No. 1: The Art of Giving Things Away

An inside look at where my novels come from

Welcome to Diary of a Novel.

I never thought a novel would need its own diary.

A written testament to its creation.

But this novel is different.

For one thing, it’s my first one outside The School for Good and Evil series. So that makes more than ten years since I’ve written something 100% new. (I did write Beasts & Beauty, but a collection of reinvented fairy tales felt like playing in the same sandbox.)

For another, it’s for older audiences (somewhere between PG-13 and R).

Plus, this book is a radical departure for me, which you’ll come to see, as I reveal more about it. It has things in common with The School for Good and Evil. It’s about teenagers (though older ones than SGE). It is huge in scope. It is wildly ambitious. It is provocative and edgy in my usual way. It is massive in its worldbuilding. It is a fantasy… to some extent.

But it is also very, very different.

I didn’t even think I was capable of writing this book.

For the past five years, I even tried to give the idea away.

When I was first struck by the idea — while talking to a friend at Sarabeth’s restaurant on a Sunday morning in NYC (I still remember my mouth being full of mini-corn muffins) — I just knew in my gut that it would make an absolutely mind-boggling novel or movie or television show.

I just couldn’t be the one to do it.

Way outside my wheelhouse. Too difficult. Too intense. Too… big.

I didn’t even entertain the idea of doing it myself.

And so, I talked endlessly about the idea to other writers, hoping someone else would take it on instead.

Year after year, everyone had the same reaction: killer idea… impossible to pull off… never gonna happen. (Like that flying hovercraft in Back to the Future we’re still waiting for.)

In the meantime, I finished all the books planned in my SGE series — six books, two prequels. For years, I had been planning the series that would follow. I was so jazzed about writing the first book. My heart still swells thinking about it!

I flew down to Austin, Texas, my secret happy place and checked into the Fairmont Hotel, where all good creative things seem to happen to me.

There, I went to start this long-awaited series I’d been plotting in my head…

But that’s not what I wrote.

Instead, I wrote the first chapter of Never-Gonna-Happen Novel.

Exactly the same way that ten years earlier, I was supposed to be working on a screenplay adaptation of the beloved classic, The Pushcart War, for a movie studio, and I opened my draft to start on the script one day…

… and the first chapter of The School for Good and Evil came out instead.

That day in Austin, I blinked at my computer screen.

At Never-Gonna-Happen Novel.

At the Wrong Book come out of me.

Oh no, I thought.

So here we are.

My creative elves gone rogue.

Again.

For one year, then — I started the book on January 2nd, 2023 — I’ve kept all its secrets to myself and hid away on a goat farm in Missouri (more about that in future entries), running at giants, tilting at windmills, day after day, month after month.

My personal Don Quixote.

But then I began wondering why I have to hide this fight so tightly.

For 10 years, I let no one in on my process and dropped each new SGE book as if it arrived by magical sprites. No one ever knew the pressures I felt, the intensity of putting out a 600-page book every year while also touring and trying to have a semblance of a life, the ups and downs of working with multiple movie studios on the adaptation (many, many downs!) while trying to preserve the purity and joy of writing the books. There was no need to share any of it either! The joy was in the doing, the battle, the process.

But this book is such a beast that I began to wonder what it might mean for others to get a glimpse into that process. And whether it might actually… help people. Because in this age of short-form and fast edits and clickbait and content, content, content, flung around to pump quick growth with little regards to staying power or sustainability… a novel is still a reminder of an old way of life. Slow-cooked, deliberate, labored over. A wildflower in a fertilized field.

Indeed, it’s a liberating feeling writing this, because for the last ten years, I’ve believed that this kind of journal should never be written for public consumption. That the writing process should remain mysterious so that the final product feels effortless, magical, and to some extent… authorless. That’s also why you rarely see me post about myself on social media — my process, my personal life, any of it. Because to me, all that matters is the book and the art and every cell of my energy is invested in delivering the best possible book.

This time, though, the climb is so arduous and intense, the peak of the mountain so far away, that it would be nice to have your company along the way.

So welcome to a new chapter in my life — personally, professionally, existentially — all told through my day-to-day experience of writing a new novel. A novel that is very much the biggest challenge of my life thus far. (A novel that I did, in fact, try to give away.)

But maybe that was a test run for giving my other secrets away. Ones that will have value to you and help us artists, who usually suffer and exult in silence and solitude, not feel ashamed by baring our ordinary struggles, in all their messy glory.

We’re in this together, now. From drafting to editing to publication — you’ll be with me, every step. And in that way, you’ll be as much a force in creating this book as I am.

So thank you for joining me.

Now, let’s get back to work.