Afterworlds
By Scott Westerfeld
Inspiration for the novel
The inspiration for Afterworlds hit me while I was on tour, coming face to face with the incredible YA community that has appeared over the last decade or so. All these readers, bloggers, fan fic writers and fan artists, all these librarians and booksellers and editors, all creating a new engine which has become the fastest growing part of publishing. Something interesting was going on, and I thought it would fun to document it in fictional form.
Novels, of course, aren't really about communities, they're about characters. The most obvious (and most fun) character for me was a young writer working on her first novel, someone for whom the world of YA would be less familiar and more intimidating, if not more exciting, than it is for me.
So Darcy Patel was born. She's just graduated high school, having written a novel in the previous November (she's a Wrimo!), which has been bought by a major publisher. She's deferred college and left home, and has to learn to live on her own at the same time as she rewrites her book. Darcy sees this YA world from a fresh perspective, and she gets to enjoy its absurdities and wonders as a part of her own growing up. I kind of envy her.
Characters – talk about main characters and whether they’re based on anyone (this could be dangerously liable!)
In the last ten years, I've spent a lot of that time collecting funny stories about touring, bookselling, and editorial conflicts. I also love listening to how writers talk to each other about stories, a process which can make for some pretty interesting stories itself. Darcy's half of Afterworlds is full of those memories, so it's roughly 93% true. The characters are composites, though, so there's no one-to-one correspondence between them and real people. You can see individual glimpses here and there, but I will neither confirm nor deny.
The writing process of the dual narrative - did you come up with Lizzie’s story first, or Darcy’s, or did they flow on from one another – how did this work?
I wrote the two threads at the same time as much as possible, bouncing back and forth between Lizzie and Darcy just as the book does. Sometimes one thread would get ahead because I was having more fun with it, so I'd have to rein it in and get back to the other. I wanted the two novels to influence each other, even in ways I couldn't detect myself, because of course Darcy's novel would be influenced by her real life.
For example, when Darcy learns a cool new word, it often shows up in Lizzie's world a few chapters later (or sometimes earlier, because rewriting isn't linear). And as Darcy is learning about love and adult responsibilities, that also transforms the her novel.
That did make keeping track of everything tricky. I took a lot of notes along the way, and used a piece of novel-writing software called Scrivener to archive old drafts of chapters. This helped me see how "Darcy" was editing her novel as she grew up (even though it was really me doing the editing).
