My Life with the Walter Boys
My Life with the Walter Boys
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Ali Novak on My Life with the Walter Boys
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.
Why she wrote it
TV obsessions, a big family, and no publication planThe love triangle at the heart of the book was not an abstract craft decision. It came directly from a specific show she was watching in her early teens, and she named the source without hesitation.
There’s always something to be said about love triangles, but it was inspired by Damon and Stefan from The Vampire Diaries. There’s just something so compelling about a love triangle, and there’s so many YA books that have been influenced by that show.
The show that gave her the triangle was not the only pop culture debt she was carrying. Her protagonist Jackie’s personality came from a different screen entirely, and from a character she specifically wanted to revise.
I also really loved ‘Gossip Girl’ at the time. And so, my favorite character was always Blair Waldorf. I saw Jackie as Blair but like the nice version of her, so that’s where Jackie’s character inspiration came from.
She finished the book with no agent, no publisher, and no clear path to readers. Her solution was the one available to a teenager in 2010, and its consequences outran anything she expected.
I did what any millennial would do and googled how to share my story. That’s how I discovered Wattpad. That decision changed my life.
Her father died of cancer during her high school years, and the loss did not arrive in the manuscript right away. She described the timeline in a 2014 interview, drawing a line between when she started the book and when the emotional core of it finally became writable.
My Life with the Walter Boys is deeply connected to my own life experiences. My father lost a four-month battle to cancer when I was in high school, and his death was one of the main inspirations behind the book. It was a long process, but writing the story helped me deal with my grief.
supernaturalsnark.blogspot.com, “Supernatural Snark: Interview: Ali Novak + My Life with the Walter Boys”How she wrote it
Seventy chapters, then a scalpelPosting on Wattpad meant her readers were reading each chapter within hours of its upload, and they were vocal. That feedback loop changed the plot in real time, and she found herself navigating it deliberately rather than just absorbing it.
If too many readers were guessing the direction I was planning to take the story, I would pivot and take it in a completely new direction. And without that social interactive element, there was definitely a learning curve when I stopped posting my work on Wattpad. [paraphrased from audio]
The scale of what Wattpad produced versus what a traditional publisher accepted tells the story of revision in a single number. The gap between the two versions is larger than most finished novels.
I think The Walter Boys was like 70 chapters and 150,000 words long when it was on Wattpad, and the traditionally published novel is 90,000 words and 20-some chapters. A lot of superfluous content was cut.
The structural difference between serialized online fiction and a traditionally published novel is not just a matter of length. She identified a different narrative logic built into each form, one that had to be dismantled in revision.
Writing serialized fiction online is very different than writing a book that’s going to be traditionally published. It’s much more like a TV show where the end of every chapter you upload has to have something — whether that’s a kiss or a cliffhanger — to entice readers to come back and read the next chapter you upload. It lends to a much more dramatic, up-and-down form of storytelling, versus the usual arc you see in a traditionally published book.
Jackie’s emotional flatness in early drafts was not a craft miscalculation. It was a direct reflection of where Novak was in her own grief, and it took two more complete passes through the manuscript before that changed.
The first draft of my manuscript lacked a great deal of emotional depth — Jackie came off as cold and unresponsive to her family’s death. At the time, it was too soon for me to write about loss, and my inability to deal with my own pain was reflected in Jackie’s character.
supernaturalsnark.blogspot.com, “Supernatural Snark: Interview: Ali Novak + My Life with the Walter Boys”The personal thread
The name she hid and the laptop she slammed shutShe wrote and posted the book under a pen name for years, keeping its existence from nearly everyone around her. The moment her now-husband found out had the shape of a farce, and she has told it more than once.
She describes slamming the laptop shut while he asked if she was cheating on him. [paraphrased from audio]
One character name in the book is a direct self-inscription, though readers had no way to know it at the time. She confirmed the source in the same 2014 Supernatural Snark interview where she discussed her father’s death, as if both facts belonged to the same private layer of the text.
It’s a shameless nod to myself. My full first name is Alexandra, but my family calls me Ali.
supernaturalsnark.blogspot.com, “Supernatural Snark: Interview: Ali Novak + My Life with the Walter Boys”What she wants us to sit with
Joy during grief, and a love triangle that was never equalHer decision about how to portray Jackie’s grief was a deliberate rejection of a pattern she found in the genre, one she had personal reasons to resist. She made that case in the same 2014 interview where she described her own experience of loss.
I strongly dislike reading contemporary novels where the main character loses a loved one and is depressed for 99.9% of the story. It takes me back to a bad place, and also, I don’t think it’s very realistic. I decided that I didn’t want Jackie’s story to focus on her pain. Instead I wanted to highlight how the happy moments of living with the Walter family helped her heal.
supernaturalsnark.blogspot.com, “Supernatural Snark: Interview: Ali Novak + My Life with the Walter Boys”She grounded that choice in what her own grief actually felt like, pushing back against the idea that surviving loss means being consumed by it.
Losing a parent is impossibly painful. The first few months after my father’s death were dark, and I’ve never cried so much in my life. At the same time, I never turned into an emotional zombie. The truth of the matter is life goes on. Eventually, you smile again. Then you laugh. Amazingly, you can even fall in love. And it’s those joyful moment during dark times that mend your heart.
supernaturalsnark.blogspot.com, “Supernatural Snark: Interview: Ali Novak + My Life with the Walter Boys”For readers who arrived at the book through the Netflix adaptation and found the love triangle genuinely unresolved, her view of it reframes the question entirely. She does not see it as two equal options.
I feel like in the first book, Jackie and Alex both use each other to avoid uncomfortable truths. And that’s not the basis for a relationship.
When she looked back at the book from the vantage of a decade and a Netflix series, she was direct about what writing it at fifteen meant for how the grief was handled. The candor points toward what the sequel exists to repair.
I was a kid when I started writing it. I was very inexperienced, and I used that trauma as just a vehicle to start this story. And that trauma was never fully addressed.