Ep 191: Ryan Graudin

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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