Lundin: While Claire’s story is entirely fictional, there are certainly pieces of me in her. Orsini: In the book, Claire navigates her own sexuality through fanfiction. I feel like I understand my characters and my story better having gone through the process. It was a learning curve for me, but a really rewarding one. You have to do all the jobs, and you have to do them with words alone. You’re the actress and the costumer and the prop builder and the locations manager and the cinematographer. Which means that after I turned in my first draft, my editor had notes for me like, “You need to describe what the character is thinking in this moment.” And I’m like, hey, that’s the actress’ job! Or “You need to describe the room she’s standing in, and what she’s wearing.” And I’m thinking, that’s supposed to be the production designer’s job, and the wardrobe department! But when you’re writing a book, you’re all those things too. Movies are very collaborative creative experiences, whereas books need to stand alone on their own. Lundin: As a screenwriter, there were certain writing muscles I wasn’t used to flexing when it came time to write a book.

Orsini: When it ended up in book form, what about the story changed the most? And maybe it can still one day be a movie, in which case… I have the screenplay ready! I wrote some sample chapters for them, which they loved, and we agreed to do it.

I had never written a book before, but I’ve been a fan of YA books since I was young, and I still love reading them so it was basically a no-brainer. They read it and saw the young adult novel in it and asked me if I’d like to write a book. My agent had sent the script out to various places, and it somehow ended up at Freeform Books, which is the publishing arm of Freeform the network. I thought that the story was pretty personal and specific-I wasn’t sure that many people would relate to a story about a girl who’s passionate about her gay fan fiction, especially if they weren’t fanfic readers themselves-but the specific is universal, and I think people responded to a story that clearly came from a personal, emotional place. What surprised me was how many people responded to the script. I hoped that at best, the script could be produced as a movie-it’s a movie I would like to see in the world-but at the very least, the script would make a great writing sample.

I decided the idea would make a great movie, and I started writing the screenplay. Why did it originally take that form, and how and why did it become a book?īritta Lundin: I’m a screenwriter, so when I first came up with the germ of the idea for Ship It, a book was never part of the equation. Lauren Orsini: Ship It began as a screenplay.

Ship it by britta lundin