Going Deeper

It goes without saying that setting is one of the most essential elements of a book. It dictates the tone, the landscape, the weather, the kind of characters, and the boundaries of how the story will unfold. In many books, characters can travel beyond the place where the story starts, and that’s often a catalyst for the plot. But when a book is set somewhere remote or the main character is trapped in a small area of space, that creates many limits and boundaries.

When I set out to write The Depths, one of the main things I worried about was keeping the plot exciting when every single character was limited to an island that is less than two square miles. I first started writing it back in 2016 (aka the Before Times) and it was hard for me to conceive of being so physically limited, while still making plot stuff happen. Because of that, and for various other reasons, I ended up shelving the draft. 

A few years later the pandemic hit, and I picked the story up again. This was back in the days of early lockdown, when many of us stayed in our homes all day, only venturing out for walks or essential supplies. It was a horrible, stifling, trapped feeling — not good for anybody’s mental heath, including mine. But when I started working on the book again, I had a newfound understanding of the dread and claustrophobia that were essential to the story. 

I realized that the solution for this book was not to travel farther away, but to go deeper. Deeper into Eulalie Island’s underbelly, its network of underground caves and waterways. Deeper into its strange and dark history and the people who ventured onto its shores hundreds of years ago. Deeper into the main character Addie’s emotions, the reasons she holds herself to such high standards and beats herself up when she fails. And deeper still to find herself, her core strength, far beyond what she ever expected.

A lot of us went deeper into ourselves during the pandemic, and maybe that was a good thing and maybe it wasn’t. But for me, taking all of my dark feelings and channeling them into a story full of ghosts and danger and death was incredibly cathartic.* And given the sheer number of horror and horror-adjacent books coming out recently and in the near future, I’m pretty sure I wasn’t alone in those feelings or artistic pursuits. 

It’s not just the pandemic, either: The Russia-Ukraine war, the attacks on human rights and gun violence in the US, and the devastating global effects of climate change are all creating an incredibly stressful environment these days. My hope for The Depths is that readers will recognize, face, and start to process some of their own deeper, darker feelings. Sometimes watching a fictional character go through hell and come out the other side stronger is just what we need.

* Note: Writing is not and should never be a substitute for proper mental health care! Therapy plus writing is what ultimately helped me.

Nicole grew up on Cape Cod and graduated from Wesleyan University. She spent a few years in London and now lives near Boston with her husband, two kids, and two rambunctious black cats. She writes young adult (The Wide Starlight and the forthcoming The Depths) and middle grade novels The Nightmare Thief and The Dream Spies) , and her books have received starred reviews from Kirkus, Booklist, and BCCB. In her spare time, she likes to practice yoga, knit, and read tarot cards.

The 411 on Companion Novels

Every author publishing a sophomore novel should prepare for the question, “Is your second book a sequel to the first?” Sometimes, the answer is a straightforward yes or no. Sometimes, the answer isn’t quite as clear. In that case, the odds are good that the author has written a companion novel. But what exactly is a companion novel, and why do authors write them? 

Generally speaking, companion novels are books that exist in the same world but focus on different characters and tell different stories. Oftentimes, the main character in a companion novel will be a minor character from the previous book, one the author or audience felt deserved their own story. A great example of this is Gary D. Schmidt’s Okay for Now, a companion novel featuring a main character first introduced as a side character in the Newbery Honor-winning book The Wednesday Wars. Ingrid Law’s Savvy, Scumble, and Switch make for another great study of how to use familiar characters to create companion novels. 

But it’s not always the case that companion novels have to share characters. For example, I always knew that I’d explored everything that I wanted to explore in The Wolf’s Curse, and the character arcs all felt complete to me. At the same time, I thought of the story as my middle grade “death” book, and I really wanted to explore what a “birth” book would look like. Because the magic/mythology in The Wolf’s Curse was so specific, I didn’t feel like I could explore the “birth” subject with as much freedom as I wanted to. Rather than invent an entirely new world, I set my upcoming book, The Rabbit’s Gift, in a neighboring country––one with its own set of magical rules and a completely different cast of characters. 

Very nearly everything about these two books are as different as two books could be—The Wolf’s Curse features an omniscient great white wolf as a narrator while The Rabbit’s Gift is a dual point of view that alternates between a rabbit and a human. In The Wolf’s Curse, the villagers believe that a Great White Wolf steals souls, preventing them from reaching the Sea in the Sky and sailing into eternity. In The Rabbit’s Gift, human babies are grown in cabbage-like plants tended by rabbits. One of my critique partners insisted that my stories couldn’t be companion novels because the magic was so different between the two stories, seemingly breaking the rule of thumb that companions have to take place in the same world. 

To solve this problem, I turned to Tahereh Mafi’s companion novels, Whichwood and Furthermore. Although the books share characters, they exist in countries with different magical rules; Mafi pulls this off by making the differing magic between the countries something that is known about and accepted by the characters (and thus, the readers). Additionally, the mode of transportation between the countries makes them feel almost like portals, thus priming the readers to believe that the magic in the two different countries would be different. I leaned the other direction and placed my countries side by side; in fact, they share a geographical feature that looks like a rabbit on one side and a wolf on the other. Because the characters are aware of the boundaries of their magic and the magic that exists in neighboring countries, readers are willing to buy into the premise that both countries exist in the same world. 

That’s not to say that writing companion novels is always the way to go. Specifically, it’s important for writers to undertake a thorough and honest assessment of their first book to determine whether there’s enough material to justify a companion. Readers will quickly grow frustrated if the second book feels too derivative of the first; they want to experience and learn something new, not feel like they are reading what essentially amounts to the same story over again. Writers must also ask themselves whether or not there are side characters with enough of that “special something” to carry an entire book, whether there are unanswered questions that remain from the first book, or whether there are new plots or themes to be explored. 

Another potential pitfall writers need to be aware of is the fact that new readers might be reluctant to pick up a book labeled a companion, believing that it won’t make sense or they won’t enjoy it unless they read the other book first (whether this is true or not). Self-published authors could solve this problem by designating their books as “standalone companion novels,” thus making it clear that they can each be read independently. In my case, the decision was made when my publisher printed “Companion to The Wolf’s Curse ” on the cover of The Rabbit’s Gift . In this case, they obviously decided that the cross promotion, and benefits of reaching the audience that had previous read and loved The Wolf’s Curse, outweighed the risks. 

The bottom line is that when approached with a clear awareness of the goals and potential pitfalls, companion novels can be a powerful tool for writers to continue to grow their readership by inviting them to remain in a story world in which they already feel deeply invested. So go ahead: take that side character you’ve always secretly loved, put them front and center in your next book (with their own unique journeys), and give them a chance to shine!  

Jessica Vitalis is a Columbia MBA-wielding writer on  a mission to write entertaining and thought-provoking literature. As an active volunteer in the kidlit community, she’s also passionate about using her privilege to lift up other voices. She founded Magic in the Middle, a series of free monthly recorded book talks, to help educators introduce young readers to new fantasy books. She was recently named a 2021 Canada Council of the Arts Grant Recipient and featured on CBCs Here and Now. Her first novel, The Wolf’s Curse, published in 2021, and a standalone companion novel, The Rabbit’s Gift, comes out October 25th. 

Sasha Laurens on Writing a Slow Burn Romance

In Youngblood, Kat Finn—a teenage vampire—is suddenly admitted to the Harcote School, a vampires-only elite boarding school. When she arrives on campus, she’s dismayed to see that her ex-childhood best friend, Taylor Sanger, is her roommate. Taylor is the school’s only out queer kid, and she’s had a serious crush on Kat for years, even though Kat is obviously straight (right?). When things at vampire boarding school start getting ~creepy~, the girls grow closer than ever as they team up to unravel the conspiracy at the heart of Vampirdom.

Youngblood is an enemies to roommates to co-detectives to lovers story. Early reviewers have also called it out as a slowburn romance, which I’ve taken as a compliment. I love (and hate) all those excruciating misunderstandings and rationalizations and missed opportunities to just kiss already! On the other hand, I didn’t set out to write a slowburn romance. It arose naturally out of how I combined romance beats with the external plot structure. Since this was my first romance, I relied heavily on Gwen Hayes’s classic Romancing the Beat, which outlines the key beats in a traditional genre romance, and my go-to story structure favorite, John Truby’s Anatomy of Story.

 Here’s a few things I did, using Kat’s arc as an example.

1. The romance plot and the external plot both poke at the same character flaw or wound:

Kat’s main issue is that she believes she has to suppress her true self to fit in, because she believes the alternative is a life of poverty and isolation. The romance plot requires her to realize she’s actually queer and that embracing that can bring her happiness and love, while the external plot forces her to reconcile her burning desire to fit in with Vampirdom’s elites with the growing realization that they’re all actual monsters. Together, these plots force Kat to confront conflicting visions of herself and the world. 

2. The tension with the external plot prevents the romance from moving too fast, too soon:

Because the external and romantic plots attack the same character flaws, they need to advance together. In the lead-up to the midpoint, Kat’s desire to fit in leads her to into “friendships” with Harcote’s mean girls, a relationship with the hottest guy in school, and a prestigious mentorship with one of the most important figures in Vampirdom. Kat’s getting what she always wanted, even if it means pretending to be someone she isn’t. At the same time, her growing relationship with Taylor has her doubting if she’s really been wanting the right things—and Taylor keeps getting her into trouble. Taylor is also pretty clear that she hates Kat’s enthusiasm for Vampirdom. In other words, the romantic plot creates roadblocks and helps raise the stakes for the external plot, while the external plot creates obstacles for the romance.

3. The Dark Night:

The third act of a romance plot is characterized by the characters turning away from each other and from love in a “black moment”. This matches up perfectly with the more generic plot structure that positions a major negative reversal right before the climax. These periods where everything seems terrible and is only getting worse fit together perfectly. Kat’s continued investment in Vampirdom, despite all their detective work has uncovered, finally pushes Taylor to the breaking point and the girls are barely talking. This happens, of course, right when the girls most need to be working together. 

Importantly, this falling out isn’t just a petty miscommunication to reduce the burn speed—it’s about showing them a world without each other, where they return to the character flaws they started with. That world feels a lot less satisfying now that they’ve had a taste of love. Of course, it’s also a world where the darkest outcome of the external plot prevails.

4. The romance climaxes immediately before the external plot:

Kat and Taylor can only take down Vampirdom and their messed up school by working together, and by now, they can only work together if they choose love. They’re stronger together—but only after completing most of their character arc. That’s why Kat only metaphorically embraces her queerness and physically embraces Taylor right before the external plot comes to a head. This plot beat is a classic feature of the romance genre, and I always find it so satisfying.

Just as there are a lot of other elements that go into a slowburn romance—the pining, the close calls where you could have kissed, the accidental touches and glances across the room—there there are a million ways to mix romance into your plot structure. Experimenting with those combinations can make both plots stronger.

Sasha Laurens is the author of young adult contemporary fantasy novels Youngblood and A Wicked Magic. She grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and has lived in New York City, Michigan and St. Petersburg, Russia. She currently lives in Brooklyn and puts her PhD in political science to use researching protest in authoritarian states.