The story team on 20 years of Warrior Cats
EXCLUSIVE from the Story Team
BY THE STORY TEAM
This year (2023), saw Warriors reach the milestone of twenty years’ publication.
Two whole decades!
It feels very strange to write those words. To think about how some of the original readers who discovered the series way back in the early 2000s could very well be in their thirties by now. To think about how there are surely new readers discovering the series now who were not even born when Into the Wild first appeared in bookstores.
Collaborating with HarperCollins on the updated Ultimate Guide that publishes next week, to commemorate this amazing milestone, brought home to the creative team just how much of a legacy has been created. The amount of working hours that needed to be set aside to review the text was genuinely quite daunting—there were so many new characters to add!—but this, we feel, is a testament to the amount of effort, care, and love that has been put into the series by so many people: writers, editors, artists and designers, our colleagues in marketing and brand licensing, and our loyal readers, whose enthusiasm for the Warriors books and their feline inhabitants constantly spurs all of us on.
The current story team joined the series about a decade ago, just over a decade after the series was originally developed. At that time, four complete present-day arcs had been written, as well as seven of the super editions and numerous novellas and mangas. It was a lot to come to grips with, and we were thankful that we happened to come on board the series with the development of the Dawn of the Clans prequel arc (Series 5). This meant that we could develop new stories for the series without the fear of contradicting established canon, while at the same time re-reading the first four arcs to get completely up to speed with the present-day action and drama. (As much as we loved Gray Wing and co. from Dawn of the Clans, we knew that we would be resuming the saga from Series 6.)
At times, living up to the series’ own legacy, and fans’ expectations, can also be daunting. While having twenty years’ worth of stories behind us is often helpful (because, with so many books, our story structure is very well established, and we always have a strong sense of what each new title “requires”), it can occasionally be tricky to come up with new storylines! More than once, the creative team has started developing an exciting new idea only to realize this “exciting new idea” is actually very, very close to a plotline or scenario in a previous book. Whenever this happens, the idea will often be discarded if it cannot be tweaked and reworked into a direction that feels less like a simple retread of something that worked once before—because we are all keenly aware that it’s not just the richness of the Warriors world that keeps our wonderful readers coming back for further adventures. It’s also the desire to see what comes next; to see how our characters keep growing and evolving as they age, and as they experience new highs and lows in their lives with the Clans.
This is why, when the story team gathers together (usually virtually, but occasionally in person!) to “break” a new story for the series, we always keep one eye on its potential long-range consequences and effects. It’s one thing to get excited about the book that you’re currently working on—but when the development of one story sparks an idea organically for a whole new story, that’s when we get really excited.
As an example, earlier this year, the team worked on a storyline for our seventeenth super edition, which takes place in the present day. It involves a group of cats being tasked by StarClan with a very important quest. In exploring the reasons for this quest, and why it held such significance to the present-day cats, we began fleshing out a backstory that will form the basis of our eighteenth super edition, which we are very eager to begin plotting next year.
One exciting idea leading organically to another exciting idea is always a big deal to the story team, because it reminds us that, even after twenty years, there are still new stories to tell—and that we’re still excited to tell them!
Here’s to twenty years of Warriors…
(…and, maybe, twenty more!)
