Michelle Knudsen: Five Things I Learned Writing Into The Wild Magic

Every day at recess, eleven-year-old Bevvy heads for the shade of her favorite tree—a safe space where she can avoid the other kids and escape into her fantasy books. When she finds a new girl sitting in her spot one afternoon, Bevvy wonders if she might finally have found a friend. But Cat is not exactly friendly. She even starts a fight with Bevvy’s worst enemy and then abandons her to face the consequences.

Later, Cat’s apology is cut short when a strange car rolls up. Cat tells Bevvy to run, drags her into the woods, and then opens a kind of doorway . . . in the air. Bevvy knows magic when she sees it, but this isn’t like one of her books. The world they escape to—teeming with strange creatures, spellcasters, and dragons—is shockingly real. It’s a world at war, with those who wield wild magic battling dark sorcerers.

Bevvy soon discovers that she has her own connection to the wild magic as both girls get caught up in the struggle. But Cat is keeping many secrets. With so much at stake, can Bevvy trust that Cat is truly a friend? And can she trust herself with her newfound power?

1. Your book may have a great origin story! Or it may not!

My last picture book (Luigi, the Spider Who Wanted to Be a Kitten) was inspired by a real-life experience in which I went to stay at a friend’s place in the country while I was between apartments and discovered that a giant spider was also staying at my friend’s place in the country. I’ve always been terrified of spiders, and while I’m better about them than I used to be, I am still not thrilled about sharing indoor space with them. Especially giant country spiders that are like 1000 times bigger than city spiders. (This is not true but it feels true.) Small spiders I can trap in a cup and put outside (I’m not a murderer), but this guy was enormous and would not be contained by human drinkware. So … I named him Luigi and talked to him a lot (mostly about how he should stay far away from me, especially while I was sleeping) and this helped me feel a bit less scared and we both survived our brief cohabitation. Later, in my new home, I wrote a book about a giant spider who was also looking for a new home. It’s a fun story I can tell at book events, and since people often ask where you got the idea for a thing, it’s a relief to have a solid answer.

I do not have a solid answer for Into the Wild Magic. This book started with a single scene of two girls meeting in a schoolyard, but I don’t know where that scene came from or why. Novels, for me, usually grow out of many things that eventually come to connect in ways I didn’t originally see. This makes it harder to answer the question “Where did you get the idea for this book?” but that’s okay. The answer is messy and indirect and basically comes down to: I recognized that there was something in that original scene that spoke to me, and I kept coming back to it and writing a little more and a little more until it started to grow into a real story. Which brings me to:

2. If you love something, there’s probably a reason.

I loved the scene of these two girls, even though I didn’t yet know who they were or what was going on. I kept those 685 words in a file for over a year, thinking about them, rereading them, wondering about them, until my writing brain finally felt that little excited spark of keep going. But before that exciting sparky stage, there was the equally important and far-less-fun waiting stage. This is when some part of your subconscious is working on the story without you. Stephen King calls it “the boys in the basement”; Damon Knight in his book Creating Short Fiction (formative in my high school writing years) called it “collaborating with Fred.”

Sometimes you write a bit of a thing and you know there’s nothing there. (Ask me about my never-finished story about George, the spear of asparagus.) Sometimes you write a bit of a thing and it’s vague or whatever but there’s something you love—something you don’t want to just delete and move on from. That’s something to pay attention to. Even if it takes you a very long time to figure out what comes next.

3. You will never get over that one terrible summer at sleepaway camp.

I have a lot of wonderful summer camp memories, but one year a group of kids full-on pretended to be my friends in order to torture and humiliate me. I had an afterschool-special moment where I overheard them talking about me on the other side of an open window and finally realized the truth of what was going on. I am now a grown-ass woman, and obviously totally past the trauma of that betrayal … except I’m not, not really. That feeling of horrible understanding that you are wrong about people you thought liked you, that they actually kind of hate you, and the inevitable follow-up questions of Is it your fault? Are you a bad person? Are you unlovable in some essential way that everyone can see but you? … those are questions that burrow deep into your soul, into your still-developing sense of self, and some part of you will be wrestling with them for the rest of your life. If you’re a writer, this means that you will write a lot about friendship, and about what it means to be a good person, and you will try to create worlds in which your characters make true connections and heal those deep fears that you may still be harboring deep within yourself. This is not a bad thing, although it can be startling to realize that there are some themes you will always come back to no matter what else you think you’re writing about.

4. It’s okay to change your process.

Writing a novel is hard. When you do it once, you may briefly believe that now you Know How to Write a Novel and that the next one will be relatively easy in comparison. You’ve got the roadmap now, and all you need to do is follow it. This might be true for some people, but I don’t think I know any of them. But you do discover some things that work. I know that it helps me to keep a novel journal for each book, to listen to certain songs on repeat during long walks to work out plot problems, and to color-code sections of notes and revision stages in Scrivener in pretty colors to please my crow brain during the hours/days/weeks/years of writing. But while writing this book, I learned a few new things and explored new methods of revising that I much prefer to what I’ve done in the past. Also, I made cool maps and watched amazing slow-motion videos of flying moths. Will these things be part of my process for the next book? Maybe! Or maybe my next book will need different process tweaks. Learning not to hold too tightly to what has worked before leaves you more open for what other things might work now.

5. You can write through Big Life Things.

Over the course of writing this book, I revised and sold and promoted a different book, met and dated the man I would eventually marry, moved in with the man and his two children, squished my apartment office into a tiny corner of our bedroom, adopted two cats, got engaged, got married, became a stepmom, and adopted a corn snake. Also, this big global pandemic happened shortly after the moving-in-together and adopting-cats thing. We had six living creatures (no snake yet) in a two-bedroom apartment under lockdown, two of whom needed help to do remote school every day and one of whom (me) had a full-time work-from-home contract editing job and two books under deadline. Also in that window, we planned and executed our tiny, lovely, outdoor, Covid-era wedding.

Small life things (unplanned errands, ill-timed phone calls, children or pets or spouses who dare to need me while I am working) can sometimes, in the moment, feel as if they may completely derail my writing for the day. But then I remember the conditions under which I wrote in 2020 and early 2021, and I recall that it is possible to write even when the world is terrifying and you have no ideal quiet time anymore and there are all kinds of things to worry about that objectively are far more important than your little book. So I try to keep that in mind, and also try to remember that making art is important even (especially) when big or bad (or both) things are happening in the world. Sometimes it’s also exactly the thing will help you make it through.

Michelle Knudsen is a New York Times best-selling author of more than 50 books for young readers, including the award-winning picture book Library Lion (Time magazine’s 100 Best Children’s Books of All Time) and the novels The Dragon of Trelian (Kids’ Indie Next List; VOYA Top Shelf Fiction for Middle School Readers) and Evil Librarian (YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults; Sid Fleischman Humor Award). She also sometimes writes short stories for older readers, one of which (“The Pigeon,” Drabblecast 476) was a 2023 BSFA finalist for best audio fiction. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with three humans, two cats, and one snake.

Michelle Knudsen: Website | Instagram | Bluesky

Into the Wild Magic: Bookshop.org | Lofty Pigeon Books (for signed/personalized copies!) | Amazon | B&N | Kobo | Libro.fm | Audible