When the Title Creates the Story: A Guest Post by Margie Fuston
Built around a deadly competition and featuring witches and vampires, this thrilling fantasy will get your heart pounding, both for the action and for the vampire romance. Read on for an exclusive guest post from author Margie Fuston on writing Our Monthly Pick, The Revenant Games.
Paperback $13.99
The Revenant Games (B&N Exclusive Edition)
The Revenant Games (B&N Exclusive Edition)
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Paperback $13.99
All of Us Villains meets Kingdom of the Wicked in this “urgent action-adventure” (Publishers Weekly) following a teen determined to win the competition held by warring vampire and witch kingdoms, only to develop complicated feelings for the vampire she’s supposed to hand over.
All of Us Villains meets Kingdom of the Wicked in this “urgent action-adventure” (Publishers Weekly) following a teen determined to win the competition held by warring vampire and witch kingdoms, only to develop complicated feelings for the vampire she’s supposed to hand over.
Most writers know the agony of completing a manuscript and realizing it needs a title other than Draft 117. Sometimes it feels like coming up with those few words is harder than the 90,000 words that came before. With my second book, which would eventually become Cruel Illusions, I found myself emailing title after title to my editor, hoping to find one that clicked. One of those emails included a long list of potential titles with The Revenant Games among them. My editor was immediately drawn to the title, but she wasn’t sure it totally fit that book.
I agreed. The Revenant Games held the seeds of its own story.
It’s no secret that I love games and competitions. My debut, Vampires, Hearts & Other Dead Things, features a scavenger hunt. I’ve described Cruel Illusions as America’s Got Talent with a lot more bloodshed. Some of my absolute favorite young adult books feature games or trials: The Hunger Games, A Crown of Wishes, An Ember in the Ashes, All of Us Villains. Nothing excites me more as a reader and writer than a competition with life and death stakes. But I’d already written two books that featured types of games or competitions—did I really want to do it again?
The answer was, of course, yes. A revenant is someone brought back from the dead or someone returning after being gone for a long time. I fell in love with the word. What type of game deserved such a title? Perhaps one where the prize was resurrecting a loved one. Fighting for survival is one thing, but how much harder would you fight to bring back someone you’d lost? It’s the type of prize you might willingly risk death for. You might even cross lines you never thought you’d cross to win. My next thought was who would fight the hardest to win such a prize? Someone who felt haunted. Someone who carried guilt. A girl who blamed herself for the death of her sister. I found Bly, and I knew without a doubt that it was her story.
Within twenty-four hours of pitching the title for another book, I emailed my editor back to say that we couldn’t use The Revenant Games because it belonged to another story. From there, I added a certain sad yet charming, red-headed vampire and a very complicated romance that became the heart of the story, and the rest fell into place far easier than any book that came before it.
Sometimes you have to hunt for a title that feels perfect and magical, but sometimes the title inspires the magic all on its own.