YA Legend Maggie Stiefvater Talks Bringing The Raven Boys to a New Medium, Her Adult Debut, and More

 Paste: Obviously, a graphic novel can’t be a sort of page-for-page version of the book, but how did you decide on the most important elements—lines, character beats, unspoken moments—that had to make it through the transition?

 Stiefvater: We have two things on our side.

One, I create through permutations—when I write, I continually imagine and reimagine different-sized and shaped boxes to fit the story in, a sort of writing by iterative adaptation. So for me it feels quite natural to imagine different formats for the same story. I have no compunction making brutal cuts or squashing together moments.

Two, we are a team of superfans. Even our editor at Penguin Teen, Meriam Metoui, has been a fan since college. This means that every draft is peppered with comments saying ‘can we add this line back in’ ‘I think fans will miss this moment the most’ ‘possible to preserve this element for existing fans’? Obviously, you can’t keep everything. But we did our best to make it feel the same as the original.

 Paste: So much of The Raven Boys lives in its setting and the descriptions of the world these characters inhabit — what was most important to you about bringing that element of the book more fully alive in this way?

Stiefvater: I think The Raven Cycle is a noisy work. I filled it with specifics that were important to me, and then did my best to prioritize the parts I wanted the reader to pay the most attention to. To my mind, that gives it a propulsive but dreamlike quality—you’re turning pages, but you’re not exactly sure precisely where the sense of movement is coming from, since it is covered with so much stuff.

The graphic novel is also filled with stuff. It’s a maximalist work. One of the reasons why I was drawn to Sas’ work was because she’s not just a character artist; she’s very good at populating the background. And not just with the lovely vistas and ancient trees of the natural world, but also unforgiving elements like cars and architectural features. That shared noisiness helps it feel both grounded and dreamy, like the original.

Paste: Graphic novels, generally, are HUGE right now, especially among younger readers. (I think they’re pretty much all my niece reads?) What do you think it is about this more visual medium of storytelling that’s appealing to younger audiences at this particular moment?

 Steifvater: I don’t think teens have changed; I think YA has changed.

It’s easy to understand how it happened: the readers who grew up with YA have stayed in YA, so the category is now designed for twenty-somethings. Those are still young adults, of course, and they obviously are thriving with a category of their own. But a fifteen-year-old has as much in common with a twenty-four-year-old as they do with a seventy or a seven-year-old. Where do they go to find coming-of-age adventure stories written for actual teens?

 YA graphic novel creators have risen admirably to the challenge of creating funky, genre-bending, experimental bildungsromane.

 I’m not sure where The Raven Cycle would go if it came out today! Weirdly, I think it would probably have a less constrained time in either adult or in children’s. YA is such a young genre; too soon to know its ultimate fate or shape.

Paste: The Raven Boys is (somehow!) over a decade old now, and it feels like it’s more popular than ever. How did it feel getting to revisit them all again in this new way? What is it about these characters and their story that still speaks to readers now do you think? 

Stiefvater: It was nice to revisit it like this, with the ink dried on the original series for so many years. I don’t know how I could have adapted it while it was still ongoing . . . how would I have known what I could afford to cut and what I could afford to expand? With all the books done, it’s much easier to see, for instance, that a character from book four could be brought in earlier in the series, and that other characters or plot elements can be minimized. In general, I think the best thing that ever happened to the Raven Cycle was its completion. As installments, the books were fine. As a finite whole written in four discrete chapters? So much better. It makes more sense once you know what it was trying to do.

As far as its longevity . . . I think it is both uncool and truthful. These teens aren’t trendy. Dusty little Henrietta, Virginia, still seems plausible; very little has changed about the social dynamics of that part of the state except that it’s a little more populated and a lot more diverse than when these books first came out. And people have cell phones now. But also, I worked very hard to draw my own friend group shape with as much truth as possible, and that shape is still a common one today. Humans remain human, attracted and repelled by predictable forces.

I think that makes teens just as likely to say “I’m a Gansey” “I’m a Blue” “I’m an Adam” “I’m a Ronan” as they did twelve years ago. Twelve! Twelve years! Gosh.

Paste: Like many YA authors this year, you also took the leap into writing adult fiction with The Listeners, which is one part fantasy and one part historical fiction. Did writing an adult book feel very different from writing a YA novel? Was it easier, more difficult, or just stressful in a different way?

 Stiefvater: I actually decided to move into adult back in 2018, but it took me that long to write the book. A lot of my peers made the more logical—and to my mind, smoother—shift into adult genre fiction, which shares a lot of storytelling rules with YA. Romance, fantasy, horror, thriller: they’re all immediate storytelling forms, just like YA.

 But I wanted to write what I was reading, general fiction, which has very different rules. It was daunting to know that if I did it right, I would please many of my readers who had also made the transition into general fiction… and displease many of my readers who were choosing to stay in genre categories. So out came THE LISTENERS, a book that I think, like the Raven Cycle, will make more sense in time. After four adult Maggie Stiefvaters are sitting on the shelf, I feel like people will say ‘oh, sure, I see the plan.’

 (Maggie writes more on this topic on her Substack here: Choose Your Fighter: YA versus Adult)

 Paste: The Listeners also has this really vivid and lived-in setting, which I’ve decided to accept is just a cool hallmark of your writing. What makes that element of your stories so important to you?

I feel like I had to examine my entire personality in order to answer this question. Why is this important to me? I guess. . . I guess . . . it’s just what I remember, as a reader. I don’t remember the books I read. I remember the books I lived in.

Paste: And, because I guess you don’t sleep, there’s even a movie of Shiver in the works! Can you tell us anything about it or what to expect?

I am a busy human, but this one’s easy: I don’t lose sleep with the Shiver movie going on because I don’t have a lot to do with it! I did get to see the script and work with them on that, but after that, the baby went to kindergarten, and I don’t know how it’s doing, apart from knowing it’s wrapped filming and is in post-production. 

I can tell you that the last time I saw the script, though, it was strange, romantic, funny, and had German poetry in it, so that seems like a good start.

 Paste: Not that I suspect you have a ton of time for this, given everything you’re working on, but it’s my favorite question to ask people when I talk to them—what are you reading right now? 

Stiefvater: I must read while I’m writing. I constantly pour fiction and nonfiction into my brain, or else words stop making sense. My reads always feel a little stodgier than the ones I see other authors recommending, but I think that’s who I am.

A recent fiction title: The History of Sound by Ben Shattuck just came out in paperback, and I have yet to stop recommending Piranesi by Susanna Clarke.

A recent nonfiction title I just read for my next project: Christ Stopped at Eboli, by Carlo Levi.

And you didn’t ask what I was listening to, but I’m loving the new Saint Motel, the sort of newish RÜFÜS DU SOL, and the not new Franz Ferdinand Always Ascending, and the extremely not new Ralph Vaughan Williams arrangement of “Bushes and Briars” performed by Quartonal.

Both The Raven Boys graphic novel and The Listeners are available wherever books are sold. 

Lacy Baugher Milas writes about Books and TV at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter and Bluesky at @LacyMB