The Goal
The Goal
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Elle Kennedy on The Goal
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
The character she almost killedKennedy originally planned a three-book run for the Off-Campus series, and Tucker was slated to be a casualty of that ending. Her editor stopped her cold.
I wanted it to be a trilogy, to be honest, and I wanted there to be — spoiler alert — a big impactful death for Dean... and it was gonna be originally with Tucker.
By the time she was deep in the earlier Off-Campus books, Tucker had accumulated enough weight on the page that she couldn’t go through with her original plan. Her description of why captures exactly what a secondary character has to do to survive a series.
He’s so kind, not to make it sound like he’s boring, he’s not. He’s the caretaker of the group.
Tucker absorbed enough affection across three books that Kennedy rerouted her entire series structure to give him a story. The trilogy became four books, and the death she had planned for Dean went to a different character.
Kennedy has described the Off-Campus series as one that grew by its own momentum rather than by design. Tucker’s book was an extension of a pattern she noticed from the very first entry: the characters insist on themselves.
I just… started writing. The Deal started as a book-for-fun, and as characters developed, I decided I wanted to write books for all of them.
How she wrote it
Finishing two books in the same breathWhen the Off-Campus series began, Kennedy’s ambitions for it were deliberately modest. What she describes as the original goal shaped everything about how she worked on these books, including the looser structure that distinguishes them from her suspense-driven titles.
In the beginning, the goal was simply to write the fun story I had kicking around in my head and see what happened when I decided to self-publish it.
Kennedy draws a clean line between the level of plotting a thriller requires and what a New Adult romance like The Goal demands. The distinction explains why the Off-Campus books read as character-driven rather than architecturally tight.
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.
The summer of 2016 was a crowded one. A brief interview that August caught Kennedy mid-sprint across multiple projects at once, and The Goal was only one item in the stack.
Right now I’m putting the finishing touches on The Goal (Off-Campus #4), working with Jen Frederick on Twisted Palace (The Royals #3), and then doing a couple of secret things that I can’t disclose at the moment.
What she wants us to sit with
The journey underneath the heatWhen the Off-Campus TV adaptation brought new attention to the series, Kennedy used the moment to address a reductive read of romance fiction that she finds genuinely frustrating. Her argument locates the genre’s pull somewhere most dismissals miss entirely.
I do think the idea that [romance] is all just spicy scenes is disheartening sometimes because I do think there are such incredible stories, and these themes, and people are drawn to them for a reason. Not that they’re only reading it for the spice. They’re reading it for the journey, for the emotions that they feel.
Asked on Goodreads which Off-Campus book she returns to most, Kennedy named The Deal first, then immediately second-guessed herself. The detail she reached for when wavering says something about what Tucker’s book actually gave her.
Usually The Deal is my favorite, because it really is special to me, but sometimes I think back to Grace’s list of demands, or Tucker’s sweet southern charm, and my mind is easily changed!