Kate Williams on The Inspiration for Never Coming Home

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 Kate Williams, author of Never Coming Home which is the perfect beach read for fans of classics murder mysteries as well as fast-paced, contemporary thrillers.

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?

Never Coming Home is the story of 10 teenage influencers who get invited to an island on what they believe is a high-profile hospitality launch. Once they get there, nothing is what they expected, and they start getting murdered. It’s a reimagining of Agatha Christie’s classic And Then There Were None, laced with a heavy dose of Fyre Festival. I remember reading about Fyre Festival and thinking it sounded like my worst nightmare, and also the perfect setting for some deadly deeds. In short, the inspiration for Never Coming Home came from something old, and something new.  

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

This book was a new concept for me, as my previous books were very character driven, and this one was very plot driven. For this one, I knew where the story would end, so worked backwards from there. The biggest challenges were the pacing and character development. A lot had to happen in this story, and yet the reader couldn’t feel rushed—they still needed time to get to know the characters or else they wouldn’t be emotionally invested in what happened to them. 

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

This didn’t happen as much with the plot as it did with the characters. My original intention was to write trope-y characters who were deliciously unlikeable. However, as I went through drafts, the characters became more complex and real. By the end, something that I hadn’t predicated at all had happened—I’d fallen in love with them and had serious misgivings about killing them off (but I did it anyway, of course.)

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

I get new ideas every day! I have ideas for screenplays, self-published romance, contemporary lit, middle-grade, picture books, graphic novels, you name it! Sometimes I have perfect, punny titles that don’t even have a story to go along with them, but the title itself is so good that I know I have to use it for something, someday. So many ideas, so little time!

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

I’m a mood reader, and a mood writer, so I go with whatever is calling to me the loudest. This is also usually the idea I’ve had the longest. I believe that there is a shared well of ideas out there in the collective unconscious and if you are fortunate enough to call down an idea from this well, you can’t let it wither. If you don’t ever take steps to make that idea into a reality, it will eventually get tired of waiting for you and move on to someone else. It really sucks to see a book pop up that is a book you had thought about writing but never got around to it. 

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?

I have a pit bull of indeterminate age, but we know she’s old. She snores insanely loud, sometimes even when she’s awake. I have also never met a creature who can make so much noise just trying to get comfortable. So while I would love to have her in my office, and she would love to be here, she hangs out elsewhere. She is, however, the only being in my life who I have ever modeled a character off of (in my The Babysitters Coven trilogy, the main character has a pit bull named Pig).

Kate Williams has written for Seventeen, NYLON, Cosmopolitan, Bustle, Vans, Calvin Klein, Urban Outfitters, and many other brands and magazines. She is the author of The Babysitters Coven trilogy: The Babysitters Coven, For Better or Cursed, and Spells Like Teen Spirit.

My Favorite Protagonists Are Difficult Women, Here’s Why

By Kelly Sokol, Author of Breach 

I find it impossible to get to know someone, I mean really get to know someone based on their likes. You like dogs? Yes, me too. You love a good book? Same girl, same. The beach is pretty, you’re right. I also like peace, nature, equality, a runner’s high. Who doesn’t?

Likes are just anodyne, and, really, pretty blah. I know I’m on the way to finding a real friend when I can lean in and whisper, “Yes, I’m a dog person. But I can’t stand doodles”—really it’s the owners of doodles that enrage me, the way they insist on their dogs’ innate right to run around leash-free inside a city of two million people, but I digress. I do love to read, but I’ll pass over plenty of canonical tomes. Running gives me life, but don’t expect to see me at a 5K, because I’m too slow to be competitive at short distances. The beach is peaceful, all sun-gilded waves and coconut oil. Nonetheless, I sit there pining for a mountainscape, the icy lick of a glacial lake as I plunge my toes in. (Really, it’s because of the free-range doodles all over the beach.)

The takeaways, aside from questionable taste allowing me to blog about myself? I like certain dogs better than others, because I have associated one breed’s owners with entitlement. I’m a voracious reader, but not wedded to genre. I have an ego around my running, no matter how much I’d like to deny it. Finally, I’m comfortable showing less skin and will never attain a “bikini-ready” body. Would you have learned that from my likes?

Likes are the prettied up and packaged versions of our dislikes and it’s the dislikes, the hates, the can’t stands, that reveal character. Our likes are vague and emotional. Our dislikes are sense-based, visceral. As early as the year 900, Japanese lady-in-waiting Shei Shonagon wrote a list of “Hateful Things” in her Pillow Book, as well as “Things That Give an Unclean Feeling.” Items on Shonagon’s lists include: “a very ordinary person, who beams inanely as she prattles on and on.” Also, “little sparrows.” Characterizing choices, no?

The same goes for fictional characters. I write women who interest me, women who offer a mirror, even if the reflection in the glass is troubling. All of the characters I write, particularly the female protagonists, are flawed and they prefer to contour those flaws away from public view. They share their likes with the world, trying to convince everyone that’s who they truly are. They hide their dislikes. Hiding is a kind of secret. Where there are secrets, there is narrative tension. Narrative tension makes good fiction.

In The Unprotected, Lara James internally ridicules the coworkers who step out of the corporate fast lane to build families. That is, until she decides she wants a baby and suddenly can’t get pregnant. And once Lara gets what she wants most in the world, after sacrificing her health, career and marriage, she has no idea what to do with the life she created. Likewise, Marleigh in my novel Breach is hell-bent on keeping her family afloat. Even so, she can’t help internally judging the people who purport to help her. Do these behaviors make the characters likable? No. They make them real. To me, that’s more important. I don’t have to like a character to invest in her. I can read on in hopes of comeuppance as passionately as for a dream fulfilled. 

Somewhere along the line, a decision was made that female characters in fiction must be likable. Having protagonists that readers care about certainly makes a writer’s job easier, but no one told Holden Caulfield or Ignatius J. Reilly that they had to be likable. If you search reviews of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, the most consistently negative comments are how unlikable the two point-of-view characters are. I remember reading Flynn’s work and experiencing that like a revelation. People can be despicable and interesting at the same time. So can characters. No one is all good or all bad, not in life or on the page. Characters who struggle with their own way of being in the world fascinate me. I have to hope they do the same for readers.

Maybe I write difficult women because I crave honesty in fiction. Honesty from the mouths, and unedited thoughts, of women can be pretty terrifying, but I can’t get enough.

Kelly Sokol is the author of Breach and The Unprotected, which was featured on NPR and named one of Book Riot's 100 Must-Read Books of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood. She is a Pushcart Prize-nominated author and MFA creative writing graduate. Her work has appeared in Alpinist, UltraRunning Magazine, The Manifest-Station, Connotation Press, and more. She teaches creative writing at The Muse Writers Center. When she is not reading, writing or parenting, Kelly dreams, in color, of the mountains. She can often be found running in the backcountry. She resides in Virginia with her family. For more information, please visit https://www.kellysokol.com