From Fanfiction to Phenomenon: Emma K. Miller’s Journey Toward Authentic Romance
By Alivia Stonier
Emma K. Miller has captured the hearts of fangirls across the internet since the earliest days of her writing career. Based in Atlanta, this 24-year-old indie author first rose to prominence through her fanfiction Cherry, a deeply beloved story inspired by the musician Harry Styles. The tale follows a young singer as he falls for a songwriter named Darlene, weaving together the dizzying highs of fame with grounded, real-world struggles, such as substance use and abuse. It was this authentic portrayal of life behind the spotlight that resonated with readers and built a devoted following.
Today, Miller is best known for her football romance series The Checklist, which showcases her ability to bring depth and nuance to a genre often dismissed as lighthearted or formulaic. The three-book series follows students from the same team across their growing pains of navigating early adulthood. Released this past January, the latest installment, The Rules of You and Me, centers on Brianne Archer as she navigates college life alongside her brother while forging a meaningful relationship with his teammate, Parker Thompson.
Image Courtesy of Emma K. Miller
To understand a bit more about not only how Brianne and Parker’s story got woven together, but also when Miller picked up the pen, she spoke about her start. Miller revealed that writing has been a lifelong companion, but took on a more serious form in 2019 when she began writing fanfiction consistently. “I would write a whole chapter if I could, or just write regularly. People told me I should try writing a real book, not just fanfiction online,” she shared. Despite the encouragement, Miller grappled with impostor syndrome early on. “It took me a few years to feel like I wasn’t an impostor or bad at writing. But romance-wise, I feel like you write what you know, and I read a lot of romance or books that have a romance plot. Even if it's not the main plot, it's what makes me happy when I read it, that's probably why I started gravitating towards that.”
What makes fanfiction writing a special experience for an author is the fact that they have immediate access to feedback. Something that many traditionally published authors wish were possible is the engagement piece, and being able to see the conversation surrounding the work being published allows for not only more of a community but also more of a push to continue when the work is being seen live. “People are crazy on Wattpad… ‘Hey. If you don't write a new chapter this week, I'm going to come to your house.’ That pushed me a lot as a writer because I got to listen to people. I got to hear what they had to say. I got to kind of learn what my audience and/or certain audiences liked. This dynamic community nurtured her craft, but transitioning from that world to traditional publishing presented challenges. “I missed the instant validation. Sometimes I’d write a line and want to share it immediately, but I couldn’t. Moving from that constant feedback to the silence of traditional publishing was tough, but Wattpad made the transition easier.” Despite these challenges, a warmth for her start was clear, “Honestly, every day, I'm so happy that I got to start on Wattpad and just on a platform where there were people anonymously telling me how they felt about my book constantly.”
Image Courtesy of Emma K. Miller
Despite the desire for feedback and the amount of appreciation that stems from the online community she was able to cultivate, the author still had a clear voice and line of thinking for her creative fulfillment. “Obviously, at the end of the day, it's my book, and I'm going to do what I want with it. But it was nice getting a lot of commentary from people, and that was, I feel like, what shaped me as an author.
While on the topic of Wattpad and Cherry, I asked Emma what her favorite color was for that day, to which she said:
“Well, I'm actually going to a hockey game today, and I have been looking forward to this for weeks and weeks and weeks on end. So it's got to be something with that. I feel like maybe white for the color of the ice or gold for the color of their jerseys.”
Image Courtesy of Emma K. Miller
Her recent novels form an interconnected universe where characters introduced in early books gradually take center stage. The Rules of You and Me focuses on Bri and Parker’s story, her longest book, which required Miller to make difficult editorial choices. “I hate cutting scenes I love, even if they’re not the most important,” she admitted. “This book is my child, and it's perfect. But it's going to have criticism, it's going to go through the ringer a little bit, and that's okay, but it was hard to talk yourself up to that point to be okay with it.” She added, “Releasing a book is like putting your heart on display and hoping people handle it gently, but you have to be ready for anything.”
Originally, Miller intended The List of Things to be a standalone. “Before handing it to an editor, I realized some side characters deserved their own stories. I thought, why introduce characters people love if I’m not going to tell their stories?” Finding the right editor proved pivotal. “A lot of the time, depending on the editor, their job is not to change the way that I write. It's to fix and correct my style of writing, and when I went through that process of finding an editor, a lot of the people at first were trying to change the way that I wrote, and I didn't want that because the way that I write is what made people want to read my books. I try to write like it's a conversation, not necessarily in proper sentences all the time, and I didn't want people to kind of trample over that and be like, ‘No. That's how I meant to say it.’ Just because it's not necessarily proper doesn't mean that it's wrong. While the first edited book felt different, the author reflected on the process as a positive change. “You do have to learn to stand up for yourself with editors because there are certain parts that they might not see as important, but to you as an author, the person who created this story from scratch and built this world up from the bottom to the top, I know what's important in my story at the end of the day, so it was tough, but I was really lucky in finding an editor that matched my energy very, very well.”
When discussing the earlier elements of Miller’s creative process, music struck a central layer. “Whenever I start a book… It's like a snowball… It kind of just keeps rolling and rolling…I get ideas for music [when] I'm listening to a normal playlist. I'll be like, Oh my god. This song would be perfect for these characters I've been thinking of in my head, so I'll just start a playlist. Every book has one, and I listen to it while writing,” she said. “In all honesty, music is just kind of universal. There's music in every part of the world. There is not a corner of the earth where you can go to where there isn't some type of music, even if it's not what I listen to. So I feel like it kind of builds us together in a way, kind of like art does, kind of like books do, like all things do that are subjective.”
When it comes to getting inside the head of your characters, Miller emphasizes the importance of expanding beyond personal experience. “I think the most challenging thing for any author is at the end of the day, you write what you know, of course. But if you only wrote through the lens and the small bubble of the world that you grew up in, you would run out of ideas really quick. So it's really important, in my opinion, at least from where I write and what I do, to incorporate other people's lives and other people's struggles and kind of shed light on them in a very respectful way…to make sure that you are doing the proper research, talking to the right people, and understanding different traumas that you might not go through, different sicknesses that you don't have, different mental illnesses that you don't have, or vice versa, and different sports that you don't play. I don't play football. I've never played football, and I wrote books about football. So at the end of the day, I'm not always going to get it 100% right.”
She added, “I mean, I've been through my old struggles and my own things, and at the end of the day, my job as an author is to not tell my story. It's to tell the character story that I made up. But there are going to obviously always be influences of my own life, my own person, and my own being… A lot of the time when there's stuff I've never been through, I can't put my own personal touch on it. I would have to do a lot of heavy research and talk to people who have been through stuff like that. And I think it's really important to make sure I'm being sensitive and careful and honest while I'm researching topics and races and backgrounds and anything that I'm writing about and being so thorough.”
Her books frequently tackle heavy topics but balance them with humor and hope. “In all honesty, I think it comes from the character and person as they are…there's always going to be a comedic relief, and there's always going to be that character that makes you laugh and makes you happy. I want it to be multiple characters, though, because I want every character in my book, no matter if they've been through something or not, to be likable and just a good person. I feel like when you make people good people, no matter if they've been through bad things, it's kind of easy to let their goodness shine through in that sense, even if they're going through something hard, because there are so many different ways to handle that kind of trauma and pain and suffering.”
“I try to have some type of beacon or light or positivity in it for that character so that they can make it through or see the light at the end of the tunnel.”
Relating her writing to her own experiences, Miller shared, about a character with similar severe trauma in a spin-off, “I could meet someone that's gone through the exact same thing as me that has the same autoimmune disorders I have, and they might be a ray of sunshine; they might be perky and happy and moving through life even if they have these bad things, and I might be negative and living in a different way and seeing things from a different view. It's important to me, at least, to show that side of things too. That just because you read this book and you went through what this character went through and you didn't react the way she did doesn't make you a bad person. It just means you're not that person.”
Authenticity is a core priority. “I wanted [my writing] to feel like how we're sitting here just chatting it up, talking. There are weird spaces, there are weird moments, and there are parts where you trip up on your words, or you say the wrong thing, or you don't word things correctly. I feel like that's really important to showcase in a book so people will read it and think I'm just like them.”
It’s clear that this novel dove into that same authenticity head first, “I'm pushing my own boundaries, and I'm learning through my characters more than I did with my first book. Not that I didn't learn through them. It was a book that would get people's attention and kind of grab them in a way that didn't necessarily showcase how deep it could go.”
Image Courtesy of Emma K. Miller
Miller confessed a particular fondness for the friends-to-lovers trope, especially childhood best friends. “I don’t really do insta-love…but a lot of the time, it will be kind of quick. So I try to write books that way, where even if the plot is not solved and fixed right at the beginning, and we don't get this instant gratification, we're getting an instant connection. I feel like an instant connection between two characters gives you an instant connection to the book in so many ways.”
The dynamic between Bri and her friend Dakota challenges conventional gender roles. “Well, I don't want to say Dakota was inspired by any single friend that I have, but Dakota was kind of inspired by a few of my friends, I would say… I didn't think about it until after the book was already out, and people kind of mentioned some stuff to me about it. Bri grew up dancing, and Bri also grew up as a cheerleader and in spaces like that—dance spaces and theater spaces and things where you don't really have a place to be modest. You don't really have a place to feel uncomfortable doing that. I mean, you can. You’re more than welcome to go to a bathroom or do that, but a lot of the time, you don't have the time to. So I grew up not really being modest. I wasn't, like, stripping down naked in the middle of the parking lots. But I would change in front of my best friends.”
The author went on to add, “That was kind of the dynamic that I felt like Bri would have with a best friend because it was kind of mentioned that she never really grew up making close relationships with people because she was scared to, so I feel like it makes sense that it's either zero or one hundred… At the end of the day, of course, she and Dakota could have been a thing, but it felt just too right to have her have someone like him because I always had Dakota growing up my whole life…One of my biggest and most important things in all of my books has been to showcase the fact that men can have emotionally complex relationships with their friends, and it's not weird, and they're not, like, there's no tension or weirdness there, and that's allowed, and that's okay.” The undercurrent overall of Miller's writing is how human all of it truly feels, as she is not afraid to bring the emotional maturity and depth of her true world into the universes that she creates by hand.
Looking ahead, Miller is writing a hockey spin-off featuring Xander and Leah, planned as a four-book series that will match the design of her original series. “[Leah] deserves her moment to shine.” She’s also revisiting Cherry with a rewrite that’s “nostalgic and challenging.” Her husband is composing original music for it, she stated, “I'm not building my book around someone else's songs. I'm building these songs around my book now. So that's really exciting.” She’s also begun work on a cowboy romance.
When asked about the connections she brings to the page, Miller said, “Relationships in general don't have to be black and white or left versus right or whatever they may be. They're just connections between two people, and you decide what that connection means and how it relates to you.“
Emma K. Miller’s stories resonate because they blend honesty, humor, and heart. She navigates real struggles with sensitivity, offering hope through characters who are deeply human—flawed, funny, and fiercely authentic. In a genre too often dismissed, Miller proves romance can be a powerful space to explore life’s complexities while celebrating connection. The Rules of You and Me is available now, inviting readers into a world where love and reality meet with grace, grit, and unflinching authenticity.
Image Courtesy of Emma K. Miller
