Beach Read: Writing Rivals to Literary Lovers

The question seemed simple enough:

Are you a Gus or a January?

We had to choose a side.

Would we channel our inner Gus Everett and write literary fiction? Or would we embrace our inner January Andrews and write romance?

Our Writing Rivals to Literary Lovers experience was inspired by the challenge at the heart of Emily Henry's Beach Read: two writers, two very different genres, each pushed outside the kind of story they think they know how to tell.

And because Beach Read wouldn't be Beach Read without a rival, we had to partner with someone who chose the opposite.

If you chose romance, you needed a lit fic writer beside you. If you chose lit fic, you needed a romance writer.

While the challenge in the novel was inspired by competition, ours wasn't.

The point of our experience was to see what might happen when someone who approaches a story differently sits across from you.

Only this time, Gus and January weren't doing the writing.

We were.

Five Challenges. Five Charms.

There were five Beach Read-inspired challenges waiting for us, each one exploring another part of storytelling.

Characters and their secrets. First lines. Meet-cutes. Dialogue. Endings.

And writers’ notebooks with five colorful tabs representing our challenges were waiting to be opened and written in as well.

We weren't outlining entire novels, however. We were playing with possibilities.

What does your character want?

What are they hiding?

What do they misunderstand about someone?

How do they meet?

What happens when they actually have to talk to each other?

And eventually:

How does this story end?

Happy for now, like Gus?

Or happily ever after, like January?

There was a charm waiting at the end of each challenge, a tiny symbol of the piece of the story we'd just explored.

But earning it meant we had to put something on the page first.

And we did.

There were stretches when the room became surprisingly quiet.

Pencils moved. Pages filled.

Then someone would look up.

An idea would be shared.

Someone across the table would ask a question.

There'd be a laugh, a suggestion, a wait—what if...

And then we'd go back to our notebooks.

It began to feel less like completing a series of challenges and more like what I imagine a really good writers' room might feel like.

Write. Talk. Listen. Steal a little inspiration from one another. Write some more.

And somewhere in the middle of all of that, something changed.

The Stories Started Becoming Ours

We had begun with Beach Read.

With Gus and January.

With romance versus literary fiction.

But when it was time to share what we'd written, the stories around the room didn't sound like Gus and January anymore.

They sounded like us.

One writer began to realize that what was appearing on the page wasn't entirely fiction. There was a piece of her own story there—something that perhaps had been waiting for permission to be written.

Another began building a neighborhood populated by families with their own stories, imagining the ways their lives might intersect from one story to another.

Another shared an idea—a character—who is stuck between who she’s been in the past and who she wants to be in the future, with details so specific that I could picture all of it in my head as if it were a movie.

Suddenly we weren't talking about a writing activity anymore.

We were talking about stories that could actually become something.

That's the moment I keep coming back to.

Because we'd gathered over a book we loved.

We'd borrowed its premise.

We'd borrowed its writers.

We'd borrowed the question at the center of Gus and January's bet.

And then, somewhere along the way, we stopped borrowing.

We started discovering our own.

Build Your Writer's Chain

Five challenges later, our notebooks weren't the only things that had filled up.

We had five charms waiting for us, each one connected to a piece of the story we'd explored that morning.

Now we got to turn them into something of our own.

Out came the chains, clasps, pliers and piles of tiny charms.

Some of us chose keychains. Others chose bracelets. We mixed metals, rearranged charms, changed our minds and helped one another figure out how all those very tiny jump rings were supposed to work.

And eventually, five separate writing challenges became one writer's chain.

We'd all begun with the same challenges, but we'd made different choices along the way. Different characters. Different secrets. Different conversations. Different endings.

The charms may have been the same.

The stories attached to them weren't.

Happy For Now…

Eventually, we had to walk out the door.

But the conversation came with us.

And maybe that's why this particular Page to Palette morning has stayed with me.

Because Beach Read gives us two writers who think they know what kind of stories they tell, until they're challenged to try something different.

For a few hours on Saturday morning, we did the same.

We arrived choosing between Gus and January.

We left as ourselves.

And with stories we might just need to tell.

Maybe that's the happily-ever-after.

Or, at the very least, a pretty good happy-for-now.

I’d like to end with a special thanks to Page to Palette’s day one, Carrie. She was our behind-the-scenes gal for our Beach Read event, and I couldn’t have pulled it off without her help. From decor to merch sales to photos to encouragement, she has been such a huge source of support.