#Creative kit spotlight theverge full#
#Creative kit spotlight theverge series#

Katy: I absolutely loved the book Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine. What was your favorite book when you were 10 years old? I like to let these things sit and pick them back up, because if I’m still interested in the ideas months and years down the road, then I know there’s something worth pursuing in there. For There Will Come a Darkness, some of the ideas had been sitting in the back of my mind for three or four years before I even started to brainstorm the book. When two or more of these little story scraps start to fit themselves together, that’s when I’m able to more actively develop the ideas and start brainstorming. I generally have a whole host of ideas, concepts, or simply feelings that I want to explore. Katy: The beginning of my creative process is somewhat of a passive process. What is the first step in your creative process? I love writing advice, but I do feel that the best teachers are stories themselves. And when you read stories that don’t land with you, figure out why that is, too. Pick apart how the construct characters, how they build worlds and how they weave plots together. Study those stories and figure out what it is that makes them so special to you. Katy: My advice would be to seek out other stories and art that make your heart sing or, as I like to say, set you on fire. What advice would you give to young writers/illustrators? I’ll never forget how important it was for a teacher to basically say, ‘I see the passion and the hard work you’ve poured into this project and I trust you to make it the best that it can be.’ It’s something I still think about.

#Creative kit spotlight theverge full#

Kraus was incredibly supportive, but at the same time really let us take full creative control. I was so proud of the show we put together and Ms. But to adapt one of my favorite books and create an entire play based off it that was seen by hundreds of other students and family…it was really the first time I had undertaken a project that ambitious and actually seen it through from start to finish. I had written stories before, but I had never adapted anything, and I had never written anything that I really showed anyone else. Over the course of about a week, on top of all our other school work and extracurricular’s, my friend and I feverishly wrote a script. Kraus, encouraged us to just adapt the book ourselves for the stage–so we did. A friend of mine and I really wanted to direct this stage version of Pride and Prejudice, but about a week before we were supposed to pitch our show to the rest of the drama department, we found out we couldn’t get the rights to the play. Katy: I did theater in high school, which is kind of funny in retrospect because I really wasn’t a good actor, but what I did enjoy was directing.

Tell us about a librarian or educator who made an impact on you. In that way I was able to write about other things that interested me–things like eschatology and cults and ancient history–but ground those ideas in the characters, in what is most important to them, and in what they are willing to do to protect those things. I wanted to explore big questions about fate and choice and self-determination through those relationships. The narrative unfolded pretty organically from building these relationships, like the one between the sisters Ephyra and Beru, or the one between two of the main characters, Jude and Anton, or the one between Hassan and his people. For me, it’s the relationships between characters that really form the story engine. It wasn’t until I came up with the five main characters of There Will Come a Darkness that I really started to flesh out what the story was about.

#Creative kit spotlight theverge series#

Katy: For a long time I just knew I wanted to write a big, epic fantasy series with multiple points of view and cosmic stakes. What inspired you to write There Will Come a Darkness (the first book in the series)? As their destinies collide, they each must figure out if they are going to be the ones to stop the Age of Darkness, or if they will be the ones to start it.

The story follows five characters who are all in some way connected to this final prophecy–an exiled prince, a ruthless killer, a dying girl, a boy on the run, and a faithful leader torn between his duty and his heart. The book takes place one hundred years after the Seven Prophets have disappeared, leaving behind one final prophecy that predicts an Age of Darkness. Katy Rose Pool: There Will Come a Darkness is a fantasy set in a world shaped and guided by the prophecies of the Seven Prophets.