Writing Wednesdays: Why I decided to start writing adult books

Okay, headline news first, in case you missed it...

I WROTE A BRAND NEW BOOK AND IT’S BEING PUBLISHED!!! I’m now officially an adult writer!

(Please note that this post contains affiliate links.)

Most of you probably know me for my first novel, The Kissing Booth - a Young Adult romance novel, all about friendships and first love.

Hopefully, you’re also aware I have some other YA books out too, all in a similar vein to The Kissing Booth: Rolling Dice and Out of Tune, Cwtch Me If You Can (a short story), more recently, TKB spin-off The Beach House, and still to come, TKB2: Going the Distance.

Now don’t get me wrong: I adore writing YA. I’ve especially loved working on The Kissing Booth series. I'm not saying I'm moving away from YA - just, also into adult fiction.

I have always written the kind of books I want to read.

...and in the last couple of years, I’ve read more adult novels. Chick lit, contemporary women’s fiction, whatever you wanna call it. Cursive tiles and down-on-their-romantic-luck heroines who (almost always) get the guy at the end. 

I LOVE THAT STUFF. Unapologetically. I absolutely adore reading those kinds of books.

And you guys know my motto. You know what I do when I can’t find the kind of book I wanna read.

I write it.

So - that’s exactly what I’ve been doing! To be honest, this started with the fanfics I write: I’d been gradually ageing the characters up in the last few years to be closer to my own age, putting them in new and different situations. 

(But how fanfic has helped me develop my own writing career is a whole other blog post - which, believe me, is coming soon.)

Writing my first Christmas book - in only a month

It Won’t Be Christmas Without You is the first original book I worked on with adult characters (as in, that wasn’t a fanfic). I am a complete sucker for Christmas books and I am just nuts for that time of the year, so it was only a matter of time before I opened up a Word doc one day and started my own Christmas book. 

I’ve done festive short stories before, but December 2017 after I’d been knee-deep in 99p Kindle Christmas chick-lit for about two months (I was travelling a lot for work, so reading a lot) I decided, I was going to write my own. I immediately knew what kind of characters I wanted to write about, and, as per usual, had only a vague idea of the storyline and where it would go and what would happen altogether. 

Once I started, I was writing with a fierce determination - and decided I was going to see if I could finish writing it within a month. 

30 days later, I typed ‘The End’ and sent it off to my agent - and I’m pretty sure the email was something along the lines of ‘so I wrote a thing???? If you.... wanna do something with it?????’ 

(Lucky for me, they did!)

Writing something new has been totally terrifying - and totally wonderful

One of the things I really loved about writing this book was how much new stuff there was to explore - and exactly the kind of things I’d been looking for when I read books myself. 

And I tried something I’ve only done in fanfic before by switching between the POV of the main characters for each chapter. It seemed like such an obvious choice at the time I didn’t even wonder if it was something I ‘could’ (or should!) do. 

I wrote it primarily for myself, and for fun. And I’m in a fortunate position where, having an agent, I could say ‘here’s a thing I’ve done, maybe we can publish it!’ But honestly, I didn’t take it too seriously while I was working on it - which is the main thing for me, when I’m writing. 

The more seriously I think about a book I’m working on, the harder it is to write. I have to have fun with it - and I definitely did with this book.


I'll talk a little more in another post about how I wrote this book in a month, and I might also post about how I found writing an adult book to be different from YA - but if you want to see posts about anything more specific, let me know in the comments! And don't forget to pre-order It Won't Be Christmas Without You while it's still only 99p on Kindle!

PLUS... Another exciting announcement!

Before you go: I've got something really exciting planned for Writing Wednesdays throughout August! 

Each week, I'll be featuring a guest post from a different Wattpad writer - kicking things off next week with Gavin Hetherington, who's talking all about how to know when to delete your entire manuscript. I don't know about you, but I can't wait!

Make sure you're following me on Twitter @Reekles so you don't miss out!