimsuit shopping, you bring your family and they're like, "You look terrible. Take that off. Oh my gosh, you look like a character from Little House on the Prairie. Stop it." And you need that. You need the really tough feedback and it can be hard to hear, but it's so valuable.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. That's huge. I love that. Oh my gosh, I appreciate so much you giving me all this time. This was such a fun conversation and let's do it again sometime.
Katherine McGee: Yes. I'm so glad we got to chat. Thank you so much for having me.
Sarah Enni: Thank you.
Thank you so much to Katherine. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @KatherineMcGee and follow me on both @SarahEnni (Twitter and Instagram), and the show @FirstDraftpod (Twitter and Instagram). For links to everything that Katherine and I talked about in this episode, please check out the show notes, which are available @FirstDraftPod.com.
And if you're interested in buying Katherine's books or any of the books that she and I discussed in this episode, you can go to the First Draft website, FirstDraftPod.com, click on the links that you find there. And if you buy the book through one of those links, part of the proceeds goes back to First Draft and it helps keep this podcast free.
Another way to support the show is to subscribe to the podcast wherever you're listening now, super, super easy. And if you have five minutes, please leave a rating or review on iTunes. It really does help the show get some natural growth in front of other people that may not find it otherwise. And it's always appreciated.
If you have writing or creativity questions that a future guest and myself could answer in one of the mailbag episodes, I'd love to hear from you. You can call the voicemail box I set up for the show and leave your question at (818) 533-1998. I would love to hear from you.
The producer of First Draft is Hayley Hershman. Jess Shane was editor and sound designer for this episode. The theme music is by Dan Bailey and the logo was designed by Collin Keith. Thanks to production assistant Tasneem Daud and transcriptionist-at-large Julie Anderson.
And as ever, thanks to you, spreadsheet humorists for listening.
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