The creator of Nimona, ND Stevenson, makes his prose debut in swashbuckling middle grade duology opener Scarlet Morning. After the pirate captain Scarlet Morning murdered Queen Hail Meridian, a storm dramatically altered the world, turning the ocean into a salt desert. Abandoned by their caretaker on an isolated outpost, 15-year-old Wilmur and 14-year-old Viola grow up reading stories about the pirate, who disappeared along with the sea. As they await their guardian’s return, the teens protect a book of esoteric knowledge. When Cadence Chase—captain of an iron-hulled ship called the Calamary Rose—arrives, seeking the tome, Wilmur and Viola strike a deal: they will relinquish the volume if Chase ferries them to the fabled city of Faire Distance, where Queen Meridian once ruled. In a conversation with PW, Stevenson spoke about dealing with creative burnout and the challenges of pivoting to a new artistic medium.
How did the idea for Scarlet Morning germinate?
Scarlet Morning has been around for a while. These characters came about when I was, like, 12 or 13, from a collaborative game—almost like LARP or D&D—that I would lead my friends in. It was this ongoing thing; anytime we had a spare moment or we were bored, we would break this out. It’s something that’s been important to me for a really long time.
The first draft of the book was written and completed when I was 15. And then I grew up and moved on, and it ended up gathering dust on my computer until 2020 when I found myself having just completed an intense job, and I was feeling really burnt out and devoid of inspiration. I was drawn back to this thing that had meant so much to me as a kid. I was like, “Is there something here that can inspire me again?” I found that I still connected with the characters and the world. I think enough years had to pass before I could be like, “What am I trying to say? How does this story need to change?” Obviously, it was so personal and close to my heart, but how does this story relate to the rest of the world? How does it relate to people outside of the friend group that I was writing to entertain back in the day? It became a collaboration between my adult and my teenage self.
Why did you decide to make it a prose novel rather than a comic?
Throughout my career, the position I was almost always in was one of: you have an idea, and you roll with it. I’m always kind of flying by the seat of my pants. Nimona started as a webcomic, so I was literally unfolding the story page by page for the entertainment of my readers. But because I was in this place where I was burnt out after years of this “go, go, go” mentality, I really wanted to try something new, and that new thing was just really spending time with an idea.
I did try to adapt Scarlet Morning as a comic, but because I had been writing it as a prose novel for several years at that point, I actually found it impossible to switch gears. I felt like I had to commit to relearning how to write prose, which was really hard. I had been relying on visual elements for so long that I felt like I didn’t have the skills to do what I wanted, and that was really discouraging at first. And then I was like, “All right, well, how do I get that skill?”
I revisited books I remember loving as a kid that initially helped inspire Scarlet Morning and I asked myself, “What is it about this that I responded to? Let’s read that and take notes.” I just kept trying to circle that target and with every draft I would get closer and closer. I never really had the opportunity to do that before. If you miss one deadline in animation, it ricochets down. It makes everybody’s life harder. So the ability to not only work on my own, to just tinker and spend all the time I needed gathering inspiration was, in some ways, totally new, and in other ways kind of a return to something I hadn’t done in a long time.
How did you choose which scenes and moments to illustrate for Scarlet Morning?
One of the upsides of visual storytelling is that, in my experience, the quickest way to find a character is to draw them. I found that as soon as I started drawing Viola and Wilmur and the ways they interacted with each other, everything started falling into place. And I knew that illustrations were going to be a part of the book in some way, so I was already illustrating scenes that I was compelled by; I would describe something and then ask myself, “Can I draw that?” I was drawing and writing pretty much in tandem throughout the whole process.
When it came time to lay it all out, my team at HarperCollins was so great about letting me figure it out on my own. They even sent me the InDesign files, so I could mess around with the layout myself, because I wanted the writing and the art to work together, and that meant having really precise placement.
You have to be careful about what you show when you’re illustrating prose. Otherwise, the words and the pictures end up fighting each other. You don’t want to go against the image that the reader is already building in their heads. I wanted the illustrations to be a stepping stone in getting the person reading it to conjure that larger image themselves, because I worried that if I just handed them the illustration, it would almost make the moment feel smaller, and it might take away some of the bigness of whatever was happening in the prose. There’s certain information that I obscured in the illustrations—some of the characters’ faces you never see, because I wanted the reader to not really know what to make of them. And so some of that was not showing certain facial expressions or body language or always cutting them out of frame.
What can you share about the final book in the series?
The characters are brought to an entirely new setting that is nothing like any of the settings in Scarlet Morning, and there’s this big mystery set up in the first book that really pays off in the second. There’s also a much larger monstrous presence in the second book, which I’m really excited about, because I love monsters. There’s a lot more intrigue and action, too. It’s going to be a good time, and I’m excited for people to read it. If you finish the first book with a lot of questions, I hope to answer those questions in a really satisfying way.
Scarlet Morning by ND Stevenson. Quill Tree, $19.99 Sept. 23 ISBN 978-0-06-321034-9
