Into the Blue: A Love Story
Into the Blue: A Love Story
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Emma Brodie on Into the Blue: A Love Story
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A character who arrived uninvitedNoah Drew, the male lead of the novel, was not a planned creation. He showed up during a walk, fully formed enough to demand her attention, and he brought the entire world of the book with him.
I was taking a walk, listening to Radiohead, and suddenly there he was — both magnetic and enigmatic. He was the one who introduced me to the rest of the world and to AJ.
Once she had a character to anchor the story, she needed a force of connection large enough to carry the weight of a contemporary love story. She reached for the biggest models she knew.
I wanted to write a cosmic connection a la Romeo and Juliet, Cathy and Heathcliff, or the Force-bond in ‘Star Wars.’
The specific vehicle for that cosmic connection had to come from somewhere real. She settled on improv after spending her early twenties at UCB in New York watching performers achieve something she found almost inexplicable, a shared frequency she could observe but never fully inhabit herself.
I wanted them to have a psychic level of intuitiveness, and the only place I’d ever seen that was in classes at UCB in New York City in my 20s. I’ve seen people actually guess what the other person is thinking.
Her own improv experience had a ceiling. She describes herself as passable, someone who spent scenes monitoring and analyzing the people around her rather than surrendering to them. That gap between watching and trusting became the engine of what AJ and Noah have to learn.
How she wrote it
180,000 words and the force as a guideHer debut, Songs in Ursa Major, was a controlled construction. This book was the opposite. She came to it after nearly two years unable to write following the emotional cost of that first publication, and she gave herself different rules entirely.
On URSA MAJOR, I was a woman with a plan; that book is constructed in fifty chapters of a prescribed length, and that was all the space I gave myself to tell the story. By comparison, writing INTO THE BLUE felt like Luke taking off the visor at the end of A NEW HOPE and letting the force be his guide — I let the feel of the story and the characters dictate the length and pacing of the first draft.
Letting the story breathe had a consequence she hadn’t anticipated. The first draft arrived at more than twice the length of an average commercial novel, requiring her and her team to cut enough material to fill a book of its own.
This book came out—how shall we say?—long. 180k words, to be exact (an average commercial novel is 90k words, for context).
Writing the romantic scenes demanded a specific two-stage discipline. The first draft moved fast, pulling whatever language was available. Revision meant returning to ask whether any given phrase had been heard before. But she built in a deliberate exception to that rule.
There’s a certain elegance in knowing when you want to use Heinz tomato ketchup. By that I mean: the generic hot-romance-phrases that just work. I want great quality beef, maybe a brioche bun — but the condiment is always going to be Heinz.
The fictional sci-fi series embedded in Part II of the novel, in which AJ and Noah are cast together seven years after their first summer, was not just setting. It solved a structural problem that had no other clean solution.
As AJ learned how to improvise, I was sort of relearning how to play and be spontaneous on the page.
The show gave her a way to let the relationship develop visibly without forcing the characters to act on feelings the situation made impossible. Readers could watch AJ and Noah tell the truth in the only register available to them.
The parallel between AJ’s arc and her own was not planned in advance. Publishing her debut had left her genuinely uncertain whether she wanted to write another book, and the re-entry happened through the character rather than despite her.
As the characters learned to improvise and play again, I found my joy again while writing the story. [paraphrased from audio]
The personal thread
The vulnerability she couldn’t fakeLong before the novel existed, she had a clear-eyed account of where her own improv practice hit its limit. The gap she describes is exactly the gap the book asks its characters to close.
I was passable. But I didn’t have that trust. I can’t be that vulnerable. Secretly, I was just monitoring everyone and analyzing; like, ‘Oh, I bet you have an interesting relationship with your father.’
What she wants us to sit with
The thing you talked yourself out ofShe framed the book’s central question not as a theme but as a conversation she wants to have with each reader directly. The novel, in her account, is less about AJ and Noah than about a pattern she thinks is almost universal.
If I had a one-on-one conversation with every reader, it would be like, ‘Was there something in your life that you tried really hard to talk yourself out of?’ And my question is, did you regret it, and is that thing really gone? Because I think that in a lot of ways, this book is about figuring out what lights you up and what your life would actually look like if you go for that thing.
Fandom in the novel is not background color. She mapped it across all four parts of the book as a structure that models what permission looks like when someone else grants it to themselves first. The Blue Coats, the diehard followers of the fictional sci-fi series, carry a specific narrative function.
Ultimately, this is a story about giving yourself permission to be who you are and pursuing what lights you up — it’s never too late to find that thing!