Natalie Messier: I Love Writing First Drafts

Natalie Messier is a Reese’s Book Club LitUp Fellow and Los Angeles-based screenwriter. She has worked as a writers’ assistant for the series “Severance” and “Chicago Fire”, and her scripts have received recognition from NBC, Disney, Paramount, Final Draft, The Blacklist, NHMC, and the Austin Film Festival. Originally from south Texas, she is a proud Mexican-American. When she’s not writing, she can be found searching for LA’s best matcha lattes, reading romance novels, and cuddling with her two cats. Follow her on Instagram.

In this interview, Natalie discusses turning her TV pilot script into her debut romance novel, Every Version Of You, her hope for readers, and more.

Name: Natalie Messier
Literary agent: Holly Root of Root Literary
Book title: Every Version Of You
Publisher: Gallery Books
Release date: July 7, 2026
Genre/category: Romance
Elevator pitch: After she dies, Joey Vasquez gets the chance to relive her life from any point of her choosing. She goes back to her freshman year of college and attempts to get the “one who got away” to fall in love with her—only to find herself strangely drawn to the man she thought she hated.

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Every Version of You came to me when I was at a bit of a low point. I was floundering in my career and had begun to doubt I would ever achieve my goals. I found myself regretting all the small decisions that had led to that point and wishing I could go back and make better choices. So, I wrote a teleplay about a woman who gets to do exactly that.

I’ve wanted to be a novelist since I was a kid, but I took a decade-long detour into TV writing. During those years, I wrote multiple pilots a year with the goal of improving my writing and crafting a sample good enough to get me staffed. The thing about writing pilots as an aspiring TV writer is that you know they almost certainly won’t get made—and since pilots are a lesson in opening up a story, not closing it, it felt kind of like a decade of unfinished business, all these characters I created and fell in love with and their stories that I started but never resolved.

But Joey (my main character) and Alex (her love interest) would not leave me alone. For months after I got that pilot in a place I was happy with, I kept thinking about them and how their story would unfold if I ever got the chance to make it a show.

The original pilot took us through approximately the first quarter of the book, and for a long time that was all I had. Over the next several months, I kept thinking about the show and what a first season would look like. Once I thought of the twist I would end season one with, it struck me that it would also work as the low point of a romance novel. I love romance, so the moment my pilot told me it could be a romance novel, I knew I had to write it.

I wrote the original pilot in the spring of 2021, and the novel will come out summer of 2026, so a little over five years. It changed a lot—the biggest change, of course, being the format.

I spent January through May of 2022 drafting it and then left it alone until November of 2023 when I submitted my first draft to Reese’s Book Club’s LitUp fellowship. That included an intensive rewrite during the summer of 2024 to get it ready for querying, another round of notes from my agent to get it ready for submission, and then edits with my publisher.

Each round of notes tightened the story and helped me hone in on the themes, so the final draft is a much more cohesive piece than it was at first. Also, I am such an over-writer, so the final draft is about 20,000 words shorter than the first draft.

So many! I love books and am an avid romance reader, but I knew nothing about publishing. The query process itself was such a journey. I was surprised by some of the agents who responded to my manuscript because a few of them were quite literary-leaning, and I thought I had written a commercial romance. That’s how I learned the term upmarket and that it can apparently be applied to my novel. The process of submission and going to auction was also such a whirlwind. I had no clue what to expect, but I was lucky to have my brilliant agent Holly there to hold my hand through it.

I love writing first drafts and diving into a new story, but I have historically not loved editing. This was the first time I received editorial feedback from anyone but my close friends, and I was surprised by how fun it can be to rip your manuscript apart and see it get better from the notes. I was also surprised by which notes might feel small but unravel the whole thing versus notes that sound big but only require a few tweaks to execute. The main storyline stayed largely the same throughout edits, but so many of the side plots changed—I didn’t expect the degree to which I was able to change those subplots without affecting the main plot.

First and foremost, I hope readers will be entertained and root for Joey to find her happy ending. But along the way, I also hope they’ll be surprised by a few of the twists the story takes and maybe even use some of those turns to examine their own lives and the things they find important. I know I did while writing it.

This is not original by any means, but it’s a piece of advice I saw early on that I have really tried to take to heart, and I’m glad I did. Don’t worry too much about writing to the market or chasing trends. Just focus on writing a story that you would love to read. I think it’s important for two reasons—first, if you’d love it, you won’t be alone and will find readers who will also love it; and second, because you’re going to have to read it so many times during the editing process, and you might as well let yourself read a book you love.