By Ramona Zacharias.

I. Marlene King

High school is hard enough for a teenage girl, what with all that social awkwardness and pre-adulthood business, not to mention parents, teachers, homework and homecoming. Throw in murder, stalking and psychological torture that is seemingly from beyond the grave, and you have the deliciously dark and irresistible world of Hanna Marin, Spencer Hastings, Aria Montgomery and Emily Fields – four pretty little liars who live in the fictional town of Rosewood, Pennsylvania and have far more drama to deal with than your average student.

Based on Sara Shepard’s successful YA novels of the same title, the Pretty Little Liars television series tells the story of the four girls, whose best friend Alison goes missing. As they find the body, bury her and try to move on with their lives, an anonymous adversary (known solely by the coincidental nickname of “A”) begins taunting them via text message, manipulating them into doing her (or his) bidding or run the risk of having their most personal secrets exposed. Co-showrunner and series developer I. Marlene King (whose ability to capture the enigma of the teenage “bestie” was first seen when she penned 1995’s film Now and Then) has brought the stories to life on the small screen for five seasons now, and with two more waiting in the wings, is just getting started with all the fun involved in such a genre.

Shay Mitchell as Emily Fields, Troian Bellisario as Spencer Hastings, Lucy Hale as Aria Montgomery and Ashley Benson as Hanna Marin in Pretty Little Liars

You are extremely well versed in writing about female friendships…what are some of the joys and challenges involved in writing about such a specific dynamic as teenage girl friendships?

The joy I think is that it’s just such a fascinating and interesting time in people’s lives; there’s just so much drama in every moment of a young girl or teen girl’s life. There’s so much there to talk about. And my philosophy on writing for that age group really is to never think of them as teenagers. I always just write them almost as if they are adults and I think they end up being very well-rounded characters who shine a light on their issues in a way that’s not talking down to our audience.

This is a series that gets progressively darker, season by season. What do you enjoy about writing that particular tone of material? What kinds of fun do you have with the characters and some of the more twisted storylines that have developed?

It’s been fascinating to watch these characters grow up. We really found them in a more innocent time and as “A” has really tortured them and put them through so many dark moments, they’ve needed to grow up. And so it’s very organic for the show to take on a darker tone as our characters mature and handle situations that are much more life-threatening than what we saw in Season 1, where “A” was really taunting them, like asking Hanna to eat the cupcakes. As “A” became a greater threat, the girls needed to rise to that challenge and we have, in every way, made the show darker; even visually it’s taken on a darker tone. It’s really fun…and simply organic. It feels like the right thing to do with this show.

The series deals with a number of important concerns facing teenagers…are these “moral tales” or do they just draw attention to very real issues through dramatic fiction?

I hope in some way they are moral tales. Since the show is called Pretty Little Liars and the girls often do portray poor judgment – as we all do, at any age, especially as a teenager – it was important for us early on to bring the character of Toby to the forefront because he was the moral compass of the show. He never told a lie – he was the only character on the show who hadn’t told a lie until he joins the “A” team with the hopes of protecting Spencer. We need the morality so we can find a great balance there. And I think the tales are hopefully relatable to people in addition to being fun and shocking and cheesy.

Sara Shepard, author of the Pretty Little Liars novels

Tell me a bit about your working relationship with Sara Shepard and about basing the series on her texts. Was the show designed more to complement than mimic her stories? How many books had been written when you first became involved with the project?

I think two had been written when I read the first one; but by the time we were making the pilot, that was a yearlong process of development and I think four were written by then. I read all four before we made the pilot. I love Sara – it was so important to me to stay true to this world, the town and the characters she created. I knew if I could do that, the show would be a success. The books had already flown off the shelf and they were such a huge success before we started the show. After Book 4, I kind of stopped reading because by then we really had sort of set our own story path in motion. I didn’t want it to be identical to Sara’s because this is a thriller, and I knew that we needed to continue to shock and surprise fans with our own twists on her stories.

As a writer, how do you deal with the challenge of inhabiting these characters that were created by someone else?

It really wasn’t a challenge at all. To be honest with you, I loved the characters. When I read the first book, I sat on my couch and read it in one sitting and I was already starting to fall in love with characters. I especially related to Hanna because my parents were divorced and I understood her struggles. It was really more of a joy – I felt like it was my responsibility to bring those characters to the screen in a way that Sara had brought them to the page. It was really my responsibility to stay true to who those characters were and they were so well developed and so fun, that it really was just fun for me to translate that into television.

Marlene King on set of the Christmas Special

Tell me about your relationship with the actors themselves – have you found your writing has changed as you have gotten to know them over the years?

I love the girls. They’re amazing and we’ve been such great collaborators on this show. And yes, as I’ve gotten to know them, and as they are growing into these mature, beautiful women, I think we bring a little bit more of who they are more and more to their characters.

It’s a series that obviously draws a lot of fans and I would imagine a lot of fan opinion! What effect, if any, does that feedback have on your storylines and do you ever incorporate suggestions from your audience into your material?

Since the pilot, we’ve been extremely in tune to our fan base. Social media has made it very easy for us to register the pulse on where we’re going with the characters and the storylines. And I will say that when we receive an overwhelming response to something, I certainly will feel validated…like the getting together of characters, Toby and Spencer for example, that wasn’t something that was in the books. I kind of fell in love with both of those characters separately and thought, “Wow, what would it be like to put these two together?” And I remember when we shot that episode where they first connect and have their first kiss and then when it aired and fans went crazy for “Spoby” – they named them “Spencer and Toby are now Spoby Forever”…it didn’t change the way we thought about it but we certainly felt like “OK, they love it as much as we do, let’s keep going forward with this storyline”. So it’s a great way to reinforce what you’re doing.

You have over 20 episodes per season – is that challenging and what is your personal writing schedule like?

It’s definitely the most challenging part of this show. We normally do 25 episodes in a season and it really is a challenge to, in a fast and timely manner, get those scripts written and tell those stories so quickly. When I first started, I came from features and I had a very strict routine where I would get up, “don’t talk to me anyone, I need to stay focused, I need to stay in the mode”…and I realized, five years later, I can steal 15 or 20 minutes and say, “I’m closing my door”. So it has changed the way that I write, in the sense that I’ll take every minute I can, when I can, and just – out of necessity – put the writer’s hat on and shift gears and take advantage of that hat.

Do you like being at the helm of a large team of writers?

I do now, but that was also a challenge at the beginning because I had never even been in a writers’ room before Pretty Little Liars. But five years later, we’ve had a wonderful vibe develop on this show. We really work well together and the team is all supportive of each other. It’s nice to have that support system.

What do you find makes a writer “good in the room”?

I think people who stay engaged and bring fresh ideas. Our show especially is a puzzle – it’s all about puzzle solving. So puzzle solving is good, and understanding that you can’t just come in and say, “I want to tell this story, I want to tell a story about this character doing x, y and z”…I think what makes somebody really helpful and needful is understanding “the handoff”. “Well, in the previous episode, x, y and z happened, so I need to honor that as I move the story forward”. That’s really such an important part of the job.

This season marked a bit of a new path for the series as a lot of questions were answered at the end of the previous season. How have you managed to maintain the momentum created by earlier episodes while spinning the story in a new direction?

The nature of this material managed that we’ve maintained the momentum. And I think one of the things I’m most fond of on Pretty Little Liars is that we are such a dense show. There’s so much material in every episode and we’re always trying to move the story forward, even in incremental ways if that’s what we need to do. But we have an end date for this version of the story – we know in Season 7 it will be the last season for these four pretty little liars. Now that we know that end date, it’s going to be helpful for us to even speed up the story more. There are so many great revelations coming, in this Season 5B and what I know will be 6A, with our fans. Because we are about to give a lot more answers at a lot more rapid pace.

The Christmas Special episode

Tell me about your Christmas episode, for which you also donned the director’s hat.

It was a very ambitious episode for us. It’s our first Christmas episode and in terms of our production, we like to set the bar very high. The show always looks so good and we wanted to really bring our A game – pardon the pun – for the Christmas episode. So we strived for excellence, and this is crew on the show who all work so well together and bring so much to our effort. This is one of those rare opportunities where we all were pushed to our limits and everybody rose to the occasion. We’re all so proud of this episode and really can’t wait to hear the fans’ response. In addition to the fact that it’s a really great story, it just looks amazing.

You have some upcoming projects, including another collaboration with Sara Shepard. Can you tell me about those?

I’m very excited to be adapting The Merciless for Lionsgate Films and am going to be working on that now while we’re on hiatus of Pretty Little Liars. That’s a fun, scary thriller that I think our PLL fans are really going to enjoy. And yes, I’m going to be working on adapting Sara’s latest books, The Perfectionists, for ABC Family. So I hopefully will be able to capture that lightning in a bottle not once, but twice.

The first ever Christmas episode for Pretty Little Liars aired Tuesday, December 9 on ABC Family.

 You can follow I. Marlene King on Twitter at @imarleneking.