Leigh Barudgo, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Shadow and Bone series, the Six of Crows duology, and the King of Scars duology, discusses her first adult novel, Ninth House.
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Sarah Enni: Welcome to the First Draft with me Sarah Enni. This week I'm talking to Leigh Bardugo, New York Times bestselling author of the Shadow and Bone series, the Six of Crows duology, and the King of Scars duology. (Please check our Leigh’s two previous First Draft interviews here, and here). I was so excited to talk to Leigh about her first adult novel Ninth House, which is out now. I loved what Leigh had to say about the future of the Grishaverse now that there is that Netflix TV show coming up, trying to get back to the pure stream of writing that has kept her sane, and telling a story about what it takes to be a survivor. So please sit back, relax, and enjoy the conversation.
Sarah Enni: Hi Leigh, how are you?
Leigh Bardugo: I'm good. How are you Sarah?
Sarah Enni: I'm doing so well. I'm so happy that you could come over and chat again.
Leigh Bardugo: I'm happy to be here and I was happy to meet your beautiful cat Hammer, who I am desperately allergic to.
Sarah Enni: Oh my gosh, Hammer has been sequestered.
Leigh Bardugo: I know. I feel bad.
Sarah Enni: But he was happy to meet you too. I'm also so glad that we are chatting again, because everyone listening to this podcast should go back and listen to your first episode [Listen here] where you talked a ton about your background, and how you came to writing stories. And then your second interview [Listen here] with me was right when Wonder Woman was about to come out, and The Language of Thorns. I just re-listened to it and am mortified at the quality of audio, etcetera, etcetera.
Leigh Bardugo: You should not be. We recorded that poolside if I remember correctly.
Sarah Enni: We were poolside. There's audible wind.
Leigh Bardugo: I love it! It adds flavor.
Sarah Enni: There's mese-en-place. I think I'm using that really wrong.
Leigh Bardugo: It's completely wrong. You think you mean mese-en-scene. But [laughing] mese-en-place is when you cut up peppers before you cook, which it goes to show that I don't know anything about cooking but have watched a lot of cooking shows. Because I'm like, "You cut up peppers. You put them in a small bowl."
Sarah Enni: I just read Anthony Bourdain so forgive me that's where my head's at.
Leigh Bardugo: That's awesome.
Sarah Enni: Ah, that's so funny. Mise-en-scene.
Leigh Bardugo: Yeah.
Sarah Enni: Mese-en-poolside, that's what we were doing. So I'm glad to have this very nice quiet studio chat about the Ninth House. However, I'm gonna ask that we start with King of Scars. Because I really love this book. I kind of want to, given this context that the last time we chatted, let's kind of lead up from there.
Leigh Bardugo: Okay.
Sarah Enni: We were at Wonder Woman, Language of Thorns. Language of Thorns was kind of adding to the Grishaverse. And I forget, I think at that point King of Scars must have been on the docket.
Leigh Bardugo: It was on the docket, but I don't think we had announced it yet. I can't remember. It's hard to go back in time to the publishing timeline.
Sarah Enni: What were you writing on that retreat?
Leigh Bardugo: I was actually writing Ninth House on that retreat. Because I was contracted to write my Grishaverse books. And it's not just a question of having an obligation. When you have worked with a publisher that long, you don't want to leave them hanging because you've decided to take on a new project. So I was really writing Ninth House in between blocks of King of Scars. So at that point I was working on Ninth House and trying to get the beats for the second half of the book right.
Sarah Enni: And by the way, I am so interested in that side of it, the professional side, and how you're thinking about timing and career-sided things. So I would love... as much as you want to share about that.
Leigh Bardugo: I would love to talk about that actually, very much. We often think of writing as this kind of magical thing that happens in a beautiful place.
Sarah Enni: Poolside.
Leigh Bardugo: It happens poolside [chuckles] but the actual business of writing is so much more complex than I ever understood it to be. And I feel I learn more with every book.
Sarah Enni: Yes. And I'm happy to mine your knowledge.
Leigh Bardugo: Okay. It's a shallow pit.
Sarah Enni: Well let's, first of all, talk about the substance of King of Scars. So do you mind pitching the book for us?
Leigh Bardugo: King of Scars is... this has been a while since I've had to do this. So King of Scars is the story of young King Nikolai Lantsov who is trying to rule a country that is in debt, that is surrounded by enemies. And also at the same time he's trying to wage a war with the very literal demon, or dark magic, that has taken him over from inside. And that is growing stronger every day.
I did my best to make it accessible for people who had not read anything in the Grishaverse. And I will say it is probably the most fantasy of fantasy books that I've written. My worlds tend to be fairly grounded with a little bit of magic happening in them. This is high magic and high folklore, a lot of religion, and I think has a different scope and feel than my other books. But I feel every Grishaverse series has a different feeling. So I think you can jump in with King of Scars if that's your jam. But I would recommend starting with the trilogy and even reading the duology too, because one of the main characters in King of Scars is Nina Zenick, who is one of the main characters of Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom.
Sarah Enni: Yes. I'm so curious about that. Because King of Scars is the beginning of a duology, so there will be a follow up to that. And then I don't know, but I can imagine there will be more in the world of Grisha?
Leigh Bardugo: I think there will be only a little bit more. There'll be a second book in the King of Scars duology, and then depending on where I'm at, and where my readers are at, and where the Netflix adaptation is at... I've always imagined a third Six of Crows book, and then maybe another book of short stories. But that to me is the complete, at this time, the complete Grishaverse. Who knows what will come to me down the road. But I tend to think in small pieces. I know Brandon Sanderson (author of the Mistborn series, the Stormlight Archive series, and the Elantris series) thinks thirty-two books ahead, but I've never had that kind of imagination.
Sarah Enni: I think that's unique to certain fantasy writers. He is definitely one of them. I really want to hear about that. And then I do want to talk about how Netflix might factor in to future thinking about this world. But I read the really wonderful, highly praising NPR review of King Scars, but they did spend a lot of time being like, "Okay, follow me as we go through..." I think they were honestly, in that review, saying, "I want you to read this book so bad. Let me give you a primer."
Leigh Bardugo: Pretty much, yeah. That was really nice though. That was a beautiful review and almost... I kind of just wanted to blurb the hell out of that. Just take it and slap it on the book. It was very nice.
Sarah Enni: They did a great job of summarizing it too. But it does bring me to... because when Six of Crows came out, you said this as like, "You can just jump in here." But that gets harder the further along you go.
Leigh Bardugo: Yeah, and it gets harder to write them that way the further you go. There's so much backstory. And I don't think it's just a question of like, you know, you can read a recap and say, "Okay, this happened here and this happened here," and you'll be fine. But I think that there's a certain amount of resonance in... these books become richer if you have the character's emotional journey in front of you.
And Zoya is a very small player in the first trilogy. But I think it is still more satisfying to read her in this book. She has a POV [point of view] in this book and plays a major role in this book. It's more satisfying to read her if you've been through the other story with her, and seeing her from the outside as opposed to from the inside.
Sarah Enni: Yes. With King of Scars... I'm sort of looking at it two ways. We obviously had to have a Nikolai book. I feel everyone finished the initial trilogy and was like, "I want to know more about this dude." He was such a winning character. He seemed so fun for you to write. That was the impression I got as a reader.
Leigh Bardugo: He is very fun to write.
Sarah Enni: He's very fun to read.
Leigh Bardugo: He's a pain in the ass, but he's a lot of fun to write.
Sarah Enni: So that seemed obvious. But it's interesting to me to hear you say that you feel like you're kind of wrapping up because otherwise, from a career standpoint, you're bringing only so many people with you. If you're like Marvel cinematic universe style of being like, you have to watch nineteen movies to enjoy Ant Man seven, or whatever.
Leigh Bardugo: [Laughing] I mean there is truth to that. I think for me I would do another series that was like Six of Crows, that was almost like a capsule universe and I would keep the crossover small. And I can imagine, you know there's a lot of territory on that map that hasn't been explored, and I think that it's a very comfortable place for me to say, "Okay, this is where my YA lives."
And I think in terms of other projects, I really started to think in terms of one-offs, and shorter series, because I do feel this... it's almost like I feel the walls closing in on me when I'm this deep into a series. There's a great joy in writing the characters because they have this history together. But I loved getting to crack open the world of what was myth and what was reality in King of Scars. For me, that's what kept it exciting. But I think that when we are moving deeper into a world, the rules almost become less fun to plan.
Sarah Enni: Yes. Yeah. That's interesting.
Leigh Bardugo: I mean you see this, I don't know if any of your listeners are Avatar: The Last Airbender fans.
Sarah Enni: I'm sure some of them are (listen to the First Draft interview with Michael Dante DiMartino, co-creator of the Avatar universe).
Leigh Bardugo: If you then move to Korra, I think Korra is a brilliant expansion on that universe, but it also says some of the things you thought you knew, were not true. Which I think is thrilling if you've been along on that ride. But you also have to be willing to be like, "Okay, I'm ready to move into a different phase of this world."
Sarah Enni: Right. Which definitely King of Scars does in such a fun way. And part of me wants to spoil the crap out of it, but we can refrain. But I do like that you mentioned it is a lot about religion. It is a lot about blowing the world up. It reminds me of Laini Taylor's series (Strange the Dreamer and The Daughter of Smoke & Bone series. Listen to her First Draft interview here) that at the end where you're like, "Ah!" You know, things become clear.
Leigh Bardugo: Yeah, there were things I wanted to pull apart. Particularly because so much of the whole Grishaverse is about the way that people see each other, the way that cultures see each other, and the way that people interpret magic. So in Ravka, yes, they have Grisha and have this second army that operate as a kind of military resource, but they also have folklore that treats Grisha power much more as we traditionally see magic.
And there's a deeper distrust invested in that magic that actually parallels the attitudes of say, people in Fjarda, much more than we would think. And it's very different say from the way that the Zemani view magic. So to me, getting to play with this idea of what people believed was true. Or what people chose to pick and choose as their fairy tales, or as their parables, is to me a fun and powerful space to play in.
Sarah Enni: Was that enhanced by having done Language of Thorns?
Leigh Bardugo: Yes. I think that that was a natural step for me, because Language of Thorns is maybe not what we would view as religious, but that line of what makes somebody a miracle worker or a magic user is so blurry. And I love that distortion.
Sarah Enni: What's the um, I'm gonna butcher this quote again, and I was reminded of it by reading an interview with NK Jemisin (Broken Earth Trilogy, and The Hundred Thousand Kingdom series) but she was talking about the concept that sufficently...?
Leigh Bardugo: Technology, if it's a sufficiently enough advance. Yeah, it's the Arthur C. Clarke (third law) quote and yes, that's exactly right.
Sarah Enni: Wait, do you mind restating the quote?
Leigh Bardugo: Oh god, I'll butcher it! It's, "If any technology that's sufficiently enough advanced, essentially looks like magic." And I think that is something that operates within the world of the Grisha but in a way that... I think we're used to fantasy worlds where magic is dying out. In the Grishaverse it's not dying out, its alive and well, but it's being replaced by military tech and the advancement of military technology.
And I think we have this weird thing where a lot of fantasy exists in this medieval world where you don't have to worry about something like a repeating rifle, or a submarine, or an airship. And that is, of course, not true for all fantasy. There's plenty of Flintlock fantasy out there and Steampunk. And those lines between science fiction and fantasy get more muddied. But for me, the idea that magic stays stagnant in a way that tech doesn't, was interesting to me.
Sarah Enni: That is interesting. And I mean, your world is so interesting in how their tech is developed with that magic in mind.
Leigh Bardugo: Which Nikolai has a grasp on that a lot of people don't. There's a strong dividing line throughout the trilogy and Nikolai is saying, "If we don't find a way to use these things together, we're going to be left behind." Because his country has for many years been effectively hamstrung by the Shadow Fold, and this failure to industrialize, and this lack of... They have tremendous natural resources, but they don't have a way to really deploy them. And so he's trying, as many Russian leaders did, he is trying to get his country to catch up. But he's not doing it in as brutal of fashion as many did.
Sarah Enni: Right. And this relates in nine thousand ways that we'll get into, but he's literally fighting, this is not a spoiler because it's the opening scene, he's literally fighting the monster within that he increasingly finds it impossible to contain. So he's recovering from the trauma that he experienced in the first series, and also Ravka is recovering.
Leigh Bardugo: I think a lot of people wanted Nikolai to stay the same glib, fun, Han Solo like character. But for me, it felt dishonest to treat somebody who's taken on the kind of responsibilities that he has as a leader, but also who has been on the front lines and who has witnessed death, and been responsible for death. It's something that he and Zoya share, the fact that if you're a commander, you're going to make mistakes.
And even if you don't make a mistake. Even if you lead your company to glorious victory, you're still gonna lose friends and you're gonna lose allies. And if you lose the ability to feel that pain, then you can become much more like the Darkling who has seen so many centuries of loss, that he has stopped putting a value on human life in the way that we would hope our leaders would. And so Nikolai's monster is also his PTSD. It's also his, maybe this is a spoiler, but his desire to be the person that people see him as, is at war with his need to make peace with the person he actually is.
Sarah Enni: Right, right. And there's such a theme of who or what to trust. The very stories that you've been told, the things that you worship or hold ideal, can betray you as well when you're going through this. He's finding a new identity, right?
Leigh Bardugo: So much of the way we live our lives, particularly now in the age of social media, is about narrative, right? The narrative we choose to project. The narrative we are experiencing. The false narratives. I see a lot of people putting false narratives forward all the time because they believe that this is the way they're supposed to be perceived. And also sometimes in a very deliberate and manipulative way because they know that our favor falls with, for instance, the narrative of the underdog. It's something I speak about a lot when I talk about both writing, and the way that authors are perceived, and the way that YA is perceived in particular. This idea of narrative and false narrative I think is super powerful.
And I think it's something that runs throughout my books. It's something that Kaz does a lot of in Six of Crows. He takes these things that would otherwise be used against him and uses them to create his own little legend within his world. And that is both powerful and also dangerous because then you have to live up to that legend.
Sarah Enni: Right. You even talking about it right now is making me think of politics and how we are seeing, at this point in the phase of a campaign, we're seeing people struggle to convey.
Leigh Bardugo: To build this narrative and to build a myth around themselves and to control the narrative around themselves.
Sarah Enni: And to turn a weakness, a perceived weakness, into a strength. The series is being developed as... actually both of the first series are being developed as a Netflix TV show. Can you explain what’s going on? And I want to hear how you're thinking about how that might interact with your body of work.
Leigh Bardugo: It's not so much thinking about the interaction with a body of work as it is thinking about... in some ways I'm at an advantage because I think I'm gonna be able to finish out the story before they [pauses] I mean, knock wood. Knock wood and all praise to George R.R. Martin (Game of Thrones and a Song of Ice and Fire). He writes much longer books than I do. But my goal is to be able to finish this out. That if this series goes as planned, and if we're able to keep going in multiple seasons, that I will be able to finish my work on the books before they catch up to me. I hope.
I will say I have a much greater understanding and sympathy for writers who have been through this, because it takes up a tremendous amount of time in your life that you don't anticipate. And let me be real clear, I would not trade it for anything. I am super grateful and super excited. But it's also a very new way of functioning and working than I am used to at all.
Sarah Enni: And can you talk about that because I'm not sure everyone's aware of how much you are...
Leigh Bardugo: Okay. So I'm an executive producer on the show. And to be clear, that doesn't mean I have veto powers. It sounds really good, right? Executive producer, I make executive decisions! But I have meaningful consultation on things. I can speak up when I'm concerned about something. I can advocate passionately for things that matter to me. And I do think that the people I'm working with care about that, but I don't have any ability to say absolute no or absolute yes. But that also means I need to keep up with things like looking at early production drawings, looking at costume designs, watching audition tapes, you know, reading scripts. That is all thrilling but also incredibly time consuming.
And you don't read a script once, you read it again, and again, and again, as it goes through multiple iterations and notes. And these are hour long scripts essentially. So it takes a tremendous amount of time and it's hard for me to then transition to a drafting frame of mine. Because you're really engaging this hyper-critical editorial state, and then trying to transition to pretending that there isn't a whole machine of people, and a whole world of readers and potentially viewers, who are going to be engaged in this. And it is incredibly difficult for me. So that's really new and I have no idea what I'm doing [laughs].
Sarah Enni: You have no idea what you're doing....?
Leigh Bardugo: No. I mean, to give you an example. I woke up this morning and there was an email saying...we're about to start production in two months. And there is still a part of me that believes that it will not happen. It will not come to pass. But it seems that a lot of other people have been hired and paid and believe that it will come to pass.
So I woke up this morning to this urgent, "Look, we need to get this person, this person, this person locked. And here are our selects for these actors." And on the one hand it's awesome to watch, but on another hand you're trying to figure out, and you're putting your votes in for people, but you don't know where other people fall. So it is really this intense thing. And then, "Oh, there's this mention of this thing in episode one-oh-two, do we need to reconcile this with one-oh-three?"
And I'm like, "Wait a minute. I don't remember what was in 102? So go back, go back." And this was all before trying to sit down and squeeze an hour of writing in. And I find that quite challenging. And at the same time I'm promoting Ninth House. So there was a time when I could carve out not just weeks, but months at a time, to just be in the world of a book. And I don't want the quality of my novels to decline. I want to take the time I need to take, and I've never been a particularly fast writer. I mean for any place other than YA I'm a fast writer, but for YA I'm not a particularly fast writer. And I'm also an obsessive writer. I go through my drafts again and again and again, and my revisions, and my copy edits, and my first pass.
And I always apologize to my editors when I'm like, "Look, this is the way it's gonna be." You know? I am that person who is gonna be reading this through every single time no matter how sick of it I am. And I'm not sorry about that. I think that it makes for a better final product on a book as a product. But yeah, I don't really know what I'm doing. So I'm trying to find a way to build a life that allows for the business side of this and the creative side of this. And we're all doing that. But these are new challenges for me.
Sarah Enni: Do you feel like [chuckles] I'm asking this cause in my head I'm always like, "Oh, but you know, a year ago I really had this figured out." And then when you get real with yourself you're like, "Wait a second. I've always been flying by the seat of my pants. And I've never fit it together."
Leigh Bardugo: I mean I feel there was this stretch of a couple of years where I was working really hard, but I sort of knew my method. I might have been crazy stressed and afraid I wasn't gonna... I pulled three all-nighters, not in a row, but three all-nighters. And at my age that is something… on Crooked Kingdom. I could not do that now, you know? But I feel in terms of my writing process, I sort of knew what I was doing. I knew the amount of time I needed to work on some things. Certainly there were surprises, but I felt I could put my head down and say, "Okay. And this is where promotion is gonna pick up." But then that all changed. You know? And I think too, I always feel healthier and happier when I'm writing.
If I've had a few hours, and even if I'm not writing great stuff, if I feel I'm moving forward in a draft and then you get a few wonderful days, I feel if I'm writing, then I feel more centered. My mood is better. And I was thinking about this, when I was in junior high school, this was my way of surviving was to write. It's the kind of writing you do when you're young where you can just generate page after page, and terrible poem after terrible poem. And this was my way of feeling okay when the rest of the world was in chaos. And now I don't quite have access to that. And so I'm trying to find a way to get there so that I don't feel insane all of the time.
Sarah Enni: Right. And I mean contributing to this, I can imagine, is the fact that you're not off in the woods, you know? In Santa Fe like George R.R. Martin or whatever. You're right here where it's happening. You're in Los Angeles. All this is happening.
Leigh Bardugo: Although we will be shooting in Budapest.
Sarah Enni: Really? That's exciting.
Leigh Bardugo: I know. I'm hoping to visit set this fall, so we'll see what happens.
Sarah Enni: So that makes a lot of sense to me. And I think that is the struggle that a lot of people have. It's sort of like you sit quietly in your own room wishing that the world recognized your brilliance and then when the world does, you're like, "Oh shit!"
Leigh Bardugo: [Laughing] I mean, I'll say this too. I don't think it's radically different from somebody who is trying to write their first book, or their second book, or their third book, and balancing a day job or balancing dependence or whatever it is. This is something that we come up against again and again. And the writing life, the creative life, is very rarely this pure thing that I think we understand and culture.
I think there is that vision of the writer off in the woods in their cabin. But there's also this kind of vision that's on Castle where it's like, "You go to glamorous parties and do glamorous things." And it's like, "Mm, no!" It's actually just a shit ton of meetings and emails and phone calls. So many phone calls. And legal stuff, copyright stuff, trying to wrangle this thing. And the show doesn't exist yet. It doesn't exist, but it does in this amorphous form for so many people. So trying to grapple with that, of all these people who are suddenly crowded into your living room, is a challenge.
Sarah Enni: Right. I mean, it's very fascinating to talk to you at this particular moment also, because it is moving along. Netflix is happening. But it's also...
Leigh Bardugo: But it hasn't happened.
Sarah Enni: Not out in the world.
Leigh Bardugo: It's this thing that takes so much of your time and your creative energy. And again, I would not have it any other way. I don't think there's any writer, I'm sure there are a few, but most of us dream of having our work adapted. And really not just because of the thrill of getting to see people speak your lines or embody your characters, or getting to see these places you've only had in your head come to life.
But also because you know you're going to reach a lot more readers. And that's what we all want. We're not writing journal entries. These are things that we, we desperately want our stories to be in other people's hands and get into their heads and hearts. This is, of course, a dream come true. It's just that dreams come with a lot of work too.
Sarah Enni: And that is not sadly the part that we [chuckles] we don't dream of emails.
Leigh Bardugo: We do not dream of... I mean somebody maybe does, they're like, "Oh God, to be able to be grappling with bureaucracy! My fantasy." I should hire that person.
Sarah Enni: I know exactly! There's a need. Well that is really fascinating. And I was running through that in my mind, thinking about how you were picturing the Grishaverse functioning in your life going forward. It's a little bit out of your hands in some ways now.
Leigh Bardugo: It belongs to many more people than me now.
Sarah Enni: I mean, is there pressure to go indefinitely?
Leigh Bardugo: I don't know. I think it depends on how the show goes. And I don't worry about that so much. I've had the plan for the way I want the rest of the series to work. And in my mind there are things that we get to do in terms of short stories and bonus content. And maybe one day doing a compendium for the worlds that are ways to give people more access to this place and these characters. That isn't about trying to extend a narrative that isn't meant to be extended beyond...you know, I don't want to stretch that rubber band until it snaps. But I also don't know… if you had asked me after the end of writing Ruin and Rising if I was gonna write more Grishaverse books, I'd be like, "Well, you know, eventually I'll give Nikolai a book, but right now I'm gonna do this and that and the other thing."
I didn't know that the idea for Six of Crows was going to come to me. And so I don't know. You're walking down one path and you don't know what you're gonna glimpse over a particular horizon and decide, "Oh wait, I really want to go there." So I don't want to close off any doors and I don't want to say never.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. You mentioned earlier that you kind of feel like your YA lives in the Grishaverse and I want to talk a lot about moving into adult with Ninth House, but do you have other ideas that are young adult?
Leigh Bardugo: Yeah, there's actually a couple. And sometimes before I've really dug into a story, I don't quite know where it belongs. But there are a couple of things that I'm desperate to write. And I am in this state that I was in when I was first approaching Ninth House, where I'm like, "Where is the time? Why can I not write faster?" Because there are a few things that I feel them pulling at me all of the time. And they're greedy and I want to indulge them.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, that's a hard state to be in. I relate to that a lot right now. I feel very frustrated with myself that I can't be more efficient.
Leigh Bardugo: I know what you mean. But I also think something I've also been letting myself do, and this was with Ninth House, I was supposed to be starting on Crooked Kingdom. I had just come off of Six of Crows tour. I was exhausted and I was really burned out. Six of Crows was an incredibly challenging book to write and I knew Crooked Kingdom was gonna be just as hard to write, and I wasn't ready to dig in.
I was supposed to. I was going on this writing retreat and it was like, "This is what I'm gonna spend the next two weeks doing." And instead I spent them working on Ninth House and it was writing a proposal and just saying, "Instead of lying here and beating myself up and trying to get blood from a stone, I'm going to let my creative guide put me in the space of this. I'm going to research and I'm gonna let myself off the hook."
And it was exactly what I needed to do. You know? This was before...Ninth House hadn't sold. We didn't know if there was gonna be any market for it. We didn't know really what it was. It was just this idea that I had been talking about since I first signed with my agent. And that every couple of years we'd be like, "And the Ninth House!" And then we'd be like, "Oh, there's so much other stuff to do."
And I had begun to feel like I would never get there. And so now that I'm working on the second King of Scars book, I'm also saying, "Okay, if I'm having a bad day or if I'm not able to get to that place, it is okay to work on another project." Better that then sitting there and scrolling through Instagram. Because then at least at the end of the day, I feel like I've done something that feeds me.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, that's a really great thing to put out there, I think. I had recently, for some reason, I wasn't able to get into the book in any way besides being like, "You know what? I think I'm gonna make fake Wikipedia pages for all the bands that I made up in this book."
Leigh Bardugo: Ha! That's so great.
Sarah Enni: And it was just so, you know, this sounds so "woo-woo” but for some reason that was how this came to me. I was like, "I want to make fake Wikipedia pages."
Leigh Bardugo: I think that there is this split personality that we have when it comes to craft. There's a part of us that is like, "We're all gonna be Hemingway and we're just gonna write, and we're gonna drink, and then we're gonna write some more, and then we're gonna go run away from a bull." You know? And this way that we dismiss opening these other doors to bring these characters, or these stories, into our house. And then we have this other side, which is kind of like, "And we're gonna journal and we're gonna do self-care." And then it becomes this almost gendered way we have of looking at writing. And it really doesn't have to be that way.
You can be an ambitious, driven, craft machine and you can also be someone who takes care of herself and goes the places she needs to go bravely. And that is really, quite frankly, an act of defiance to say, "I'm gonna go make my Wikipedia pages." Or, "I'm gonna go work on this graphic novel that may never see the light." Or, "I'm going to do these things because I know it will lead me back to where I need to go." That is having courage and saying, "I have enough faith in my own will to get this work done, that I'm gonna allow myself these things."
Sarah Enni: Yeah. And I was beating myself up thinking like, "This is masking a character sheet. It's procrastination. You're just hiding it." But then when I let myself indulge for a week, and just read so many weird profiles about all these bands. I saw the book opening up in this way that it never would have.
Leigh Bardugo: It's a different kind of research. Okay? And research feeds you in this very strange way where you have no idea what you're going to use. You know, there's times you're researching, "Oh, I need to know what this particular thing is called." Great. Most of the time, research is about casting this wide net and allowing yourself to fall into that rabbit hole, and to just discover things, and to initiate that discovery. And it's so valuable. And Ninth House could not have been written in any other way.
Sarah Enni: I was gonna say you, once again, teeing me up so well, and that is to make this transition. So let's talk about Ninth House. I want to ask so much about the research. But before we do that, let's get a little more detail about the book. Do you mind pitching Ninth House for us?
Leigh Bardugo: Okay. Ninth House is a story set among the secret societies at Yale. And it's really the story of Alex Stern who is this young woman with a criminal past who is out of chances. And she is surrounded by people who burn through second chances. And she is trying to navigate this world of privilege and dark magic and eventually murder because a girl is killed on campus. And everyone seems to think it has nothing to do with these secret societies. But Alex knows better and she decides to pursue that. Sometimes putting herself in... painting a target on her back.
Sarah Enni: So you mentioned earlier that this idea has been around for a long time. Let's do the forensics on that. Was it when you yourself were at Yale?
Leigh Bardugo: Yes and no. Okay. So I feel I keep telling this story, so apologies to anybody who's been at one of my events and has already heard this. But it's so rare that I feel like I can trace back to a particular moment with a book. But back then when I was an undergrad we wrote letters to one another. And I had gone off campus to [the] post office to get my mail, and I was reading a letter and I had my head buried in it. And I'm one of those people who, I think a lot of readers are this, but my parents genuinely worried when I went away to college that I was gonna walk in front of a car because I'm just so much in my head.
So I look up from my letter eventually and I'm like, "I have never been on this street. Oh my God!" And I looked to my left and I see a giant mausoleum. And when I say giant, I mean it was the size of an apartment building, and it's all white marble with a Greek pediment and columns. It is a mausoleum and it is surrounded by this black wrought iron gate covered in black snakes, black iron snakes.
And on my right are the gates to the Grove Street Cemetery, which is basically smack dab in the middle of the Yale campus. And these gates have a plinth on top of them that reads, "The dead shall be raised." And I thought, "Where the hell am I?" This was, you know, we as fantasy readers are constantly looking for magic to creep into our worlds. We are looking for the places.
There is always something lurking in the woods or under the bridge. And here I was in this incredible moment and I found out later that this giant mausoleum was the clubhouse, or tomb, of Book and Snake, which is one of... There are many secret societies at Yale, most of them more society than secret. But there are eight that are considered, they're called the Ancient Eight, and they are the most established and prestigious of these societies.
And this one was Book and Snake. And so I became obsessed with these structures. I had never heard of Skull and Bones. I had never heard of these places. And there are these incredible, weird, architectural, things that are all over campus. And I, of course, wanted to believe that magic was happening in them. And as it turns out, they're quite mundane.
But for the purposes of Ninth House I thought, "Okay, well what if the reason that these societies yield such prestigious alumni, you know, presidents, secretaries of state, publishers, Academy award winners, hedge fund managers, people who make and break economies. What if the reason for that is not that they're old boy drinking clubs, but what if they're actually repositories of occult magic? And what if each of these societies represents a different branch of that arcane magic?"
Well, if you're gonna put that kind of magic into the hands of a bunch of undergrads, then there sure as hell better be somebody making sure they don't quite literally raise hell. And that was where the idea for the Ninth House came to me.
Sarah Enni: That is amazing. Did it sweep over you all at once? Or is it something that's been chewed over time?
Leigh Bardugo: No! This is something that's been percolating. I can point to that moment, but I can't point to the moment where I really came up with this idea. It was something that developed over time. And when I first signed with my agent with Shadow and Bone, you know I came to her off of the slush pile, she asked me what other ideas I had or wanted to pursue, and this was one of them. And by then it had evolved into knowing that it was about this girl Alex Stern, but I didn't really know her.
And I guess the second... you know, Ninth House really has two origin stories. That's the fun part of the story, right? That sounds fun. Secret societies, magic, Yale, awesome! But the other origins of story it has is when I was coming up to doing my first research trip for Ninth House. I can't really call him a friend, I would call him an acquaintance, reached out to me via text. Said, "Oh, you know, my kid is reading your book and are you gonna go to reunion?"
And I had not remembered that reunion was happening. And I went, "Oh hell yes, I'm going to reunion. I have something to gloat about now. I'm a New York Times bestseller. Of course I'm going to reunion!" And we started corresponding via text and talking about who was going to be there and so forth.
And he started sending me pictures. He had lived in a suite across from my suite of coed dorms at Yale. And we had lived in the basement of a dorm on old campus. And their suite of guys had lived across from our suite of girls. And so we would drink together and so forth. And he started sending me pictures of all of us hanging out.
And I had this incredibly negative reaction to them. A really profound, unpleasant reaction. And I realized that I had been dodging excavating my own experiences at Yale. And I had forgotten. The people I had kept with me from college were the people I had wanted to keep with me. The people who are still in my life, who had become my idea of what Yale had been to me, were the best.
They were the kind of people, the brave people, the dangerous people. These were the people who had had my back and whose backs I had had. These were the people I loved who I had kept with me, and everybody else had fallen by the wayside. But the everybody else is the truth of what college was like and this culture that we all lived in. This toxic, white, straight, rich culture that we were all striving to be a part of.
And I looked back on the person I was, the way we talked about ourselves, about our bodies, about other women, and it was with a really deep sense of sadness and shame. And the language around gender, and power, and assault, and harassment, has changed so much. I wish I could say that these things had changed. They have not. My Google alerts tell me differently. But we didn't even have language for what we were experiencing or going through. We all wanted to be in on the joke and that was truly a wrenching experience for me.
And going back into all of that, and then writing to that, and trying to be honest about it was really... you cannot write about an institution like Yale without exploring ideas of privilege, or class, or gender. And you cannot write about being a young woman in that environment without being honest about what it is to be a young woman, still, on a college campus.
Sarah Enni: Especially with, as you mentioned, young people who wield enormous power. I mean, the metaphor is right there. The power that they hold is real and it can feel like magic, especially to people who haven't been able to access anything remotely like that, which Alex feels keenly.
Leigh Bardugo: Absolutely. Alex is a pure outsider. I was very much an outsider when I came to Yale, but I isolated her even further. Which at one point, she talks about how her threads have been cut. She doesn't know her father. I didn't know my biological father. And so you lose an entire side of your family. Her mother is, speaking of "woo-woo", her mother is very much ensconced in this kind of LA world. Who is very divorced from the religion and rituals of her mother and that culture. And so Alex is without any kind of foundation to draw from, any kind of culture to draw from, to give her strength. And I felt that way very much too.
College stories, we don't see a ton of college stories. And I think that's in part because, not that they're not out there, but that the stakes somehow feel lowered to us. There's high school, and then there's real life. And then college... I think because, though this is not necessarily true, I think to many people, college feels like a very insulated, safe environment. Even being able to go to college is such a privilege.
So the idea that you get to live in a dorm or an apartment, and that your job is literally to go to school for four years, or however long, feels like a place of tremendous privilege and insulation. And I think that for me, I wanted to raise the stakes as acutely as I could for Alex.
She has to make this work, not because she needs a degree so that she can go teach humanities somewhere, but because otherwise she doesn't have a plan B. And this is a way of building a life for herself and potentially for her mom that she suddenly has access to. So I needed that to feel dire for her.
Sarah Enni: At what point was it clear this was an adult story?
Leigh Bardugo: Really early. I think that's why we waited so long to move forward with it because we knew it didn't belong in YA. And I did not want to write... I think there's a version of Ninth House that you could write that is very fun, and just a romp, you know?
And that wasn't the way I wanted to write the story. Now, to be clear, I think it's a very funny book. I may be wrong. But I think it's a very funny book full of jokes, and puzzles, and bonkers magic. But to me magic is a commodity. And I wanted it to operate as a commodity in this book that certain people have access to, and others don't. And what that does, how that twists and bends this college world.
So I knew early on I wanted it to be adult. And as soon as I started actually writing the pages I was like, "Oh yeah, now I know where I'm going." And I turned in the first eighty thousand words of the book to my editor before anything else. And he had bought it on proposal, Noah Eaker. So he had only read about ten pages of it. And then a long document full of worldbuilding and a plot synopsis.
So when I turn in this eighty thousand word...this weird dark book. And I thought, "Oh man, I don't know what's about to come back to me.” Is he gonna say, you know, "You went too far." Or, "This isn't what I thought I was getting into." And he didn't even blink. He was like, "Great! Let's get into this." So bless him. And I think he knew, I think he knew even from those early pages. I think if you read the prologue and the first chapter of Ninth House, you kind of know where you're going.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, yeah, yeah. What are you, and this is just interesting to hear your perspective on, but what do you see as the big difference between writing adult and young adult?
Leigh Bardugo: That is such a complicated question, and I've thought about it a lot. I've been asked it a lot. And I think there's a bunch of different answers you can give. I think one is simply the audience. The fact is a lot of adults read YA, and a lot of teens read adults. So every reader is different. And I've tried to be really vocal on my social media channels and say to people like, "Look, this is not YA." Okay?
And that's not because I'm saying, "If you're fifteen you shouldn't read this." Because there are some fifteen-year-olds who this book will resonate for them. I was reading Stephen King when I was nine, ten, you know? And it depends on what kind of reader you are. And there will be thirty-five-year-olds who are like, "Oh my God, I don't want any part of this book."
So I think the first thing is the category of reader. And then there's also a question of, I think YA there's a quality of the finite in the stories we tell. We are trying to get our characters through a heist, through the prom, through a revolution. And then there's a sense that from then on out you get to imagine what their lives will be. Will they grow up? Will they have kids, will they prosper?
And fan-fiction takes over. And I think that with adults there's different questions that are raised for the protagonists in terms of what survival looks like. It's not about surviving through a given thing. It's about what survival looks like day-to-day for the rest of your life.
Sarah Enni: I often tell people that I am drawn to YA, and like writing YA, because there is an inherent optimism to it. You know, when your main character is especially a young person who can't even vote yet then there's some obvious stakes in you wanting them to survive, right? We protect the young. We feel there's inherent value in the fact that they have the rest of their life to live. And what I felt was reflected in Ninth House, was this is not an optimistic world. It's a realistic world.
Leigh Bardugo: I think there's a lot of hope in the book, but it's a very angry kind of hope. Somebody asked me the other day, "How do you want people to feel when they're finished with Ninth House?" And I said, "I want them to feel they're ready to burn shit down." I want them to feel powerful enough and tough enough that they can do that. It's a story about survival and what it takes to be a survivor. And Alex is an anti-hero. I guess she's probably closer to Kaz than any of my other characters. She is willing to do whatever it takes to make a life for herself. And as she moves through the story, she begins to understand what her moral compass is and who she wants to protect, and what she actually believes in.
Initially she begins just wanting some peace. She wants a very bougie, nice life where she can drink tea, and have a nice view from her window. She wants safety. And then as she moves through this story she begins to reject the things that she thought she needed to build a life for herself. And she begins to embrace the things in herself that actually make her a really brilliant detective. It's not an optimistic world. It's an ugly, crazy, violent world because that's what we live in. To be a woman in this world means to constantly be at war.
Sarah Enni: It sounds bad to say it's not an optimistic feeling world, but what I mean by that is that it's very honest. Especially when you are talking about Yale. And it's so clear-eyed in these halls of power, young people not understanding all that they have been equipped with by virtue of their birth.
Leigh Bardugo: Yale was my Hogwarts. I loved it. I loved it. I loved the people in my life who I encountered there and who are still with me. I loved the experience of living in these beautiful buildings and going to class. There's this one classroom in Liz Lee Chintenhon Hall with this incredible stained glass window, I think it's a Tiffany window. As a kid who came from the San Fernando Valley where nothing lasts for long, it's all strip malls, to be in this place of beauty, of beautiful, strange things. As if they can afford the strange. There is a secret sculpture gallery. Okay? Who can afford a secret sculpture gallery? They can!
Sarah Enni: It's like hidden bookcases are only in certain houses, right?
Leigh Bardugo: Yes. Because you can afford it. You know, I need to make the most of all my square footage. You're like, "I can, in fact, have a secret den over here." You know, a lair is expensive to equip. So, for me, it really was this place of tremendous magic, but it also came at cost. And to me the best fantasies are honest about the cost of magic and power.
And even when I was writing Six of Crows, when I envisioned Six of Crows, I thought, "Oh this is gonna be a fun heist. It's gonna be fun and magical." But the truth is if you want to write a story about thugs and thieves, then you have to be honest about what forces created those thugs and thieves. And Ketterdam became this embodiment of what it means to make profit holy and to put it ahead of truly anything else. What is the human cost for that? And it's different for every character in those books.
And I think it's different for every character in Ninth House, their interaction with magic. Ninth House is told from two POV's, from Alex's and from Darlington, her mentor. And I'm both of these people. I am Alex who is just fucking trying to get by and who is a character who is just wrong in so many ways. She's come from a background that has not equipped her for this place of magic and privilege. But I'm also Darlington. I'm a snob who loves puzzles, and words, and literature, and who has been waiting for her damn letter to Hogwarts her whole life. No wardrobe is safe because I will crawl into it looking to see if I can get through the back to Narnia.
And I'm both of these characters. And I hope for a lot of readers, they will find themselves in those stories. They'll find themselves in Dawes who is the grad student who is perpetually working on her dissertation. And maybe even in Turner who is shocked and baffled. He's kind of our cop, our detective, who we recognize from other stories, but who has suddenly come up against this world that he just doesn't want to believe exists. So for me, the way each character interacts with the way magic functions in this world is what's most interesting to explore.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I love that. Is the treatment of sexual trauma... In the Ninth House, you are exploring that really explicitly. I mean, what was it like writing that? How did you think about what you wanted to explore?
Leigh Bardugo: For me, you know, I'm a survivor of sexual assault. I was assaulted when I was young by the father of one of my friends, and I was also assaulted again in college. And that's not uncommon. Because if you have not processed trauma or dealt with trauma, you frequently become a victim again. And for me, when I write trauma, the most essential thing for me is that it's just not misery tourism.
I wanted to explore trauma through the lens of someone enduring it, surviving it, and then conquering it. And I don't think that's something that happens in a few pages, or that happens because you make just the right friends. It's something that has to be explored day-by-day for the rest of your life. And Alex is someone who has been cut off from friendship. She has been cut off from the things that give us strength.
And at Yale she begins to discover them. And through her involvement with the Ninth House, she begins to question what has happened to her and to call people to account. Not just men, but women as well. And there is a, what I can only describe as, a prolonged revenge fantasy scene that I swear felt like it was written in a fever dream.
I didn't expect this book to be cathartic for me in the way that it was, but when I say it's an angry book, I mean it. This is something that we are now beginning to talk about. And it is a commonality that we experience, not just for women, it's for all of us who are experiencing this culture. And I just wanted to deal with this honestly and also to give people hope at the end. I never want to write something that's bleak for the sake of being bleak
Sarah Enni: Again, I'm gonna endeavor to ask this with no spoilers. But speaking of hope at the end, at a certain point in the book, a certain character hadn't been there for a while and I was like, "What's gonna happen?" I didn't know there was a planned sequel so I was getting very distressed. But now that I know there is more, was that always planned?
Leigh Bardugo: Yes.
Sarah Enni: Okay, you knew how it was gonna break down.
Leigh Bardugo: Yes. There are three main mysteries that operate through Ninth House. There is the murder that is propelling the present day narrative. There's the question of what happened to Darlington, and there's a question of what happened to Alex and who Alex is. Because she is not the character we meet.
We meet a girl who, the truth of who she is and what she can do, is very different from the person she's trying to present at the beginning of the story. So those are the three driving mysteries and it is structurally very complex. And so I had to know where I was going from the start.
Sarah Enni: Did you feel your audience was gonna be more patient because you're writing an adult book?
Leigh Bardugo: I don't know. I mean, I guess I'll know when the book comes out. I think for me, I hoped that the murder mystery would be enough to keep them with me. But you just don't know. And my impression is, from early reviews, there are some people who are like, "I didn't know what was happening in the first hundred pages." And I'm like, "I feel you." You know? "There's a lot being thrown at you."
But there are other people who are in from the start because they're along for the ride. And I think it just depends, again, on what kind of reader you are. I can only write the story the way I want to write it, and try to make it as clear and as rich as I can. And yes, I do think I felt I could write a more dense world. This is a different kind of magic system and I could write heavier worldbuilding. And I could digress.
I'm the kind of reader who just loves digressions. I don't know if you remember in The Princess Bride (by William Goldman, screenwriter of such movies as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and All the President’s Men), so much of that story in the book is about digression and about like, "Let me tell you the history of the five most beautiful women in the world." And even as a kid, that for me was the most fun. Those were my favorite parts of the book. And I wanted to build this world where you really couldn't distinguish between the real and the imagined. I think people would be shocked to know how much is real in Ninth House.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, I mean I love that!
Leigh Bardugo: Good! [Laughs].
Sarah Enni: Speaking of that, I'm interested in that element, because this is not in your imagined world. This is in the real world. Did you feel a hindrance at any time? Was that really hard? Or was it really fun right from the jump?
Leigh Bardugo: It was really fun because New Haven is so bizarre. This town is so fascinating. And when I went to do my research at Yale, I had planned it as a Yale research trip. I was gonna tour the Beinecke and I had toured the Peabody setup, and I stayed in my old residential college, and I had envisioned this as me going and taking notes on the architecture. And instead what ended up happening was this lovely guide, Barbara Lamb, ended up really opening my eyes to New Haven. And I'm embarrassed at how little I knew about the city that I spent four years in, but fell in love with this place. And that's why Darlington has the story he has.
I originally had imagined him as a kind of scion of an East Coast family. And what I realized really quickly was that New Haven had this incredible history, their relationship to manufacturing, their relationship to race, that I wanted to play out differently. And that I could explore much more fully if Darlington was from a family that had built, and lost, their fortune. As is the way of New Haven in this city.
It's frustrating because I had one research trip there, and then there were things that you have to contend with in terms of just mapping a place, that you don't think of otherwise. There's a level of convenience to building your own world where you can really make it easier for the audience to navigate, than a real city that they've never been to. I say Old Campus, most people have no idea what that is.
They just envision maybe some old buildings. Old Campus has a very specific structure that actually impacts the way the characters interact with it. So there were certain things that were a challenge. But it was also this tremendous joy because there are all of these secrets, and stories, in that book that are real.
One of my favorite examples is that the New Haven Green is in fact built over the city's first cemetery, and that they transported many bodies from there. But there are still thousands of corpses beneath the New Haven Green. And that in fact, a skeleton emerged into the roots of a tree after this big hurricane. And so this is what New Haven is like. And I would learn something, like you learn about the old tomb of Saint Elmo, one of these societies that is now called Rosenfeld Hall. And it kind of operates as an office space for the campus.
So I start researching this tomb. And who knows if it's real or not, but supposedly it has seven subterranean layers that are full of taxidermized zoo animals. So every time you think you've discovered one thing, you've actually discovered eight things.
Sarah Enni: Wow!
Leigh Bardugo: Yes! That were apparently acquired by J.P. Morgan because why not? There are so many incredible true stories. And there's this restaurant, Yorkside. Every business that I knew, every locally owned business, has basically closed because Yale raised their rents. And so there are many chain stores now. One of the exceptions is Yorkside. And no one knows why. So I thought, "I'm gonna give a magical reason why this place still exists." And so for me, there was something very joyful in blurring that line between the real and the imagined.
Sarah Enni: That's some of my favorite magic writing. It’s like you can't believe what's real. As a reader, for me, it makes me just want to watch every documentary about Yale or do my own reading.
Leigh Bardugo: My dream is that I'll get to lead a walking tour around New Haven. Or that people will go there, I know that that's sort of far-fetched, but that people would go and look... Because every single structure in Ninth House is real except for Black Elm the house Darlington grew up in and lives in. And that is actually a mush of a number of existing buildings.
But every other building in that story, and there's a lot of architecture in the book, they're real places that you can go see. They may not let you in, but you can go see them. You actually can go into Beinecke where Orelian performs one of their rituals. And you can stand there and see the glowing Amber of these panels. And you can go and look at this giant mausoleum that's Book and Snake, or the exterior of Manuscript which was the society that Jody Foster and Anderson Cooper were in.
And there is in fact a circle in the stones, that if you stand one way you don't see it. But you move the other way, and the sunlight hits it, and there's a secret circle in those stones. I love that! I want people to feel there's magic everywhere and that if you just knew the right people, or the right combination, or the right magic words, it would reveal itself to you.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, I love that too. Okay. I'm not gonna keep you here all day, so we gotta wrap up. Although I will say you should definitely at some point in some edition, put a Ninth House walking tour map in the back.
Leigh Bardugo: I would love to do that! We do have a map in the final. And it is the map of New Haven, and most of the structures in the story are marked. So you could, in theory, do your own [pauses] maybe I'll just go and move there and I'll live and be like, "If you come and you bring me a gift of cake, then I will give you a New Haven walking tour."
Sarah Enni: Just make your own podcast recording where you walk around. And then people can... it's like the museum...
Leigh Bardugo: Yes! I love an audio guide. I have to say too, there was so much walking involved in researching this book. And I was using my cane. And what I learned was everybody opens a door for the woman with the cane. I got access to so many places I was not supposed to be admitted to, because no one wants to be that guy. When you're like, "Hold the door! Won't you hold the door for this little lady with her cane?"
Sarah Enni: Secretly, Leigh is now in all eight secret societies.
Leigh Bardugo: They don't even know.
Sarah Enni: [Laughs] Just add your name to a ledger somewhere.d Oh my gosh. You've been so generous with your time. Thank you so much.
Leigh Bardugo: My pleasure.
Sarah Enni: As you know, we wrap up with advice. We've gotten the chance to talk a couple times. So I'm just curious if there's maybe anything more recently that you have come across that has aided your writing, or that you've been thinking about in particular with your writing lately, that you want to share.
Leigh Bardugo: First I would say visit Robyn LaFever's Instagram, (and listen to her First Draft interview here) or sign up for Susan Dennard's newsletter (Misfits and Dreamers) (and listen to her First Draft interview here) because they generate information on craft so frequently. And they always have interesting, great stuff that I'm like, "Oh, I'm gonna try that." So I guess what I would say is that every book is different. I thought I really knew my process and I had it down for every book, and Ninth House kind of proved me wrong. It was a very different book for me to write. And it meant writing very slowly and writing deeply. And doing multiple iterations in a way that I hadn't done before. I used to fast draft. I would just charge straight through. So I think you respect your process, you build your process, but then you also have to have the flexibility to say that a book may ask something different of you.
Sarah Enni: Did you find it freeing to write this as an adult story?
Leigh Bardugo: I found it fairly terrifying. I think anytime you do something new there's a tremendous sense of risk attached, and people want you to stay the same. And I don't mean just readers, and maybe not even readers, readers maybe want you to branch out. I think though that when you’ve found something that is successful, or working for you, there's a real sense of… you should just keep doing that thing. And I was very lucky because my agent, and then this new editor who took this tremendous risk and said, "No, do this. Take the time to do this. And then we're gonna try to make it work." And then there were authors like Kelly Link, and Lev Grossman and Joe Hill, and Stephen King! Thanks Stephen King! People loved her right off.
And Charlene Harris. I don't want to miss Charlene. But people show a great deal of contempt for YA authors and YA readers. And I wish that that had changed. And I don't think it really has. I think we still see this same lack of understanding of the breadth of what is available under the YA banner. So I feel very grateful that people were able to, and willing to, embrace this story without regard for [sighs] the stigma that comes along with YA. I love YA. And I will always write it. And I will always defend it. But it felt honestly in writing Ninth House like I was really running off of a cliff, and my little feet were peddling in the air, and I was just hoping to keep... suddenly sprout wings.
Sarah Enni: Oh, that's so interesting. And also Stephen King, to his credit, has always been such a great champion for... he'll shout about good works wherever he finds them.
Leigh Bardugo: Bless him.
Sarah Enni: A very early adopter of J. K. Rowling, which worked out great for him.
Leigh Bardugo: I mean, I can honestly tell you, when we got that email with his blurb in it… I was in a hotel in Boston on tour, and I made a sound that I can only describe as a strangled bleat. It felt like part of my body had shut down. I literally, I just couldn't function. So yeah, it was not cute.
Sarah Enni: A bleat!
Leigh Bardugo: A bleat.
Sarah Enni: We should all be so lucky to discover our secret bleats. Well, on that note, thank you again so much Leigh. I should just be outright and say I loved Ninth House so much and I'm so excited for it.
Leigh Bardugo: Thank you so much. Thank you for reading it and thanks for having me back.
Sarah Enni: Thank you so much to Leigh. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @LBardugo and follow me on both @SarahEnni (Instagram and Twitter) and the show @FirstDraftPod (Instagram and Twitter). For links to everything Leigh and I talked about in this episode, check out the show notes which are at FirstDraftPod.com. I make show notes for every episode. This one is super fun. It just is links to all the movies, TV shows, other books, other writers. And other, you know, maybe interesting facts about Yale and some of its secret society members that Leigh brought up in this episode. So check that out at FirstDraftPod.com.
Do you have any writing or creativity questions that you would like me and a guest to answer in an upcoming episode? I hope you do. I'd love to hear where you're at in your creative process and if there's anything that myself and a fellow writer might be able to help you with. Leave those questions at the voicemail box I set up for First Draft that's at 818-533-1998. One more time, 818-533-1998.
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I'm gonna read you one of the recent five star reviews that was left for the podcast. This review was left by Brynn Avery. Brynn says, "Inspiring podcast for writers. I just found this podcast and I am now bingeing all the amazing episodes. I love hearing from authors like Susan Dennard, Leigh Bardugo, Marie Lu, and so many others. Great for people who are in the query trenches, just getting started writing, or want a little inspiration from writers who have found success." Sarah moderates with ease and I love her insight on writing, feminism, and really all the things. Highly recommend."
Oh my goodness, Brynn, that is an incredibly sweet review. Thank you so much for your kind words and for taking the minute out of your day to leave that review. That means a ton. Reviews like that kind of get the algorithm working in our favor. It puts First Draft in the recommended feed for other book and writing podcasts, and exposes us to people that might not have heard of the podcast before. So that kind of organic growth is really huge for the show, and I really appreciate people like Brynn taking the time to give some shouts.
Hayley Hershman produced 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 dreamers of emails for listening.
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