It was while researching her first book that Ashley Little discovered the fascinating world of all-girl gangs — the rarest alliance in all of gang culture. Inspired, she wrote Anatomy of a Girl Gang, a multiple-perspective story about a gang of five teenage girls who seek solace in each other while terrorizing the city of Vancouver.

Ashley Little lets us in on the secrets behind her gritty International IMPAC DUBLIN Literary Award-longlisted novel, from her emotional research in the Downtown Eastside to the Shakepearean love story that inspired her.

"I went over to Vancouver and stayed on the Downtown Eastside — Cambie and Hastings — for two-and-a-half weeks over a three-year period. I dressed down and walked around. I wanted the novel to be set there so I could offer readers a window into that world, especially Canadians who couldn't imagine that this is going on in our own country. I wanted to paint a picture of that community for people who would never go there. I'd walk around just researching, listening, seeing, then I'd go back to my room and cry and write everything down and then do it all again."

"I began thinking of my characters and planning what they would be like, and I mapped them all onto the body of a girl. So Mac, the leader, would be the head, her right hand/arm would be Mercy, then Z would be her left hand, and then her two drug runners would be the legs, and the heart of the gang would be the city. I think the title came to me first — Anatomy of a Girl Gang — and so I began thinking of both anatomy as the study of something and then also as the physical body... A lot of my research would end up with West Side Story, and then when I was thinking of my plot, I thought what if I did a retelling of Romeo and Juliet? And that is how I plotted my novel. Mac is Romeo and Z is Juliet. Both the lovers are women. And Kayos is Tybalt, Mercy is Mercutio and Sly Girl is the apothecary. Vancouver is the chorus. It's the same story retold in modern day with female gangsters."

"I used to rest my feet on the heater underneath my desk, and keep my feet warm. My desk is no longer above a heater, and now I still have this phantom craving to keep my feet warm, so I use a heating pad. When I was having a hard time getting through the day, I would light candles and have them sitting by me. Those seemed to help. I'd work for about six hours on the book. Three in the afternoon and three at night. That's just writing — not including reading. I did yoga regularly while writing this book. I'd fit it in sometime during the day. And in Tofino we had the good fortune of having a hot tub overlooking the ocean, so I'd spend a lot of time in there decompressing."

"I have big sheets of butcher paper which I tape all together and put up on the wall like wallpaper. I have my plotline with major plot points — and that is the most useful tool in writing the novel. Without feeling like it's a big monster that I'll never get finished, I just work on getting from one point to the next point. I don't even have to have it all mapped out — I just need to put one foot in front of the other. Then I have a big paper of themes and 'about' — and a big sheet for each of the characters, which describes the physical traits and personality traits, and a one-line motto. So when I was writing, I could say, oh yeah, what colour were Mac's eyes again? And I could go to those. I also had a big notebook with all my notes."

"I was really interested in graffiti at the time. I was interested in learning to read tags and different types of graffiti… I did a private graffiti tour in NYC, and that was really helpful. I felt like I was on the ground and I was getting the real deal. I would ask the guide, would it be possible to do this or that? Would this be plausible? My guide was a former graffiti artist who then went into business starting tours… I wanted all of the voices to be very distinct from each other and Z was the last character I figured out. I wanted to make her sound different and then I realized that she's a graffiti artist and these are the letters she thinks and sees in."