The Score
The Score
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Elle Kennedy on The Score
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.
Why she wrote it
A series that started as a book for funThe Off-Campus series was never mapped out in advance. Kennedy was not executing a plan when she began writing the first book; she was giving herself permission to write something with no commercial obligation attached.
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.
Hockey was not a calculated genre choice. Kennedy grew up in the suburbs of Toronto, where the sport was simply ambient, and that familiarity made the Briar setting feel less like research than home ground.
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”Dean Di Laurentis had been a supporting presence across the first two books, and by the time Kennedy turned her attention to him he had accumulated enough texture to become her favorite of the Off-Campus men. That affection came with a specific design: she wanted to break him.
I always used to say I was #TeamGarrett, but I think Dean’s taken the top spot. There’s something about his cocky vulnerability mixed with his humor that just takes the cake.
The affection is real, and so is the intent behind it. Kennedy has said she engineered The Score specifically to shatter Dean’s world, which makes the “cocky vulnerability” she names here the exact seam she chose to pull apart.
How she wrote it
Running with an idea, then meeting the consequencesKennedy distinguishes between the tightly plotted suspense fiction she also writes and the looser method she uses for new adult novels. For the Off-Campus books, the outline sets the destination but not the road.
For my new adult novels, I tend to start with an idea and then run with it.
The plan for Dean’s book originally required killing someone close to him, and Kennedy’s first candidate was Tucker. Her editor refused. What followed was a negotiation that determined the emotional architecture of the finished novel.
I wanted it to be a trilogy, to be honest, and I wanted there to be — spoiler alert — a big impactful death for Dean. I love seeing a reformed Playboy character. So I wanted to shatter his world, and it was gonna be originally with Tucker, and my editor was like, ‘Absolutely not. We love him so much.’
Kennedy agreed with her editor, and the reasoning she gives reveals how she thinks about which characters can absorb a devastating plot function and which cannot. Tucker’s role in the group protected him.
He’s so kind, not to make it sound like he’s boring, he’s not. He’s the caretaker of the group. And I was like, ‘No, he needs [a story]. So I ended up choosing a different character to shatter Dean with...
That different character became Beau Maxwell, whose death gives The Score its second-half weight and transforms the book from a secret-hookup story into something harder.
Summer Di Laurentis, Dean’s sister introduced in this book, carries traits drawn from people Kennedy knows personally rather than from research. The observation is specific: Kennedy noticed the traits in Summer as she was writing her, not before.
I know a few people with ADHD and anxiety, and when we first meet Summer in The Score, I felt like I could see some of those traits in her as well. A lot of the time, it’s the world around me that influences the characters I write about.
Writing The Score also produced material Kennedy hadn’t planned on using in it. Some scenes she wrote were distributed only to her newsletter subscribers, and that overflow later fed into the fourth book in the series.
I actually did some extra scenes for The Score, which were sent out exclusively to members of my newsletter. Some of those scenes were later used in The Goal.
thelovelyteacheraddictions.blogspot.com, “The Lovely Teacher Addictions: My interview with Elle Kennedy, author of The Off Campus Saga and many other series”The series grew by accumulation in the same way. Each book introduced characters who demanded their own stories, and The Score was the most generative of them.
The personal thread
A world that keeps expanding beyond the planKennedy has described a recurring experience across the Off-Campus series: finishing one book and realizing she has populated it with people who now need books of their own. The Score was the moment that pattern became undeniable.
Then in Dean’s book, I introduced more teammates, and had introduced his sister, and I was like, ‘Oh boy.’
What she wants us to sit with
Trauma, growth, and what a couple can rebuildKennedy’s clearest statement of intent for the Off-Campus series as a whole came in the context of discussing the television adaptation, when she was pressed to name what she most wanted viewers to carry away from the stories. The language she reached for was about process, not outcome.
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.
Among the four Off-Campus books, The Score is the one Kennedy deliberately built to put that intention under the most pressure. She designed Dean’s loss to be the thing that forces the question of whether growth is actually possible for someone whose identity depends on keeping the world light.