My First Big Break as a Writer

How The Vampire Diaries Got Me a Job in Publishing

I’m still on break this week, but I wanted to pop in and share an interview with y’all. Rolf Potts has a brilliant interview series on his website where he talks to travel writers about their work. I had a great time chatting with him about my three favorite things: writing, travel, and The Vampire Diaries.

Here’s a short excerpt from our conversation. You can read the whole interview here.

Interview Excerpt

What do you consider your first “break” as a writer?

A month into my first semester of online school, The Vampire Diaries premiered on The CW. It was September 2009. New Moon’s release was only three months away, and the pop culture obsession with vampires was in full swing. My best friend and I had planned to hate-watch Vampire Diaries because there was no way it could be as good as Twilight. But as the credits rolled at the end of the pilot, I sat on the couch with my golden retriever absolutely astounded. The pilot alone was orders of magnitude better than Twilight, and I remember thinking then at fifteen years old: “This is what I want to do with my life. I need to get as close to writing Vampire Diaries as possible.”

Seven years later, I got my first job in publishing as an executive assistant at a licensed book publisher. Three months into the job, I was taking minutes while my boss was on the phone with Warner Bros.. Toward the end of the call, he mentioned that our Vampire Diaries book was “in trouble” because its editor had just left the company and no one else had watched all eight seasons of the show. Before this moment, I had no idea we had a Vampire Diaries book under contract. As soon as he hung up, I all but demanded that he give the book to me. This was the first book I edited. It was an important moment in my writing life because it affirmed in a small way that dreams do come true.

The rest of the interview is available here.

I’ll be back next week with the final lesson for Act I. If you’re just now joining us, you can check out the first two lessons on Act I here:

• Act I: How to Write the Opening of a Novel

• Act I: Creating Conflict

See you then,

Kat