My Return to the Walter Boys
My Return to the Walter Boys
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Ali Novak on My Return to the Walter Boys
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A promise kept, and a debt to griefThe open ending of the first book was not an oversight. From the moment she conceived the series as a teenager on Wattpad, Novak designed it in two parts: Jackie leaving for New York at the close of book one, and her return to Colorado as the opening of book two. She held that back for years rather than raise hopes she couldn’t yet fulfill.
I’ve always wanted to say, ‘Well, yeah, I wrote it like that because it’s meant to have a sequel.’
The Netflix adaptation, which brought in a wave of readers who had never touched the Wattpad original, became the concrete condition she had attached to the sequel’s existence. She had made the promise publicly; the show’s success made it non-negotiable.
I always told my fans, if a TV show or if an adaptation comes to fruition, I will write a sequel. And it did. So I did. [paraphrased from audio]
The third reason was the one she had been carrying longest. She opened the first book with Jackie losing her entire family in a car accident, then moved on. Writing that book at fifteen, before she had any experience of catastrophic loss, she had no tools to sit with what she’d put on the page.
One big thing that I want to highlight in this book that wasn’t addressed in the first book is something very traumatic and life-changing happened to the main character. 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.
The sequel is, in part, a correction. She now had the life experience the first book lacked, and a reader she specifically wanted to reach: a teenager who has lost someone and is waiting for fiction to acknowledge what that actually feels like.
How she wrote it
Scraping off years of rustThe gap between author and character was nearly two decades wide. She first wrote Jackie at fifteen, the same age as the protagonist. When she returned to that voice for the sequel, she was approaching thirty-three, and the distance showed immediately in every draft she attempted.
The big difference was me. So when I wrote the first story, I was the same age as Jackie. I’m in my 30s now. So it was very, very hard for me to get back into the mindset of that teenage character. I probably wrote an entire outline and then scrapped it. And then I probably wrote three or four chapters and all of those got tossed out before I finally got into the groove of writing what became the sequel. [paraphrased from audio]
Even after she found her footing in the broader structure, the opening page kept resisting her. The first chapter was the place where Jackie’s voice either rang true or exposed the author’s age, and she returned to it repeatedly before she trusted it.
I definitely rewrote the first chapter multiple times before I felt comfortable with what I was doing. It was almost like I needed to scrape off years of rust to get Jackie’s voice.
There was also a prior draft to reckon with. During college she had posted a follow-up on Wattpad called ‘My Life as a Walter Boy,’ told from Cole’s point of view and set four years after the first book. Her editor agreed it was the wrong sequel. She agreed without hesitation, and the draft has since been removed from the platform.
There is a terrible sequel that was written that will never see the light of day.
The Netflix show added one more layer of complexity to the writing process. The show’s writers were developing their own direction before she had a finished manuscript, and by the time production was underway, the showrunner had arguably spent more recent hours in the Walter Boys world than Novak had. She drew a clean boundary between the two versions early.
You can think of the show and the books as separate entities at this point.
The personal thread
Losing a father after writing a grief she didn’t understandShe was seventeen, two years after posting the first book on Wattpad, when her father died. At that point the book was already written, already being read by thousands of people, and it had sent its protagonist through catastrophic family loss without ever pausing to examine what that loss does to a person over time.
I didn’t write this book with the thought process of someone losing a parent and dealing with that grief. But after I wrote this book, I ended up losing my father when I was 17... So, I understand that feeling and hopefully when I write this sequel, it can help young teens who have maybe lost a family member address that grief.
The big-family dynamic at the center of both books also has a personal origin, one that predates any of the writing. Growing up, her extended family was dense enough that cousins functioned as siblings, and that texture became the blueprint for the Walter household.
I have a very large extended family. My mom has five siblings and my dad has five siblings, so I have a ton of cousins, and when I was growing up, we all lived in the same area. A lot of my cousins felt like siblings when I was a child, and that’s why I wanted to write a big family dynamic for The Walter Boys.
What she wants us to sit with
Grief that was ignored the first time aroundShe is specific about what the sequel is not dropping. The chaos of the Walter family, the banter, the humor: those stay. What she is adding is the thing she skipped at fifteen, when she was young enough to use tragedy as an engine and then drive past it.
The sequel will still have the chaos of the Walter family and the fun banter and the funny jokes — well, hopefully I’m still funny — but I also want to address some of that lingering trauma that Jackie has, because her grief was heavily ignored in the first novel.
The new audience that arrived via the Netflix show sharpened her sense of who she was writing for. More than 150 million reads on Wattpad had already shown her that the Walter Boys world reached people; the show proved it could reach a generation of readers who had no memory of Wattpad at all.
The show has brought an entirely new group of fans to the world, and that means everything to me. [paraphrased from audio]
For those readers, this book is a first encounter with Jackie and the Walter family on the page. Novak is writing for them and for the original fans simultaneously, which is why getting the grief right matters more in this book than in any she has written before: it is the element that the newcomers will meet fresh and the longtime readers have been waiting fifteen years to see addressed.