Sarah Adlakha On Writing World War I

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 Sarah Adlakha, author of Midnight on the Marne which is set during the heroism and heartbreak of World War I and in an occupied France in an alternative timeline.

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?

Midnight on the Marne wouldn’t exist if one of the main characters, George Mountcastle, hadn’t found his way into my debut, She Wouldn’t Change a Thing. In She Wouldn’t Change a Thing, George appears in one of the late chapters as a ninety-four-year-old WWI veteran who’d experienced a phenomenon similar to my main character (repeating certain parts of his life) when he fought in the Second Battle of the Marne during WWI. He turned out to be a crowd favorite, and I couldn’t wait to tell his story. 

Once the original concept existed, how did you build a plot around it?

I knew the basic premise of George’s story, and since it had already been laid out in my first book, I didn’t have the liberty of changing it too much during the writing process. I also knew that I needed a strong female lead to balance the story being told from a male’s point of view, so I created Marcelle – a French nurse working on the front lines who also doubles as a spy for British intelligence. The story sort of morphed into Marcelle’s as the plot was more firmly established, but I think I found a nice balance between the two.

Have you ever had the plot firmly in place, only to find it changing as the story moved from your mind to paper?

I’m a plotter through and through, so my overall plots don’t seem to change much throughout the drafting and editing process – unless of course my editor points out significant concerns. I spend a lot of time with my characters in my mind before I write their stories, so their actions – or the way they’ll respond to various situations - are pretty well established before they’re put through anything. That’s not to say things don’t change during drafting and editing, but when I have a completed novel in my hands and look back at the original outline and chapter summary, there typically aren’t drastic changes. 

Do story ideas come to you often, or is fresh material hard to come by?

My mind is always going, always creating stories. When I was in college, my friends would tease me about the stories I created about random people we might pass in the mall or at dinner. It was never anything malicious, but more a made-up character study – like something you might do in a creative writing class. For example, if a mom walked by in a hurry with her young son, I might create a scenario where she was a single mom who was supposed to be heading to a job interview when her son awoke with a fever. She couldn’t take him to school or daycare, but she didn’t have anyone to watch him – and she couldn’t miss the interview – so she had to call her son’s dad who worked at the mall but was rarely involved in his life. And then that would be the launch point into the plot where a hostage situation at the mall would ensue and she would learn of it while she was in the middle of her interview. Now that I’m an adult with a job and a writing career and a family to care for I’m often forced to rein in my imagination to get things done, but I certainly don’t have a difficult time coming up with material. 

How do you choose which story to write next, if you’ve got more than one percolating?

I let the characters decide for me. I prefer to read – and write – character driven novels. So, while I might have a fantastic story idea, if I can’t seem to cast the right characters in my mind, I know there will be something missing when I put it on paper. I also run my ideas by my agent before I start anything new. She’s heard quite a few, and she’s typically very supportive of my plans, but she’s also very keen and realistic about trends and movements in the market, and she knows where my strengths lie.  

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?

My six-year-old dog and my seven-year-old daughter are almost always by my side. It doesn’t make for the most conducive writing environment, but that’s what my life is right now, and I certainly am not wishing it away. When I’m drafting and editing, I need complete silence and no interruptions, so most of my hard-core writing gets done after everyone is asleep at night. My pup stays by my side day and night, but he’s not much of a bother – just when I’m having a late-night snack. When it’s time to head to bed, I usually have to wake him up, but then in the morning I let him sleep in while the rest of us drag ourselves out of bed and start all over. 

Sarah Adlakha is a native of Chicago who now lives along the Mississippi Gulf Coast with her husband, three daughters, two horses, and one dog. She started writing fiction shortly after retiring from her psychiatry practice. Her debut novel, She Wouldn’t Change a Thing, was a CNN most anticipated book of 2021. Midnight on the Marne is her second novel.

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.