S5 E9 V.E. Schwab: At the End of a Trilogy

V. E. Schwab (0:00)

Proud, complete, and relieved. Hello, hello, I'm V.

Jenna Maurice (0:15)

E.

V. E. Schwab (0:15)

Schwab, and welcome to No Write Way, a podcast in which I convince other writers to confide in me about their own creative process in the hopes of proving that there is, in fact, no right way to write.

Jenna Maurice (0:29)

Hi, hi, it's producer Jenna. Today's guest has written a lot of books.

She's probably the reason you're listening to this podcast. She's given us parallel London's, very complicated villains, immortal souls, haunted houses, and some of the most wonderfully complex people you could ever hope to spend a few hundred pages with. She is, of course, the brilliant V. E. Schwab, my bestie, and she's been a guest on this podcast twice before, talking about her own writing process as well as writing with a partner. So if you haven't heard those episodes, put them on your list. And with Victoria's coming out this year, she has officially made it to the other side of her second trilogy, which I think gives us a pretty excellent excuse to talk about what it actually takes to write one. So today, we're getting into the craft of trilogies and just how that craft has evolved over time, how you know a story needs three books, what changes as a writer from book to book, what happens when years pass between them, and what it's like to come back to a world you've been carrying around in your own head for a very long time. Victoria, welcome back to No Write Way.

V. E. Schwab (1:36)

Thank you so much for having me. Such a good introduction. Oh my God.

Jenna Maurice (1:41)

I just love scheduling you on your own podcast.

V. E. Schwab (1:44)

I also just love hearing all those things because I'm like, I don't know. The answer is, I don't know.

Jenna Maurice (1:50)

You know, we're gonna find out bit by bit here as we go along. And, you know, we always ask, when I say we, I mean you, you always ask on this podcast where, how, when you are. We're in different places.

V. E. Schwab (2:06)

Yeah, I'm sitting on the floor of my Edinburgh flat because I have a puzzle going on the table where we normally record. It's a real, real hairy situation here because I'm watching both of my cats. I, the puzzle table.

And there is a chance that one of them will mess shit up in the time it takes us to record this because they don't like it when I'm on a video chat and not paying attention to them.

Jenna Maurice (2:32)

They are always right up in the computer wanting to be on the video.

V. E. Schwab (2:37)

They are.

Jenna Maurice (2:38)

I just want to mention that this is, this is going to be a spoiler free convo.

V. E. Schwab (2:42)

Oh, yeah.

Jenna Maurice (2:43)

We're not talking, we're not spoiling Victorious because it is out. Well, we're recording this before it's out, but when it comes out, it's going to be out this week.

V. E. Schwab (2:53)

Oh, God.

Jenna Maurice (2:54)

We're getting into trilogies here today because guess what? You have written two of them now. You're on the other side.

V. E. Schwab (3:01)

Yeah.

Jenna Maurice (3:02)

Of two of them.

V. E. Schwab (3:03)

Two really different ones.

Jenna Maurice (3:05)

Two super different ones and you wrote them really, really differently in different timelines. We will definitely get into that. But the first question I want to ask you, Victoria, is how do you know when you start writing a book that it's going to be a trilogy?

This is a weird question maybe for this one because you wrote out of the two trilogies, the first books are Vicious and then A Darker Shade of Magic, and you wrote those back to back.

V. E. Schwab (3:32)

Yeah.

People always think that Vicious was originally a standalone, but it was never a standalone for me. It was always a trilogy for me. It's just that it was coming out at a time when I didn't have the career security of knowing that there would be like an audience to buy into a trilogy, and I had just had a trilogy, what was supposed to be my first trilogy, my first YA trilogy, The Archive, had been aborted three books or two books into three. And so I didn't. And so it just ended on a cliffhanger. And I never wanted to have my readers go through that experience unintentionally again. Obviously, Gathering of Shadows would end on a brutal cliffhanger for the Shades of Magic trilogy. But for me, it was really important that Vicious, Vengeful, and Victorious, that they, at least the first two, could stand by themselves. So people often think that I just like, I was like, came back around and I was like, wow, those book sales sure were nice. I guess I'll just write more.