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.
Today’s guest for the WHAT is Kate Williams, author of Never Coming Home which is the perfect beach read for fans of classics murder mysteries as well as fast-paced, contemporary thrillers.
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?
Never Coming Home is the story of 10 teenage influencers who get invited to an island on what they believe is a high-profile hospitality launch. Once they get there, nothing is what they expected, and they start getting murdered. It’s a reimagining of Agatha Christie’s classic And Then There Were None, laced with a heavy dose of Fyre Festival. I remember reading about Fyre Festival and thinking it sounded like my worst nightmare, and also the perfect setting for some deadly deeds. In short, the inspiration for Never Coming Home came from something old, and something new.
Once the original concept existed, how did you build a plot around it?
This book was a new concept for me, as my previous books were very character driven, and this one was very plot driven. For this one, I knew where the story would end, so worked backwards from there. The biggest challenges were the pacing and character development. A lot had to happen in this story, and yet the reader couldn’t feel rushed—they still needed time to get to know the characters or else they wouldn’t be emotionally invested in what happened to them.
Have you ever had the plot firmly in place, only to find it changing as the story moved from your mind to paper?
This didn’t happen as much with the plot as it did with the characters. My original intention was to write trope-y characters who were deliciously unlikeable. However, as I went through drafts, the characters became more complex and real. By the end, something that I hadn’t predicated at all had happened—I’d fallen in love with them and had serious misgivings about killing them off (but I did it anyway, of course.)
Do story ideas come to you often, or is fresh material hard to come by?
I get new ideas every day! I have ideas for screenplays, self-published romance, contemporary lit, middle-grade, picture books, graphic novels, you name it! Sometimes I have perfect, punny titles that don’t even have a story to go along with them, but the title itself is so good that I know I have to use it for something, someday. So many ideas, so little time!
How do you choose which story to write next, if you’ve got more than one percolating?
I’m a mood reader, and a mood writer, so I go with whatever is calling to me the loudest. This is also usually the idea I’ve had the longest. I believe that there is a shared well of ideas out there in the collective unconscious and if you are fortunate enough to call down an idea from this well, you can’t let it wither. If you don’t ever take steps to make that idea into a reality, it will eventually get tired of waiting for you and move on to someone else. It really sucks to see a book pop up that is a book you had thought about writing but never got around to it.
I have 6 cats and a Dalmatian (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 have a pit bull of indeterminate age, but we know she’s old. She snores insanely loud, sometimes even when she’s awake. I have also never met a creature who can make so much noise just trying to get comfortable. So while I would love to have her in my office, and she would love to be here, she hangs out elsewhere. She is, however, the only being in my life who I have ever modeled a character off of (in my The Babysitters Coven trilogy, the main character has a pit bull named Pig).
Kate Williams has written for Seventeen, NYLON, Cosmopolitan, Bustle, Vans, Calvin Klein, Urban Outfitters, and many other brands and magazines. She is the author of The Babysitters Coven trilogy: The Babysitters Coven, For Better or Cursed, and Spells Like Teen Spirit.