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1. Sara Shepard was working as a ghostwriter at Alloy, the juggernaut book publisher behind Gossip Girl, when she came up with the idea for the Pretty Little Liars book series: Four friends trying to move on after the disappearance of their group’s queen bee. Shepard revealed that she was inspired by two women she knew who had been kidnapped. “So I was always afraid of being kidnapped,” she explained to Cosmopolitan. “I remember thinking, ‘What happens when somebody takes you? What happens next?'”
2. In a move that surprised Shepard, showrunner I. Marlene King decided to condense the plot of the first book into just the pilot episode. But it set the tone for the series’ breakneck pace moving forward.
“Sara Shepard writes these great OMG, WTF cliffhanger chapter endings,” King explained to Cosmo. “I decided that if we could end each one of our episodes in a way that Sara ended her chapters—that was the tone I set out to accomplish. I knew the book fans would follow the material to television.”
