Kate Rorick on the many layers of 'The Secret Diary of Lizzie Bennet'

Kate Rorick, author of The Secret Diary of Lizzie Bennet (out this week!), an adaptation of Emmy-winning Web series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, joins HEA to explain how it all works together …

Kate: A novelization of a Web series that was itself an adaptation of a novel? Yes, we went there.

But the question is… how? What? How?

Hi, Kate Rorick here, one of the writers of the Web series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, and author of The Secret Diary of Lizzie Bennet. And at first, I was as confused as you are.

The levels of meta I delved down when writing The Secret Diary of Lizzie Bennet were more than a little unusual. First of all, there's the book. The 200-year-old Pride and Prejudice that is possibly more beloved now than it has ever been, thanks to numerous film versions and miniseries (I'm a Colin Firth gal, myself), not to mention updated takes on the story (I'm looking at you, Bridget Jones and zombies). So how did we take on the classic tale of Elizabeth and Darcy and their misunderstandings, and modernize it for the YouTube generation?

Well, we gave Lizzie a video blog.

The Lizzie Bennet Diaries is the second level of meta I had to deal with when writing The Secret Diary of Lizzie Bennet. A YouTube Web series about a 24-year-old grad student who had a mountain of student loans and was living at home along with her two sisters — beautiful Jane and reckless Lydia. Lizzie starts vlogging about her life for a school project, and soon enough, those videos take on a life of their own.

When rich and handsome Bing Lee comes to town, along with his stuck-up friend William Darcy, things really get interesting.

Then, there was the transmedia.

The Lizzie Bennet Diaries was a lot more than just videos. It was a transmedia project, spanning several different social-media platforms and in the voice of a couple dozen different characters. So, when William Darcy tweets, it's canon to the Diaries. (We were really good at it. Heck, we won an Emmy for it.)

In writing our novelization, I had to be true to both to the original Pride and Prejudice and the videos. Not to mention every single tweet, Tumblr post or photo pinned to Pinterest.

No problem, right?

Luckily, I knew Pride and Prejudice backwards and forwards (thank you, Colin Firth). And, thankfully, not everything that happened in the Web series happened on screen. It couldn't. When telling a story via TV or film or the Web, you are constrained by what you can afford to put on screen — and we had absolutely no budget. (Not to mention, a really tiny screen!)

So, I got to do what I had been gleefully wanting to do the entire time: expand on, well, everything.

For example, when we were writing the show, we could allude to Lizzie's relationship to her dad, but he could never appear on camera. In the book, Mr. Bennet can be front and center in the Bennet household.

Also, in the videos, Darcy doesn't appear on screen until over halfway through — because why on earth would he be in videos he knew nothing about? But since The Secret Diary of Lizzie Bennet is Lizzie's journal, her most introspective and detailed retellings of her life … let's just say William Darcy plays a big part.

Basically, what The Secret Diary of Lizzie Bennet allows for is more. More of a story we all love, more introspection, and more of that quintessential Lizzie Bennet voice — one that's been imprinted on readers for over 200 years.

What could be better?

Here's the blurb about The Secret Diary of Lizzie Bennet:

There is a great deal that goes into making a video blog. Lizzie Bennet should know, having become a YouTube sensation over the course of her year-long video diary project. The Lizzie Bennet Diaries chronicled Lizzie's life as a 24-year-old grad student, struggling under a mountain of student loans and living at home with her two sisters—beautiful Jane and reckless Lydia. What may have started as her grad student thesis grew into so much more, as the videos came to inform and reflect her life and that of her sisters. When rich, handsome Bing Lee comes to town, along with his stuck-up friend William Darcy, things really start to get interesting for the Bennets—and for Lizzie's viewers. Suddenly Lizzie—who always considered herself a fairly normal young woman—was a public figure. But not everything happened on-screen. Luckily for us, Lizzie kept a secret diary.

The Secret Diary of Lizzie Bennet provides more character introspection as only a book can, with revelatory details about the Bennet household, including Lizzie's special relationship with her father, untold stories from Netherfield, Lizzie's thoughts and fears about life after grad school and becoming an instant Web celebrity.

Written by Bernie Su, the series' executive producer, co-creator, head writer, and director, along with Kate Rorick, the novelist, TV writer, and consulting producer on the series, the novel features a journal-entry format and design, complementing the existing Web series, while including plenty of fresh twists to delight fans and new readers alike. The Secret Diary of Lizzie Bennet expands on the phenomenon that captivated a generation and reimagines the Pride and Prejudice story like it's never been done before.

Find out more at www.katerorick.com and www.lizziebennet.com.