Inspiration is a funny thing. It can come to us like a lightning bolt, through the lyrics of a song, or in the fog of a dream. Ask any writer where their stories come from and you’ll get a myriad of answers, and in that vein I created the WHAT (What the Hell Are you Thinking?) interview. Always including in the WHAT is one random question to really dig down into the interviewees mind, and probably supply some illumination into my own as well.
Today’s guest for the WHAT is Joy Llewellyn, author of The Teen Rebel Series which involve teenage girls kicking butt as they find their way out of unfamiliar and challenging situations. Camino Maggie is the first in the series.
Ideas for our books can come from just about anywhere, and sometimes even we can’t pinpoint exactly how or why. Did you have a specific origin point for your book?
My husband, Evan, and I were hiking the Camino Frances, a 1,000-year-old pilgrimage route. We hiked for 72 days straight, averaging 25km per day, from Le Puy, France to Santiago, Spain. Evan had been a counsellor for Youth at Risk and when we were hiking, he made a comment about how taking troubled youth on this hike would be a better way to help them heal and deal with their issues than any of the punishments our system handed them. That was the seed for Camino Maggie. We have since hiked five more Camino routes in Spain and France and that idea still rings true.
Once the original concept existed, how did you build a plot around it?
Not a lot about the plot has changed since my first draft. I knew I wanted a protagonist that got caught doing a B&E and then was forced to hike the Camino Frances as punishment. The big change involved the gender of my characters. I wrote it with teen boys in mind, then during Draft 2 gave myself a shake and thought of all the travel and adventure books I had read growing up and how the majority of them had a male protagonist. In Draft 3 I finally switched genders, making the young offenders forced to go on this hike female, and it opened up language and experience possibilities. I shamelessly used my Camino journals for story ideas, so many of the physical experiences are true and something Evan and I went through.
Have you ever had the plot firmly in place, only to find it changing as the story moved from your mind to paper?
Again, the plot didn’t change much from the first draft. It was the characters I continually fleshed out, again borrowing shamelessly from the people we met on the trail and either tweaking their story or combining stories or imaging the reverse of what a person had told me and slipping in that version. People jump into personal story exchanges when hiking on any of the nine main Camino routes. I was a film and TV screenwriter and one of the steps you had to do (and it’s a paid step) was write an Outline, like a short story version of your script. That step is part of my creative process for everything I write. The biggest unknown was how would Maggie, my protagonist, feel at the end of her hike? Would she reconcile with her mother? Would she learn more about her own future dreams, and be willing to again step out of her comfort zone to explore them? That was a fun process. By the end of the book, she spoke and I wrote.
Do story ideas come to you often, or is fresh material hard to come by?
I have been a working writer for almost 30 years, as a journalist, editor, fiction and non-fiction writer, screenwriter, story editor, and now novelist. Fresh material is NEVER hard to come by. The problem is finding the time to write all the stories that present themselves. And because I was a professional writer, I didn’t have the luxury of picking and choosing when I wrote. Each day was putting my butt on my desk chair and getting down to it. This was especially true of working in TV, which is time-intensive. Most of my writing work was in documentaries, which usually had a smaller budget than any drama productions so the research and writing work was done as expeditiously as possible. Finding the right person to interview, getting them to share the most dramatic stories, was a very similar process to developing characters for my fiction writing.
How do you choose which story to write next, if you’ve got more than one percolating?
Ah, a good question. I struggle with that decision. I have two completed manuscripts in this Teen Rebel series and am presently doing a deep edit of Book 2, which I plan to publish in January, and will then move on to a deep edit of Book 3. They are all YA. The one common thread is they involve a teenager—female—finding herself forced to deal with a situation that is out of her comfort zone—but she always wins/learns/celebrates her experiences. I have a number of film and TV scripts that never went anywhere and plan to change them into novels. “Spark Rebecca,” Book 2 of the Teen Rebel Series, is based on a spec script I wrote mega-years ago as a writing sample for sci-fi shows I was pitching myself to as a writer. It never got produced, but like my spec X-Files, it got me work. And now I get to play with it. Nothing we write ever goes to waste.
I have 5 cats (seriously, check my Instagram feed) and I usually have at least one or two snuggling with me when I write. Do you have a writing buddy, or do you find it distracting?
I live on a small island a 2-1/2 hour ferry ride away from Vancouver, BC (the “mainland”). There are 2,400 people, hundreds of deer, a resident Orca pod, and my beloved Muddy Lotus writing group. There are five of us, all professional women writers, who get together every two weeks to share work and get feedback. Everyone is working on a new book—there are about 40 books published by these fabulous women (poets, memoirist, children’s, YA). I’m the newbie novelist of the bunch. We call ourselves the Muddy Lotus because in mud, the lotus grows. We’ve all had life experiences that have left our mud well fertilized with experiences and feelings of pain, joy, lust, love, pity, embarrassment, happiness, illness, ego, fear, and lots of curiosity!