First Draft Episode #258: Ally Carter
JUNE 30, 2020
LISTEN TO THE EPISODE
Ally Carter, New York Times bestselling author of the Gallagher Girls series, the Heist Society series, the Embassy Row series, Not If I Save You First, Dear Ally: How Do You Write a Book?, and a new middle grade series that kicks off with Winterborne Home for Vengeance and Valor.
Sarah Enni: Today's episode is brought to you by A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor, Hank Green's new book out July 7th in hardcover, ebook, and audio books, wherever books are sold. A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor is the sequel and conclusion to Green's debut novel the New York Times bestselling An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, which tells the story of a young woman thrown into fame during a global crisis of contagious dreams and mysterious robots.
A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor is a bold and brilliant conclusion that asks whether anyone has the right to change the world forever. Library Journals starred review said, "Throughout this adventurous, witty and compelling novel, Green delivers sharp social commentary on the power of social media and both the benefits and horrendous consequences that follow when we give too much of ourselves to technology." A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor is out July 7th in all formats wherever books are sold, and you can get more information about the books and Hank himself at HankGreen.com.
Sarah Enni: Welcome to First Draft with me, Sarah Enni. This week, I'm talking to Ally Carter, New York Times bestselling author of the Gallagher Girls series, the Heist Society series, the Embassy Row series, Not If I Save You First, Dear Ally: How Do You Write a Book? And a new middle-grade series that's kicking off with Winterbourne Home For Vengeance and Valor.
Ally and I really got into the weeds about her strategic approach to her career, which I think makes this one of the maybe most useful, practically useful, First Draft episodes maybe ever. I loved what Ally had to say about first writing every book as a screenplay, about making the leap from one series to another, having readers cool out of her books and how the landscape of middle-grade and YA has changed over the course of her career. Everything Ally and I talk about in today's episode can be found in the show notes.
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Okay, now please sit back, relax and enjoy my conversation with Ally Carter.
Sarah Enni: So hi Ally, how are you?
Ally Carter: I'm doing great. Thank you so much for having me, Sarah.
Sarah Enni: I'm so excited. I was hoping to be able to meet you in person, but as soon as everyone was housebound, I was like, "Let's just do it anyway."
Ally Carter: I think that's great.
Sarah Enni: Well, I am so excited to chat. I like to start my conversations way back at the very beginning, which is where were you born and raised?
Ally Carter: I was actually born in Oklahoma and raised on a small farm in Oklahoma about an hour outside of Tulsa. And so I grew up very, you know, kind of picture book, ideal. You know, lots of cows, lots of chickens, lots of garden patches. That whole thing, that was sort of my childhood. And lots of opportunities for a person to use their imagination to entertain themselves.
Sarah Enni: How was reading and writing a part of your life then?
Ally Carter: You know, my mom was an English teacher, English, speech, and creative writing, which I always like to joke that creative writing is the only class of hers I never took. Because, of course, I went to a really small school. So when you go to a small school, everybody kind of does double duty, and so I had her in class. And books were important in our house, but we didn't really have access to that many because it was a long way to the store. We didn't have, you know, of course there was no Amazon, no eBooks, no anything like that at the time. The public library was very, very small. I think it might've actually been like a room in the jail [laughs].
I know! We never went to the public library and I think that was why. Don't quote me on that. That might have just been, again, my imagination filling in those blanks. So yeah, I got a lot of stuff from the school library. And I was really fortunate, there's a woman named Joan Bennett who was my elementary school librarian. And when I left elementary school and went to the middle school, she actually got transferred up to the high school. So I got to have her both all for my elementary school experience and all for my high school experience. And she is a phenomenal woman and a wonderful, wonderful friend and mentor. And so she made reading very fun. And she is definitely a part of how I got here.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, that's huge. And to have someone that knows your taste level and kind of developing it, that's really great. I read an interview with you where you talked about going to Walden Books and getting a screenwriting book.
Ally Carter: Yes, I did. Looking around here, I probably have that... actually, I think I loaned that book to somebody. At the time, even though books were important in my childhood and I did some reading, I was kind of a reluctant reader. When I found a story that I loved I read it eighteen times, but I put down probably more books than I finished. And so I thought that there was something wrong with me because of that. But I always loved story, and I loved imagination, and I loved movies. And so I thought, "Well, I can be a screenwriter."
And again, my mom being a teacher was very supportive of that like, "Any kind of writing you want to do, we'll support it." And at the time, there was a little mall that you didn't have to go into the big city of Tulsa to get to, you could just go right on the outskirts of the city. So that was where we felt comfortable going. And they had a little Walden Books in there. And so we went in and the only screenwriting book they had was Screenplay by Syd Field, which is, I think if you talk to most screenwriters that's, chances are pretty good, that was their first screenplay book.
Sarah Enni: I know, I'm like, "I have it here somewhere." It's on my shelf in here.
Ally Carter: Exactly. And I'll never forget sitting down and reading. And he talks about plot points. And plot point number one is where it hooks into the action and spins the story in the opposite direction. And that visual of the hook and the spin, I still go back to almost every day. Like, "This story needs, you know, it needs to change. It needs to hook. It needs to spin." And I learned that a screenplay page is about the same as a minute of screen time and all of those basic things that, even though I ended up not becoming a professional screenwriter...yet, I still use those storytelling things almost on a daily basis.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I mean, it was really interesting to me to hear that that was kind of the first craft book that you picked up. Because I do think, and we'll kind of get through your books in a second, but there's so many kind of visual elements. I feel like I can see the influence of how scripts are, the propulsive element of scripts, is something that you seem to really take to with your writing.
Ally Carter: Thank you. I do. Cause I can't have three or four pages where nothing happens where it's the author telling us the backstory, or telling us where the characters are emotionally, or something. That just bores the fire out of me. And so I feel like I have to show and not tell. And I don't know if that makes my book superior or inferior or what, that's just the way I'm wired. And to this day, the first draft of everything that I do, I do in screenplay software.
And so I actually write all my first drafts and final draft. Because my books are pretty action packed and they're also very plot heavy. And so I don't want to spend a lot of time writing stuff, like a subplot, that I might end up cutting. So it's basically just an outline, but with dialogue, is basically all a screenplay kind of is. And so that works out nicely for me.
Sarah Enni: That's so funny. So more or less your first drafts are screenplays.
Ally Carter: They really are. Yeah. Everything takes place in a scene. Everything takes place with dialogue. I was reading a book last night that I'm probably not gonna finish cause it's not very good. Because I notice that you'll have like seven pages of absolutely no dialogue because we're not in a place, we're just kind of floating out in the ether and trying to take in information. And I would rather see that than be told that. I always like to joke and say that I write unrealistic realistic fiction. So everything that I write could technically happen, it's not beyond the laws of physics or what have you, but it's probably not going to happen.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I love that. And you reference the Mission movies and everything like that. It's like, "That's how we love them." It's reality taken to its extreme.
Ally Carter: It really, really is. Yeah.
Sarah Enni: Well I love that story about finding the screenwriting, and also what it made me think of, was that I think you were a teenager when you had that conviction that you wanted to go into the world and be a writer.
Ally Carter: Yes, I was. Actually the idea of being a writer came to me, I think I was in middle school and I read The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton. And so she, of course is from Tulsa. The book is set in Tulsa. Tulsa was the biggest big city that we had. And so when I found out that she was from Tulsa and that she was a sixteen-year-old girl when she published that book, I knew that that was something that was possible for someone like me.
And so that became kind of the dream that, because I was a reluctant reader, it was a struggle for me. And then I thought, "Okay, I can do the screenplay thing." Not knowing that the screenwriter gig is significantly harder.
Sarah Enni: So much harder!
Ally Carter: So much harder, so much harder to break in. You basically have to move to LA. I can write books from the moon if I want to. But fifteen-year-old girl, you don't know any better than that. And it seemed that a hundred page screenplay seemed accomplishable to me. That seemed like a chunk that I could bite off. And so, I'm really grateful to it in that way because that, as you know, it's important to start writing, but it's also important to actually get to the end of some things.
That's one of the things you hear from lots and lots and lots of teen writers is they've got, you know, 40 things that they have 15 pages of and it's important to get to the end. So screenplays were an excellent way for me to do that. And like you said, I started doing that really in high school. I finished my first screenplay, I think, in college. And then I continued working on those just nights and weekends for fun in college and in graduate school. And then, after graduate school, I got my first full time job and sat down to write a new screenplay and wanted to do like a character bios, kind of evolve the characters. And I just kinda kept going. And that turned into my first novel. Not one that's ever been published, but that was the first novel I ever finished.
Sarah Enni: Oh, okay. And I love this because I think you went to undergrad and graduate school for agricultural economics. Is that right?
Ally Carter: Yes.
Sarah Enni: That's amazing. I love that.
Ally Carter: I don't know this for a fact, but I would say I'm probably the only YA author working today who can graph the supply and demand of fertilizer. It's, it's cool. It's a good skill set. No, all joking aside, I do use my degrees more than people would imagine. Because ultimately when you're a writer, you're a small business owner and ultimately farms are small businesses. And so when I'm talking about, "Okay, maybe it's time to incorporate, maybe it's time to whatever." It's very, very helpful to know those things.
Sarah Enni: Well, even the concept of a supply chain and thinking about, listen, I'm in the middle of doing that series, like I said, thinking about the publishing world as a business. So I'm very much in that head space. And I think it behooves everyone to sort of step back from just the craft and the beauty of what we're doing and really think about how do we fit in the larger infrastructure?
Ally Carter: Absolutely does. And, you know, I've never really been super involved in writing romance, but I was for a long time a member of RWA (Romance Writers of America). And so I would go to the RWA annual conventions every two or three years for a long time. And it was so fascinating to watch the self-publishing thing come along. And to watch authors have the opportunity to become their own publisher. And to see the writers and let's face it, women, who thrived under that and the women who sunk under that. And for the most part, it was the ones who had business backgrounds.
It was, "Oh yeah, I have an MBA from Stanford. Of course, I now make $3 million a year self-publishing." Because they understood the supply chain. They understood not really releasing something until you had something else to release right on the heels of that, because they know that people binge read and you want to be able to feed that demand. And the demand will die if you're not able to feed it. And so, a person should never think about this as, "Oh, I'm just an artist." You know, that's fine, if you do want to do that, but don't expect to pay the bills. Expect to need a day job, expect to need a sugar daddy or a sugar mama, expect something because it's a very hard, hard business. And I think the margins are gonna just get tighter after this. I'll be really curious to see what the industry looks like in a year.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think we're all kind of waiting to see. And I do want to get to that at the end here. I want to hear about how you're being creative and living your life in this time. So I'm interested in, that kind of leads us a little bit to Cheating At Solitaire or to the advent of writing novels.
Ally Carter: Yes.
Sarah Enni: I want to kind of just pause and ask about the subject matter, because your first book, Cheating At Solitare, is a book for adults. Were all of the screenplays you were writing, even from college and on, focusing on adults?
Ally Carter: They were. Cause when I was a kid, and especially in college and high school, YA didn't really exist. I mean, it was Judy Blume, it was S.E. Hinton. It was, you know, sort of this classic...
Sarah Enni: R.L. Stein.
Ally Carter: Yes, it was that. But to walk into a bookstore and have like a teen section is a relatively new thing. And I a hundred percent attribute the success that I've had in this industry, into being in the right place at the right time. Back to the self-publishing people, the people who made serious bank on that are the people who became super big YouTube celebrities or whatever. They were the early adapters. And you've got to be an early adapter and really get in on the ground floor of something to be able to experience the true boom.
And it was a hundred percent sheer dumb luck that I was able to be in on the boom of YA. So I had written that book that started as a screenplay, and I got an agent based on that book. And it was called Burning Greenwood, it was kind of a literary mystery. And it was probably okay, I mean, I got an agent based on it. And she was a new, it was Kristin Nelson (who appeared on the Bonus Episode of Track Changes about Publishing During the Time of COVID) who is now a big, big agent, but at the time she was very small.
So we kind of grew up together. And she said, "You know, I think this is strong. I want it to be a little bit stronger. I'm gonna have you do some rewrites on it. And so I over-wrote it in that rewrite process. I messed it up. And she's like, "I think we need to take a break from this." And so at the time, chic lit was very much a big thing. And one of the screenplays that I had done, I think in graduate school, was a screenplay called Cheating At Solitaire.
And it was kind of a romcom about a self-help author who is famous for being single. And then the paparazzi get pictures of her with a hot, young up-and-coming actor. And everybody thinks, "Oh my gosh, she's got a boyfriend." And it ruins her life, you know, but it doesn't, or course. And so I was telling that to Kristin and she's like, "That's chic lit. What you have done is you have written a screenplay for a chic lit novel. Why don't you turn that into a book? I'll sell it."
She's like, "I won't have any trouble selling that. And then you'll get a little bit of money. You'll have a credit under your name. And then we'll go back to your real book. We'll go back to this very serious literary murder book that you wrote." And so that's what I did.
So that was, to this day, why I write everything as a screenplay first was because that book I wrote from a screenplay and it was super easy. I still had my day job at the time and I could come home, and like on the weekends, I'd write 40 or 50 pages a day. Because it was all there. And I was again, sheer dumb luck. You know, I was just a big dumb kid. And I was like, "This is cool. And do, do, do, do." You know?
And I had no internal editor, I had no filter. I was basically writing fan fiction for my own stuff. And it sold, and it didn't sell huge numbers, but it was a two book deal. And then the chic lit market crashed. And so it could not have come out at a worst time. But I had my agent, I had a deal under my belt, and Kristin had just done another YA deal for another one of her authors. And so it was a Wednesday and she sent, you may not want any of this detail. I don't know.
Sarah Enni: No, I do.
Ally Carter: Feel free to edit it out. It was a Wednesday, and I was at my day job. And she sent an email and said, "I think, teen stuff is getting ready to be big." And this was pre-Twilight. This was a while ago. She was very much an oracle on this. She was like, "I think this is getting ready to be a thing, anybody out there who wants to write YA let me know."
So I had just a bunch of busy work at the office that day. And I remember standing at the copy machine, just kind of waiting for my copies to get done and my mind is going and going and going. And I went back to my desk and I wrote down, I don't know, six to 10 ideas and sent it to her. And she wrote me back and she said, "These are all terrible." [Laughs] I realize now in hindsight, they were the kinds of books that were being published when I was a teenager. It was a lot of like, "Oh, my sister died. And now I have to process the grief." And they were all kinds of after-school special type books.
And she's like, "You need to think bigger. You need to think higher concept." So I went home that night and I popped a big bowl of popcorn. When I tell this story, I always include the popcorn, I don't know why. I popped a big bowl of popcorn. And I'm sitting in front of the TV with my laptop open. I'm just sort of making a list of high concept things. "Okay, you've got athletes, you've got movie stars, you've got pop stars, you've got criminals, you've got, you know, whatever."
And I put spies on the list and then I immediately discounted it, because Spy Kids was a relatively recent movie. And I was like, "I don't want to write that. That's already been done." So I immediately moved on to other things. And then I was watching Alias, which of course was a spy show. And I misunderstood what was happening in the episode cause I was kind of just half watching. And it was an episode called The Orphan and the main character had found out she had had a half sister who grew up in Argentina in an orphanage.
And I misunderstood what was happening and I thought she was growing up in a spy school. And I turned up the volume and I was like, "Oh my gosh, this is so cool. They're doing a spy school!" And then they weren't doing a spy school and I got so mad. I was like, "Why aren't they doing spy school. Spy school would be amazing." And then I thought, "Wait a second. I need a high concept YA idea, why don't I do one set at a spy school?" So that's where Gallagher Girls came from. So that was a very long winded story. I don't even remember what the initial question was and I'm sorry.
Sarah Enni: No, I love that. That was gonna be, was how we kind of went from writing adult to... I mean, what I really am drawn to and what I really like about being able to share your story with people is that, I say this in a complimentary way, you're very strategic, right? You're very able to then identify what you wanted to do. You're excited about it, but it also makes sense for you. And you're thinking about a career, as opposed to, like you said, just kind of wanting to go where the wind takes you and keeping your day job.
Ally Carter: And there's something to be said for that, you know? I now wish I could get back to that. Like I think I've gone too strategic and too business minded. I don't know if big dumb kid Ally sitting on that couch, I think it would have been very easy for me to have over-thought my way out of the biggest thing I'll ever do in my career. And so I do think that there is something to be said for writing that first idea that you get, and the thing that you think like, "This would be cool! This would be fun! I want to play in this sandbox." I kind of miss that a little bit because it is easy to overthink and to lose track.
My writer friends and I we talk a lot about writing from a place of Id, you know, what are the things that you're just hardwired to like, the things that you just have always been drawn to, that you wanted to read when you were a 12 year old? And I don't want to get too far away from that because those are the things that readers then respond to.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Yeah. That's true. That's true. You did a pretty good job of just setting up, but do you mind giving us the pitch for the Gallagher Girls Series?
Ally Carter: So, I always start every project with one question and that is, what's the worst that can happen? And that is my job is to mess my characters lives up in the most interesting way possible. And so I thought, "Okay, if you're a girl who goes to the world's best boarding school for spies, what's the worst thing that can happen to you is a boy." It's pretty much always the boy is the worst thing that could possibly happen.
And at the time, again, I'm coming from a place of adult chick lit. And chick lit, I didn't know it at the time, but it made a lot of sense that we were still in that sort of phase. And maybe we still are, where whatever is big as an adult, you will eventually get the YA wave of it. And so we were, even though adult chic lit was very much crashing or on the verge of crashing at the time, the YA wave was still kind of going strong.
And so I came to that story mostly as a rom-com. And so something that I had just always kind of told myself, or like used jokingly with friends or whatever is I'd say, "Oh, I'd tell you I love you, but then I'd have to kill you." And so that was a saying that I had actually used in my regular life for a very long time. And I don't remember if I had read, I don't think I had read, that day I had looked up a bunch of things, a bunch of YA books that were selling really well. And one of them was The Earth, My Butt, and Other Round Things. And I love the idea of a really long title.
And so I sent it off to Kristin and was like, "Okay, girl goes to a boarding school for spies, falls for a normal boy who can never know the truth about her. And basically hi-jinks ensue. And this is the title, I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You." And that was all I knew when I sent that to Kristen. And Kristen wrote me back immediately, cause she's a workaholic, and said, "This is it! This is the one go! Gimme pages. I need to sell this right now."
And so I did, I sat down and I wrote a 10 page synopsis and 36 sample pages and we sent it off. And it got preempted at auction a week or two later. And so it was very fast and furious from that point. And it sold to a woman named Donna Bray, who at the time was with Disney Hyperion, and Donna is a genius and a visionary. And she saw the change coming, she saw the adult chic lit crash coming.
She knew that the YA crash would be behind it. This was all happening in, I believe April of 2005, and she said, "This has to be on shelves by next March." And I had 36 pages and a full time day job. So I set about the business of trying to write this entire book cause it had to go to copy editing in like October. And so it was very fast and furious. And I wasn't able, even though we sold two books, I knew that I wanted to have enough gas in the tank to do a series if it worked.
And so I knew I had to have some sort of big unanswered questions by the end of it. So that's why I gave my heroine a missing father who had also been a spy who disappeared on a mission, never came home. It's the dominant question of her life is, "What happened to my dad?" And I set about writing that first book having absolutely no clue about any of that. Because I had no time to sit down and create an elaborate backstory, and these are the twists that are coming, and this is what's gonna happen in book six. I had no idea! None whatsoever. I just wrote. And again, sheer dumb luck. Cause I think if I had sat down and planned everything out, I probably would have come up with something that was significantly less good or it didn't work as well.
Sarah Enni: Right. When you're forced to do something so quickly. Then you're just kind of like tapping into whatever is. There's something to be said for passing by the frontal cortex. Right? And just writing.
Ally Carter: There really, really is. Sarah Rees Brennan, (author of Unspoken, The Demon’s Lexicon, and more) who I adore, talks a lot about the clay pot experiment. They did an experiment with two groups of kids, people who were studying pottery. And one they said, "Your job is to take 12 hours and make the most perfect pot you possibly can." And the other group they said, "Your job is to make as many pots as you possibly can." And the people whose job it was to just stop thinking and just make pots, they made better pots than the people who their job was to make a perfect one. And so I think about that all the time, like you said, just bypass that brain and go and see what comes out.
Sarah Enni: I like that. Well, and I want to ask about that experience. It sounds like a wild summer!
Ally Carter: It was very wild.
Sarah Enni: And not only are you writing what could potentially be the first of a series, but you're also doing it in this new voice, the young adult voice. How was that? Did you kind of take right to it? Or were there any stumbling blocks?
Ally Carter: It took me a little while. I think one of the keys was I switched to first person, my adult stuff had been in third person limited. And first person just felt more YA to me. And so, it felt different enough and younger enough. And I started reading a lot of YA. I started reading Gordon Korman (author of Schooled, Ungifted, Swindle, and more) and Meg Cabot (author of The Princess Diaries, Size 12 is Not Fat, Shadowland, and more) and Carolyn Mackler and all these great people.
And Meg Cabot actually was a big influence because in The Princess Diaries books, she does something that I still to this day love and really, really admire. Which is that I realized in reading those books that not everything had to look like a book, like there would be pages of narrative. And then because it's technically a diary, she'd have a page that was just like homework assignments or her passing notes with her friend.
And I was like, "Okay." So this is technically a spy report. This is a covert operations report. I can have like transcripts from the girls talking over their comms units. One of the hard things that I had to deal with was the passage of time. Cause like I said, I don't do filler well. And so I was like "I've got all this really interesting stuff that's happening in the beginning of the semester and all this really interesting stuff that's happening at the end of the school year. And there's a lot of treading water in the middle."
And so my editor, number one, gave me the best advice. She said, "Well, just make it take place over a semester. If you've got filler in there, just shorten that time frame." So that became just a semester story. And I still was like, "Okay, how do I get from September to November?" Like, "How do I skip over the entire month of October?"
And then I realized from Meg Cabot that I could just have like the pros and cons of things that happened that October. And then just like a funny little list that just acknowledges that October happened. And here's some information and layered in there are a joke or two, and then we just skip right to the interesting stuff. So that was very, very helpful.
Sarah Enni: I love that. And also, I'm prone to writing text message exchanges or emails. That's something that feels very accurate to teens, right? Especially now who are used to cobbling together, I mean, I think we all now are the people who are like, "Was that in an email? Or an Instagram DM? Or a text?" That's what we're all doing.
Ally Carter: It is. It very much is. So I think that it makes it feel fresh. It makes it feel real, and very, very relatable to actual teen readers.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. And we're gonna move forward in your career. I promise, but this is a very interesting moment for you. The book comes out and I think it's pretty, pretty immediately received really well. And obviously you did get the chance to go on and make a series out of it, but I'm just interested in what that time was like for you. You were still working a full time job. You weren't sure if this was gonna work out and then it kind of becomes this big thing. What was that time like?
Ally Carter: So it sold, it was preempted at auction, and Donna, of course, fast tracked it. She also made it the lead title. And so again, big dumb kid author, I have no idea what that really means. But Kristin was like, "No, no, this is good. You want this." And so I hammer out the book, and like you said, the book, it doesn't get any starred reviews. It does not hit the New York Times list. I come out and I'm like, "Oh, okay, well I, you know...." And all these good things were happening, but they were happening very much under the surface. And so it was getting in the hands of gatekeepers. It had really amazing support at Barnes and Noble.
So Barnes and Noble basically gave it table placement for its whole first year. So I remember going to BookExpo America the next year. And the head of sales was kind of walking me around and he's like, "Well, you know, your book's been on the Times list." And I'm like, "No, it hasn't." And he's like, "Oh, it's been on the Times list." I'm like, "Trust me. I would remember this! This is not something that I would forget." And he's like, "Really?" I guess every week it was selling right under the threshold, you know? If it took 3000 copies to hit the Times list that week, my book was selling like 2,800 copies literally every week. And so it was just kind of slowly, slowly building.
And meanwhile, this is probably interesting for a writing podcast, I'm trying to write the sequel, having not planned anything. And so Donna and I talked very early on, "What do we want the sequel to be?" And so there's a throwaway line in book one. It's just a joke, it is purely just a joke where it talks about one of the girls who's kind of like the head gossip at the school. They say that she's been swearing for years, that there's a top secret boys school in Maine.
And so Donna is like, "What if....?" And I'm like, "Wait, hold on. I've got an idea. And then we're both at the same time, like boy's school in Maine!" So we're like, "Okay, we're going there. We're doing something with the boy's school."
And so I sit down and start writing and I do that thing that you shouldn't do, which is I start overthinking it and I started with a premise, but not a plot. And this is hugely, hugely, hugely important and different. So I knew the boys were gonna come to the girl's school. And then what? Like, "You've got the scene where the boys show up at the girl's school. And the next day they go to class, and then they have dinner. And the next day they go to class again." And it's like, "Okay, this is not a book."
And so I turned in something based on that plot. And Donna was like, "Ah! Why don't we try this again?" And so then I kind of did like the Hogwarts style, like battle of the schools kind of thing. And that just didn't really work. And so I ended up writing three different books basically for Cross My Heart and Hope to Spy.
And those were dark days because again, Love You, Kill You was selling really well. And so every week I'd get the call that, "If you can nail this second book, you've got a career. Like, this is gonna set you up. If you can't nail the second book, then it was good while it lasted." Like everything boils down to this.
Sarah Enni: No pressure.
Ally Carter: No pressure. Like eventually I got to the point where I'd get off the phone and I'd cry. And then I got to the point where I'd get off the phone and I'd throw up and then I'd cry, you know? And my hair was falling out, like the whole thing, like it was bad. And so at the time Jennifer Lynn Barnes and I had just become friends on My Space, which this dates everything here, and Jen's parents live in Tulsa. And my day job was about two hours away from Tulsa. And she had come home, she was in graduate school at the time, and so she'd come home for Christmas break. And she was like, "Just drive down to Tulsa and we'll go to the movies.
And I remember telling her like, "Jen, I can't. None of my clothes fit. I've done nothing but eat for six months." She's like, "I don't care. Wear what you're wearing right now. Just come, get away from this devil book." And so I did. And I came down and we went to see, The Good Shepherd, which was a spy movie that didn't really make a lot of waves, but it had a great cast.
It had Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie and a bunch of people and it was set kind of in 1960's, cold war, Europe kind of stuff. And that was really the heyday of espionage. And so there was a scene where the spy knows that somebody is following him, and he kills him, and he's dumped in the river. And I just like "Click!" And I thought, "It's not cat versus mouse. It's cat versus cat." And that was the book.
I was like, "Now I know." In my brain, the pieces went, click, click, click, click, click, click, click. And I went home and I took a leave of absence from my job. And like, I don't know, a few weeks later I had a book. And it was the book that debuted on the Times list. And it is to this day, most of my reader's favorite book. And it almost killed me.
To this day though, for every book I've ever written, there's been that moment. There's that one linchpin thing. Either the characters don't make sense until I get that, or the plot doesn't make sense until I'm like, "Oh, Uncle Eddie has an identical twin." I'm like, "Oh, then everything in this book makes sense right now." You know, I just have to wait for the linchpin to show up.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. And I'm interested, for you, is that like a visual thing? Cause for me when everything locks into place, it doesn't necessarily mean I know the details, but I feel like I know the beats and then I just have to work out the details.
Ally Carter: Yeah, pretty much that. There's one big piece. It's everything that makes everything make sense. It's almost more like a decoder ring kind of thing, you know? Like, "Ookay." So for example, with my Not if I Save You First book, which is the one set in Alaska. And I couldn't figure out who this character was and like, "Why isn't this funny?" Like, "Nothing about this is funny?" Like, "How do I make this into a rom-com?"
And then I wrote a line where she was telling the guy who has kidnapped her in the wilds of Alaska while the storm of the century rages around them, where she says, "I have Taylor Swift's signature scent, which isn't as good as it sounds because to a bear, Taylor Swift smells delicious."
And then I was like, "Oh! That's who she is. She's the girl who wants to smell like Taylor Swift, but she can't because then a bear would eat her." And from that moment, she made sense. Now there were definitely plot beats and things that it took me awhile to get, but the characters were locked in at that point. I knew I could do it.
Sarah Enni: I love that. Okay. That is so interesting. And all of the behind the scenes stuff, I love it. I want to talk about how Heist Society kind of factors in, because that's a whole new series, but you were still writing Gallagher Girls when Heist Society came about. So kind of lead me to how your career developed to that point. And then how did you manage writing those two at the same time?
Ally Carter: So in a way Heist Society came about, I think, because Cross My Heart was so hard and I didn't know how to be excited about writing again. And then I, again, at this time I still had my day job and I was driving home from a meeting really late one night across the Flint Hills of Kansas, which is big, open, beautiful country. And it's like nothing for 20 miles, no lights. And I'm listening to an audio book and there's a line in the audio book that says, "I was like a cat burglar in my own house." And I just thought, "I'm gonna write a book about a girl named Kat who's a burglar."
And I have always loved heist stories. My dad's favorite movie was always The Sting, so we watched that a lot when I was a kid. The new Oceans 11, the George Clooney Ocean's 11, had just kind of come out. And I was like, "Oh, I can do Veronica Mars meets that. And what if Veronica Mars was Danny Ocean's daughter? I can write that." And so I sat down and Kristen, my agent, was like, "Okay, we can sell this, but just so you know, what they want is Gallagher Girls three." And I'm like, "Okay... yes." Because at that point I was like, "This is kind of fun again."
Now from a career standpoint, I don't know if selling and writing Heist Society then was the most brilliant thing I've ever done or the stupidest thing I've ever done. The truly smart person in that moment doubles down on Gallagher Girls. And they do Gallagher Girls quickly, and they do it well. And then, if and when it's time to branch out and do something new, they do Gallagher Girls The New Class, they do Gallagher Girls The Prequel, they stay in that world. And I was not smart.
So I did not do that. And I don't know if Heist Society and releasing it then, set me up to have a better post Gallagher career. I kind of think it might have, cause there were a lot of people writing at the time who had big, YA series that never really got to make the leap to a second big YA series. And I did. Because I think I was able to take my fans and turn them not into Gallagher fans, but into Ally fans. And there's a difference, I think, in that sort of branding and that mentality. And Heist Society, it also brought a lot of other really good things. Like it had a lot of film interest and a big, big film auction. Had a lot of foreign rights deals, it hit a lot of state reading lists.
And I think kind of solidified my place with a lot of gatekeepers, which was also very, very good. And I just love that series and I love those characters and I could write a hundred Heist Societies. I would write them until I die. if they'd let me.
Sarah Enni: Do you mind just doing the quick pitch for that series?
Ally Carter: Okay. Yeah. It's basically Veronica Mars meets Ocean's 11. So Kat Bishop is the daughter of the world's greatest art thief. And all in the world she wants to do is leave the family business. And so she has conned her way into this very elite boarding school until one day she gets kicked out for something she didn't do. And she's like, "What the heck is happening?" Turns out her dad is in trouble. A very bad mobster type guy has had five priceless paintings stolen and he thinks Kat's dad did it.
And he says, "You basically have two weeks to get my paintings back or else." But you can't return what you didn't steal. So Kat, basically her best friend breaks her out of this boarding school and is like, "Look, we gotta save your dad." And the only way to do that is to track down the real thief and steal the paintings back. So that's Heist Society one, then there were three books in the series so far. So that was a lot of fun. I really, really, really love Heist Society.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. And I, like you, am very drawn to that type of story. And the cover is so great.
Ally Carter: Thank you. When I sold Heist Society and was in the process of writing, I had so many people who were like, "I love heist books. I'm gonna sell one too." And then all of them, in the weeks and years following, I'm like, "How's your heist book?" And they're like, "Oh yeah, I gave that up." Leigh Bardugo (author of Shadow and Bone, Six of Crows, and Ninth House. Llisten to her First Draft interviews here, here, and here,) and Holly Black (author of The Cruel Prince, Tithe: A Modern Fairytale, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, The Spiderwick Chronicles, and more. Listen to her First Draft interview here), and I sit around sometimes like old men on a porch somewhere talking about the good old days and just bemoaning how hard heist books are.
Because I always like to say, "There's the con you run on the mark and there's the con you run on the reader." And the second one's the hard one. That's what makes a heist movie different than like a Mission Impossible movie where they're always stealing something. They're always stealing something in a Mission Impossible movie. And I always thought to myself, "Mission Impossible movies are just heist movies in disguise."
But then I realized, "No, there's a slight, there's that key difference." In that you never are supposed to think that Ethan Hunt didn't pull it off. Whereas you're always supposed to think that Oceans 11 crew didn't pull it off. You are always supposed to think that that SWAT team is getting them. And so it's that reader con and that's the hard part.
Sarah Enni: Just on a very practical level. At this point, you have two series going on, when does the day job go away? How do you focus on two at once?
Ally Carter: It goes away then. So what I did, because I knew that Cross My Heart was so hard and so brutal. And again, at this point, Love You Kill You, is selling, you know, a couple thousand copies every single week. And we had a really... we didn't know that it would, but it felt really likely that book two would hit the list. And so I told myself I was gonna trade my second job for my second series. So that's when I quit. And I gave notice at my job.
And so I was actually at a conference at my day job, the big conference that I actually organized, and when I got the call that I was on the Times list and I was like, "This is awesome. Now I have to go give a presentation to a bunch of dairy farmers, but this is great and I'm gonna go celebrate with the dairy farmers." And at that point I had given my two weeks notice. So I sell my house in Kansas, I buy a house in Tulsa that's a couple of miles away from where my sister lives, and I make the transition to full-time writer.
Sarah Enni: So what was it like to take on two series and all of a sudden be a full time writer, just from a process standpoint, how do you kind of keep your sanity and keep all those balls in the air?
Ally Carter: I had two big whiteboards and one was always a Gallagher whiteboard, and one was always a Heist whiteboard. And for the most part, I don't leapfrog. Like I don't write Gallagher in the morning and Heist in the afternoon or something like that. You know, so even though we sold Heist and Gallagher three, at the same time, they were like, "We need Gallagher three first." So that's what I sat down to write. And I had learned so many things in writing Gallagher two, that luckily I was able to avoid a lot of those mistakes.
So the plot for Gallagher three is one of the girls, her dad's a senator and it opens with him being nominated for vice president. And so they're at the big political convention, and there's a kidnapping attempt where somebody repels out of a helicopter and tries to take her. And Cammie, my heroine, is there and they fight them off and everything. And so the premise of that book and the plot of that book are very, very closely aligned. And so the question is, "Who wants Macy? Why? And how do we stop them?"
And as long as my character has a goal and something standing between them and that goal, I can write it. And I'm sure my friends would be like, "You were miserable writing that." But it felt like the easiest book that I'd ever writen. And so I hammered that one out pretty quickly. And then I started on Heist Society. And so I tried to do for several years there a book every nine months. Again, it would have been great, it would have been far better for my career if I could have done a book every six months.
And that way you could have had Gallagher in the spring, Heist in the fall and from a practical business standpoint, booksellers like to know. If you look at like a Janet Evanovich (author of the One For the Money series) or somebody like that, they know Labor Day weekend, we get her new book. And they plan on it and they budget for it. And so they were able to do that for that time there Rick Riordan (author of Percy Jackson and The Heroes of Olympus series, The Kane Chronicles, and more) was doing the Percy books and also the Egyptian mythology books. And he did those every six months. And I think it practically killed him, but they were able to lock those in.
And again, if I had been a smart person, I would have worked a little harder and made that happen. But at that point I was very burned out. Maybe I could have done it and just not... but the books wouldn't have been as good. So I know they wouldn't have been as good. Not that they were great, but I would have had to sacrifice something.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I mean, this is where we get to that, the difference between the idea that it's a business, but undeniably it's a creative one that requires a lot of self care, and self knowledge, right? To be able to admit like, "I just can't make this happen."
Ally Carter: And I was also dealing with backlash from a lot of readers who were like, "How dare you write something that's not Gallagher Girls."
Sarah Enni: Oh, my gosh!
Ally Carter: They would tell me that, they were up in my face that they had to wait an extra, you know, six months or whatever to get the new Gallagher Girls book. I mean, they resented Heist Society. They were mad. They turned on anybody who read Heist Society. But Heist Society was building... and not all of them, and Heist Society was building its own fandom. And so I was like, "How do I get these people to get along?" And so I actually wrote a free novella that was a crossover between the cast.
And at that point they kind of merged into a super fandom. And that was very, very helpful. And again, I say, if I were a smarter person, I probably would have put a pin in Heist Society, wrapped up all six Gallagher's, done some kind of crossover thing and then blended that in. But Heist Society made me a better writer.
Sarah Enni: I want to talk then about Embassy Row. And also, looking at the timeline, it's so funny because it ends up being, I think like about five-ish years between introducing new series kind of on a regular basis. So in five years it seems like there's an itch, "Ally gotta do something new."
Ally Carter: It does. So Embassy Row actually came about as I was leaving my day job. I had made friends with the librarian in my small town. And so I went to say goodbye to her before I left town and her son had just started college. And so I asked her how that was going, and she said, "He thinks he's getting ready to declare a major. He wants to go into foreign services." She says, "But I don't know how I feel about that. Cause that would mean my grandchildren would have to grow up in embassies all around the world."
And I thought, "Children growing up in embassies all around the world." But at the time like, "Okay, can't really sell a third series." I hadn't even started Heist Society yet. So I just kind of put that one in my back pocket and it just kind of stayed there and every now and then I wouldn't work on it by any means, but I'd take that out and play with it and be like, "Yeah, I think you're what's next." So when Gallagher did wrap up, I said, "Okay, I think it's time to do children of an ambassador." And this bigger sort of global landscape. Again, very unrealistic, realistic fiction. And again, a premise; kids growing up on Embassy Row.
At the time, I'd also done a tour that had taken me to D.C. And so it was one of those things where the media escort was like, "Well, you know, we've got 40 minutes, it'll take 15 to get to the hotel and back. Do you want to go back for 10 minutes in your hotel room? Or do you want to kill 40 minutes on this side of town?" And I'm like, "Well, let's just kill 40 minutes on this side of town." She's like, "Okay, what do you want to do?" And I said, "Well, I've been wanting to write a book set on Embassy Row. Can we drive down Embassy Row?" And so she took me down Embassy Row and there's this big creepy house at the end of the street and turns out it is the Country of Iran because we haven't had diplomatic relations with Iran since the 1970's, but it's still the Iranian Embassy and it's still technically like the sovereign soil of Iran.
And it wasn't the linchpin plot-wise, but it was the linchpin world-wise when I saw that. I was like, "Okay, this is just a street. These are just kids. The difference is the creepy house at the end of the street is the country of Iran." Like this is just a different kind of scale and reality than a normal street. And so that's when I got real serious about writing that one.
Sarah Enni: And I want to ask, from a very practical level, you start with these really bold, broad premises, how do you then break it down into composite parts to have a character and a cast and their specific motivations? How do you think through that?
Ally Carter: It's a little bit different every time, I think. A lot of times it's sort of asking, you know, "Who's the most interesting person for this world?" So both Kat and Cammie, now that I think about it, are people who are in family businesses but they're questioning whether or not they belong there. Like, "Do I want to follow in my parents' footsteps." Grace and Embassy Row is somebody who is a little bit different because her grandfather is actually the ambassador. And so she's the new girl in town, but town is this world capital, this legendary city, and her grandfather's this legendary ambassador. And so then I have to ask the question, "Wait, why is she living with her grandfather? Where are these girls' parents?" And so then I start backing the truck up.
And how I came up with the idea of Grace's mother having been murdered, that she was the only witness to that murder. I don't know. That's a great question. I don't really remember that. I think I really wanted to do something with diplomatic immunity because that's what a lot of people think of when they think of ambassadors and stuff. And so I was like, "Okay, what if her mother was killed and then she sees her mother's killer, but he's this guy who probably has diplomatic immunity and nobody believes her."
And the nobody believes her part of it ended up becoming much, much, much more important in the actual book, like the sort of mind game of, you know, what is memory? And how witnesses are not very reliable actually. The brain fills in blanks in ways that it probably shouldn't. And so how much of that is going on with Grace?
Sarah Enni: Yeah, we talked a lot about cinematic influence and it makes me think of the Fugitive and all those fun, actiony stories. It also is, that series is a little bit darker than the other series. And I'm just interested if you, now you have a little bit of time away from it, if you get a sense of why that was or what you were kind of working through with that series?
Ally Carter: I don't know. So Gallagher got darker the longer it went. So if you go from Gallagher one to Embassy Row one, it's a huge leap. If you go from Gallagher six to Embassy one, it's kind of just the next natural stair step. And so I don't know how much of that was me just growing, like getting older, about to turn 40 and stuff. And how much of it was, I'd already written all the hi-jinks and the fun.
Also just YA as a genre was getting more mature and getting older and getting darker. And so, the books that I went and picked up when I sold my first YA cause I wanted to be like, "What is this YA business?" Were the Meg Cabots of the world and the Sisters of the Traveling Pants and those types of books. And in whatever that was, 2015 or so when I did the first Embassy book, those books would not have sold those books would not have been on YA shelves.
And so I don't know how much of it was conscious and how much of it was... I also just really wanted to do like a hard-boiled YA thriller. I wanted to do the Fugitive. I wanted to do, you know, I thought that there would be like tons of movie interest in it and stuff, turns out there wasn't, and I still don't really know why. The YA thriller market, now you have it, but it's more on the domestic thriller types of things like the Karen McManus (author of One of Us Is Lying) work and stuff.
But nobody ever really made fetch happen with sort of international intrigue YA thriller. And even the teen spy kind of stuff that is being done now is being done in the middle-grade space. And I think it's because you have to have the suspension of disbelief and the hardest thing that I do, and this actually leads us nicely into Not If I Save You First, but the hardest thing that I do with every book is answer the question, "Why don't they call 911?"
So this ragtag group of kids has figured out where the bomb is, "Sure. Let's go diffuse the bomb.That makes sense." No, that makes no sense. You're an idiot. You're the stupidest children ever, you deserve to be blown up by that bomb. But calling 911 is a really boring conclusion to a novel. And so I've gotta walk that line of making them not idiots, but also making them save the day. And it is a virtually impossible line to walk. You can do it, but it is so much harder.
And I think that that's why too, you've never really seen a dropoff in fantasy and you've never really seen a dropoff in, well, paranormal has changed, but there's always been something. And dystopian, because in the dystopian future, you can say, "Hey, a 12 year old girl must lead you." In a fantasy world, you can say, "Oh yeah, there's a prophecy that this sixteen-year-old girl must save the universe."
In contemporary, the sixteen-year-old kid has to stop this international assassin is just a bridge too far for most people. And so that's why it's either gotta be younger, more fun kind of stuff, or it has to be in a fantasy or dystopian or some other genre space.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. And that's so interesting. Cause what you're talking about, you know, you talked about the heist being layers on layers on layers. This is kind of where, when you're writing a contemporary genre book, then having it be in the YA space adds this layer of work as an author that you have to do just because of category.
Ally Carter: Exactly. And so leading into Not If I Save You First, about this time in the fall of 2015, 2014, I don't remember, it was my parents' 50th wedding anniversary. And so we did what everybody seemed to do on their 50th wedding anniversary, which is we went on the Alaskan cruise. So because you get on the cruise and it's everybody on the cruise is wearing the tee shirt that says "Happy anniversary, Nana, and Pop Pop." It's almost exclusively people cruising with their families for their 50th wedding anniversary.
So we do this and it was great. I had a great time. But I remember standing up on deck one night... another interesting thing about the Alaska cruise is you can see land almost the entire time cause you're going through like basically channels. And I'm looking out over the wilderness and it's millions upon millions of acres and there's one light burning in the distance. Like that's just it. It's millions of acres and one light.
And I thought to myself, "If something happened here, you can't call 911." And so then I started thinking, "Okay, I have to set a YA thriller here because my biggest problem doesn't exist." I can write a book where the girl has to save the day and nobody's gonna think she's an idiot because she didn't just stop and go to the police station. Cause there is no police station. And so that's how Not If I Save You First came to be.
Sarah Enni: Do you mind giving the pitch for that book really quick?
Ally Carter: No, not at all. So that is basically, again, if you write what I write for as long as I write, I knew that eventually I was going to have to do president's son, secret service agent's daughter. It's inevitable that that is going to happen. And so setting that in Alaska just made a lot of sense. It was like, "Okay, now I've got a setting for that set-up." And so that is basically, president's son is kidnapped in the Alaskan wilderness and only a secret service agent's daughter can save him.
And that's the one again, where she, you know, smells like Taylor Swift, which is bad cause to a bear Taylor Swift smells delicious. So that one took a little while to kind of figure out who the villain was and that kind of stuff. It also, one of the big challenges that I had with that is I wanted them to be friends. I wanted them to have a history because I think it's really... my nieces were growing up and it was interesting to watch the little boys that they used to play with and be friends. And now they've creeped into that, "Oh my gosh, Oh my gosh, he's looking at me!" Phase. And I'm like, "When did that happen somewhere in there?"
And so I wanted to play with childhood friends who are then separated and come back together as teenagers. And so, again, I tried to write it as cinematically as possible, where you have, like the first 10% of the book is setting up their life in D.C. There's a big attack. And then her dad is very, very critically injured. He retires from the secret service moves her to the middle of nowhere Alaska. And then I had six years of them being apart, and we jump in time six years later to him getting in trouble and being sent to Alaska, kind of to keep him out of trouble.
And I was like, "How do I show them growing up?" Like, "Do I do flashbacks? Do I just sort of work that in and hope that readers can fill in the blanks? Is she happy to see him show up?" What's going on there. And then I was at a writing retreat with Sarah McClean (author of A Rogue by Any Other Name, Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake, and more. Also host of the podcast Fated Mates), who's a brilliant romance author. And my favorite book of Sarah's is a book called A Rogue By Any Other Name.
And in it is childhood best friends who then are grown apart, you know, separated and they don't see each other for like 20 years. And at the beginning of every chapter, she has a letter that the little girl, that they had written back and forth to each other when they were children. And I thought, "Okay, I can do that. I can have Maddie writing him letters and those can open the chapters."
And so that became very, very important as a way of showing her arc and her growth. And then the fact that he never wrote her back is the source of a lot of contention when he does show up. So automatically we've got a lot of built-in anxiety, intention, and hatred, and like long-seething stuff right there. And then all of a sudden he's kidnapped and she's got a save him. And she's like, "I really want to kill Logan, but I have to save him first." And so that's the book.
Sarah Enni: And it is a standalone book.
Ally Carter: It is. Yeah. So I had transitioned, I'd done Embassy Row with David Levithan at Scholastic and David and I were talking about what to do next. And he's like, "I think, you know, you have never done a standalone. Why don't you try that? I think you would really like that. You wouldn't have to get in your head and like plot three books ahead and all this kind of stuff." He's like, "You'll leave it all on the field." Basically.
And also from a business perspective, standalone is a great thing to do if you're trying to hit state reading lists, it's a great sort of entry point into an author. Cause if you're like, "Oh, you need to try so, and so, you're gonna love it. She's got a fourteen book series." All I'm gonna hear is, "Holy crap. That's gonna take, you know.... I'm committing the next year of my life to reading this person." Whereas, especially if you've got like a reluctant reader, a kid, you can just hand them this one off, "Here, try Ally Carter. If you like this, there are fourteen other books in another series that we can hand to you. Start here."
So that made a lot of sense. And I very much wanted to do just the YA action adventure rom-com. And tell it all, leave it all on the field. And in that sense, it was so much fun. And I really, really enjoyed it. Now my friends, again, would be like, "You were miserable writing that book." Cause I'm miserable writing everything. And the hard part is always, for something like that, again figuring out who the villain is, what do they want. But the world and the characters always made sense. Once that Taylor Swift line came to me, the characters always made sense.
Sarah Enni: Was it fun to then just be able to walk away from something? Or did you feel like you were leaving something behind?
Ally Carter: It was kind of fun and kind of freeing. The problem now, is that Not If I Save You First just hit a whole bunch of state reading lists and stuff, and now when I go on tour, the question that I get is, "Where's Not If I Save You First two?" And I'm like, "Well, that kinda doesn't exist." So I'm always trying to think about how do I catch that lightning in a bottle again? What is a similar experience that I can give to readers that's either an actual companion novel where Maddie and Logan do show up in book two, or just something else that's a tightly branded, separate standalone.
And so I'm trying to figure out what that would be because it would be nice right now to have a sequel coming out that those readers could latch right onto. But from a creative standpoint, I feel really good where I left that one.
Sarah Enni: Well, let's talk about, I really want to talk about Dear Ally and then we can talk about Winterbourne. And thank you for being so patient as we walk through all of this.
Ally Carter: Oh no! This is super fun.
Sarah Enni: So I love that you went ahead and wrote Dear Ally. It's Dear Ally: How Do You Write a Book? Can you just tell me about how this came about?
Ally Carter: Well, I'd always liked a lot of writing advice. I'd always written a lot on my own. I had a big section of my website and blog that was dedicated to it. And for years I thought, you know, cause you do enough events, you do enough signings, you get enough reader comments, you know that there are a lot of kids out there who are serious about writing. So I had spent a lot of time kind of toying with the idea of just taking those articles and blog posts and stuff and bundling them into an ebook, putting it up for 99 cents or whatever, just so they're all kind of in one place for people.:
And then I was doing the Tweens Read conference in Houston with the Blue Willow bookstore and three different sessions in these ginormous gymnasiums full of kids. The very first question, three different kids asked in all three sessions, the very first question was, "I'm working on a novel, do you have any advice?" And these were like nine-year-olds who were asking this question. And I thought, "Okay, these kids are very serious about it." It's not, "Do you have any advice for authors or for writers?" It's, "I'm working on a novel, I've already started something. I am in the process of this."
And so again, at the time, I'm working with David Levithan at Scholastic and have a really good relationship with them and with the Scholastic Book Fairs. And I thought, "Okay, this kid needs a hard copy of this book and they need it to be in their Scholastic Book Fair. That's where they're gonna find it." Because the hard part with YA nonfiction is where do you shelve this stuff? Because it's almost a nonexistent portion of the store.
So I thought, "Okay, they can get it through the book club." And it was 2016 during the election, and so I was working on Not If I Save You First, during the day, and then I'd come home and watch election coverage and go crazy. And I was like, "I need something fun that I can kind of focus on." So I went back into those old blog posts and started pulling them out and kind of typed up a proposal to David. And he got back to me and he's like, "I love this." He's like, "We have no idea where we will shelve this, but let's do it."
And I was talking on the phone with my agent Kristin about it, and I was like, "I don't know what the conceit of it is." Like, "Is it just me writing a bunch of writing advice?" And I said, "You know, what I really want to do is I just want to answer the questions that kids have." And then she was like, "Why don't you just answer the questions that kids have?" And so I worked again with Scholastic and my website and put a form up and I just advertised far and wide. Like, "If you are an aspiring writer, if you're a teenager, let me know what your questions are."
And we had got over a thousand questions. And so then I just had to sort them out. And you know, of course it was like of those thousand, like 900 of them were like, "Where do you get your ideas?" But it was really, I can't imagine writing that any other way, because there were definitely things in there that I would not have thought to include. There were a lot of questions along the lines of like, "What do you do when people find out you're writing a book and they laugh at you?" A lot of sort of self-esteem, self-confidence type questions. And so, I think it made for a stronger book to actually just not even mess around, just get right to what the kids want to know.
Sarah Enni: So let's talk about Winterbourne, Winterbourne Home for Vengeance and Valor, which just came out. I want to talk about Winterbourne and then I want to talk about scripts and then we'll wrap up I promise.
Ally Carter: No, this is great. I'm having so much fun.
Sarah Enni: Oh, good. Me too. I'm so interested in, you've talked about this in a few interviews, but I'd like to hear about what made you think about shifting to middle-grade.
Ally Carter: That was actually a conversation that I'd been having with some folks about how, and actually it was David who said, "You know, if you submitted I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You to us today, we would reject it. And we would have you rewrite it as middle-grade and resubmit it." Because in the 10, 15 years since I started, the YA spectrum has just moved slowly older, slowly older, slowly older. And so you've got the folks like Meg Cabot who were the queens of YA, who are now in middle-grade. It was kind of always inevitable. You look at Love You Kill You and the early books, and yeah, they don't really truly fit. I've always kind of had a foot in each world, I think. And I'm happy to have.
I think that that's a lot of why I've been able to have a career as long as I have is booksellers know, "You've got the kid who has read all of the Percy Jackson books four times, what do you hand them next? They think they're ready for YA, they may not actually be ready for YA, but they sure think they are. Okay. We hand them Gallagher Girls." So it felt really nice. And then I was talking to a bunch of different editors, including my current editor, Catherine Onder, who I had actually worked with on Gallagher and Heist Society at Disney - cause editors move around - and we were talking about like, you just can't do whimsy in YA.
You just can't have that same sort of level of, "This is a goofy, cool, fun thing. I think I'm going to do it." I always used to joke that readers didn't age out of my books, but they cooled out of them. Like, "I just got a little too cool for Ally Carter." And I'm like, "That's fine. Most people are too cool for Ally Carter." And so it felt really nice to be able to think about writing for middle-graders who, "Oh, yeah! Oh, the stairs turned into a slide. Cool. Let's do that." You can't do that in a YA book.
Sarah Enni: Well, let's, let's talk about Winterbourne specifically. Do you mind pitching that series for us?
Ally Carter: So this one is to, again, do the Hollywood thing. It is Batman meets Annie. So it's basically a girl who's been in the foster care system for ten years, her mother left her. Her mother left her with a note saying she'd be back and a key. And so April has had a key for ten years, and of course, if you've had a key for ten years, you've been obsessed with a lock. And so she realizes that the lock has something to do with the famous Winterbourne family.
And when she gets asked to go live at Winterbourne house she thinks, "This is great. I am going to find what this key opens." And so the Winterbournes are a very famous family, very wealthy, very pillars of industry types. But twenty years ago, the entire family died in a boating accident except one of the sons, the youngest son Gabriel.
And so Gabriel lived in Winterbourne house all alone for ten years. Then on his 21st birthday, he just disappeared. And so now it's ten years later, everybody assumes Gabriel Winterbourne is dead. Like Gabriel Winterbourne is dead, the courts are gonna declare it on his birthday. We've turned his house into an orphanage, enter orphan girl who is sneaking around trying to find what her key opens when she realizes that Gabriel Winterbourne is not dead. He is living in the cellar of Winterbourne house. And he is back to take vengence on the man who killed his entire family. And they sort of form a very unlikely alliance. So it's basically if Batman was back, he didn't tell anybody he was alive, and his only ally was Little Orphan Annie.
Sarah Enni: I love that. And the main character is, I think, twelve right?
Ally Carter: She is twelve. Yes, she is.
Sarah Enni: So you firmly set it, at least in the U.S., that's middle-grade definitely.
Ally Carter: That is yes. Hopefully it'll be a longer running series and they will technically age, I think it's always gonna be in that middle-grade space. I definitely didn't want it to be ambiguous as to is this YA? Is this middle-grade? Because let's face it, that does not exist in our current book industry. I don't know that there is a New York publishing house that would publish a 14 year old or a 15 year old heroine if you paid them. I don't know. And that, as somebody who's nieces are thirteen and fifteen, that hurts me because I'm like, "Nobody's publishing books for these girls."
Sarah Enni: Yeah. It's a bummer.
Ally Carter: It is. So yeah, so we went with twelve.
Sarah Enni: And I'm interested in, was there any kind of challenge or unexpected... You do have to shift a little bit of tone and style when you're talking about middle-grade. What was that experience like?
Ally Carter: It was interesting trying to get back to that place I was at with Love You, Kill You, basically. I just wanted to write it like Love You, Kill You, but without kissing. And that was hard. I kind of had to, you know, scale myself back. One of the more challenging things is, again, back to why don't they just call 911? You can kind of stretch that with a 16 year old, 17 year old, 18 year old character. You have a lot less rope with that with a 12 year old character.
You've really got to have a good reason why you're telling a 12 year old, "Hey, there's a half dead guy in the basement. Don't tell anybody." That's a hard stretch. And so that was one of the more challenging things about this book, was figuring it out. How, again, they can be smart and they can also have agency. Because it's hard in a contemporary world to put that much in a 12 year old characters hands.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I read an interview with you where you were talking about your writing process now is very structured and you do so much work ahead of time to know what the book is gonna be. But in that interview, you said that it's time consuming and that you're frustrated by that. So I'm just interested to hear your thoughts on that. I too am frustrated by how it just takes me awhile.
Ally Carter: I just want to be big dumb kid Ally again, and just sit down and be like, "This sounds cool! Do, do, do do. I type it now." I don't know anybody who actually likes their process, first of all. It always seems like, "This book, this book! I'm gonna figure this out and I'm gonna make it easy." Like, "This is gonna be the one, Sarah, this is the one where we have found the magic bullet." But we don't, it's always hard.
So that's why, you know, I have to also start thinking about the screenplays that I write. They're a first draft. I need to give myself permission of giving myself mental credit for that. And then when I do have one of those done, I can sit down and write an actual screen, like a prose draft very, very quickly. Like I actually did, back before the world caught fire, I actually did a two week Disney cruise on which I wrote the entire first draft of Winterbourne 2.
Sarah Enni: Oh my gosh!
Ally Carter: Yeah. Cause I had the screenplay and I was like, "What I need is like two weeks of no internet access and somebody bringing me food." And where do you get that? On a cruise ship. So that was wild. So yeah, I've tried a bunch of different things and always in the guise of trying to make it easier. And it's never easy.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I actually, I think that hearing you say like, no one likes their process. Cause I think we all imagine that someone somewhere is just easily producing a book a year,
Ally Carter: Yeah, obviously Holly Black is sitting somewhere and like ravens are bringing her coffee and, you know, wild ivy is growing up around her while she... No, no Holly hates her process. Everybody hates their process. So it's almost freeing when you find that out.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I just want to ask about scripts and then we can wrap up with a really quick round of advice. But you recently on Twitter were kind of talking about, I don't know, something... A deadline or something an author had said. How Hollywood could be nicer to authors. And I just would love to hear where you're at with screenplays and what you would like to do with them and how you're thinking about that being a potential part of your career going forward.
Ally Carter: Yeah. You know, all the way going back to that first book and that first 14 year old me desire, it's never really left me wanting to write movies. And every book that I write, I write as if it will be a movie. It is a movie in my head that I transcribe. But I've also had a lot of things optioned and have never really made it past the script stage with stuff before. So I've often wondered, "Why don't I just write the scripts?" Which, there's a good reason why most authors don't do that. Cause it is a very different medium and a very different skillset and it's a process and it is a different beast. But it has become something that I've wanted to do.
And so when I was working on the Embassy Row books and just the way the contracts read, and calendars laid and everything, I always turn those books in on like December 1st or December 15th or something. And then I would do nothing but lie on the couch for a week and watch cheesy Hallmark Christmas movies. And it was glorious. And so I would get kind of punch drunk about Thursday and I'd be like, "I could write one of these. I'd write one of these over a weekend. Heck, back in my day..."
And so finally I was like, "You know, I need to stop talking about writing one of these and just write one of these." So I did, I sat down and wrote one called A Castle for Christmas, about a woman and a Duke who accidentally buy the same castle, as you do. And they have to live there over Christmas cause they don't dare let the other one like establish residency or whatever.
And so I have a good friend who lives in LA and is an author herself. And she also has like a boutique law practice. And I let her read it and she was like, "Okay, this is, I like this, this is good." And then she had lunch with a woman who's a producer and she gave it to the woman and that turned into an option. And so now that's in development someplace, I don't know if I can say where. It was actually supposed to be filming right now. They were actually supposed to be in Scotland filming right now. So that hurts a little in my soul. Maybe when this is all said and done. The good thing about that is now I have a screenwriting credit.
And so now it's a little different than the author saying, "I demand that I adapt my own material." Now it's a little different. And I've also done some spec scripts or just, you know, adaptations. I did a spec script on Heist Society, I did a spec script of Not If I Save You First and whether or not those things are ever made is probably a very long shot, but I am a firm believer that you write for yourself for free, for a long time before you write for money.
And so if you're not willing to sit down and write some things for free, then you're gonna be miserable trying to write for money. And so, I don't regret that. And another thing I say all the time is, "Time spent writing is never time wasted." And so every one of those scripts that I've sat down and be like, "Okay, how do I turn that to that?" Has taught me something about story, and has taught me something about craft. And so I'm a big believer in that. And I think everybody should try to write a screenplay.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, well, I definitely agree. And I think it shows that you started with that as kind of the backbone, because it really hammers into you like plot, nothing is wasted. Is there a quicker way? Could you accomplish three things at once if you set it in a different....? You know, like there's a lot of mental gymnastics that will help you work through.
Ally Carter: And it's impossible to tell not show if you're doing everything in a screenplay form. And so that has really, it's made me a bad reader. Cause I get very frustrated when people don't do that, but I think it's made me hopefully a better writer.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. And I mean, it's not like you've got moving boxes out to move to LA or anything like that.
Ally Carter: No, no. I don't think so. I think if I did any screenwriting, it would be on limited types of properties, either stuff that I wrote on spec and sold, or my own books or something like that. I don't see me going and doing the couch and water tour as my friend calls it. I don't think I'll spend a lot of time doing that probably.
Sarah Enni: All right. Well, if you ever come to LA again, let me know.
Ally Carter: Definitely.
Sarah Enni: I'm in town. This has been so fun. Oh my gosh. I could talk to you all day, but we do have to wrap up for this convo. We just talked about how you have a whole book about writing advice, but I'm gonna ask you to just kind of, actually, I'd love to hear as someone who has written several series, if you have advice for someone who is maybe even starting out with a book that has series potential, like what would you tell them?
Ally Carter: I would tell them, first of all, I have two different pieces of advice. And one from a craft standpoint, one from a business standpoint. From a craft standpoint, every book in your series, the world has to get bigger. That you can't just go back to Hogwarts on the train. You've got to go to Hogwarts on a flying car. And then when you get there, you've got to go into the Chamber of Secrets. You've got to go new places, you have to meet new people.
I like to say... what do I like to say? Something about new people. New characters, equal new conflict and conflict equals gas in the tank. And also there are a couple of different types of series. Are you gonna do an episodic type, you know, Nancy Drew style series? Or are you going to do the one story told over multiple volumes types of series, which leads us into the business advice of things, which is be prepared not to be able to write a series.
Especially in surviving the big paranormal boom and the paranormal bust. I know a lot of people who had mentally planned out their seven book series that had to wrap it up after two. So be prepared to write every book as if it is your last book in that series. Cause you won't know if you're gonna get to write another one for a long time. Unless book one comes out and it just blows the doors off the place, or you have all of them under contract.
Even if you do have three to five books under contract, they can change that. There is nothing that says that they have to publish those. So be prepared to have the series end when they decide to end it not when you decide to end it.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I think that's really good advice. And I think that's another challenge, right? I think if you get to book two and you're like, "Well, let's just make sure that something wraps up so it's satisfying, in case, is actually probably just good from a craft perspective anyway.
Ally Carter: It is. You've got to give the reader that sense of accomplishment that, "I didn't just wade all the way through this to not know anything else." I'm a big believer in not necessarily cliffhangers, but game changers. So you get to the end, we know who put Harry's name in the Goblet of Fire. We know why. We know Harry survived. We know who didn't survive. But we also know that Voldemort has a body.
So that's not a cliffhanger, but it is a game changer. Cause you know that that next book is gonna be different. And so that's what I like to do with all of my books is, there is that moment where everything is wrapped up, but we know that we've just leveled up difficulty wise. And so every book you've got to level up, like a video game.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I love that. Oh, Ally it's been so fun to talk to you. Thank you so much.
Ally Carter: Thank you!
Sarah Enni: Thank you so much to Ally. Follow her on Twitter @OfficiallyAlly and on Instagram @TheAllyCarter. Follow me on both @SarahEnni (Twitter and Instagram) and the show @FirstDraftPod (Twitter and Instagram). This show was brought to you by A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor, Hank Green's latest book. It's the followup to his New York Times bestselling debut An Absolutely Remarkable Thing. A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor is out today in all formats, wherever books are sold.
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