Frances Whiting

And I love telling would-be writers that because there is no other area in your life where, you know, you can't really be, you can't be marked wrong.

There is no wrong.

And I kind of love that.

So with Nocturnals, I knew the beginning.

I knew the ending.

I knew the last sentence, weirdly, before I sat down to write it.

And I knew I wanted a twist.

So that was a start point for me.

I knew that I had these five misfit characters and that something was going to happen and that I had to find a way to resolve it.

I did not know what the twist was going to be, but then as I was writing, it kind of became clear to me which character was going to provide that twist.

And then it was just a matter of making it believable and

That was the hardest part, actually making it believable.

But then if you are a writer and you go to do a twist, I find the trickiest part is just with this particular one, just going back and back and back and back and back and checking that at no point had I inadvertently given it away.

And in one of my checks, and interestingly, it had already been to a

proofreader at Harper as well, I think the first one, but I did a reread and I found this one paragraph where this character said something very casually to another that completely gave it away.

It's just so embarrassing.

People think I knew.

I did not know when I wrote this book that the 90s were going to come back.

But weirdly, I think the reason that the 90s have come back is exactly the reason why I said it in the 90s.

So I said it in the 90s because I wanted to write about a group of teenagers.