Ann Brashares on Building Emotional Complexities in Characters & Writing Challenging Scenes

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Ann Brashares is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series, which has sold over 8.7 million copies. Booklist hailed Ann’s newest book The Whole Thing Together as “quintessential Brashares”, it’s a story that explores fractured families, first love, and loss.

In Ann’s episode, we jump right into the inspiration behind “The Sisterhood of The Traveling Pants” and how she made the transition from the original Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants to Sisterhood Everlasting. Ann also shares the inspiration behind her newest book and we discuss how she explores the emotional complexities of her characters.

We discover how reading became a refuge for Ann throughout her childhood and how she now finds time to write with a busy family schedule. We also get into the fundamentals of writing challenging and personal scenes in your stories and why it’s so important to surround yourself with trustworthy accountability partners. Ann shares tips about joining a book club and how to approach it in a way that specifically helps to improve your craft at writing.

For listeners working on query letters, Ann walks us through how being personal and specific in your query letter can attract literary agents.

Happy listening!

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“In order to get going, I just need to write.”

-Ann Brashares

“You really just have to liberate yourself to try things, take risks, and write really badly sometimes if necessary.”

-Ann Brashares

“I was a reader certainly before I was a writer and I just loved getting involved in stories”

-Ann Brashares

What You’ll Learn From This Episode:

- How reading became a refuge for Ann during her childhood
- Ann shares a snapshot of her new book The Whole Thing Together
- How Ann explores the emotional complexities of her characters
- How to write challenging and personal scenes in your stories
- The importance of surrounding yourself with trustworthy accountability partners
- How joining a book club can help improve your craft at writing
- The inspiration behind Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
- How to find the time to write with a busy family schedule
- How Ann made the transition from the original Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants to Sisterhood Everlasting
- How being personal and specific in your query letter can attract literary agents

Ann Brashares, beloved author of the bestselling The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series, which has sold over 8.7 million copies in all formats, is back with another unforgettable story about fractured families, first love, and loss in her latest novel, THE WHOLE THING TOGETHER. Readers will feel the sand between their toes and smell the salty air of Brashares’s Long Island beach town setting, which serves as the backdrop for Sasha and Ray’s unusual and budding relationship. Summer for Sasha and Ray means the sprawling old house on Long Island. Since they were children, they’ve shared almost everything—reading the same books, running down the same sandy footpaths to the beach, eating peaches from the same market, laughing around the same sun-soaked dining table. Even sleeping in the same bed, on the very same worn cotton sheets. But they’ve never met.

Sasha’s dad was once married to Ray’s mom, and together they had three daughters: Emma, the perfectionist; Mattie, the beauty; and Quinn, the favorite. But the marriage crumbled and the bitterness lingered. Now there are two new families—and neither one will give up the beach house that holds the memories, happy and sad, of summers past. The choices we make come back to haunt us; the effect on our destinies ripples out of our control . . . or does it? This summer, the lives of Sasha, Ray, and their siblings intersect in ways none of them ever dreamed, in a novel about family relationships, keeping secrets, and most of all, love.

Learn More About Ann Brashares

Ann Brashares is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series, The Here and Now, 3 Willows, The Last Summer (of You & Me), and My Name Is Memory. She lives in New York City with her family.