During Write the World’s Fiction Writing summer camp, YA author Rowana Miller answered our campers’ burning questions about writing. From finding inspiration in unexpected places to balancing plotting with spontaneity, Miller shared the strategies and lessons that have shaped her writing journey.
The interview below has been edited for length and clarity. To read the second part of the interview, check out this blog post.
When did you start taking writing seriously?
I have always been very serious about writing. When I was 6 years old, I set the goal of publishing my first novel by the time that I graduated from high school.
That didn't happen, but it was very much the guiding aspiration of my childhood and teenage years, and I started writing my first manuscript when I was in seventh grade. I tried to get it published. I don't know if you guys have had any experience querying agents, but it is really not for the faint of heart. I got rejected a bunch of times. I shelved that book, wrote another, got rejected a bunch of times again, and shelved the second book.
Around the time I entered college, I took about a year off from writing novels. I was still pursuing other writing, but I was trying new things in the writing space and broadening my horizons. And then the following year, I started working on the book that would eventually become my debut novel.
So I would say that I got serious about writing when I was in seventh grade, but really, it's always been something that's been important to me.
How do you get inspiration?
The advice of “write what you know” is generally pretty good, but striking a balance between “write what you know” and “write what you wish you knew” is really where I get most of my inspiration.
Secrets of the Blue Hand Girls was inspired by the time that I got recruited to a secret society. And that was really good writing fodder. I highly recommend getting recruited to a secret society as inspiration.
How do you start brainstorming ideas?
Generally, what I do is take ideas that are kind of bad, and free-write about them until something better occurs to me. Having anything out on the page is better than starting from nothing.
I also tend to mine my past for experiences that could be the jumping-off point for something interesting, even if those experiences are not inherently story material. My second book is inspired by a set-painting internship that I did in college at an off-Broadway theater. Even though no mysteries took place when I was an intern, it was a literal behind-the-scenes look at an institution that I think has a lot of mystery to it.
What is your writing process?
When I was growing up, I thought that you had to choose whether you were a plotter or a pantser. You either planned everything out before you started writing, or you planned absolutely nothing. The ideal place for me is somewhere in between.
I start a book with an outline that is much more specific about what happens in the first few chapters, and then gets gradually less specific about what happens later in the book. I update the outline as I write, so that I'm always a few chapters ahead of where I am in the draft.
That allows my characters to have some degree of flexibility and freedom in how the book develops. It allows me to surprise myself, but it also provides me with the structure that I need in order to know what happens next.
That’s because one thing that I found when I was pantsing was that there's no way to avoid having an outline. When I was pantsing, I would write a lousy first draft, and then based on what I discovered through the process of writing that first draft, I would make notes for how to reorganize my text into a plot that made sense logically. And then I realized I was not actually avoiding the process of outlining; I was just postponing it and wasting my time writing a lousy first draft first.
Not that I have anything against lousy first drafts! I think that they are an essential part of the writing process. But I've found that the way to keep myself organized and be more efficient is by starting with some semblance of an outline.
How do you grab and keep the reader's attention?
I think about the books and other kinds of media that I feel have been really successful at keeping my attention, and I try to emulate those in my strategies.
Leigh Bardugo does a really good job of constructing worlds in a way that makes you as a reader want to participate in that world. She tends to start her stories with a mini-conflict or a mini-inciting incident, where you are able to immediately get drawn into some kind of high-stakes situation but you're still getting acquainted with the world.
When she introduces the real inciting incident of the story in another couple of chapters, you've established the baselines of the plot and the characters so that you understand why the real inciting incident is a departure from the norm. But the fact that she starts with conflict is what allows you to get invested right away as a reader.
Do you create your characters, your setting, or your themes first?
I tend to start with the plot. I like a good inciting incident, and I tend to write the scene of the inciting incident as my first piece of developing a story.
The scene is how I start to develop the characters and setting. For me, the theme comes later. Theme is something that emerges naturally, typically when I'm at the end of a draft. I try not to think too hard about it because I want it to make itself known, rather than being something that I'm hitting the reader over the head with.
My biggest piece of advice in getting started, is that conflict is a really good tool for developing your characters and setting. I think that the most interesting things about those two facets of story construction arise from what happens when you see them in conflict.
Is there a writer that inspired you, or one that you deeply admire?
Nova Ren Suma, the young adult fiction writer. I'm biased here because she's also my writing mentor. I was introduced to her because she taught at my university, and I actually started Secrets of the Blue Hand Girls when I was taking her class.
She's a wonderful speculative fiction writer. Her books straddle the line between commercial and literary fiction. She's very big on ghosts and themes that are on the verge of supernatural, but you're not quite sure whether it's supernatural or reality. She does a great job of creating worlds that make you see the magic in the real world.
Do you use any writing exercises to improve your skills?
I do a lot of side writing, which is actually something that I learned from Nova. It's writing that you have no intention of putting in your final story. And that's really helpful because it relieves the pressure of having to be interesting to the reader. It allows you to just write for your own sake.
For example, writing your characters' daily rituals provides you with a lot of context about who you're writing about, but there isn't conflict or anything that would be especially engaging to a reader.
There's a Margaret Atwood quote that I like to use as a prompt for side writing.
I like to wonder what people would have for breakfast — which people, as their breakfasts would be different — and where they would get those food items, and whether or not they would say a prayer over them, and how they would pay for them, and what they would wear during that meal, and, if cooked, how, and what sort of bed they would have arisen from, and what else they might be doing while having the breakfast — talking to someone (who), in person or on a device (what?), and who would be allowed to do that, and what they might feel safe in saying. Breakfast can take you quite far.
That is something that I use a lot to help me start fleshing out the world of a story.
In what ways do you feel like you've improved with writing since you first started?
Sentence-level writing is something that's always come naturally to me, and when I first started, I assumed that because I was a strong sentence-level writer, I was also a strong storyteller. I don't think that that was necessarily true.
When you're writing a story, every event has to build directly on what comes before. A story is a series of dominoes. That's what makes certain plot points feel earned. When you are focusing on your sentence-level writing, or even scene-level writing, you're not always thinking about how the different plot points connect to each other.
That was the thing that wasn't working about my story arcs as a whole, and that's something that I've been very intentional about improving my skills at. I think that I'm always going to be continuing to work on that, but it's an area where I feel confident that I've gotten a lot better since I've started writing.
Do you have a favorite genre to read and a favorite genre to write in?
My favorite genre to write is definitely mystery/thriller because I like having a book that is a slightly heightened version of reality. But in terms of what I like to read, I'm a lot more eclectic. I don’t think there are patterns to what I read, the way that I have patterns to what I write.
To read the second part of the interview, check out this blog post.
About Rowana Miller
Rowana Miller writes about riddles, goblins, secrets, strange girls, and mischief. She is also the founder and Executive Director of Cosmic Writers, a nonprofit that provides creative writing education for kids and teenagers, and an adjunct professor at Pace University. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, she lives in New York City with her wife, Penelope, and two cats, Alice and Jabberwocky. Her debut novel, Secrets of the Blue Hand Girls, was named one of Marie Claire’s Best Thrillers of 2025.
About the author
As a College Essay Advisor at Write the World, Vivian Zhi supports high school students through their college application journey. Vivian looks forward to helping young writers find themselves through their writing.