First Draft Episode #191: Ryan Graudin

Ryan Graudin, New York Times bestselling author of the Wolf by Wolf series, as well as Invictus and The Walled City, talks about staging Redwall battles in the backyard, how bad teachers inspired her love of history, and how restrictions at key times in her life led her imagination to flourish.

Links and Topics Mentioned In This Episode

• The Redwall series by Brian Jacques

• The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis and The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander were among the fantasy stories Ryan devoured after she discovered Redwall

• AIM: AOL instant messenger

• Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine was a novel Ryan devoured, and was so upset by the fact that it didn’t have a sequel that she made her first foray into fan fiction

• Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

• Bret Lott author of Oprah Book Club pick Jewel, who taught Ryan at the College of Charleston, where she majored in creative writing

• Cathedrals by Raymond Carver was the kind of high literary fiction that was all Ryan was allowed to write about in college (she turned to fantasy after graduation)

• Kowloon, the Walled City in Hong Kong that inspired Ryan to write The Walled City

• Jackie Pullinger, a woman who worked inside Kowloon for 25 years, and author of Chasing the Dragon: One Woman’s Struggle Against the Darkness of Hong Kong’s Drug Den and A Crack in the Wall: The Life and Death of Kowloon Walled City. Hearing her story inspired Ryan to explore Kowloon and to write The Walled City

• SNIS: Shiny New Idea Syndrome

• Anata No Warehouse, an arcade in Tokyo that replicates Kowloon Walled City in painstaking detail

• Bloodsport, the Jean Claude Van Damme movie in which certain scenes were filmed in Kowloon Walled City

• Ryan’s short pitch for Wolf by Wolf is: Code Name Verity (by Elizabeth Wein) meets Inglorious Basterds (movie) meets X-Men (comic book and movie series)

• The Leviathan Trilogy by Scott Westerfeld, which is a fantasy world that takes place in an alternate World War I, which inspired Ryan’s approach to World War II in Wolf by Wolf

• Alvina Ling, VP, Editor-in-Chief of Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, was Ryan’s editor for The Walled City, Wolf by Wolf, and Blood for Blood

• YALLFEST, an annual young adult book festival that takes place in Ryan’s hometown of Charleston, S.C.

• Ryan asked Alexandra Bracken, author of Passenger, for advice on writing time travel. Alex told her, “Run--don’t do it,” but Ryan went ahead and did it anyway

• Pam Gruber is a Senior Editor at Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, and she was Ryan’s editor for Invictus

• Ryan’s next book, a stand-alone YA, is pitched as Lost meets Westworld meets Black Mirror (her nickname for it is TwistyAFBook)

• Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clark was one of the books Ryan may not have read unless she was in South Korea with limited access to English-word books

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