“I am super chill all the time!”
Switching from YA to Adult, overcoming doubts, and some wisdom from Margot Robbie.
Hello! Happy New Year! It is finally 2024, and we are less than two months out from the release of Listen for the Lie! Click here for pre-order links!
A LISTEN FOR THE LIE box!
My publisher has put together an amazing box they’re sending out to some lucky bookish influencers! You can see me unbox it over on Instagram, and here it is:
That’s an advanced copy, a mug with the title of the podcast from the book on it (Listen for the Lie with Ben Owens), and a 285 calorie1 brownie (it’s a thing in the book). I’ve never had one of these influencer boxes before, so I am super excited about this one!
I can’t believe we’re so close to release, but also it feels like it sort of snuck up on me. The wait for this book was pretty long – over two years from the publisher buying it to release – but now it’s right around the corner!
The speed of publication is actually one of the things that’s been really different for me about my adult debut vs the young adult debut. Acquisition to publication of Reboot was only 15 months, which is pretty fast for traditional publishing. In fact, everything about YA back then felt like a frenzied rush, like someone was standing on the sidelines of my career screaming, “go, go, go!!!” Publish as fast as possible, hit the trend on time or perish, submit the next one, go, go, go!
I really didn’t mind the wait this time. Amy of 2013 needed to chill out, and Amy of 2023 was actually old enough and wise enough to do it (mostly, anyway. But I have always very much identified with Leslie Knope when she yells, “I am super chill all the time!” So. My level of chill is relative, maybe).
Transitioning to Adult
Speaking of YA! I wrote last time about how Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train got me thinking about writing my own adult thriller for the first time, but I thought I’d share a bit more about how that process of changing both age category and genre unfolded for me.
In 2018, I was writing the early chapters of All These Monsters over and over (and over and over). The first few chapters of that book focus on Clara’s abusive home life before she leaves to join a monster-hunting squad in Europe. The abuse story line in ATM is very important (it’s the whole point of the book, really, including the title), and so grounding the reader in the reality of that abuse before getting to the sci-fi action stuff was crucial.
I rewrote the early chapters in so many different ways, trying to get it just right in as few words as possible (pacing is everything in YA). A million rewrites later, I managed to do it, but I’d left out a lot of stuff. I wanted to explore some darker themes, themes that seemed better suited for older characters. I decided that I should take whatever it was I was trying to do (it was still murky at that point) and put it in an adult book.
It was months before I started Listen for the Lie, and there were some detours and false starts along the way. I wasn’t able to fully commit to it at first because my contracted YA books came first, and I was nervous about making a sharp turn out of YA and sci-fi/fantasy. Authors are usually advised to stick to what we’re doing, even when things aren’t going that great, because jumping to a whole new category and genre means starting over, which is risky and difficult.
I spent a lot of time trying to talk myself out of writing it. My favorite scenes to write (of every book) have always been the quieter moments, the witty banter and the character revealing scenes, but I still had this bizarre fear that I didn’t know how to write a book with no explosions or fight scenes.
Plus, I wasn’t sure that my idea of adding significant parts of a podcast to the book would even work. I wanted the podcast to unfold mostly in real time, and attempting to get that to line up with Lucy’s chapters and her own discoveries seemed incredibly difficult.2 I had doubts about everything — the writing, the career change, the plot — but I couldn’t stop thinking that if I could pull it off, it could be so great, and so fun.
I was reading this interview with Margot Robbie recently, and she mentioned needing to be 90% sure a project is going to work. Robbie is most famous now for starring in and producing Barbie, but in Hollywood, she’s well known for her production company, LuckyChap, which prioritizes making films by women writers and directors. She talks here about that 90% confidence in Promising Young Woman, one of the films she produced:
I think this is also very true of writing a book, especially when you’re taking a risk and doing something new. I don’t think that most writers sit down with 100% confidence that what we’re doing is going to come together in the end. In fact:
Two years! I’d been writing Listen for the Lie for two years3 and I still wasn’t 100% sure it was working. I can’t really even say that I was 90% sure. Not all the time, anyway. But I think in the moments when it counted — when I decided to start writing it, every time I decided to go back to it, when I queried for a new agent — I was 90% sure, and I managed to ignore that annoying naysaying 10%.
And in the end, it came together! I could, in fact, write a book with no explosions! I did still add in one or two fight scenes, though. Is it really an Amy Tintera book if no one gets punched in the face?
In conclusion, do the thing, even if there’s a voice telling you that can’t or that you shouldn’t. And eat cookies (or a brownie!) whether it comes together or not. You deserve them.
Not actually 285 calories.
“Incredibly difficult” turned out to be an understatement. I had to do two different color-coded outlines, one digital and one on a cork board, and I still felt like my brain was melting half the time.
This is a slow pace for me, and the book probably wouldn’t have taken that long if I hadn’t needed to put it aside for months at a time to write ALL THESE WARRIORS and THE Q.