A.S. King is a surrealist author, a total pantser, and an absolute pro when it comes to revising novels. She’s also one of the most decorated authors in young adult literature.
And she joined me on Your Next Draft to share how she shapes her subconscious inspiration into powerful, unforgettable stories.
Have you ever read a book and thought, Holy cow, this is amazing. How did this author DO this?
How did they manage to craft such an intricately plotted, complex story? How did they come up with such inventive, unusual points of view and narrative devices, and make them all work? How did they innovate so much on a technical level, and keep me hooked on a brilliant story all the way through?
Or, maybe you’ve read a book and thought, Wow, I wish I could write (or in my case, edit) a book like this, but this is incredible and it might be beyond me?
Well, that’s how I feel when I read an A.S. King novel.
She’s an impressively decorated author of novels for middle grade, teens, and adults. She writes these brilliant stories that are surrealist and puzzling and weird and at the same time beautiful and heartfelt and honest and real.
When I read her books, I see what I aspire to be able to help writers create.
And when I heard her mention in an interview that she loves revision, I knew I had to bring her to Your Next Draft and ask her: how does she do it?
How does she take a draft of something like Dig., which has nine points of view and a ghostly surrealism and three generations of a family reckoning with race and a missing persons crime story, and revise that layered complexity into a novel that wins the highest award in young adult literature?
So I was thrilled when she agreed to join me on the podcast. In our conversation, A.S. King shares her complete revision process, from first draft to final draft; the feedback she gets from her editor at her publishing house; and what it really means to write—and revise—a story.
Get the A.S. King Revision Reading List
Want to see A.S. King’s editorial choices in action? Read the books she wrote and revised.
I’ve gathered all the books Amy mentions in this episode and the insights she shares about how she edited them, and I’ve compiled them into a reading list.
It’s ordered by publishing date, so you can see how her novels have evolved over time. And it includes links to order each book from Aaron’s Books, Amy’s local bookstore, where you can get your books signed and personalized by Amy herself.
Fill out the form below to download your reading list:
Plus, they’re all fantastic reads—you’re in for a treat!
Meet A.S. King
In order for you to get the most out of our conversation, there are a few things you need to know.
First, her first name is Amy. In fact, she publishes her YA novels under A.S. King, and her middle grade novels under Amy Sarig King.
Second, I need you to know how awesome she is. Amy is one of YA fiction’s most decorated authors.
I could list out so many awards here, but I’ll highlight just my two favorites: she is the only author to win the American Library Association’s Michael L. Printz Award twice.
I typically describe that to people as the highest award in young adult literature, but in this case, I can’t really say that, because she has also won the ALA’s Margaret A. Edwards Award honoring her and her body of work for her “significant and lasting contribution to young adult literature.” That’s not just for two books, but for her lifetime achievement, which is arguably even higher.
That is by no means all her awards, though. Scroll through her website, and you’ll find just an awe-inspiring collection of awards, starred reviews, and critical acclaim.
My point is this: Amy writes good books.
Third, her latest novel is called Pick the Lock. She describes it in five words as “confined feminist punks smash patriarchy.”
It’s a novel about Jane, a teenage girl—though Amy wrote the book for both teens and adults, so don’t think that Jane’s age confines this story to the YA shelves. Jane’s mother, Mina, is a punk superstar who tours the world releasing platinum albums and selling out concerts—and when she comes home to the Victorian mansion where Jane, her father, and her younger brother live, Mina is confined to a system of pneumatic tubes that run throughout the house, like a mouse in little plastic tunnels.
And Jane would like her mother back.
Fourth, Amy loves revision. One thing you’ll hear us mention in our conversation is the table of contents she creates to revise each of her novels. Here’s a photo of the table of contents she made for Pick the Lock:
Fifth, and this is somewhat less exciting, we had some technical difficulties when we were recording, and so you might hear some slight variance in audio quality. I did my best to clean them up, and I hope they’re not distracting. We persevered, though, and I think the conversation we had was more than worth it.
And I believe that’s everything you need to know! Listen to the episode to hear our full conversation.
How Amy Revises Her Novels
Here’s what stuck out to me about Amy’s revision process.
First, there’s the how—the literal steps she follows to revise her manuscripts.
Amy knows the general point of the story from the beginning, and she discovers the end through writing the first draft.
She uses the surrealist writing method, which sounded to me like perhaps the purest form of pantsing, but when she gets stuck, she calls her plotter friend, David Gill, creator of the “Sticky Note Plot” method, to help her untangle plot problems. At this point in her career, Amy does revise as she writes, and so by the time she finishes that first draft, the story has largely taken shape.
When that draft is complete, she does her Holy Shit Chainsaw Revision, where she ruthlessly cuts ten to twenty percent of the word count, largely by removing redundancies.
Then she reads a lot of poetry and listens to a lot of music while she’s working through the next draft, which is all about refining the language.
When she sends it to her editor, she includes a list of all the things that she already knows need help.
The feedback her editor gives her at this point in her career tends to be more of a heavy line edit rather than significant structural changes. Her editor also brings a lot of market awareness, taking into account where the book will sit on bookstore shelves.
She does not always agree with her editor’s feedback—in fact, she’s had many instances where she vehemently disagreed with an editor or agent. But she found ways to apply the feedback anyway, and those revisions have always made the book better.
One thing I did notice about how Amy describes her process is that so much of how she shapes her stories is intuitive. There are some parts she struggled to describe, some parts she doesn’t recommend to other writers, and some parts she can’t really teach.
And that’s why this isn’t an entirely solo process—when she needs plot support, she calls in her plotting friend, and when she’s taken the manuscript as far as she can she brings in her editor. Intuition can take you a long, long way, and where you get stuck, that’s where you can get help.
So that’s the how—how Amy revises her manuscripts.
How Amy Thinks About Revision
Even more than that, I love her perspective on revision.
In fact, I’m just going to let her share my favorite quotes again.
Revising is about making sure that you’re saying what you wanna say in the way you wanna say it.
There’s so many roads you can take with every sentence. Alice, once we close the door, can do anything she wants. And we can change that in a book anytime. We can actually just cut the whole last third of the book and change the whole last third of the book if we need to.
To me, revision is the sport. It’s the impact. It’s the reason we’re writers.
Every revision is worth it. Every revision.
I couldn’t put it any better than that.
See Amy’s Revision in Action in Her Novels
If you loved this conversation, I have good news—there’s a lot more where this came from. Like I said, I’ll be sharing what Amy has to say about her publishing experience on the podcast soon.
In the meantime, I encourage you to check out Amy’s books!
Read The Dust of a Hundred Dogs and watch for the fourteen sentences about pirate feelings that made the entire book work.
Read Ask the Passengers and see how Amy shaped the ending and made Astrid Jones come out in a way that fulfilled her editor’s recommendations while retaining the heart of the book.
Read Attack of the Black Rectangles and watch for how Amy showed and told her character’s asexual identity in ways that were so profoundly meaningful to her readers that she’s received heartfelt fan mail thanking her for the representation.
Read Dig. and discover all the disparate, seemingly random ideas Amy’s subconscious supplied to her during her surrealist writing sessions—a kid with a shovel, a freak, a mysterious fifth cousin—and how she shaped all the ideas she pantsed into a Printz-award–winning novel.
Read Pick the Lock and see how Amy followed the point she knew she was making—that her confined feminist punks would smash patriarchy, not get smashed by it—and wrote her way to the end to discover how they’d do it in ways that surprised even her. And if you figure out what Station Six is, or how far it all goes, do let us know.
You can order these books and all Amy’s books from her local bookstore, Aaron’s Books. Amy will even sign and personalize the books you order from Aaron’s Books; just make sure you fill out the form to indicate you’d like them signed.
And don’t forget, you can download this entire reading list to see what to watch for in each book and what Amy said about each one’s revision process. Get the reading list here:
You can find Amy online at as-king.com. She’s also on Instagram and Bluesky.
And I’ll let Amy have the final word.
In the end, it is all about your voice and your experiences and your feelings. That’s it. It’s all writing is.