The Mistake
The Mistake
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Elle Kennedy on The Mistake
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.
Why she wrote it
The character who refused to stay secondaryThe Off-Campus series began with no series in mind. Kennedy wrote the first book, The Deal, in 2014 as a private project, with no expectation of publishing it, let alone building a world around it.
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! I ended up publishing The Deal after much prompting from friends.
thelovelyteacheraddictions.blogspot.com, “The Lovely Teacher Addictions: My interview with Elle Kennedy, author of The Off Campus Saga and many other series”Once The Deal was out, Kennedy’s editor made clear that Logan, The Deal’s wisecracking wingman, could not be left without his own book. The exchange Kennedy describes captures exactly how much professional pressure sat behind what became The Mistake.
My editor’s a huge fan of Logan. She’s like, his number one fan. She’ll fight you for him. She lost her mind, she was like, ‘What do you mean it’s one book? We have to see [his story.]’
The Mistake was Kennedy’s answer to that demand, published in May 2015, weeks after The Deal.
The editor’s advocacy for Logan was only part of the story. Kennedy has said that the ensemble itself made a longer series feel unavoidable, because too many figures in the margins of The Deal had already earned their own space.
after The Deal, there were just too many good side characters that people wanted to see, so it ended up being way more books than I expected.
How she wrote it
Running with an idea, deciding mid-draftKennedy draws a clear line between how she approaches her suspense work and how she handles new adult romance. The latter runs on instinct rather than outline, which meant that The Mistake’s cast kept shifting in importance as she wrote.
For my new adult novels, I tend to start with an idea and then run with it.
The most concrete evidence of that instinct-first method is what happened with Tucker, a secondary character in The Mistake who was not yet earmarked for his own book when Kennedy began drafting. His place in the series was settled not in planning sessions but at the keyboard.
When I was writing The Mistake, I still hadn’t decided [about Tucker], but Tucker, I was like, ‘Oh, I just love him so much.’ He’s so kind, not to make it sound like he’s boring, he’s not. He’s the caretaker of the group.
The physical conditions Kennedy requires to produce that absorbed, fast-running prose are austere. She has described shutting the world out completely, a necessity that shapes how and when the books get written.
I just require silence – if my phone rings or something jars me from the ‘zone,’ it takes a while to get back into that writing space. I usually just tell people I’ll be MIA, mute my phone, and hide in my writing cave.
What she wants us to sit with
The journey underneath the banterKennedy is specific about the tonal problem every book in the Off-Campus series, including The Mistake, has to solve. The lightness readers arrive for cannot come at the cost of the weight that makes those same readers stay.
It is definitely a balance because you want it to be fun and you want the banter, and you want that journey of the relationship, and then you also want to see the characters’ growth and how they change, and how their traumas affect the way they view relationships, and then how they overcome them, whether as a couple, or how they help each other overcome it.
Kennedy has also pushed back on the assumption that romance readers are drawn primarily to explicit content. She sees that framing as a misread of what makes the genre work, and her defense names what she believes the real draw is.
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.
The college setting of Off-Campus is not incidental atmosphere. Kennedy has connected it directly to a particular kind of self-reckoning that her characters, and her readers, are working through at the same time.
[T]hose 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).
Kennedy has also named what she thinks keeps readers returning book after book to a world like Briar’s: not any single couple, but the texture of belonging that the group produces. She said this in the context of the Off-Campus TV adaptation, where the question of what the show had to preserve was on the table.
I think that my readers, in particular, like a friend group and a found family. Off-Campus had that with the four lead boys and with Hannah and Allie. People resonate with it because they feel like they’re part of that world, and they’re in the friend group, and they’re experiencing all these firsts that happened in college [alongside the characters]: first loves, first sexual experiences, that kind of stuff.
For a reader coming to The Mistake after The Deal, that sense of belonging is already in place. Logan and Grace are still present; the group is intact. The book asks readers to extend trust to a new central couple while keeping the friends they already know close.
Kennedy’s own favorite question, which Off-Campus book she loves most, reveals how much The Mistake’s characters got under her skin. She usually names The Deal, then catches herself.
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!