Exclusive Interview

Meghan Quinn Reveals the Inspiration Behind ‘Just For the Cameras’ & Shares Her ‘Elite Tropes’

Calling all fans of the Meghan Quinn universe: Now might be the time to revisit some of your favorites because the romance author’s new series is bringing back beloved side characters and putting them in the forefront. The first novel of her Bay Area Players series centers around Maple, a character readers might remember from Quinn’s recently concluded Bridesmaid series.

In Just For the Cameras, out now, zookeeper Maple is willing to do just about anything to prevent the closing of the flamingo lagoon. Enter Graydon St. John, a football player for San Francisco’s Foghorns who desperately needs to get the public on his side when his reputation for being a grouch gets out of hand. The Foghorns PR team has a solution: Graydon will show off a new side to himself volunteering with Maple at the zoo, and perhaps this opportunity will improve the chances of Maple keeping her favorite exhibit open. What starts as a business arrangement snowballs into a fake relationship when fans spot the chemistry between the pair, but is falling in love with the world watching the ultimate win or a career-ending loss?

Meghan Quinn spoke with Swooon about how her fans’ love of side characters inspired a new series, her holy grail of romance tropes, and what means the most to her after more than a decade of writing love stories.

What inspired the start of a sports-centric romance series?

Meghan Quinn: It’s funny because I tend to write a lot of side characters, and my readers love them, and they’re always asking for their stories. So I’ll hold on to them until I’m ready to have an actual story for them. I had two male side characters and a female side character that didn’t have a story yet. The two guys were in sports: one was a hockey player, one was a baseball player, and the girl was a zookeeper. And I was like, “Okay, how can I make this work?” [I came up with] what if it’s an all-sports series, and there’s a PR crisis, so all the sports teams in San Francisco become friends because they have to try to make their teams seem better to the people of San Francisco. This all stemmed from the lack of a storyline for side characters, and I just pulled it all together.

You’re known for crafting true rom-coms that are a marriage of romance sentiments and true comedic hijinks. Does one aspect come more naturally than the other?

Quinn: I really enjoy making people laugh. It’s one of my favorite things. There’s so much going on in the world that if I can help people escape from reality for a moment and give them a little chuckle, then I feel like I’m doing my job. But it depends on what part of the book I’m in. So the comedy aspect, everything just happens in the moment. And sometimes the comedy is beefed up in the editing process. And as for the romance, I think they go hand in hand for me. It depends on what kind of mood I’m in and which one’s easier to write [in that moment]. Sometimes I get really in the mood, and I can write that spicy scene so quickly, or the comedy just flows easily, especially the banter. It just depends on where I’m at that time of the day.

What was your favorite joke and scenario in this book that truly tickled you?

Quinn: There’s one that I can’t stop thinking about, and I keep going back to it and thinking like, why did I do that! And why did my editors allow it? It’s a scene in the coffee house, and all three guys are sitting around and talking about Graydon’s love life, and OC, who is a character from a previous series and is very beloved in the Meghan Quinn universe, is eating a muffin. And he’s talking about eating a muffin in a dirty way. He’s being very inappropriate with the muffin, let’s just say that. But he’s really in a desperate phase of his life because the person he loves is getting married to somebody else. So he’s in a bad spot. And he’s just… making out with this muffin. There’s been early ALCs that have been out, and people have mentioned it to me, like, “Oh my god OC in the muffin scene!” And I’m like, I know, I don’t know what I was thinking, but we went with it.

You mentioned that this series is a marriage of prior side characters and new characters. Was it challenging to bring together all of these characters from across the Meghan Quinn universe?

Quinn: It was so difficult to be honest. I pulled Maple, the female main character, from my Bridesmaid series. Graydon is completely new. OC is from the Vancouver Agitators, and he’s in two books in that series. And then Bennett is from my Almond Bay series, and he’s in one book in that series. And then I also have characters coming from my baseball series, like, from back in the day. It was hard because I had to go back and read certain sections [of their respective books] to remind myself how they spoke, what they looked like, how they acted, and how they reacted for every single character. I had to keep them consistent, since they’re all a big part of this book. It took a lot of time to take notes and remember who is who, and how they react to different situations.

Were there any particular characters that you were surprised you didn’t recognize their potential the first time around? Or were excited to expand on?

Quinn: Definitely! When I write heroes in particular, it’s harder for me to write someone grumpy, like Graydon. He’s kind of mean at first, but he has a reason as to why he is the way that he is. And so that’s much harder for me to write because I can be very sarcastic. My responses, just in general, come off more funny and sarcastic than serious. And so for him, I was having the time of my life revisiting his character because I could just be goofy and enjoy that aspect of it.

Graydon and Maple are complete opposites. How do you pinpoint the emotional opposing factors for your characters? And how did you do it for this couple?

Quinn: She’s very sunshine, and normally in a grumpy/sunshine story, you would feel him being the total grump, and sometimes the sunshine takes it. But what I liked is that Maple doesn’t take it at all, and that she gives it right back to him and still stays in her sunny persona. And then, to me, there has to be a reason as to why the characters are the way they are, because that’s just how humans are. We are all formed and shaped from our background and what has happened to us, which leads us to how we are today. With Graydon, I wanted him to have that dark demeanor, [someone who] didn’t care for anybody until she came into his life. But there had to be a reason as to why, and his backstory made me cry. His backstory is so heartbreaking, but it gives you reason as to why he is the way that he is.

This is, of course, not your first fake dating romance. What do you enjoy most about the trope? What emotions or experiences does fake dating open the characters up to that we wouldn’t be able to see otherwise?

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Quinn: Fake dating and enemies-to-lovers are the elite tropes, in my opinion. They add that ability for an author to create tension within the reader. So as you’re reading it, you’re like, “Oh my god, he touched her,” especially in fake dating. They have to hold hands. They have to pretend to kiss, they have to do all these different things. And it’s like, when is it actually going to be something more? There’s just so much tension and slow burn that you can build within the story with tropes like that, which makes it so much more fun. And you are edging the reader the entire way. There’s so many little touches here and there that you can do to tease the readers. [And it feels like] is this going to be the moment? And then it’s not. And it’s like, damn it! So it’s fun for me.

You made your debut in 2013 and wrote full-time in 2016. What has been the best thing about continuing to write for the romance community?

Quinn: The real answer is truly being able to give people an escape. I just got a message this morning where someone wrote me a message and said that my two Christmas books brought them out of one of the darkest times of their lives. Writing is fun, but being able to help others, even if it’s just through words, is so rewarding in a way that, I don’t know, it’ll never be topped. That is the best thing that I could do. I can retire one day and be like, I gave people joy, I made people laugh. And that’s all I can really be happy about.