The Star Wars: The High Republic co-authors of Defy the Storm talk about writing as a team and choosing when to save or sacrifice a character. Plus, we reveal some new character art!
The release of Defy the Storm marks the fourth book that authors Tessa Gratton and Justina Ireland have written together. But long before they were co-authors, they were friends swapping manuscripts and giving each other advice on their drafts.
In the latest installment in the StarWars.com series celebrating Phase III in Star Wars: The High Republic, which continues this week with the new young adult novel Defy the Storm arriving March 5, and continues this summer with Gratton’s Temptation of the Force adult novel in June, pull up a chair and laugh along as the two writers finish each other’s sentences and chat about emotional snacking at 2 a.m., killing their darlings, and saving one particular Jedi.
Tessa Gratton: I was thinking…I can't remember the first time we actually interacted or met. I remember how we became friends. It must've been the Romantic Times Convention in Kansas City in 2013.
Justina Ireland: Yeah, we met there, but I mean everyone knows everybody else in YA.
Tessa Gratton: But it was in 2015 when we actually became friends by fighting on the internet.
Justina Ireland: Because everyone fights on Twitter! But fun fighting, not like…soul-sucking fighting.
Tessa Gratton: I remember being like, oh my gosh, this Justina Ireland is really angry just like me about all the same things I'm really angry about….And then [later] we started reading for each other, before books were going to our agents and editors.
Justina Ireland: Yeah, I think the first thing I read of yours was, oh my gosh, it's been so long. I think it was Moon Dark Smile was the first?
Tessa Gratton: It was Strange Grace.
Justina Ireland: Oh, it was Strange Grace! I'd read your other stuff, but I think that was the first book that you sent.
Tessa Gratton: And then I read an early version of Deathless Divide.
Justina Ireland: Yeah. You meet people, but there's a different level of friendship to letting people read your stuff. Yes, we're friendly on the internet. Yes, we'll hang out together. But I'm not letting you read my words. And then we wrote a book together, which is passing that bridge.
Tessa Gratton: I think we've written four together now, right?
Justina Ireland: [Defy the Storm will] be four, which is so many books with another person!
Tessa Gratton: But it was a really easy decision to make. I used to tell people I would never collaborate. I like to sit alone by myself and write my own weird books and deal with all of the struggles and plot and character arcs for three or four drafts before I'm interested in even talking. And you clearly just ignored me every time I said that. [Laughs.]
Justina Ireland: Well, because every time we were in the same room, I was like, “Tell me what you're working on. What problems are you having?” You're like, I don't want to talk about this. I'm like, I don't care. Let's talk about it anyway.
Tessa Gratton: If we're writing a book together, you have to talk about it.
Justina Ireland: And then we went right from writing Path of Deceit to writing Chaos & Flame.
Tessa Gratton: We had written the first act of Chaos & Flame, and then we did the entirety of Path of Deceit.
Justina Ireland: Yeah, that makes sense because I definitely remember I was like, “Come write Star Wars with me!” And you were like, “Absolutely not.” And I was like, “Please, otherwise I'll have to do it all by myself and I'm so tired.” [Laughs.]
Tessa Gratton: Well, now I'm tired, too. [Laughs.]
Justina Ireland: Welcome. Now we all get to be tired! It’s been a really busy two and a half years.
Tessa Gratton: I do really like collaborating with you. You're really good at plot and action and figuring out pacing. I think at the very beginning when you do the outlines, that's something that you just are so good at. And then I can be like, “Well, but what if we have more philosophical discussions here?” And you're like, “No, we need a flood.”
Spoiler warning: This article discusses some details and plot points from Star Wars: The High Republic: Path of Deceit and Star Wars: The High Republic: Defy the Storm.
Justina Ireland: Oh, this is a spoiler. Can we do spoiler jazz hands if we're going to talk about a spoiler? But you definitely wanted to save Kevmo [in Path of Deceit], and I was like, “No, he must die. Kevmo has to further the plot for us.” That's why, when we started breaking out the character chapters, I was like, “You definitely have to write Marda, because that's more your philosophical introspective [point of view].” Let's think about how the cult makes us feel. And you're so good at writing that emotional arc of somebody just dealing with their feelings where I'm just like, “Let's just punch things! Let's get through this.” But I also think you're great at writing those romantic beats. I don’t write romance, though.
Tessa Gratton: Yana [Ro].
Justina Ireland: Yeah, but I threw those over to you and you revised some of those sections. I was like, Kevmo has to be a little less excited in parts. Let's dial him back. He loves being a Jedi, let's make him love it a little less. But I do think — I know RIP Kevmo — but I do think that was one of the things that did work well because we were writing two very different characters and being able to break out those Yana and Marda chapters and then share the Kevmo chapters made it go a lot faster than normally writing a book. I knew everything that was going to happen, but seeing how you had framed a scene and then being able to put a different perspective on that same scene was a lot of fun. And that's why we ended up writing Defy the Storm together. I was like, well, I want to do this again. This was fun and less like me [writing alone] at 2:00 a.m., eating Cheetos, crying. [Laughs.] There was a lot less crying, so that's great. It's always a win.
Tessa Gratton: Yeah. How did you feel when I said that I really, really, really wanted to write the point of view of Xylan in Defy the Storm?
Justina Ireland: I was actually surprised because I do think you tend to write characters who have a little more depth. Xylan is all fashion, no depth, but you gave him hidden depth. You made him deep, even though he was originally just kind of a very surface-level character. I definitely thought you'd want to write Jordanna [Sparkburn] just because when I wrote that character, it was kind of an homage to you. [She is] just like, “Lemme show up, get the work done, and hang out with my cat.” But I was pleasantly surprised by [Xylan’s] chapters. He just shows up to chew the scenery, which is delightful. And you need that, especially with Phase III. It's so deep and there's so many horrible things that our characters have gone through and there's so many obstacles they still have to get past that I think you need those moments of lightness in the book to help carry you through. So, I think readers are really going to be excited and delighted to see how Xylan has changed from Out of the Shadows to Defy the Storm.
Tessa Gratton: I really liked how he and Avon [Starros] play off of each other. That was something that I wouldn't have predicted, but I really like every single scene that the two of them are in together. Avon is probably my favorite of your characters from Phase I. It's hard to say that when there's Vernestra [Rwoh] right there, but…
Justina Ireland: I like the regular people. You go through the galaxy and you’re a Jedi? You have a lot of things going in your favor. And then you go through the galaxy and you're a regular human and, oh my gosh, everything is so dangerous for you! You are soft and squishy and you'll die. And Avon has grown and changed, and that's been one of my favorite things about getting to work in The High Republic. So often with Star Wars, you dip in, you write about a character, and you dip out, and so being able to craft a character arc… Wait, are we supposed to talk about Defy the Storm? I don't want to spoil it.
Tessa Gratton: I think a little bit. Yes.
Justina Ireland: What's your favorite scene? If you can talk about a scene in the book that's non-spoilery, especially one that you wrote, because I can barely remember the stuff I wrote. There are so many scenes.
Tessa Gratton: My favorite scene to write actually takes place over a couple of chapters: the introduction of Cair San Tekka. I had a lot of fun doing that and getting to show him through different characters’ points of view and just really dig into, well, what kind of weird fun stuff can I do here? Yeah. So, I think writing those were my favorite scenes to write.
Justina Ireland: Do we have art of Cair?
[Editor’s note: We do. And here’s your first look at it.]
Tessa Gratton: I've seen some!
Justina Ireland: It's all a blur. All I remember is — this is a spoiler — so many Boolan [illustrations]! My brain is just full of Boolans. But yeah, I liked Cair a lot because I am a sucker for big, messy families just because I tend to think it's a big galaxy. We should have more than one big family there doing lots of stuff for better or worse. Definitely my favorite scenes to write in this book were Avon's scenes just because…what do you do when you find out your mom is hanging out with the worst person in the galaxy? Imagine that teenage angst and embarrassment about your parents and then ratchet it up to a thousand because your mom is hanging out with the leader of the Nihil. A war criminal. It's like, what if your mom dates Hitler? So that was a lot of fun just to really delve into her. She's just all teenage angst.
Tessa Gratton: And she's not constrained by the kind of angst that the Jedi get to express.
Justina Ireland: She's like, “I don't have any code of conduct to follow. I just do what I want.”
Tessa Gratton: I think one of my favorite things about coming in late to The High Republic — since I just started with Phase II — was how I was encouraged to find things from Phase I and things that would be moving into Phase III and help develop them and make them my own. And I really was happy that everyone, but especially you, had done so much with the Grafs in Phase I. I love a good family feud. Let's do Grafs and San Tekkas in absolutely everything.
Justina Ireland: And we were writing brand new characters in Path of Deceit. Defy the Storm was a little different… It is nice in the YA book we get to slow down and kind of focus on character a little more than we do on the adult side. That is pretty fun. Speaking of which: wait, are you allowed to talk about the adult book?
Tessa Gratton: I think a little bit. It's announced and everything.
Justina Ireland: Okay. So, what was your favorite part about writing [Justina whispers] Temptation of the Force?
Tessa Gratton: I'm still in the thick of it, so it's hard to think about. But I have really liked finding small moments with characters to just have a moment of quiet. I've especially enjoyed doing that with Burryaga. Actually, I had never really thought about Wookiees very much.
Justina Ireland: The personal struggle of the Wookiee.
Tessa Gratton: They're fine. They're really tall Ewoks, which are my favorite, but it's been cool to really figure out who I think he is and who he's developing into because, of course, while I was working on Temptation from concept to outline, different aspects of who he is and who he's become were being written, like the short story in the anthology, Tales of Light and Life. I read that in the middle of the process, which has a huge impact on who he is.
Justina Ireland: Burryaga is actually a really interesting character coming out of Phase I, right? He’s kind of been the witness to history. He's always just there, maybe a little bit in the background. I do think it's interesting that now we're getting a different perspective. He's been missing and now he's back. He's in George [Mann]'s book [The Eye of Darkness], and it's going to be fun to see his arc. I mean, we don't necessarily get Wookiee arcs. I'm really looking forward to reading how he's changed, and especially once everything is done, it'll be really cool to see how everyone has picked out a different part of the character arc.
Tessa Gratton: I know you're writing one of the very last books of Phase III, and I definitely don't know what you could possibly even say about it.
Justina Ireland: Absolutely nothing! [Laughs.] It's going to have Star Wars characters. There'll be some Jedi, there'll be some non-Jedi. There'll be some enemies become friends, there'll be some friends become enemies. I don't know. It's going to be a middle grade book, so it'll be a nice quick read. So, we'll see. It's still kind of in the conceptual stages, but at this point now I've written two other High Republic middle grades and you've written a middle grade. That's my favorite spot — in and out and a nice short adventure.
Tessa Gratton: I like YA because I get to put in — not a lot, but some — kissing and more murder. I had to take a surprising amount of murder out of the Quest for Planet X. My instinct is kissing and murder. I struggled with that in the middle grade
Justina Ireland: Because there's not a lot of kissing in middle grade. But murder? I mean, I killed an entire ship full of people [in A Test of Courage].
Tessa Gratton: That was shocking! That was the first High Republic book I read and I was like, “Wow, we're just jumping in.”
Justina Ireland: It's like, “Welcome to High Republic. Everyone's dead.” [Laughs.]
Tessa Gratton: But the kids are brave.
Justina Ireland: Yeah, the kids are okay…I do have a surprising amount of kidnapping in my books, so I do like that we were able to turn that on its head a little bit for Defy the Storm, where it was kind of a tongue-in-cheek kidnapping. There's so much kidnapping in Star Wars, especially my books. People are often taken against their will. Welcome to a Justina Ireland book.
You're several books deep now into your Star Wars trajectory. What's your thing that you keep finding pops up in your storytelling?
Tessa Gratton: Other than Grafs and San Tekkas? I keep coming back around to questioning the Force and the Jedi and how the Jedi use the Force. I think that goes all the way back to my childhood when I was eight and I was like, “I want to be a space wizard.” [Laughs.] How does this really work? There don't seem to be very many rules in these movies.
Justina Ireland: [Laughs.] Luke just does what he wants.
Tessa Gratton: He doesn’t have anybody guiding him so he has to guess about the rules.
Justina Ireland: That's true. You don't get the rules until [The Empire Strikes Back], when he goes and finds Yoda, and then Yoda always speaks in riddles.
Tessa Gratton: Yoda's not really a rule-oriented teacher.
Justina Ireland: [Laughs.] While you're questioning the Force, I'm always questioning hyperspace because we have so many different ways of faster-than-light travel across the sci-fi spectrum, and I do think a lot of people have borrowed from Star Wars in that regard without thinking about the mechanics of what exactly is hyperspace beyond a few hand-wavy, astrophysics explanations. Especially in a galaxy where you have other places that exist within the forest and stuff like that.
Tessa Gratton: I really appreciated it when we first started working on Defy the Storm, because we have a lot of hyperspace stuff.
Justina Ireland: So much.
Tessa Gratton: But you immediately sent me links to [real scientific] things to read. “This is some of the physics and the math. And oh, by the way, here's this really big document about how hyperspace theoretically works.”
Justina Ireland: That and eating Cheetos at 2:00 a.m. Literally when I was writing Out of the Shadows, I was like, “How does any of this stuff work in Light of the Jedi?” We talk about the Paths, but we don't really explain it in a way that we can replicate it. And we knew that the Paths were going to come back around and we knew that Marchion [Ro] was going to use the Paths to make things worse into Phase III, but … if I don't understand the why and the how of a thing in a story, it bothers me.
Tessa Gratton: The science-y technological middle of Out of the Shadows is my favorite.
Justina Ireland: You’re one of five people across the world who feels that way, but me, too! My favorite parts of Star Wars are always when the academics show up and they give you a lesson about something in-world, because I'm just like, yes, I want to be in school forever. Let me experience that even in my fantasy. I talk about hyperspace now. My husband is like, “Oh, no, no. I don't want to hear any more about hyperspace.”
Tessa Gratton: [My wife] Natalie, too.
Justina Ireland: It's funny that you're working on Star Wars books with me because you were the first person, I think, who knew that I was doing The High Republic. I don't think it had a name back then, but we went to a writing retreat and I had to leave early because I was flying out to Skywalker Ranch. Do you remember that?
Tessa Gratton: I do remember that because you said, “I'm not supposed to tell anyone, but I know you really, really care about this.”
Justina Ireland: I was like, “I know you really like Star Wars,” and you're like, “I do.”
Tessa Gratton: I'm totally cool. “Skywalker Ranch? Yeah, I've never even heard about that place.”
Justina Ireland: [Laughs.] I just remember you were like, “What are you going to write about? What are you going to write?” And it was nice to bring you in and say, “Hey, let's write this book together.” Because the whole time I was like, “Do you remember that book that came out in the nineties?”
Tessa Gratton: I remember everything up until around 2003 when I went to graduate school and then post-graduate school, I don't remember anything. I'm good on all the Star Wars that came out before I was in graduate school.
Justina Ireland: At some point, we're going to have you and Cavan [Scott] do a Legends quiz-off because I think he's the only other person I've met who knows as much Legends stuff as you do.
Tessa Gratton: I'll definitely lose.
Justina Ireland: I guess we should probably talk about when we decided to save [or sacrifice] Imri [Cantaros]. I think even when we were breaking the story for Defy the Storm, we still hadn't truly settled on [it.]
Tessa Gratton: I think so, too, because for a while they were looking for him. Looking for him was always part of it. It’s not really fair that I didn't get to save Kevmo, but you got to save Imri.
Justina Ireland: It wasn't my fault, it was peer pressure! I'm pretty sure Jen [Heddle, Lucasfilm’s executive editor] sent me an email. She was like, “I can't believe you're going to kill the cinnamon roll. That's the worst.”
And I came back from New York Comic Con and [an adult fan] had come up to me and said, “I love Imri so much. He is everything I've ever wanted in a Jedi. I've been waiting my entire life to see a Jedi like him and me.” And I was like, “Oh no!” I remember I texted you at that point and I was like, “Imri has to live. I don't know what we're going to do with that, but he has to live.” Then we had our Star Wars roundtable meeting not too much later, and we were listing off everybody who was dead or missing, and I was like, “Oh, no, no, no. Imri's alive.” Jen Heddle was definitely happy.
Tessa Gratton: Without spoilers, I really like the way that his arc ends up playing out and the way that it affects Vernestra's arc as well. It's really interesting and complicated, and I really like how surviving a trauma can be so much more emotionally devastating and rewarding than just death. It really adds something really very important to Defy the Storm specifically, but also to Phase III [overall,] when all of the characters are reacting to galactic trauma.
Justina Ireland: After reading The Eye Darkness, I'm really glad we made that decision because even though things are not great at this time, we end on a high note in Defy the Storm. I think it's going to be a nice little bit of a pick-me-up. But I will say, I think the fan reaction has been probably the thing I've been most [excited about].
Tessa Gratton: It's really intense and so overwhelmingly positive.
Justina Ireland: It's a very pure love. And it's for books! We will have The Acolyte this year, but there's no other time period really where you can point to just books — there's no [series], there's no movies. When you have that much love and passion for a book, to me that makes me like you a thousand percent more just because I think it's easy to show up and love a TV show or a movie, especially one that's well known, but I do think it's really, really hard to show up and have that much passion for a book and then to get other people to read books. I've talked to people who met and are dating because they both love The High Republic books, which is such a flex.
Tessa Gratton: That's great. And the level of creativity has really impressed me, too, with the fan art and cosplaying that happens before books even come out. I saw so much Kevmo art before Path of Deceit even came out, and of course I was like [Nervously.], “Yeah, he's great.”
Justina Ireland: Was that New York Comic Con when somebody came up to us and was like, “I'm in the middle right now. I love Kevmo so much!” And we were like, “Yeahhhhhhhh, keep reading.” I don't want to tell you I killed your fave, especially when you just met him. But Imri lives! So that's what matters.
Tessa Gratton: Let's write another book together…in five years.
Justina Ireland: [Laughing.] I need so many naps.
