Casey McQuiston

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First Draft Episode #309: Casey McQuiston

June 15, 2021

Casey McQuiston, New York Times bestselling author of Red, White, and Royal Blue, talks about their latest queer rom-com, One Last Stop.

Welcome to First Draft with me, Sarah Enni. This week I'm talking to Casey McQuiston New York Times bestselling author of Red, White, and Royal Blue, who joins us to talk about their latest, One Last Stop. I loved what Casey had to say about books written by and for depressed queer millennials, reverse engineering an MFA by being a scholar of tropes, and engaging with queer history and incorporating it into their work to bring it to a new audience.

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Okay. Now please sit back, relax and enjoy my conversation with Casey McQuiston.

Sarah Enni:  So, hi, Casey, how are you doing this morning?

Casey McQuiston:  I am doing so well. How are you?

Sarah Enni:  I'm doing well. I'm so excited to chat. I was such a huge fan of Red, White, and Royal Blue and had just finished One Last Stop in this like blurry haze of racing to the last page. But before we get to your written works, I want to start with a little bit of background about you. So I'd like to start all the way back at the beginning, which is where were you born and raised?

Casey McQuiston:  So I am originally from Southern Louisiana, from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I grew up there for the first 27, 28 years of my life. And then I lived in Colorado for a while and now I live in beautiful Queens, New York.

Sarah Enni:  How was reading and writing part of growing up for you?

Casey McQuiston:  Oh my god, it was everything. I loved every type of Scholastic Book Fair Dear America epistolary journal I could get hands on. We were a big reading family in terms of like, at night, my parents would always read to us. And then I have an older sister who's eight years older than me, who is a voracious reader. And, of course, when you're eight and your sister is 16, you want to be exactly like them. And so I did a lot of stealing books off her shelves and that's how I discovered Dorothy Parker at like age 11, you know, all the greats.

So I think, as far back as I can remember, I wanted to write. I remember being in first grade when I wrote my first picture book, which was about a kid who wanted to swing so high on their swing set that they could touch a rainbow. Very pure. And then like second grade I tried to write a middle grade novel, I guess, that was basically just plagiarism of Pokemon.

So yeah, a lot of people will be like, "How did you know you wanted to be an author?" I'm like, "I don't remember not wanting to write books." And I always was just reading. So, yeah, so that was kind of where it started for me. I was like an indoor/outdoor kid.

Sarah Enni:  Before we get to Red, White and Royal Blue, I would love to have you track for me... I understand you were in magazine publishing, how was your writing developing before you actually started writing the book that would become Red, White and Royal Blue?

Casey McQuiston:  I feel like magazine publishing is a really, really nice way of saying it, I was like a glorified freelancer at local media writing about brunch. I had an interview the other day where somebody is like, "You worked in magazine publishing, how are you not burnt out?" And I was like, "I need you to understand that when I say that, what I mean is, I was writing about 'Five different macaroni and cheeses you can get this weekend.' [Chuckles] Which, I'm very proud of the work I did, but it was completely different from what I do now.

And I'm trying to think, okay, so it was early 2016, and I have just recently started telling this part of the story, cause it's kind of embarrassing. But I had just gone through like a really, really rough breakup. And I was going through that quarter-life crisis meets post-breakup crisis of like, "Who am I? What am I doing? Why am I here?" And for a solid six months, like every other week, I was like, "This is my thing now. I'm gonna do this thing!"

And at some point decided I was gonna make and sell soaps, and I bought everything to do that. At some point, I got really into lap loom weaving, like textile art. I was doing that for a while. At some point I was gonna get into aquariums. I was going through it. I was really going through it. And one of the things, one of these hyper fixations that I had during that period of my life, was like, "Well, I've always wanted to write a book and I haven't tried in a while. And maybe I know enough about the world now to actually come up with a book that's not Pokemon."

And so I was kind of kicking around different ideas like, "What do I want to do?" I felt like I really wanted to a rom-com because I had attempted, when I was like in high school and college, so many half-baked YA fantasies. I have the utmost respect for all of my friends who write YA fantasy and do that kind of elaborate world-building. My brain does not work that way. So I was like, "Okay, well, I'm gonna do a rom-com cause that's the thing I'm good at, I'm good at the relationships. So let me try this."

And I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do and I had just read the Royal We, which we love (And its sequel The Heir Affair, by Jessica Morgan and Heather Cocks, the writing duo otherwise known as Fug Girls).

Sarah Enni:  Love!

Casey McQuiston:  I've been a huge Fug Girls fan since I was like 15 (Hear their First Draft interview here). I would read their blog religiously every day after school, which is like, what? Like that would have been 2007.

Sarah Enni:  I'm the same. And their voicey-ness. That totally makes sense to me. That's very reminiscent of the kind of colloquialism that you bring to your work.

Casey McQuiston: Yeah. I do feel like I owe at least one branch of my sense of humor to them. It's them, it's Louise Rettison (author of Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging: Confessions of Georgia Nicolson and many more YA novels), it’s Eddie Izzard, and it's my dad.

Sarah Enni:  Ah, that's a good combo.

Casey McQuiston:  So anyways, I'd just read that and then, obviously, it was like early 2016, so I was following the presidential election. And I'm also a big non-fiction reader, so I was reading Carl Bernstein's Hillary Clinton biography at the time. I thought it was super interesting. And there were so many little details about life in the White House in that. And so I kind of had both of these things on my mind at the same time. And I was like, "Man, I would love to do sort of like a grownup My Date with The President's Daughter, or like Chasing Liberty type of fun, rebellious 'first kid' romcom. I think that would be fun, like a young Kennedy.

And then I was like, "But I would also like to do this subversion of the Prince Charming trope, like royalty rom-com. That would be really fun too." And then, I literally just had the lightning bolt of like, "I could do both of these things in the same book if I do it this way." And so that was like literally on my way to work. I got to work and I opened up G-chat and messaged one of my friends and was like, "I need to tell you this idea I just had before I forget it." And that was kind of where it came from.

Sarah Enni:  So I have questions about Red, White, and Royal Blue that I'm gonna ask, but before we get into that book, do you mind pitching it for us?

Casey McQuiston:  Yeah. God, it's been so long since I've pitched it because I've been pitching my second book. So Red, White, and Royal Blue is, I call it new adult, which is a controversial term in the industry. But to me it is new adult because the characters are college age, 21 to 23-ish. But it is a new adult romantic comedy about the First Son of the United States, kind of stumbling headfirst into a rivals-to-lovers entanglement, affair, whatever you want to call it, with the Prince of England. He is not the heir to the throne, he's a little farther down the line, but he is very much still the Prince of England. And it's about the two of them trying to figure out what they are to each other and how to be together while being literally the two most famous people in the world.

Sarah Enni:  I have so many questions, and a lot of them are in relation to One Last Stop. So I'm gonna try to see if I can order these questions in a way that makes sense. But to me, the real standout, and at the risk of sounding like a jerk and/or a snob, your book was actually funny, which is a mean shady thing to say in the world. But your book made me laugh really, really hard. The dialogue is so fresh and natural, and it really flowed in a way that... at some point you wrote that your audience is, "Clear millennials who are kind of depressed."

Because I do think that there's a millennial rhythm that was reflected in the dialogue of that book and in the pop culture references. And that's why when I read somewhere that you were in magazine publishing, I was thinking of writing for the internet and writing for... like glossy magazines have a certain kind of cadence and vibe and snappiness [snaps fingers].

I just was thinking about it, when I used to write a blog, I was like, "This is kind of magazine-y, but that's really my voice." And for contemporary, that really lends itself well to, especially, a very present, in the moment book, which is what Red, White and Royal Blue is, I think. That wasn't a question, but I'd love to hear what you think about that.

Casey McQuiston:  Thank you so much. I feel like, more than anything, where that voice comes from is sort of from all of those comedy influences I mentioned earlier. I'm also have my little rotation of the same few comedy shows that I will rewatch again and again, because I love them and they make me happy, and it's just like a security blanket. And it's shows like, Derry Girls and Happy Endings. And I really do love New Girl and a few of those shows like that. I've watched a few times, obviously, if you can't tell.

Sarah Enni:  I think you mentioned Parks and Rec in another interview.

Casey McQuiston:  Yeah, Parks and Rec is another one, for sure. And I think that part of watching those shows over and over is you tend to internalize that rhythm, that ensemble banter rhythm, you know? And it's very rarely that I sit down and I'm like, "Okay... and then this person says this, and then this person says this." It's much more like, it just kind of flows. And I think that that is how you get a conversation that sounds natural and not stilted, or like you're trying too hard to be funny. And you just kind of let it flow.

Sarah Enni:  You brought up a good point that I think, I would love to hear your thoughts on, how the dialogue does help balance these large casts. In both books that you've published so far, there are a lot of people in them, but I have found them easy to follow and differentiate because the dialogue was so helpful in getting the personality right out on the page. You can almost hear them in your head. So I would love to hear how, for you, dialogue helps to engage all of these different voices.

Casey McQuiston:  Well, like when you have a group of friends, there's certain jokes that one friend would make, and another one friend wouldn't. There's like this friend has like a weirder brain than this friend. It's in the same way that like, when you see a certain funny tweet, you will send it to that one friend and not all your friends, but this one friend who's gonna really appreciate it. You know? And so I think part of crafting a character, is crafting their sense of humor and crafting like, "How do they talk? What is their role in their friend group?"

And when you're able to kind of establish what somebody's role is, not just in the friend group but to each member of the friend group...? If you're able to be like, "Myla is this to West." Then that is telling you more about Myla and West at the same time. Every friend group is like that, every friend group has its own little ecosystem, that has its own little balances and ways of functioning. And so I try to do that with this book.

I mean, August and West are definitely more of like, I guess for lack of a better word, the straight men, not in the orientation sense, in the comedy sense.

Sarah Enni:  And just to be clear, you're talking about One Last Stop with these character.

Casey McQuiston:  Yes. I'm sorry, this is One Last Stop. But I feel like you have to have your characters who are less of the jokesters, who are not throwing out the one-liners. Cause not everybody in the friendship group is the same level of like, "I'm cutting up!"

Sarah Enni:  That would not be sustainable.

Casey McQuiston:  And also something, and this is kind of silly cause it's like a very, very basic type of point of reference, I remember for some reason, a very formative thing for me was when How I Met Your Mother was on the air. I remember seeing somebody say that the creators of the show had noticed that on Friends, and other sitcoms, they never would show the other actors laughing at a joke. And they would deliberately have the actors laugh at jokes on the show, because that's what real friends do. And I feel like that's kind of the spirit of what I try to do with ensembles.

Sarah Enni:  That is so interesting that you bring that up. Yes. I'm sorry. I don't mean to interrupt you.

Casey McQuiston:  No, no. It's just I think like, "These are real people. They're not just people delivering lines." And so those jokes have to land some type of way, you know?

Sarah Enni:  Yes. Whatever that was, an article or whatever, I read it as well. And I remember that hitting home really hard for me like, "Oh, that's what makes..." Cause How I Met Your Mother is far from a perfect show, but there's a lot that it did really well and in a way that felt more fresh to me than so many other shows. And when I read that, I was like, "Oh, that's definitely part of it. They are very explicitly wanting to show all these characters, enjoying each other. It's not taken for granted that someone's funny, that they're gonna laugh at Ted's joke, or attempt at a joke."

Casey McQuiston:  Right. Well, what's the point of having friends and hanging out with your friends, if you don't all enjoy it and enjoy each other. So those little dynamics, the little micro dynamics within a group. And it's the same thing of like, not to keep mentioning every sitcom in the world, but it's the same thing on Happy Endings. There's a whole episode about the different sub-groups of the group, and how certain characters are never seen hanging out with each other. And that's something I always think of when I'm crafting a big ensemble is like, "Okay, what's it like when it's just these two together?" Like, "What's their dynamic?" And when you know those things, it really can fill out the entire group dynamic.

Sarah Enni:  I want to definitely get to One Last Stop, so we'll kind of wrap up with Red, White and Royal Blue here. But I want to ask about the reception for that book because it was really well received, it hit the New York Times bestseller list. It was one of those books that everybody was giving to their friends. And it was a summer book that everyone was reading on the beach. I wonder what you were expecting when it was coming out. How did that play out in your life? What was that whole experience like?

Casey McQuiston:  I didn't expect any of that at all. I think I expected this book to kind of perform really well with its niche of, like you mentioned earlier, and like what I was said, depressed queer millennials. Because that's who wrote it and that's what I was writing for. And I expected it to perform well amongst my friends and people like my friends, and I did not ever expect even a fraction of what has happened.

And to be honest, it was really overwhelming, it was very much like zero to 60 or zero to a hundred. And I did have to delete Twitter off my phone for a couple of months cause it was just like, "Ah, I can't process this many feelings and this much information at once!" But I think in terms of how it played out in my daily life, honestly, it hasn't. For me, my life did not change that much for a very long time.

First of all, the way the book payments are structured, I didn't get any money for like nine months after my book came out. Like it was on the list and I'm like, "All right, well I still take the bus." You know? Financial security has been amazing. The fact that I feel like, at least for the foreseeable future, I will never have to go back to having a day job and this is my day job. And that's all I ever wanted was just to be able to dedicate all of my energy and all of my time to writing books. That's all I wanted.

And so to be able to do that, and to have that...I'm struggling to not say the southernism of, "It's such a blessing." But I do feel incredibly lucky and incredibly thankful and grateful. It is like super overwhelming too, sometimes. Sometimes I'm just like, "Oh man, I have a job I can't quit. That's weird."

Sarah Enni:  That's an interesting and correct way to put it. I do want to talk about what it means in an analytical, left-brain publishing industry, kind of way. I know your editor, Vicki Lame, socially, she's a friend. And when I tell you that she shoved a bound version of Red, White and Royal Blue in my face and was like, "Don't even talk to me again until you've read this book!" She was such a champion for it.

So obviously she was very obsessed with it. But I wonder, behind the scenes, I think a lot of listeners would be curious to know like, was your team establishing expectations like this? What did it feel like in the run-up to it? And when you hit the New York Times bestseller list, something that, as you just said, comes along with it is some degree of a sense of stability or a sense of, "Okay. I think that people will be willing to bet on my projects, at least for the next few runs at this." So I would just love to hear about the psychology of that and how you're thinking about your career post hitting the list or having a successful first book.

Casey McQuiston:  I absolutely do not think those expectations were there within my team. I think that my agent and my editor were not shocked or surprised. I think that the powers-that-be higher up perhaps at MacMillan, and they've gone on the record saying this, they were very surprised and they were not expecting it and they hadn't really spent that much time wondering how this book was going to perform.

And so I think that it was just as much of a pleasant surprise to me as it was to a lot of people on my team. And that's not to say they didn't believe in me, it's just that you also have to be realistic. The paperback trade fiction list is... that's a lot of books to compete with. And with a debut especially, it's hard. It's really hard to break that list. And I squeaked on there at #15 for one week back then. And now I've been on it like for five weeks this year, which is so wild. Like it's had this pandemic renaissance, a 'pandemaissance'.

Sarah Enni:  [Laughs] A 'pandemaissance'... that's not surprising. 2020 was a wonderful year for backlist titles.

Casey McQuiston:  Yeah, it really was.

Sarah Enni:  And 'feel-good' titles.

Casey McQuiston:  I remember having a call with my agent last April, in that moment when everybody was in a tailspin about like, "What is my future? What is the world?" And being like, "Should I be worried?" And she was like, "You're one of my only people that I will tell you not to worry because your backlist. And people are just gonna fall back on the titles they've heard of." But yeah, I mean, in terms of expectations, I think it was a surprise.

And I think looking forward into the next few years of my career, I mean, it's so funny cause you do have that sense of stability, of hitting the list. But at the same time, it's also very, very clear to me that it's possible to also be a one-hit-wonder. And if you don't hit the list with your second book, then people are gonna be like, "Hmm. Mm-hm, so perhaps it was a fluke."

That was a big fear with my second book because, on purpose, it is much less broad appeal and commercial. And that was a deliberate choice that I made because I wanted to really show my range and do something that was more intimate and grungy and not quite so, um, what's the word I'm looking for? Big shiny cinematic, you know?

Sarah Enni:  Yeah, high um...

Casey McQuiston:  High concepts.

Sarah Enni:  That's it.

Casey McQuiston:  I do think that One Last Stop is pretty high concept in the sense of, it is a book about time travel on the subway.

Sarah Enni:  That's true.

Casey McQuiston:  But there's like this back door into Red, White and Royal Blue where these characters are like figures, they are tropes. They are archetypes that you already are very familiar with so I don't have to sell you on them. I don't have to convince you that you should care about the gay Prince of England. You were there with me already.

With this, I have to convince you that you should care about this depressed 23 year old who's on her fifth year of college, and doesn't know what she's doing, and is really closed off and prickly. I have to convince you to care about that person. And so anyway, this is way off target of what I was trying to talk about.

So it's like there's this stability, but then also it raises the stakes at the same time. I, personally, am somebody who is extremely distrustful of good things. In fact, the day I announced my deal with Red, White, and Royal Blue, I was so stressed all day. I was like, "I don't like that this good news is out in the world. I feel like I have 5 million evil eyes on me." Like, "Something bad is gonna happen." And then that day I spilled like a jumbo horchata in my car and I knew my car was gonna reek for like a month. And I was like, "Oh my god, thank god the scales of the universe have balanced."

[Both laugh]

Casey McQuiston:  So it's a great thing. And also to me, somebody with an anxiety disorder, it is also a very stressful thing. I'm very competitive with myself and I always want to do better than I did before. But I do feel really thankful that I know that I'm now in a position where I can have weird ideas, like my subway book, and pitch it to my editor and she's like, "This is so weird but I trust you, so you should do it, and I want to see how you do it." That is a really huge peace of mind to know that I have the luxury of being able to experiment now and try new things.

Sarah Enni:  The last thing I want to say before moving on and asking about how One Last Stop came to be is, speaking of pandemaissance - or whatever we're going to call.

Casey McQuiston:  Pandemaissance, that's what I'm calling it.

Sarah Enni:  I like that as a term. Not only were people going for backlist titles, but also we had this whole explosion of Royal family drama, which I'm sure was also making people think of the Royal We and your book. I just want to hear about... have you been following that? And also, you and The Fug Girls... I'm like, there is some level of like, "We called it." Or, "We brought this into being."

Casey McQuiston:  I do think that anybody who pays attention to pop culture, and the Royals, could have predicted that there was a reckoning coming. So, obviously, after the Harry and Meghan thing, Harry and Meghan interview with Oprah, I was like, "Oh my God, I need to consume... I need some more deep dive context on this." Cause I've done a lot of research into the Royals but I would, by no means, consider myself a Royals expert. And so I went and listened to... I don't know if you listen to the podcast, You're Wrong About?

Sarah Enni:  Yeah, that's what I was just thinking you were gonna say!

Casey McQuiston:  Yeah, they have a five-part series on Diana and I learned so much from that. And so I really then had Royals on the brain for a week or two there. And I don't think it will come as a surprise to anyone who has ever met me, or read my work, to know that I am team Meghan. I think that's pretty obvious about me. My favorite Royal before her was Diana and now Meghan is my favorite.

I am a sucker for the person who gets in this situation, and it's supposed to be amazing and the best thing that ever happened to you, and then it's horrible. And then you find your own way to either get out of that situation, or make it into something that can mean something to you. And she got such a raw deal and everybody acted like she was supposed to be so thankful for it. And I'm so happy that she's out and I'm sorry that she had to experience any of that. But you know what? Come back to America. We're gonna take care of you, girl!

Sarah Enni:  I know! Back in the Vineyard with Oprah where we're glad to have her.

Casey McQuiston:  And her kids are so cute.

Sarah Enni:  Her kids, oh my god they're so cute. It was funny watching this all. It's very kind of mind-bendy, cause you're like, "We're in this very historical moment of this happening." But it did feel like the cultural imagination was somewhat primed for this Royal family blow up. And not least of which, because these books have been kind of exploring that and asking like, "What does this really mean?"

Casey McQuiston:  I think that if anything, between our two books, between my book and the Royal We, we have been preparing people for an American to dismantle the Royal family.

Sarah Enni:  [Laughs] So watching it was kind of like, "Wait, I've seen this before!"

Casey McQuiston:  It was so strange because literally, I remember going to bed the day I finished my first draft of Red, White, and Royal Blue, and then the next morning I woke up and I had a push notification on my phone that was like, "Prince Harry and Meghan Markle announce engagement." And I was like, "Wow!" So weird. The universe does weird stuff like that.

Sarah Enni:  Okay. Brief segment about the Royal's family drama, but I do want to talk about One Last Stop. So before I ask questions about how this book came to be, and we talk about it in detail, I would love for you to pitch One Last Stop for us, please.

Casey McQuiston:  So One Last Stop is a queer new adult rom-com. And it is about a cynical loner named August who moves to New York to try and start a new life, and expects to spend that life alone, as she has. And then she meets this super-hot girl with a leather jacket on her subway commute named Jane. And at first it just looks like a very sweet public transit strangers-to-lovers romance. And then you discover that Jane is actually displaced in time from the 1970's, and she is trapped on the Q train. Does not know how she got there. And so now August must try to save her without falling in love with her before she leaves forever. So that is the book.

Sarah Enni:  Well pitched. I will say that I did not read any bio, any info about it. I was just like, The next Casey McQuiston book? Of course I will read that. No information required."

Casey McQuiston:  Oh, so you didn't know?

Sarah Enni:  I had no idea. I was like, "Whoa!" It really took a turn. And I was like, "This is awesome." And then I read the back and was like, "Oh, okay. This is definitely what it's being pitched as."

Casey McQuiston:  But actually I love that because I did kind of envision some people reading it blind. And I really put in a lot of foreshadowing stuff to see if people could figure it out before it happened. I really did want it to be something that you could experience with no context and it would be really fun and rewarding.

Sarah Enni:  Because it ends up being time-slip book, but for a solid chapter or two there, I was like, "I don't actually know what book I'm about to read." I was kind of waiting to see it play out and was like, "Is it gonna be a supernatural? Is it gonna be...?" It was a fun, kind of like on tenterhooks. And then I was so happy with how it played out.

Casey McQuiston:  Well, that was kind of inspired by the fact that when I first came up with the idea, I didn't know what Jane was gonna be. I just knew she was gonna be kind of haunting the Q. And my first idea was that she was a ghost who was haunting the Q train. And I decided to go with time-slip because I didn't think I could see my way to a happy ending if she was just full on dead. I was like, "I don't know." In that way it was influenced by Disney channel original movie, Susie Q, if you ever saw that?

Sarah Enni:  I haven't. I saw many of them, but unfortunately, not that one.

Casey McQuiston:  It's a classic. The whole thing is on YouTube. You should watch it sometime.

Sarah Enni:  I absolutely will. I want to hear about how a mix of things in my head, I think, are connected. So I want to hear about how the idea for One Last Stop came about, and also the research for this book. Because I understand in your real life, you were not yet living in New York, so I'd just love to hear about the origin story for that.

Casey McQuiston:  So I had the idea, actually, on a trip to New York, or the beginnings of an idea. Shortly after I signed my book deal, I happened to be coming to New York, just to visit friends, I often did before I moved here. And I went to MacMillan and I met my editor and it was so wonderful and cool. And I was like, "Wow, I'm a real author." And I got to go in the Flat Iron Building. Like, "What a dream!"

And it was also the first time that I took the subway by myself a lot, and really began to learn the subway. I'm from a part of the country that does not have a lot of public transit. And what we do have is certainly not in the form of underground trains. And so to me, I'm still not fully over the novelty of the subway. And I know that's so silly to people who are lifelong New Yorkers, or who have lived here a long time. But to me, I'm still like, "Wow, it's like magic."

And so on that trip, I was kind of panicking cause my editor was like, "Oh yeah, I can't wait to hear what you're gonna write next." And I'm like, "Ha-ha, me too!" And I was like, "Oh my god, I don't know what I want to write next." And I remember, I think I was just on the subway on that trip, and I was just feeling that whole magical excitement. I feel like right now there's like a Lourde style, super cut of highlights of the subway running through my mind. Like when you're passing another train in the tunnel, or when you see somebody across the empty tracks from one platform to the next. There's just like so many moments in the average subway commute, where you have just the most fleeting moment of your life intersecting with another person's.

And to me, I was like, "That is so romantic. There's something really inherently wistful and romantic about that." And so I really wanted to play around with that. And I started thinking about the idea of the subway as like a liminal space cause I didn't want to just do a straight up public transit rom-com. I was like, "There's gotta be more story to it than that." So I started thinking about when the subway feels like an in-between space. Like when you're going from one stop to the next and you're in the tunnel and you could be anywhere.

I've also always been fascinated by stories that are about somebody transcending through time and space. I was a big Doctor Who fan when I was like 19. And I was a huge LOST fan as like a tween when it was on the air. And both of those, I mean, just anything that messes with timelines, I'm like, "I'm here for it. I think it's really cool."

Sarah Enni:  I mean, the Doctor and River are like...

Casey McQuiston:  Yeah. I mean, that's romance, baby.

Sarah Enni:  Yeah, nothing better.

Casey McQuiston:  When you have two people who mean so much to each other that time and space are meaningless, that is romance. And I kind of just had all these things cooking in my brain, and that's where the story idea came from. I distinctly remember taking my post-trip sadness bath... You know how after you go on a really great trip and you get home and you just like get in the bathtub and you're like, "I have nothing to look forward to now." I was in the bath and I remember thinking like, "Magical. Subway. Lesbians." Those were the words that came to my mind and that's kind of where it started.

Sarah Enni:  Amazing. I love that. And just for context, you had already sold Red, White and Royal Blue at that time.

Casey McQuiston:  Yes.

Sarah Enni:  Was it a two book deal?

Casey McQuiston:  No. So it was like, and I'm gonna probably explain something you already know, but for the benefit of listeners, so it was a single book deal. But it did have basically an option, not like a film option, but an option that basically my publisher would get first bid on the next thing that I wrote. And so it was very like, "Oh, whenever you're ready to pitch us something." And they don't necessarily have to buy it, but they do get the first look. And so that was the situation.

And not a lot of people know this, but One Last Stop is actually a two book deal with a second book that has not been announced yet.

Sarah Enni:  Oh, okay.

Casey McQuiston:  I sold One Last Stop and then my third book, which is an unannounced book that I sold in 2018, at this point. So I sold both of those in late 2018, I would guess like October-ish, September-ish. I don't know, but I had been working on One Last Stop for several months before I sold it. I kind of had just decided it was the one they were gonna buy, whether they wanted it or not. And I kind of told them that when I pitched them, cause I sold it technically on proposal.

Sarah Enni:  That's what I was gonna ask. How much you had of it when you brought it to them?

Casey McQuiston:  Well, I had written it, but they hadn't read it. I had written a lot of it, I had started drafting probably in early 2018. As soon as I had the idea, I started working on it. But I pitched them a paragraph, basically they asked for like, "Could you just give us three or four pitches and we'll see what we like." And so I pitched them that and my third book and then two other. They were all queer rom-coms because that's what I do. I just put that one at the top of the list. And I was like, "Just so you know, I've already been working on this, so I really hope you like it."

Sarah Enni:  That's so interesting, and I appreciate you kind of giving some context there. It's so interesting how, especially second books, how they come about. Sometimes people already have something in the drawer, or sometimes it's just one sentence and they go buck wild after that.

Casey McQuiston:  In One Last Stop, the first line I ever wrote for it, and it's still in the book and I think it's also gonna be the thing I inscribe for special signings, is like, "The Q is a time, a place, and a person." And that's one of my favorite lines in the book. And for a while, that was the entire thesis of the whole book. And that's why I really appreciate, and this is not a spoiler because I'm gonna be very vague about it, but there's a little bitty call back to that line at the very end of the book in a romantic love note type of way. And it's one of my favorite parts of the book. That's something I added in line edits just to like make people cry.

Sarah Enni:  I love it. I love it. Yes, it was very satisfying. All those callbacks really wrap things up so well. I want to ask about the construction of this world because you sort of started with this other worldliness and then go to the time-slipness and then you have... I wrote them down. You're writing a rom-com, it's a time-slip book. It turns into, at some point, a bit of a heist. There's also some detective story elements. You're really running the gamut, doing the genre Olympics in this book.

And it's so, so, so fun as a reader, but I was reading it being like, "Wow, every one of those genres comes with so many archetypes and rules and expectations." So I'm just interested in how you constructed this book and how you were kind of doing that balancing act?

Casey McQuiston:  I feel like first it started with just the demands of the plot. And I remember when I sat down to write this book I was not like, "And then there will be a heist in the second to last chapter." I remember having a very, very firm idea of how the first two acts were gonna go and then just writing and being like, "I hope to god I figure out how I'm gonna resolve this at the end," which is very rare for me. I'm usually a big time plotter, but with this one, I was like, "I see the setup that I want to do." I consider myself a really huge scholar of tropes and I feel like TVTropes.org owes me some advertising money for how often I mentioned them in interviews.

I remember discovering TVTropes.org and now my favorite thing, when I finish watching or reading something that is really popular, is I will go to TVTropes.org and I will literally read the entire article. Literally picking out and describing every single trope that is present in that piece of fiction. And then I'll click on the name of the trope and go read every other thing that has that trope in it. And that, to me, is a really, really fun way to secondary engage with something I love, you know?

And I think that's kind of how I reverse engineered an MFA. At the time I was living in Colorado with some friends in a house, and my room did not have a door on it, [chuckles] as we do in your mid to late twenties. Instead of a door, I had a folding room divider that was made out of chalkboards. So I just got color-coded chalk. And I had like plot A, plot B, and plot C.

And plot A was like...Oh god, I can't even remember now, but I'm pretty sure that plot A was like the romance, and plot B was Belly's, the restaurant, being in danger. And then plot C was the actual time travel part. And I wrote them all out in bullet points. And then I would go back with the colored chalk and draw arrows to show where they overlapped and everything. I mean, I looked like August with her serial killer...

Sarah Enni:  What came to mind was August saying, "At least I don't have yarn. Yarn is when you really cross the line into a beautiful mind level."

Casey McQuiston:  Yes, yes. Exactly. Actually, that was exactly me. It's not like I even intentionally had this idea, it's just like, "Okay, well you need to do this. And I don't see any way around it, except they have to get somewhere that they are not allowed to be, which means that we're gonna have to have a heist. So I'm just gonna fully commit to that. And we're gonna say it out loud on the page. We're gonna be like, 'We're doing a heist?'"

Speaking of TV tropes, there's one trope that I love a lot and I use a lot and it's called lampshade hanging. And it's like, when you do something that you recognize is ridiculous or unrealistic and you just hang a lampshade on it to be like, "Ah yes, this is silly." Now we know that we're self-aware. I put a heist in the book and I have the character to be like, "Um, are you sure we have the range to do a heist?" You know? Like, "Just hang a little lampshade on that."

Sarah Enni:  That helps with a reader buy-in, right? You're acknowledging the audience and saying like, "Come. Trust me. I know what we're doing." Like, "Come with me on this." You have the, um, what's the word looking for?

Casey McQuiston:  Suspension of disbelief.

Sarah Enni:  That's it! Yeah. I was like, "Plausible deniability? Why is that in my head?"

Casey McQuiston:  Well, plausible deniability is a line in the book, we do mention that.

Sarah Enni:  That's why it's in my head. Anyway, what you're saying is a really great device to make sure that your audience is like, "Okay, we're still in this with you."

Casey McQuiston:  I think anytime you try to do something really ambitious, and it's especially easy to do in rom-com. I take it really seriously as a genre cause I really believe in it, and I think it is good art. But the great thing about the genre is that it doesn't take itself that seriously. And so the rules are way more bendy. If I was trying to write science fiction fantasy, like with a capital SFF, I could not get away with half the stuff I get away with in this book. Because it's a rom-com I can be like, "Well, but also you have to account for the power of love."

Sarah Enni:  You are bringing me right to the research. So Jane in One Last Stop is on the Q and she's stuck out of time, but her time was the seventies. I'd love to hear about how you decided what time she was from, and then doing all of the research. Cause there's such rich visuals and thinking about the seventies and what her life was like then.

Casey McQuiston:  As soon as I knew she was gonna be displaced in time, there are certain things that, first of all, she had to be from a time in which the subway had been built. So that narrows it down. But then I also wanted her to be from a time where she was queer. She was openly gay in her own personal life at the time, as much as you could be in the seventies.

There's so much happening in this book we do not have time for her to also discover that about herself. She needs to have been already living in that, and have experience in that, because we have so many other things that we have to catch up on with her. This is not something that we had time to do in this book.

So I was like, "Okay, so we'll probably say some time from like the sixties to the eighties." Cause we want her to be far back enough that she's obviously displaced in time. And then honestly, a lot of where it came down to was an event that caused her to get stuck, that I cannot say because it's a spoiler, but it happens in the seventies and it's an actual historical event.

I was actually with a friend of mine in a writing group that was like, "Well, what if it was this?" And I was like [gasps], "You just made the whole thing come together. Oh my god!" You know? So that really determined a lot of it. But as soon as I had that idea, it was like, "I really love the idea of this character being from the seventies."

She's Chinese American, she's a butch lesbian, and I want her to have this punk rock aesthetic because I felt like that was the easiest way you could mistake somebody from the seventies from the present day. I'm like, "Well, she just wears a leather jacket and high waist ripped jeans." Like, "Everybody wears that."

Sarah Enni:  Mm-hm. Timeless.

Casey McQuiston:  Right. And so from there it was like, "Okay, this is the groundwork of a really, really cool character." And so I was like, "Well, if she was all of these things, then she must've been involved in the gay liberation movement, and she must've been involved with the anti-war movement, and the Asian American rights movement." These are all really cool things that were happening very, very actively in the seventies.

And so, from that point, I was just all about learning. I was looking at like primary sources. A lot of archive websites. I went to the GLBT historical society museum in San Francisco. I went there while I was in town there for work.

And then I also went to the Stonewall 50 exhibit at the New York Public Library when that came out. And I got Stonewall Reader, which is basically a lot of the archival documents that they use for that exhibition. And it's like first-hand diary pages. It's like excerpts from zines. It's so much cool stuff. I think the Stonewall 50 exhibit was one of the most important pieces of research I got to do was just like getting some experience with that.

And then also, I don't talk about this that much because it's very, very special to me, but the dedication to Lee and [unintelligible] at the front of the book is about like.. a friend of mine introduced me to some family friends of hers, who were a lesbian couple who have been together since like 1976 and live in Soho. And I had dinner with them and it was just one of the most incredible experiences. And we talked all about their life and how they got together in the seventies and everything.

I would never call that an interview cause it was just like me, as we say in the south, it was just us like breaking bread together, you know? But yeah, so it was a lot of stuff like that. And I read Stone Butch Blues, as you must. And it was so much. It was so much, but I really hesitate to call it even difficult cause it was really rewarding research. And it was really cool to get to spend that much time with these moments in history and embody them. And then feel like I was giving them a little bit of a tribute with Jane.

Sarah Enni:  I have recently had a few conversations with writers who are writing like Full Disclosure, Camryn Garrett's Full Disclosure, and a few other conversations where it's been really instructive and moving to talk about queer history, it's so recent and yet it hasn't been taught in the same way as traditional white history. I mean, we're doing a lot of re-thinking history, right?

And what One Last Stop does bring up and it's not like all of a sudden it turns into a lecture kind of way, but what's baked into discovering Jane's past, and her life, is touching on queer history and bringing it to readers who may not be familiar with it.

So I'm interested in how you were thinking about that as you were including all these details? I feel like you challenged the reader to be like, "No, really. Think about what it was actually like then."

Casey McQuiston:  Well, I very much did not want to present this whitewashed version of like, "I was a lesbian in the seventies, but it was all right." And I also didn't want it to be this like Disney-fied version where it was like, "She fought so hard and she's perfect and she can do no wrong. And now she's gonna live in the present and everything's gonna be perfect here." And it's like, "Well, everything's really complicated."

And so I tried really, really hard to be like, "This was just her life." For her, this was not like monuments and queer history, this was her life. This was just like her going to the grocery store in the afternoon, like this was her life.

And I didn't want it to feel like I was sensationalizing these moments in queer history, or romanticizing how it felt to be kicked in the face by a cop. I didn't want it to be that, I wanted it to be like, she lived through all of this and she probably has some PTSD from it, but she also has a lot of other stuff going on in her life. She's got a lot of other sides of her.

And I wanted to create a space where a person who lived through this could just be a person, and have a happy ending, and find somewhere that she feels safe. Jane is very adamant about the fact she's like, "I was not a hero. I was not an organizer. I was there, but I wasn't the one who put it together. I was just the one who was throwing a bottle." And August sees her as a hero.

I think that the book challenges that, and I think there's room for Jane to both be a hero to us and for Jane to also be a person to herself, you know? And I really am proud of that in the book. And I think it came from... a lot of my choices with wanting to engage so much with queer history in my work, and especially in this book, is exactly what you're saying. It's not something that I was taught in school. It's not really even something that I was exposed to at all growing up.

I can vividly remember meeting my very first openly gay person, and I was 11 and it was my sister's college friend. I did not grow up in an environment that was hospitable to queer history or the queer community very much. And so when I got to my late teens, early twenties, and started to de-repress some of my stuff, I was like, "Okay, well, now I have to learn these things." And so I had to really deliberately go out of my way to educate myself on queer history because it was not taught to me. And because of that, I feel like I have this very hard-fought relationship with it where I'm like, "It feels really, really special to me because I had to go out and get it."

And I also want to make it more accessible to people who, like me, didn't have a lot of access to queer history. I mean, we all have Google now, but you might not know where to start. There's so many words in this book that you could just search up and then learn something. So, yeah. I mean, I try to be sneaky about giving people homework assignments in there so they don't feel like I'm making them eat their vegetables.

And also something I was really playing with in the story is, speaking of tropes, that very harmful and terrible trope that we complained about so much, which is 'bury your gays.' And very often, for the listeners who may not know, this is when in a work of fiction, like a TV show or a franchise will introduce a queer character and then give them a horrible, tragic ending. Cause like, "Oh! We were so attached to that character!" And like, "Now we don't have to write a gay person anymore," you know?

So I really wanted to do something that was like on a meta level, like an unbury your gays. And so Jane is literally trapped underground. And for all that her friends knew, she didn't make it out of the seventies. And I wanted to write the story about that person, in every way, getting to have a second chance at life. I guess maybe I was just really taken with the idea of how many people, how many wonderful, incredible, but also very normal people that were lost in the seventies in the queer community. And I really wanted to give one of those people a second chance. So that's what I wrote.

Sarah Enni:  Thank you for speaking to all of that. I mean, it's a lot to take on and I really love how you said that you wanted to give Jane, the character, also the ability to be herself, a singular flawed normal person.

Casey McQuiston:  The thing about being seen as a hero, or being idolized, is that it can be really dehumanizing at the same time. And I feel like, Not Your Hero by Tegan and Sara is playing in my mind right now. And I think that's very much how Jane sees herself. We are allowed to be like, those people who lived through that were heroic, but there needs to also be room for those people to just be human.

Sarah Enni:  Yes, and we've all just lived through something pretty extraordinary and intense. And I think we all were just trying to be humans through it. And I don't know...

Casey McQuiston:  I was just thinking about like when I lost my dad, I had so many people being like, "Oh, you're so strong." I'm like, "I don't want to be strong. I just want to be the version of me, who I was before I had to be strong." And I think about that a lot. I think about the dehumanizing effect of wanting to just see somebody for their heroic deeds. And I hope that I was able to write Jane with respect for what she went through, but without making her nothing more than what she went through.

Sarah Enni:  I relate to that. I think that's a really important thing to keep in mind when we're all humaning together. Cause it might come to us to do heroic things and you don't want to create that distance. I don't know, it's like you can twist it and you can spin it around and make it an empowering thing to say like, "We're all capable of these acts of heroism because the people who did them were just humans."

So if the moment comes when you have to step up and do that, you can, or you should, or whatever. So, okay, I've kept you here for so much time. One more question and then we'll wrap up with advice. You mentioned early on about loving, when you were young, reading epistolary works and Red, White and Royal Blue, and One Last Stop have emails, or intermittent articles and like Craigslist postings. And I really loved how you mixed that up in the text and kind of switched it up on the reader in those ways. I'd just love to hear about including those things and what was it like to write them?

Casey McQuiston:  I mean, like I said, like when I was growing up some of my favorite stuff was like the Dear America stuff, and George Nicholson diaries. I liked reading the Princess Diaries and this is like a very young kids thing, but the Amelia's Travel Journals that you can get at the Scholastic book fair, I loved all of those.

And those all had like epistolary but also a scrapbook-y vibe. And I just have always loved that, it just really tickles my little brain in some type of way. It just feels really immersive. And I am a very tactile person. And when you can expand a story from just words on a page into something that you can kind of touch, or smell, or see, or taste, or imagine that you could, or feel you could hold in your hands, to me, that really elevates the emotional experience of connecting with the story.

And so I put that in everything I do. I will always find a way to do it because I love doing it. You can get around a single POV, which I prefer to do single POV, but you can get around it and disclose information that the single POV can't otherwise communicate, by having those.

If you notice, the most romantic lines in Red, White and Royal Blue are not spoken out loud because it's really hard to put really romantic lines in dialogue and make them not sound corny. And so it was like, "You know what? They're gonna write emails. They're gonna write love letters." I'm not Jane Austin. I can't make people say that to each other's faces and somebody's gonna believe that!

Sarah Enni:  You have to believe like this person was able to edit this and refine it.

Casey McQuiston:  Right, exactly. And then with One Last Stop, it's actually my best friend who had the idea of... her original idea was like, "Every chapter should be a different Craigslist post." Like a different Craigslist missed connection. And I kind of took that and ran with it. Instead it ended up being like between every chapter is a little scrap from August's research.

And I thought that was a really cool way to A) Show August's notes and B) to really make Jane feel real. And I think it was also really inspired by how much archival stuff I was going through when I was writing it. And I was like, "I want this to feel like these are artifacts that you could hold."

Sarah Enni:  I love that, it was really effective. And like you said, making everything do a job. I think about it that way with writing. You really want to be economical wherever you can. And one fake Craigslist missed connections post, just tells you so much about how deep August was going in research and opens the reader up to like, "Oh yeah, Jane's been around and has made this striking impression on people for decades."

I would love to wrap up with advice. Actually, from your perspective, I would be interested if you have advice for people who are writing romantic comedies right now. Because I think it's a genre that's ever changing and you're writing a really modern kind of style of it. So I'd love to hear if you have any advice for people who want to do something like that.

Casey McQuiston:  I think that, first of all, I think that if you're writing dialogue, you should read it out loud. Because often, if you can't imagine how a normal human in real life would deliver a line, then that joke's not gonna land for the reader, you know? And that's just a pretty straightforward rule just for writing any type of comedy in a book.

But I also think that you have to treat every rom-com that you write as a moment. You have to walk into it with the confidence that like you're gonna create the next When Harry Met Sally. And that comes with doing like little self-referential jokes, and doing callbacks to your own work. Like by the end of the book, call back to the beginning of book. Treat the book like a moment. Cause I think that that's what makes a really good rom-com is that it is like this self-contained little shoe box full of sparkly things that you love, you know?

And if you write it like it's special, then it will feel special to the reader. And that is what will make them really grab onto it. All of my books, I think, are really self-referential and I seed stuff through that. I'm like, "I'm gonna call that back later. I'm gonna call that back later." And I think that that is how rom-coms function in the movies. It's not just a romantic gesture at the end. It can't just be a romantic gesture. It has to be a reference to something personal between those two, you know? So plan these things out. It has to be this full circle moment, and that is what makes the biggest payoff in a romantic comedy.

Like at the end of 10 Things I Hate About You when they have that moment where Patrick does his final gesture for Kat and wins her back. It's not like he just tells her he loves her, he gets her the guitar that he knows she's been wanting since the beginning of the movie. And the way he gives it to her is in the car that she rear ended him with in the parking lot... oh no, she doesn't rear end him, but he watches her rear end somebody else.

Anyway, all of this imagery is really important to the mosaic of their relationship. And to create that moment is what makes it really memorable. It's not necessarily that he finally said, "I love you." It's everything about their story all came together at the end, you know? So does that make sense?

Sarah Enni:  It does. And what I'm bringing to what you're saying is Elana K. Arnold, who is this absolutely stunningly brilliant writer, has this way of talking about that, where she talks about audience satisfaction. And she's like, "Your audience wants to encounter the same characters, again. Callbacks work... I forget where I was. At some point in my life, I was with someone who was like, "I don't like callbacks." And I was like, "You're an alien. Everyone likes callbacks."

Casey McQuiston:  Why wouldn't you like a callback?

Sarah Enni:  I think this person was just trying to get attention. I was like, "You're just wrong." Everyone loves a callback because it's giving the audience that satisfaction of like, "Oh, I remember this. I know this. I live in this world too." It's really justifying the time your audience has already spent with you and your characters. All the belief that they've already suspended is going to come back and be worthwhile for them.

And I think it's important. Elana phrases it as thinking about your audience and whether they're gonna be satisfied at the end of your story. And for some reason, I think people feel hesitant about that. They want it to be quote, unquote real. And it's like, "No! It's a book. Be a book."

Casey McQuiston:  That is also not what we come to rom-com for. I think people have this idea that rom-com can't be good art and that they want to make good art. And so they shouldn't do it in a rom-com-y way. And I'm like, "First of all, what is good art?" To me, good art is something that is emotionally effective and able to transport you to exactly the emotional place that they want to transport you.

Sometimes that place is like this feeling of melancholy that you get from a barely resolved arc at the end of the book. And sometimes that feeling is like Letters to Cleo playing on the roof of the school at the end of 10 Things I Hate About You. And like, yeah, I think that that is art. And I think that that is good art. And if you want to write rom-com, you need to accept that rom-com is good art and you should act like it.

Sarah Enni:  I love that. Oh, that's perfect. Well said. I support it wholeheartedly and I'm probably gonna go watch 10 Things I Hate About You later cause it's making me so nostalgic. Casey, this was such a fun conversation. Thank you for giving me so much time today.

Casey McQuiston:  Of course. Thank you so much for having me. It was so much fun.

Thank you so much to Casey. Follow them on Twitter @Casey_McQuiston and Instagram @Casey.McQuiston and follow me on both @SarahEnni (Twitter and Instagram), and the show @FirstDraftPod (Twitter and Instagram).

Like I mentioned at the top of the show, leaving a rating and review on Apple podcasts is a great way to support the show and help new listeners find us. And though I'm never gonna say no to a rating, I love the reviews because I get to read them in the credits, and I'm gonna read a recent review that was left, now.

This review was left by Mal Foxley. Mal Foxley, which by the way, sounds like a love interest name. Mal Foxley says, "Great show. Sarah, host of the First Draft with Sarah Enni podcast, highlights all aspects of storytelling, and more, in this can't miss podcast. The host and expert guests offer insightful advice and information that is helpful to anyone that listens."

That's it! Mal Foxley just like in one fell swoop just summed it all up. I so, so appreciate that. I really appreciate the kindness of that review and also the time it took to leave it. It's absolutely something that boosts the show and the algorithm ecosystem, what have you, of Apple podcasts. And that means we get in front of new listeners and growth, et cetera, et cetera. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

First Draft is produced by me, Sarah Enni. Today's episode was produced and sound designed by Callie Wright. The theme music is by Dan Bailey and the logo was designed by Collin Keith. Thanks to social media director, Jennifer Nkosi and transcriptionist-at-large Julie Anderson.

And, as ever, thanks to you, timeless fashion icons, for listening.

…

Casey McQuiston:  Oh my God. My mom just texted me about how she's buying Michelob Ultra. I'm sorry. It just like came through. I'm going home this weekend and she's like, "I'm getting Michelob Ultra." I'm like, "Okay." Anyway, you can delete that.

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