Sinner Author Maggie Stiefvater Gets Real…With Rock-Star Werewolves In L.A.

If you’ve never opened a Maggie Stiefvater novel, and have only read the synopses of her books, you might think they would solely appeal to fans of werewolves (Shiver), fairies (Lament), Welsh mythology (The Raven Boys) and, um, rabid water horses (The Scorpio Races). But the truth is, she writes some of the most realistic (and heartrending) fiction about coming of age, depression, poverty, art, and love on the YA shelves today—there just happens to be a bit of magic powering the plot. In her latest release, Sinner, suicidal rock-star-turned-werewolf Cole St. Clair heads from Mercy Falls, Minnesota, to L.A. to win back the heart of troubled ice queen Isabel Culpepper and possibly revive his career by starring in an online reality show with a reputation for destroying its subjects. We caught up with Stiefvater to find out why she decided to write this spinoff of her Shiver trilogy, even after swearing it was done for good.

When did you decide to write Sinner?
Maggie Stiefvater: I think I wrote in the author’s note in the end of [Shiver conclusion] Forever that I wouldn’t be returning to the world of Mercy Falls, and I still can’t imagine that. But in my head, the Cole and Isabel story feels so different because it doesn’t take place in the same state at all. To me, the setting is so important to the book that it completely changes the atmosphere of the entire thing. … [Sinner] is dedicated to readers, and that’s because one of the big reasons that I wrote it is because people ask me all the time, Will you write a sequel for this? Will you follow so and so’s story? Usually I’m saying, no no no, that’s not going to influence what I write. But that happened so many times with Cole and Isabel that I started to wonder what happened with Cole and Isabel.

You’ve said that you feel like you’re a different writer now than you were when you wrote the Shiver trilogy (which was released from 2009–2011). How so?
It’s definitely the way that I look at characters now. I think of it a lot more now like painting a portrait. I used to be a portrait artist before I was an author. When you first learn to paint something that’s totally realistic, it looks just like the person, just like a photograph. And the next step is being able to actually paint a picture that looks like them, but looks like only a version you could do….I was struggling so hard to make them look like real people, and now I like to think they look like real people, but real people that are definitely Maggie Stiefvater characters.

Which means they rip our hearts out.
No one has to cry when reading Sinner! I wrote the Shiver trilogy because I wanted people to cry buckets in public while wearing eye makeup. I don’t need them to do that when reading Sinner. I want them to hug the book at the end and be happy. No tears.

You post drawings of your characters on your blog and Tumblr all the time. Do you write your characters or draw them first?
I think of my characters first in words. No, that’s a lie. I just lied to you. What I actually think of is, I can see the image in my head, but I’m better at writing than I am at art. So it’s easier for me to imagine them first, then to paint a word picture of them. Then once I know them really well, that’s when I can start drawing them. By the time you see them on the blog, that’s because I’ve thought about them enough and written about them enough that I have a better picture in my head.

You’ve also said in interviews that you went through a suicidal time as a teenager. When you were writing about Cole’s suicidal thoughts, did you dive into that personal history?
A lot of times people write about suicide and they never really were there, so there’s a glamorous aspect to it, or sometimes even too dingy, where it’s something dirty and grimy where it could never happen to you, could never happen to a nice white girl from a nice middle-class neighborhood or whatever. I wanted to strip that away. I wanted to make it more realistic, which sounds strange because he turns into a werewolf in his suicidal episodes, but that’s totally how it works!

Cole signs up for a brutally voyeuristic reality show in order to record a new album. Is this meant as a commentary on reality TV?
I actually am really fascinated, not only by reality TV, but also by social media. All of my friends are writers and we’re all very active online. You can see how we all take different approaches to translating who we really are online, and some people have a definite persona, which is very different from what I think is their real-life persona. And some people put so much of themselves out there that you can see people online ripping their hearts out. For me reality TV was a great way to talk about what social media does.

What does Cole’s band NARKOTIKA sound like? Can you compare them to any real-life band?
I love this question and I hate it. I love it because I want to answer it with a list of all of these bands that I love, because I love sharing music. Before I even announced what Sinner was, I put on my Tumblr and on my blog the playlist for it, and I listed all of these songs that I was listening too. I couldn’t believe it, but halfway through my writing process, someone messaged me and said, “I know what book you are writing…from the songs that you’ve posted. It’s Cole and Isabel in California, and he’s come to win her back.” On the other hand, NARKOTIKA is so subjective, because in my head, they’re a band that’s a little bit uncomfortable to listen to. So I want to say for me, when I first started writing the series it was someone like Head Automatica. But now I can listen to Head Automatica when I’m vacuuming or sleeping, so it’s always a moving target for me.

Did you spend a lot of time in Los Angeles to research this book?
Actually, a couple of years ago, my husband said, “You know you could write a book in a nice, sunny place, and that way when we went to research it we could actually be in some place nice for once, instead of being in frozen Minnesota or some cold, miserable rainy British island. And so it was really nice to go and spend a summer vacation in L.A. From now on, all my books are going to take place in super sunny locales. I’m actually lying to you. I’ve actually lied to you twice now.

Now that you’ve written this, do you think you’ll ever write a sequel to The Scorpio Races?
After I was done with The Scorpio Races, I tried desperately to think of a sequel, but I just didn’t have the story to go along with it. So as soon as I think of a story to go on that island. It would not be Sean and Puck’s story, though. Maybe when I’m 50 and old and gray.

We spent more time talking to Maggie Stiefvater about Blue Lily, Lily Blue, book three in her four-part series The Raven Boys (about boarding school boys and a local daughter of psychics searching for a long-lost Welsh King buried in rural Virginia), but you’ll have to wait until October for that! In the meantime, the car-obsessed author is embarking on a 3,000-mile cross-country road trip for Sinner this summer. Check out the dates here.