Inspired by ghost hunters, ensemble casts and imposter syndrome

This weekend, take a look behind-the-scenes at the inspiration for three YA stories: spooky thriller The Graveyard Shift, by Sophie Dewdney, fantastical Cursed Kingdom, by Sam Spier, and the bloodbath that is Eat the Rich, by Dan Hunt.

The Graveyard Shift, by Sophie Dewdney

Uncanny meets A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder. The Graveyard Shift is a YA ghost novel that follows Willow and Louis, two best friends in their final year of school who have found themselves drifting apart. When Louis ventures off to a graveyard and accidentally summons a powerful demon, their friendship is put to the ultimate test. In a story filled with horror, romance and betrayal, can Willow and Louis restore their friendship, or will they lose the chance to reconnect and be erased from existence forever?

Sophie: When I started the MA, I had one particular story idea set in mind: a YA time-slip piece that I was still struggling developing. I was pretty certain that I was going to stick with it, but around two months into the course, we had a writing prompt about creating a piece surrounding multiple characters and POVs, and just after brainstorming and coming up with random storyline ideas, I had already realised I’d come up with a brand new story, (just from a quick prompt idea)! I think my main inspiration was from watching the show Uncanny, as I’d been listening to the podcast and watching the series around the time that we had been given the prompt. I’ve always been obsessed with hearing other people’s ghost stories and watching different ghost hunting shows in general, so writing my own story about it was ideal, (and so much fun to create)!

Cursed Kingdom, by Sam Spier

Cursed Kingdom is a young adult fantasy novel exploring what happens when someone desperate to be normal discovers she’s destined to save the world. Months before her seventeenth birthday, princess of Erelie, Eleanor discovers she has magic. There’s just one problem. Magic is outlawed, and her uncontrollable powers are threatening everything she holds dear. With unlikely allies by her side, Eleanor must decide whether to embrace the prophecy she’s determined to escape or find another way to save her crumbling world. Lord of the Rings meets Little Women in a story of self-discovery, girlhood and the consequences of power.

Sam: I didn’t really have a plan for my WIP when I started the MA. Early on in the first time, I found some old bits of writing that I’d started when I was a teenager and I felt inspired to pick it back up and try again with the skills and knowledge that I was learning in class. From the second I started getting back into that world, I knew it was the story that I wanted to try and write for my first YA manuscript. 

I always start with character, and I already had my protagonist, Eleanor, pretty fleshed out in my mind, but it was incredibly fulfilling unpicking the characters I’d made when I was younger and making them into complex, interesting and exciting people to write about. All the books I enjoy have huge ensemble casts, and so I knew that that was something I wanted to play around with, and I’m now really happy with my big cast (even if I am terrible at coming up with names!) 

From there, the plot has been developing ever since. I’ve been really inspired by authors who can hold multiple threads of plot and weave them together to create interesting and diverse storylines, so that’s something that I’m constantly aiming for. 

Eat the Rich, by Dan Hunt

A YA supernatural slasher about escaping human sacrifice – think Mean Girls meets Midsommar. Fifteen-year-old Roz is running for her life through the halls of St Kilburn’s Academy for Girls, but what happens when the hunted becomes the hunter? Eat the Rich is about teen rage, class divide, and the horrors of surviving private school as Roz learns that the secret to everlasting wealth isn’t hard work but a pact with an eldritch moon deity. For fans of Scarlette Dunmore’s How to Survive a Horror Movie and Rory Power’s Wilder Girls.

Dan: I wish I could say Eat the Rich was one of those burning passion projects that’d been aflame for years, but there wasn’t a spark. I had to fan the coals before it really got going.

‘Walking Teenage Embarrassment’ - as it was originally called - was a simple response to a prompt given in the first week of the MA: share a time where you felt injustice as a child. I wrote it up, brought it back, and people liked Roz and the voice I’d created for her. She was funny, and so much of her was me: a state school kid with imposter syndrome, going places she never thought she would (or was allowed).

For a while, I left her behind, attached to the idea of writing Ghibli-esque middle-grade fantasy. But when I went back to my roots, reading little YA horrors for inspiration, it clicked. It was a slasher. Some drafts had shapeshifting skinwalkers, others had vengeful cultists, but the more I wrote, the more confident Roz became and, soon, Eat the Rich was a cinematic bloodbath confined to a wintry private school.