About the Author: “Kayvion Lewis is a young adult author of all things escapist and high-octane. Her Thieves’ Gambit duology has been published in over 25 languages, and is being adapted for film by Lionsgate. A former youth services librarian, Kayvion’s been working with young readers and kidlit since she was sixteen. When she’s not writing, she’s breaking out of escape rooms, jumping out of airplanes, and occasionally running away to mountain retreats to study kung fu. Though she lives in Louisiana and often visits her family in The Bahamas, Kayvion never really knows when she’ll take off on her next adventure, which could take her anywhere in the world” (Bio from author’s website).
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A huge thank you to Kayvion Lewis for taking the time to do an interview with us at Pine Reads Review! Her newest young adult novel, Heist Royale, the sequel to Thieves’ Gambit, is coming out November 12, 2024, from Nancy Paulsen Books. Also, be sure to check out our review of Heist Royale here!
Disclaimer: This interview was edited for length and clarity from a spoken conversation.
Hannah Goerndt: What draws you to the young adult genre?
Kayvion Lewis: The young adult genre is unique because most YA books explore the same coming-of-age story. It’s about people who, in addition to going on all these adventures and having romances, are also people who don’t really know who they are yet and are still figuring that out. This is true for the teen age but it’s also true for people who are maybe a bit older than the young adult demographic. I think YA resonates with people in a way that hits home and people can relate to those stories. I am drawn to YA because I get to write about people who are still figuring it out while I am still figuring it out.
HG: When you sit down to start a new project, do you begin with characters, setting, or do you go for plot? And then where do you go from there?
KL: I am a plot-first writer. I start with an idea, which for Thieves’ Gambit was just a competition of thieves; I had no idea for characters or setting or anything. From there I go and work out all the details, things I think would happen or set pieces. I don’t do any character work while I am planning, but when I begin writing, then I need a main character, and other characters sort of fill in the gaps as I need them. I usually need to do a lot more work during revision and with fleshing out characters. And once I know the plot and the overarching events, I try to think of character arcs that would fit in that. Like in Thieves’ Gambit, thieves would naturally have trust issues so that is where I started with Ross.
HG: Since we are on Thieves’ Gambit, what made you decide to write about thieves?
KL: It’s going to sound cliché, but I swear this is true. I got the idea from a dream where a disembodied voice told me the premise, which is a competition of thieves, and then I woke up and I thought someone would have written a big heist YA teen book but I spent the entire morning searching and I couldn’t find one. So, I had a little random spark of an idea that was unique, and no one had done it before, and I had to do it. It was too good of an idea not to write. I didn’t decide to write about thieves, they decided to be written by me.
HG: All the characters in the book have such unique personalities and they all come from very different backgrounds, which applies to how they interact in this world, so how did you form these characters?
KL: It was definitely a layered process; in first drafts I feel like my characters are very two dimensional and I have to flesh them out through the revision process. I wanted each character to be as different as possible. I began with generic subtypes of characters and then added details like a sculptor. I definitely made it very intentional to have all the characters from different countries and places, which felt realistic as this competition brings together all the best teenage thieves so they wouldn’t be from the same place but everywhere in the world, which makes them distinct. I had to think about how their cultures and where they were raised would affect their personalities and the way they acted.
HG: The heists are all high-stakes and crazy intense, so what factors and ideas helped you create these scenes?
KL: Even though I am a plot-first writer, my original outlines start out pretty thin, and it’s something I have to build on as I’m writing. I’ll have an outline and it’ll be like: main character meets this, dramatic thing happens, bullet point for heist, dramatic mess up happens, character gets out of bad situation. Then I would have a heist and not have a clue about the twists and turns and the reversals and reveals that people expect with heists. I was trying to pay homage to the traditional thieving/heist aesthetic. One of the first things you would think about is a museum heist. So, the first heist in Thieves’ Gambit is in a museum, but there are almost eight different heists and characters who are at each other’s throats at the same time. And then when it comes to the Cairo heist at the gala, I’ve always had a fascination with ancient Egypt, so that was a bit of me living my childhood fantasy. I thought it would be the coolest thing ever to have them stealing a golden sarcophagus. And this is a competition novel, so I needed the stakes to escalate, so the phases in the competition should escalate as well. What’s more intense than a museum heist and a team versus team gala heist, well, stealing a person would be the highest escalation. So, the last phase is to be a kidnapping, but to make it more intense, they are stealing people that are related to the other competitors. It was basically just me sitting at my desk about what’s the craziest thing that I could do with these characters and deciding to go for it. When it comes to the actual twists and turns of each heist, I have to build it in layers like a puzzle as I go along, and the heists start to make more sense and become more complicated as I revise. It’s really a piece-by-piece process of putting together each heist that requires a lot of time and patience.
HG: I saw that there was a film adaptation in the future for Thieves’ Gambit; what was it like when you got that news?
KL: So, we had a weird situation. After your book is published, you get film interest, and it’s a slow process. We actually got offers for movie adaptations before we even sold the book. So, I was already so fixated and obsessed with the fact that publishers wanted to publish my book, and this complicated process. And my agent casually mentions that some film agents were sent my manuscript. I think I malfunctioned at that point with all the stuff happening at the same time, I couldn’t take it all in. It wasn’t until a few months later that I realized that I actually have a movie deal with Lionsgate and I still wake up and have to check my emails to make sure it wasn’t just a dream.
HG: Were you always planning to have Thieves’ Gambit as a duology, or if you weren’t originally thinking about that, at what moment did you decide that a sequel would be needed to finish this story?
KL: I never really decided that there was going to be a second book. I wrote Thieves’ Gambit and I thought it was going to be a standalone, despite the major cliffhanger. In my head it was like an open-ended book and the reader could imagine what would come next. But I was reading my literary agent’s submission material for publishers, and it says that Thieves’ Gambit is a duology. And to this day I can say that I have never told anyone that this is a duology, but my agent and the publishing team and the people working on the movie collectively decided that it was a duology. And so, I wrote a second book. I’m glad now, though, because it was clearly a half-finished story that I didn’t know I needed to finish at the time, but it’s finished now.
HG: Are there any authors or books that inspire you as an author or any that directly affect the way you would like your writing to be perceived?
KL: When I was a kid, I really loved the 39 Clues series by Rick Riordan. That series definitely has the same heartbeat as Thieves’ Gambit with the grand adventure and sinister family members and around the world globe traveling. I love the way those books made me feel like a kid. The tangible fantasy that wouldn’t happen to me in real life. I wanted to write something that made me feel that way, so those books are a direct inspiration. When it comes to my common reading habits today, I find that I absorb stories that are very different from what I write. Sometimes I get in my head and worry whether my book is as good, and then I’m not reading for pleasure anymore. So, I end up reading in different genres, like lately I’ve been a fan of sci-fi and horror.
HG: What advice would you pass on to young authors as they begin their own journey through publishing?
KL: My biggest advice is to remember that you are your first and most important reader. I mean don’t write stories for other people or stories that you think other people are going to enjoy or because it might be popular. Write the story that sets your heart on fire. Write the story that you love and that you would want to read, as if you were writing this book for another version of yourself. Everything else will come. People can tell when they are reading a book that is somebody’s passion and comes from their soul. So, write for yourself first.
HG: To wrap things up, what does the future look like for you? Do you have any ideas you are working with or plans you can share?
KL: So, I actually sold a three-book contract to Penguin. The first two books are the Thieves’ Gambit duology. And I’m currently working on a third YA book that is set in the same universe as the Thieves’ Gambit series. It is going to be more mystery than thriller but there’s going to be some references to the organization and some other characters but still a different story, setting, and completely different energies, a little spookier and more sinister. I don’t want to say too much because it hasn’t been officially announced, but I am really excited to write more in this criminal underground world. I am also working on a middle grade book now that has more magical elements. It feels like Thieves’ Gambit in the sense of adventure and mystery, but a little bit of reality TV, I’ll say that hint about it. Hopefully, that will sell at some point within the next year or so, and I’ll get to officially talk about it.
Hannah Goerndt, Pine Reads Review Writer