Caraval
Caraval
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Stephanie Garber on Caraval
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
The book she was aching to readAfter roughly 200 rejections across five completed manuscripts, Garber went into her sixth book with a single governing rule: she would write only what she was burning to read herself. That commitment produced a very specific obsession.
When I wrote CARAVAL, I was brutally obsessed with the idea of a magical game that blurs the lines between fantasy and reality.
The rule she set for herself before writing that sixth book was more precise than a vague instruction to follow passion. She drew a sharp line between writing to satisfy a reader’s hunger and writing to satisfy a market or a habit.
Write the book you want to read. This isn’t the same as writing the book you want to write... if you’re writing something just to write it or just to sell it, and not because you are aching to read it, then it’s very likely that no one else will ache to read it either.
The visual mood of the book arrived in a single moment watching Baz Luhrmann’s film adaptation of The Great Gatsby, specifically the party scene that most viewers remember. That image translated directly into a directive she gave herself for every page of Caraval.
When I wrote Caraval I wanted it to feel like a Florence + Machine song meets a Baz Luhrmann movie—I wanted it to be bold and colorful and a little over the top.
bookpeopleteens.wordpress.com, “Interview with Stephanie Garber – BookPeople’s Teen Press Corps”The character of Legend, the elusive and mythologized master of Caraval’s immersive game-world, had a stranger origin than the book itself. Garber had bought Marie Lu’s novel assuming it starred a character by that name, held onto the unfulfilled idea for years, and then heard a song on the radio that gave her everything she needed.
The song Centuries by Fall Out Boy. I came up with Legend’s character and backstory, as soon as I heard the lyrics: ‘Some legends are told. Some turn to dust or to gold / But you will remember me / Remember me for centuries...’ I listened to this entire song on repeat as I wrote out Legend’s entire history.
How she wrote it
World before story, uncertainty by designGarber spent over a year gathering images and atmospheres on Pinterest before she had a plot. She did not begin with characters or stakes. The game-world of Caraval existed as a collection of feelings she wanted to inhabit before she knew what anyone would lose or gain inside it.
The story and the world took shape separately. I had the world before the story.
When Garber finally finished the manuscript and signed with agent Jenny Bent, the feedback arrived immediately: the lush, sensory description that felt like excess on the page was actually the point, and she needed more of it. She and Bent spent roughly two months in intensive revision before the book went on submission, and that process required Garber to give herself explicit permission to exceed what felt tasteful.
When I first wrote Caraval I thought I was being really descriptive, and I signed with an agent and she’s like, ‘Oh, no, you need to take this further.’ [paraphrased from audio]
The novel’s central structural question, whether anything happening inside Caraval’s elaborate performance is real or staged, is the engine of its suspense. Garber held that question open not just for the reader but for herself, writing two parallel backstories for key characters simultaneously so that neither the real version nor the performance version was yet true while she was drafting.
I kept it a secret for myself, what was real and what was a game, until for certain characters I wrote out like two different possible backstories. [paraphrased from audio]
Julian, the morally complicated sailor who pulls the protagonist Scarlett deeper into Caraval’s world, was not planned. He arrived in the second chapter and would not be written out. Garber also tested making him Legend, the game’s mythical creator, plotted that version through to its conclusion, and pulled back when she saw where it led.
I did not intend to make him a significant character. He just showed up, and I just kept throwing him in more and more to see what would happen. [paraphrased from audio]
Garber sent the finished manuscript to her editor as a self-contained standalone, with an epilogue that closed the story. The trilogy that Caraval eventually became was not a plan she arrived with but a consequence she discovered. The third book became necessary only after she was already writing the second.
I wrote it as a standalone. Um, it had a very like, I had a different epilogue that wrapped it up and I wanted to do a companion novel. [paraphrased from audio]
The personal thread
Pulling from fear, pulling from loveScarlett’s bond with her younger sister Tella, the relationship that sets the entire plot in motion, came from the closest friendship in Garber’s own life. Her real sister is her closest friend, and writing that relationship in Caraval required crossing a threshold of vulnerability she had avoided in her previous five manuscripts.
It was the first time in my writing where I was like, ‘Okay, I’m gonna be more vulnerable than I’m comfortable with.’ So I pulled like a lot of the emotions from like how I feel about my sister and how I feel about that relationship. [paraphrased from audio]
The vulnerability extended beyond the sister relationship. Garber discovered while building Scarlett’s character that she shares a form of synesthesia with her, a neurological trait in which senses cross so that emotions or sounds can register as colors. Embedding that detail meant more of herself was on the page than in any earlier work, and she felt it.
I put so many pieces of myself in Scarlett, so many thoughts and insecurities and fears and it was really, really terrifying to do it. But it’s also been so rewarding over the last decade to hear people say that they connect to this character and they relate to this character... a lot of her is real. [paraphrased from audio]
What she wants us to sit with
What’s real, and what love actually costsThe game at the center of Caraval is designed so that players, including the protagonist Scarlett, can never be sure whether what they are experiencing is genuine or staged. Garber kept that ambiguity unresolved in her own drafts so she could feel it as a writer before asking readers to feel it. She was clear about what she wanted that uncertainty to do.
I wanted the focus to be like, ‘What’s real and what’s just part of the game?’ [paraphrased from audio]
The trilogy’s emotional argument about love, which the first book establishes through the sacrifices Scarlett makes for Tella, is something Garber sharpened into a specific claim at BookCon 2019. The claim is less about romance than about the structure of any genuine commitment.
I think love is not selfish. And so I think a lot of times... love is making this choice for someone else. Like you’re choosing... a commitment, and it’s choosing not to be selfish, and to choose them over what you want. [paraphrased from audio]
When BookTok brought a new generation of readers to Caraval years after its 2017 publication, the renewed attention mattered to Garber in a way she connected directly to the risk she had taken in writing the book. The personal cost of that vulnerability is what made the connection feel like something beyond a commercial second wind.
It feels really special to me whenever people connect with those books, because they came from such a personal place.
Caraval began as the book Garber had to write after 200 rejections, built from an unfulfilled want, a film frame, a song lyric, and the closest relationship in her life. That it found its readers twice is the consequence of how much of herself she agreed to leave on the page.