Hello, and welcome to the first of ten behind-the-scenes blog posts about Never Saw Me Coming. I will release the posts, like kraken, over the course of September. The posts won’t have spoilers in them, but some posts will focus on specific content from certain chapters, and you might not get why I am writing about something in particular until you’ve read that chapter (I will note the chapter).
One of the most common questions authors get is “where did the idea for your book come from?”
The entire plotline of Never Saw Me Coming was not an idea that was bubbling in the back of my mind for years. Sometimes I have something simmering on the back burner for a year or so before I start working on it, but sometimes I get ideas in one sudden go—typically this happens more with short stories. What I can remember most specifically is walking back from dinner with one of my friends (we’d had a few…) who I’m working on a project with. He asked me something about where I get ideas for books, and I said something like, “I don’t know, I just think about a good hook. Like what if there was an entire school filled with psychopaths?”
I did have a clear visual scene pop into my head before anything else: (without spoilers) the scene where someone is holding a piece of cloth and sort of snaps it to unfold it. (I love that scene.) I immediately knew who both those people were. And I knew in which ways they could be dangerous to each other.
I definitely knew that a revenge plot was going to permeate the novel, and that Chloe was a methodical, intelligent, and unusual protagonist. But as I started writing the book, she surprised me because she would make these snarky comments that were pretty funny. (I read everything I write aloud during the final editorial process, and there are still some lines she says that make me laugh even though I’m the one who wrote them.) The humor fit in with her character who is judgmental and shallow, but also at times insightful and cynical. Also by nature of being a psychopath there is something weirdly refreshing about it: she is unabashedly selfish in a world where women are constantly asked to be selfless, she’s angry when we’re told that’s unladylike, wildly self-confident when we’re forced to be modest, she’s judgmental when we’re told to be kind.
This is one of those weird books that wrote itself. At the time, I was struggling with a rewrite of a science fiction book—a character driven space opera that was supposed to be a series—but I just wasn’t getting any ideas for how to fix the plot. The idea for NSMC came to me and I wrote the first draft in a wild sprint. To be honest, this did not require toiling in any sense— getting up at 4 in the morning, and writing deep into the night in haze of coffee. (I point this out only because people always act like having a full time job while also being a writer involves some deep sacrifice like waking up at some ungodly hour or going into a cabin in the woods somewhere at the expense of one’s family. It’s not. It’s possible. It can be done if you’re just really efficient.) I typically wrote for an hour before I went to the gym on a weekday, and maybe did a few hours over the weekend. It never felt like work, but the one humbling thing I learned is that there’s such a thing as working too fast. The first draft had some significant plot problems which I didn’t realize until much later when interested agents pointed them out to me (at which point they were so obvious that I facepalmed). So I deliberately and methodically paced out how long I was going to take to do revisions, even though I’m impatient by nature and wanted to hurry through. I do a lot of writing work that technically isn’t writing: color penciled diagrams and post-it notes in a large bullet journal, one per each novel. (You will see some of this in a future blog post.)
I also love college novels and can’t get enough of them. I thought of setting NSMC at a real college (“John Adams University” is a bit of a joke about George Washington University—a very real college in DC) but I wanted the luxury of building Adams to look and be exactly how I wanted it. And I definitely wanted to capture the feel of college: dorm friends and drama, shitty cafeterias, never having enough money, classes, and having embarrassingly earnest conversations. In some ways my own college experiences are reflected in the book, and in other ways also not. (While Chloe would be eager to hit the club on night one, when this was suggested during my Freshman orientation, I wanted to crawl under my extra long twin bed and die).
Ultimately, who knows where ideas really came from. Stuff floating around your subconscious or the zeitgeist (I did much of the first major revision of this book during the hearings for Brett Kavanaugh.) There were things I wanted to see in thrillers that were coming out but didn’t—more character driven stuff and less reliance and increasingly crazy plot twists. Dramatic irony. Humor. Write the book you want to see in the market but isn’t there yet, they keep saying.
So, I did. And I hope you enjoy it.