Creative Conversations: Olivia Worley
She chats about her new YA thriller 'The Debutantes,' her switch to writing full time, and more.
Olivia Worley is an author based in New York City who writes thrillers for both young adults and adults. Her first young adult novel People to Follow came out last year, and her new young adult novel The Debutantes comes out next week on Oct. 29, and it’s available for preorder here. Her first adult thriller So Happy Together publishes this spring. We chat about her recent switch to writing full time, her new book The Debutantes, and more.
Since it’s coming out next week, we have to start by talking about The Debutantes. Can you tell us a little about it?
It’s a young adult thriller that I've been pitching as “Pretty Little Liars” meets the world of New Orleans debutante culture. Specifically, it follows three high school seniors who are maids in a debutante ball, and they all have various levels of wanting to be a part of this ball. They're all on this court, which is what they call it in Mardi Gras debutante culture. And on the night of the ball, as the Queen Lily LeBlanc enters, the ball is sabotaged, and then the next day, she goes missing.
So the three remaining debutante maids, April, Vivian, and Piper, are pulled into this investigation of her disappearance. And as they look deeper, they start to uncover some secrets about the dark underbelly of the New Orleans debutante scene. They also start to suspect that the death of the previous year's debutante queen may not have been as accidental as they were led to believe. And they also start getting threatened by an anonymous, masked figure called the jester, who's threatening to expose their own secrets if they don't stop digging.
What inspired this story?
So it’s actually heavily inspired by my own personal experience with New Orleans debutante culture. It is a tradition that's kind of important to one side of my family. So I have been saying, lovingly, I was forced to be a debutante, and I was never really comfortable or interested in the entire thing. But I love my family, so of course I was willing to do it for them. But the deeper into it I got, the more I was like, oh, this is even more horrifying than I had originally thought and I have to write a book about it one day.
So that was the seed of this idea. I wanted to write a book about New Orleans, and specifically this weird, unique element of New Orleans that I don't think anyone really knows about, that I think is also the perfect breeding ground for a thriller, because it's like masquerade balls and privilege and secrecy and like, literally, hidden identities. So yeah, how the debutantes was born.
Your first adult thriller So Happy Together comes out this spring. What was it like switching from writing young adult to adult thrillers?
I definitely plan to continue with both right now. But I think switching to adult, it was kind of a similar reasoning for why I wrote young adult in the first place, which is when I started writing, I was roughly the same age as the characters in a young adult novel. I think I first tried to write a book when I was like 16 or 17. So now being in my mid 20s and living in New York, I was very much feeling pulled to write about that experience, which is what led me to writing So Happy Together, which is about a 24 year-old playwright in New York City.
And you just switch to writing full time. What is your writing process like? How has it changed?
Before I was writing full time, I had a part-time job as a tutor, which got pretty close to full time by the end of it. So I would do my writing specifically in the morning hours before I left for my afternoon tutoring job, and now I have the full week to write. So the main shift has been that I still try to mainly set aside four to five hours every day to be working on everything. And the main difference now is that I'm trying to give myself real weekends again, because I don't have to do my writing on the weekends anymore, which has been harder than I anticipated to not work all the time.
It’s tough because obviously writing is my favorite thing to do, and I love it so much so it feels kind of weird to shift from this is part of the many things that I'm doing to this is my job now. So as much as I want to be doing it all the time, I think it's healthiest to give myself a bit of a break. Giving myself weekends to read whatever I want and go do things in New York City, I feel like I come back on Monday feeling inspired and refueled to keep writing and being creative.
What do you like to do to get the creativity flowing when you have writer’s block?
I'm a big proponent of the little treat sometimes—like going out and just getting a Diet Coke from the bodega. A little walk, a little silly drink, that does surprisingly a lot for me. But also, just in general, it's okay to set the thing aside and come back to it. And also, a change of location can do a lot as well.
What inspires you to be creative?
Partly, it’s having more time to read things. I just read for a panel that I'm moderating at a book festival—I've been reading the books of those authors on the panel. I also just read Compound Fracture by Andrew Joseph White, who is an author I've been meaning to read but haven't had the chance to yet, that I loved. It's about a trans boy in West Virginia confronting the evil deeply rooted in the structure of the town that he lives in.
Outside of reading, though, just being in New York trying to experience as much culture as possible. I'll still try to see. Broadway shows because I have some friends who work in the industry and can sometimes get me tickets, and honestly, reality TV. Also, I think just being out in New York in the fall. I feel like everyone's out in their cute outfits, and there's always something interesting and strange to be seen. And that is a consistent source of inspiration.
Olivia’s Recs ✨
Job - “I just saw the play Job… It was a psychological thriller about workplace burnout, but also some really dark things as well that I won’t say because it’s spoilers.”
AMC A List - “It’s like $25 (or less, depending on your location) to see up to three movies every week… I’ve gotten to see a lot of things I would not have seen otherwise.”
Six More Months of June by Daisy Garrison - “I just read my friend Daisy Garrison's YA romance… which was really beautiful and delightful.”
Find Olivia on Instagram and TikTok. Preorder The Debutantes here and So Happy Together here. And get a copy of People to Follow here.
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