Leigh Bardugo's craft advice keeps circling two ideas: respect the revision, and build characters honestly. She's blunt that you can't outrun a rough first draft. She's just as clear that villains and heroes start from the same place.
You Can't Outsmart the First Draft
Bardugo's most repeated piece of advice is to give up on getting a first draft right. In her experience nobody outsmarts the messy stage, and pretending you can just stalls you out. The book gets good in revision, where she reads a draft through over and over, no matter how sick of it she is. She reads those drafts out loud, which is how she hears whether each character actually sounds like themselves. Because she works from an outline, her revisions tend to add depth and length rather than hack away at structural mistakes.
Write People, Not Roles
She builds characters from the inside out. Rather than deciding up front that someone is the villain or the love interest, she hands them a history and an agenda and follows what they do. That's how the Darkling turned into an antagonist readers could actually believe in, a leader with genuine charisma instead of a ranting madman. Bardugo has said the most dangerous people in real life don't arrive wearing a sign that says they're evil.
I don't set out to write a villain or a love interest or a hero; I set out to write a character with a history and an agenda of his or her own and then I see what happens.
Leigh Bardugo, YALLfest interview
The same honesty shapes her heroines. She's wary of YA protagonists who are endlessly wise and calm and sure of themselves, and she'd rather write someone who doubts herself and sometimes makes the wrong call.
Permission to Write Around Your Life
Bardugo is generous about the practical reality of writing. You can hold a job, even two, carry all your ordinary responsibilities, and still get a book finished. She did exactly that while paying down student loans, and she's careful to tell other writers to build a process that fits their own life rather than copying someone else's routine and feeling like a failure for it.
For her full method and daily cadence, see the full Leigh Bardugo writing routine.
What You Can Steal
- Stop polishing the first draft. Get it down, then fix it in revision.
- Read your pages out loud. It's the fastest way to catch a flat voice.
- Start characters with a history and a goal. Let the label come last.
- Let your heroes be flawed. Doubt and bad calls make them believable.