Braving the Blank Page: A Guest Post by Rory Power

A thrilling premise that gives way to deep and meaningful character studies and teenage tension. It’s dark, it’s atmospheric and it has a razor sharp edge. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Rory Power on writing Kill Creatures.

This isn’t a spoiler—Nan did it. Last summer she went out into the canyon with her three best friends. Killed them, came back, and told everyone they’d disappeared.

When we meet her one year later in Kill Creatures, she’s still keeping the truth a secret. Not from you, though. Within the first twenty or so pages, you know what Nan did, which means you know why she’s so thrown when one of her victims shows back up alive. And, with any luck, you’ll want to keep reading to find out how on Earth that happened.

Typing it out now, it’s hard to believe that when I first started writing Kill Creatures, I wasn’t sure if any of it would end up in the book at all.

Making plans for my books doesn’t come very naturally to me. That doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes have to make them anyway, but when I do try to outline a story, I often find that it’s missing something key, something I can discover only by braving the blank page.

For Kill Creatures, that missing piece was the heart of Nan’s whole character. Without it, I couldn’t make sense of her. I knew the sound of her voice, by turns pitiful and cold. I knew she was angry about something—my characters usually are—and that she’d been left behind in some way by her friends. I knew, too, the sort of atmosphere I wanted her to live in, a gauzy, eerie dream-summer inspired by things like Picnic at Hanging Rock, the Pied Piper, and The Virgin Suicides. But those pieces weren’t clicking together. Nan’s voice was too vicious, too pointed—it couldn’t exist within the story without puncturing it completely.

There had to be something else. She needed a better grudge to hold. A better secret to keep.

I’d thought about making her a killer before, mentioned the possibility offhand in the last paragraph of an email to my agents. I’d shied away from it, though, worried that it would be off-putting for readers. Finally, thanks to a rewatch of the Pretty Little Liars TV adaptation, I reconsidered.

There’s a scene in the fourth season of the show where one of the main characters, Spencer Hastings, threatens to hit one of her friends with a shovel. She doesn’t—she trips and then wanders away morosely—but whenever I watch that moment, I always wish she would just take the swing. As I watched it this time, Nan at the back of my mind, I knew immediately that Nan would. She would swing, and swing hard. And she’d never regret it, either; she’d want her reader to know about it as soon as possible.

That was enough to send me on my way. I kept writing, kept digging. It turns out there are other secrets Nan is keeping, too. But you’ll have to uncover those for yourself.