Love Song
Love Song
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Elle Kennedy on Love Song
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.
Why she wrote it
The idea that jumped the queueKennedy had a contracted book waiting when the idea for Love Song arrived mid-drive and immediately displaced everything else on her schedule. She pulled over, called her editor, and pitched a story that hadn’t existed ten minutes earlier.
That wasn’t even on my slate. I’m trying to remember what the next book was supposed to be — it was supposed to be something completely different, and I was driving in the car, and I was like, ‘Oh, I think Wyatt should be with Blake.’ And I instantly called my editor, and I was like, ‘Listen, I have an idea. I know it’s not the book we contracted, but I want them together. I think it’s going to be called ‘Love Song’ because he’s going to write a song about her.’
The editor agreed on the spot. Title, premise, and central conceit arrived as a single unplanned package.
Both Wyatt and Blake had already appeared in earlier Briar books, but Kennedy had never found a reason to put them together. The car-ride idea solved a problem she hadn’t been actively trying to solve.
I did introduce her brother, and I introduced Blake, which is Logan’s daughter, but I just didn’t have a story for them.
Writing about the children of beloved original characters is a structural challenge she has consistently found harder than writing the originals, which makes her decision to jump into Love Song with Wyatt Graham and Blake Logan — heirs to two of the Briar universe’s most fan-protective relationships — a deliberate risk.
I’m still not a huge fan of the next-gen, because, again, I like the parental conflict. It really just depends on the character and on the story.
How she wrote it
Characters first, plot wherever they leadBefore Kennedy writes a scene, she builds the person who will live in it. Because Blake and Wyatt had histories in the Briar universe before Love Song existed, she had more raw material than she typically does at the start of a new book.
I usually start with a character (whether a new person or someone introduced in the background of another book) and analyze who they are, what makes them happy, what makes them tick and what they’d really need from another person. I like to let the characters drive their stories.
Her outline is a diagnostic tool, not a fixed contract. The depth of the outline varies with the genre: suspense books need scene-by-scene scaffolding because the plot mechanics can’t be improvised; standalone contemporary romances like Love Song get the looser version.
My writing process is pretty simple. I start with an outline. Sometimes it’s detailed scene by scene (if I’m writing a book with suspense elements), and other times it’s just a loose idea of who is in the book, what they are like, what major plot beats will take place, and how they get there. Once I start writing, a lot of what I’ve planned will evolve, but it gives me a good starting point.
One constraint shapes every next-generation book she writes, and it determined what kinds of stakes were available to her in Love Song. The book does include a significant tragedy, but it belongs only to Blake and Wyatt — never to their parents.
You can’t kill an original character, ever, and I will never do that. So fans rest assured, anytime a blurb says there’s a tragedy or there’s something, they immediately think I’m going to do something bad to one of their favorite characters. But none of the OGs will ever be harmed by me.
That guarantee also explains why next-gen books require a different kind of narrative engine. The conflict can’t be borrowed from the older generation; it has to be built entirely from scratch inside the younger one.
The Briar universe itself began not as a franchise plan but as a book Kennedy wrote for herself, with no expectation that it would anchor more than a decade of interconnected stories. Love Song is the product of that unplanned foundation.
I actually started The Deal in 2014 as a ‘just-for-fun’ book I wrote for myself. Being Canadian, hockey is a way of life, so I incorporated that and a college setting and next thing you know the Briar boys were created!
thelovelyteacheraddictions.blogspot.com, “The Lovely Teacher Addictions: My interview with Elle Kennedy, author of The Off Campus Saga and many other series”What she wants us to sit with
The journey underneath the heatKennedy has described the coming-of-age years that anchor every Briar book as a specific kind of threshold, one where identity is still being negotiated rather than settled. Wyatt and Blake begin Love Song at exactly that junction.
Those years of our lives really are about discovering who we are, who we want to be, and what it is we truly want for ourselves. We’re shaking off the influences from our younger selves, and (hopefully) finding that happily ever after (or at least happily-for-now).
Romance as a genre is regularly dismissed as lightweight, and Kennedy has pushed back on that characterization directly. Her argument is not about respectability but about what readers are actually seeking when they pick up one of her books.
Not that they’re only reading it for the spice. They’re reading it for the journey, for the emotions that they feel. I do hope that people start to take them a little more seriously, and it’s good to see them in the mainstream now because it’s showing that this is not just sex, but there’s a lot more to it. There’s so much more heart to them.