LOS ANGELES, July 7 (UPI) — Jessica Knoll said elements of her new book, Helpless, available Tuesday, were inspired by pressure she felt after her first book, Luckiest Girl Alive. In Helpless, screenwriter Faye laments that all of her interviews ask her to represent broad women’s issues.

Knoll also adapted Luckiest Girl Alive into the screenplay for the Netflix film starring Mila Kunis and Finn Wittrock. That book dealt with a sexual assault and a school shooting.

In a recent phone interview with UPI, Knoll said she was careful to address those issues “with a lot of care and a lot of thought.” Still, stepping into those worlds was fraught.

“It was tough when the film came out and I felt like I had to be very careful in how I spoke about it,” Knoll said. “I’m not saying it’s a bad standard to be held to but it’s a lot of pressure. So I was looking for a place to put those feelings. The character of Faye gave me that opportunity.”

Faye attends a funeral where she sees her ex-boyfriend, Henry. Henry was the subject of an episode of Faye’s TV show based on their breakup.

Henry ultimately drugs Faye and holds her captive in a cabin. Since Faye has taken a social media break for a week to write, nobody is looking for her.

“Misery wasn’t necessarily on my mind when I was writing it,” Knoll admitted. “It was after I finished it that I was like oh, it’s giving a little bit of Misery.”

Stephen King’s book had an injured author held captive by an obsessed fan. Henry and Faye had a relationship before, and her captivity rekindles some of those feelings.

“It’s a little bit of this idea of toying with this idea of a Stockholm situation, especially with someone that you had a very specific connection with at a previous time in your life,” Knoll said.

Henry and Faye had a kinky relationship in which Faye enjoyed being overpowered by him. That gets complicated when Henry does actually hold her against her will.

“It was really important to me that she was the one driving the boat, so to speak, when it came to their sexual dynamic,” Knoll said. “It takes some convincing of her male partner in order to participate in them but he happens to be really good at it when he does participate.”

Faye herself references Fifty Shades of Grey late in the book. Knoll said in most literature about submissive relationships, “it’s usually the guy who is leading the very pure and virginal main character into the dungeon with the whips and chains.”

That said, Knoll refrained from speaking too specifically about such relationships. Faye is not officially part of a submissive community. She is just a woman with her own kink.

“I’m always really interested in someone who feels, for whatever reason, they can’t show up as their real self in the world or their real self in a relationship,” Knoll said, adding that the story forces Faye to ask “who am I and what is it that I want and what is it that I like and what are my needs and how can I get them met?”

Faye does reflect some of Knoll’s own writing habits, such as storing good lines of dialogue in the Notes app on her phone.

“A lot of times they come to me when I’m not sitting down at my desk, when I’m out in the world and someone says something that sparks something,” Knoll said.

In writing Helpless, Knoll went through seven complete drafts. The ending of the book’s Part Four completely changed, and an entire section prior to the funeral was deleted.

“There was a whole, I would say, probably 40 pages that Faye spends in New York City before she attends the funeral that my editor lovingly referred to as ‘a bunch of throat clearing,'” Knoll said.

But, Knoll said, she had to get the New York pages out to realize they weren’t necessary.

“You can do more with more so you bloat the [expletive] out of it and then you can look at it and be like okay, this is where I trim the fat,” Knoll said. “I try and just allow myself to write and write and write, whatever gets me to sit down in the chair and do it, and not harp on the fact that this may not be usable.”

Knoll said she does not outline, though once she has the plot worked out, goes back to add details that foreshadow it in earlier pages. She aims to write 1000 words per day, but secretly hopes she can write 1700.

She prefers to write in the morning with a cup of coffee, Stumptown Cold Brew in the summer and plain coffee with milk in the winter. Sometimes she can balance an adaptation and a new book at the same time, but never two original books at once.

“I think I would formally lose my mind if I was juggling multiple book ideas at multiple times,” she said.

With Helpless finished, Knoll is 60 pages into her next book, which has not been announced yet.

“True to form, it dabbles in a few different genres but the one thing all my books have in common is murder,” Knoll said. “So this one also features murder.