Children’s Lit Fabulosity

Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple published their first collaborative novel, Pay the Piper: A Rock ‘N’ Roll Fairy Tale, a couple of years ago and followed that up with a sequel, Troll Bridge: A Rock ‘N’ Roll Fairy Tale, which released in paperback over the summer. Jane is known far and wide and probably even in outer space as the "American Hans Christian Anderson," having written nearly 300 books and won pretty much every award you can win. Adam is a well-known musician (aka rock and roll star), poker player, and all around good guy; his debut novel Singer of Souls came out in 2005 and a sequel is in the pipeline from Tor as we speak. Oh, and in case you didn’t know already, Jane is Adam’s mother. They were nice enough to take the time to answer some questions about their collaborative efforts, so let’s get to the good part.

GB: First question is always process porn for the writers out there, so tell me about how you write solo. You can start at whatever part of the process you want–when an idea occurs to you, when you actually start writing, when the deadline’s looming, outlining/not outlining, etcetera. Does this change depending on the project or are your work habits fairly consistent?

JY: Every project is different for me. Let me tell you a story.

I once heard Norton Juster tell a group of  third graders–my daughter among them–that he got his ideas from a postbox in Poughkeepsie. Some of the students thought he meant it. One boy even raised his hand and asked how far away Poughkeepsie was.

My daughter knew better. She knew from having lived with me all of her eight years. She knew that I got my ideas from everywhere: newspaper articles, other people’s books, magazines, rock lyrics, folk songs, overheard conversations, dreams, her life, her brothers’ lives, her father’s life, her great grandparents…oh, and gossip. Gossip is often the beginning of stories.

There is nothing a writer will refuse in the making of story. Here are a few of the places I have gotten ideas.

*Reading the local newspaper, I was riveted by a photo of a boy with his prize-winning frog named “Star Warts”. The  boy’s smile was enormous, his frog-well–even more enormous. But I knew that it wasn’t frogs  that were supposed to give you warts, it was toads. (Well, they don’t actually. It’s just a superstition.) But suddenly Commander Toad in Space was born, the idea of a ship called the Star Warts carrying a crew of amphibians was too funny to resist. I eventually did seven Commander Toad books and loads of reluctant readers began their reading with the Commander, Mr. Hop, Lieutenant Lily, and the rest.

*An editor friend called me up and said, “My son is three and hates to go to bed and he loves dinosaurs. Can you do anything for him?” Now Adam and his brother Jason had been the same at that age, so much so, that even though I’m a lousy seamstress and can’t sew a straight hem,  I actually embroidered dino pillows for each of them. So for my editor’s son, instead of an embroidered pillow, I wrote How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight? The opening rhymes simply tumbled out and the book practically wrote itself.

*Because my husband took all our children birding, and staying out late at night owling was a particular pleasure they shared, I smooshed together (that’s a technical writing term!) all of their night journeys into the woods  and wrote Owl Moon.

*I dreamed the actual first page of Wizard’s Hall (some 9 years before Harry Potter was published) and the strange opening of The Wild Hunt some years after that. The house in The Wild Hunt is the house we have in Scotland. And the house in the Tartan Magic books is the Scottish house plus its garden.

So you see, no post box in Poughkeepsie for me. I don’t wait for the mail to be delivered. I am always ready to listen at keyholes, sneak up next to people on buses and trains and planes, read and read and read, and shamelessly steal conversations, arguments, and jokes from my children and grandchildren. Because that’s where the ideas are.

And also remember that ideas are the LEAST important part of a book. They get you started, sure, but what comes after is much more interesting.

AS: The biggest thing I had to learn about writing, was figuring out early what form the idea I have is going to take. Is it a short story idea? A novel idea? A poem idea? It can be annoying if you start on a short story only to discover it's a novel; it's disastrous to get to the middle of a novel and realize your idea was only strong enough to support something shorter.  My work habits are not nearly as consistent as I'd like. I have traumatic brain injury, which presents like pretty severe ADD, so it's difficult for me to get started. But if I can force myself to sit at the computer and stare at a page for ten minutes, I usually don't get back up until I've written 1,000-2,000 words.  Usually, when I write, I have a scene in my head toward the end of the book/story that I aim for.  In Singer of Souls, it was Douglas striding into Faery, in one story, A Piece of Flesh, it was young Victoria cooking soup in a boot, in another, The Three Truths it was Master Shichiro, a troubled samurai, commiting seppuku to protect his lord.  These scenes kept me writing, gave me a direction to travel in whenever I was stuck.  Now, what's funny is that in only one of these tales did I actually get to that scene.  Stories change and grow as you write them--at least they always have for me.  No matter how hard I try to control them, the characters eventually take over, sometimes refusing to go down that dark alley you present them--Master Shichiro does not end up killing himself--sometimes getting so beaten down by events that they fail when presented with heroic opportunities--Douglas doesn't stride manfully into Faery, but rolls in beaten and bloody, and the decisions he makes once there are questionable at best.

GB: Now I'd like to know how you've worked together collaboratively, including all the nitty gritty like how you avoided killing each other in revision. And Jane, I know you have collaborated with lots of people, so was there anything different about working with your son? Adam, likewise for you, you're a musician and very used to collaboration--do you think that made it easier to work with someone else?

JY: Well, this is from a speech we are just working on now:

All stories are collaborations--between author and editor, between author and reader. However we two have collaborated even more, by being mother and son, as well as co-writers. That means we share a history, have attitudes toward each other and toward work that are...complicated and rich, and we know which buttons to push.

And yet, we come to our writing from different places and different spaces. When we work, we may argue about characters, about word choices, about titles. Sometimes Adam gives in and sometimes I do. But it is always done with respect--for one another, and for the work.

Writing with a relative means walking a fine line. In the end, my relationship with Adam is more important to me than the work, and I will back off if we hit some immovable spot. But so far we have agreed more often than disagreed, and I love the way he writes.

AS: Being a working musician for twenty years has made everything about writing easier. A literary agent I knew who was also in a punk band, once said, "Why do authors complain about bad reviews?  When I get a bad review it's in the form of a beer bottle thrown at my head." Writers complain about contracts; the only thing sure in the music business is that if you have a contract you MIGHT get paid. Collaborations among musicians are shaky at best, with egos always at the forefront. Additionally, education and work habits are at a premium in the land of musicians; we didn't join a band to work hard and do a lot of thinking. And if there are musicians reading this who are insulted by this, please remember that I count myself in your number–when I say I don’t like working with musicians…

Oh, and congratulations on reading!

All kidding aside, I learned how to write by working with my mother. She is a wonderful writer/teacher/editor/mom. We rarely argue over what we’re working on because we largely share the same sensibilities. Makes sense, I am her son after all.

GB: What would your advice be to people working on collaborative projects? There seems to be a lot of this going on in the children’s/YA field at the moment.

JY: Talk about stuff before you begin–like whose name goes first, who has the final pass on the book, how to resolve arguments. Know what your strengths are (mine are dialogue, scene, theme. He is Mr. action, Mr. Funny, and Mr. Plot. Also anything really dark in our books and stories–blame Adam!)

AS: Respect your partner and their ideas, and be respectful to them. Make sure you are writing the same book. Talk often and listen more. Meet in person to plot the book, talk about characters, polish a theme. And in person is important. We communicate more than we know with body language, and when discussing–flighty things that can be tough to get hold of–it is important to get as much across as possible.

GB: Switching gears a bit, what artform or genre do each of you find it most enjoyable to work in and why? Or if enjoyable’s not of interest, how about what’s most challenging?

JY: I love writing picture books, fantasy, historical, poetry, and graphic novels. You won’t find me doing hard science, blood and intestine spills, or Gossip Girls.

AS: I do most of my writing in fantasy, so I must like working it. But truth be told, I like writing everything. I read a lot of fantasy, and love it, so I am familiar with the tropes and it is easy for me to move around in that kind of world. But I loved writing my historical samurai mystery stories as well. Research intensive as they were, they presented an opportunity to learn and a set of challenges unique to their genre (are you saying you haven’t heard of the thriving Historical/Samurai/Mystery genre?) that made me enjoy writing them as well. I just like writing.

GB: What are each of your next projects (any more collabs on the horizon)?

JY: We have a book called Bug which stands for Big Ugly Guy and is a novel about a Jewish kid who is picked on at school. So he makes a golem for protection that becomes the drummer in his klezmer garage band.

On my own–I have just finished a 92,000 fantasy novel, Dragon’s Heart, fourth book in my Pit Dragon trilogy (don’t laugh.) Did a nonfiction book called Bad Girls with daughter Heidi and we are in the revision process. And starting a picture book called Shortstop about Honus Wagner.

AS: I’m currently working on what my writer’s group calls a "Big Epic Fantasy." My mother and I seem to have an offer upcoming on another rock ‘n’ roll fairy tale, this one about a Jewish garage band that create a golem mostly to play the drums.

GB: What are some things you’ve read or listened to or watched recently that you’d recommend to others?

JY: Adam’s sequel to his first book is called Steward of Song and will be out in March. Brilliant. Patricia MacLachlan’s Edward’s Eyes is incredibly moving. I was fascinated by Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret though not entirely in love with it. And then I just read the latest Ian Rankin’s Rebus mystery novel because I am a big fan.

AS: Been very delinquent on my reading lately, though I can highly recommend Bobby Clark’s The Baffled Parent’s Guide to Coaching Youth Soccer, though probably only if you’re going to start coaching youth soccer. Saw Michael Clayton last night and recommend it highly.

Visit today’s other WBBT stops:

Loree Griffin Burns at Chasing Ray
Lily Archer at The Ya Ya Yas
Rick Riordan at Jen Robinson’s Book Page
Gabrielle Zevin at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast
Dia Calhoun at lectitans
Shannon Hale at Miss Erin
Alan Gratz at Interactive Reader
Lisa Yee at Hip Writer Mama

Christopher Barzak‘s debut novel One for Sorrow was released in late August to a flurry of praise in the Village Voice, Washington Post, and San Francisco Chronicle, and cries of joy throughout the blogosphere. But, for years now, discerning readers of short fiction have kept a watch for new Barzak stories. His next novel–The Love We Share Without Knowing–recently sold to Bantam, and more on that in a moment. And I’m not even going to get into how he’s one of the hands-down best people you’ll ever encounter (not to mention a fine master of ceremonies). It’s probably best if I let you get charmed by him yourself, so…

GB: I can’t ask you the process question because you already answered it for me. So… where do you get your ideas? Kidding, kidding. You and I have talked a lot about how place and where you’re from impact your work. Can you speak a bit about that? One of the things I love about One for Sorrow is that it has that element of a kid coming to terms with where he grew up, in all its complexity.

CB: Place has always been one of the elements of fiction that I’ve enjoyed as a reader, so it’s no surprise to me that it’s one of the things I tend to gravitate toward as a writer. In the case of One for Sorrow, I set the book in a fictional small town in rural Ohio which bears a lot of similarities to the one in which I grew up. I didn’t name it for a couple of reasons. I wanted to be able to use place names and local anecdotes from a variety of neighboring villages and townships as well, so it became its own town in the novel, one part imagined, one part experienced, and one part observed. Growing up in a rural town was really a great experience in a lot of ways, to be honest. Being able to know just about everyone and some part of their story gives the world a sense of coherence and meaningfulness, I suppose. You’re able to be more certain of people and things, or at least you’re able to hold the illusion of certainty more easily. When I left home to go to college, I quickly discovered that I had been brought up to live a very particular kind of life, though, and that much of what I’d been taught about "how things are in the world" really only held true for where I’d come from. And on top of this, where I went for college was to a university in a dead steel town, Youngstown, Ohio. As I tell friends who sometimes ask why on earth I ever went there, it was where I could afford to go, it was the nearest "city" to where I’d grown up, and frankly it looked like a city to someone who grew up on a farm. It had a downtown with buildings over five stories tall, and a bus system, and a college, and parks. I think for a lot of people "city" conjures up Manhattan and Chicago and LA, but for me a limping along ghost town seemed pretty big. Again, when I left college and traveled a bit outside of Ohio and lived in other places, I got a better sense of how others lived. I mean, I’d of course seen the general standard of suburban America on television, but it never really felt real to me. When I started writing seriously, I decided I wanted to write about the places where I’d grown up and lived long enough to call home, to have lived there long enough to know them well. I wanted the region I came from to have books and stories they could read and say, "Hey! I know where that bridge is!" Or, "That’s that old church on Elm that’s falling down, isn’t it?" I wanted people from where I’m from to be able to pick up a book and find the place where they live in a story, because story is a powerful thing, and if you can’t find yourself in them you start to feel like maybe where you come from makes you unimportant. Literature has this validating effect on people. Certain places are often used as settings over and over. So I wanted to bring a voice from this abandoned corner of working class Ohio to the pages of books. In some ways, I think it may feel anachronistic to some readers, and it is anachronistic in a way, because this area is a place that was left behind. We’re still trying to catch the boat to the twenty first century. Hopefully someone will wait till we can get on board.

GB: One for Sorrow is being published as an adult book (as it should be), but it’s definitely a title with cross-over appeal for YA readers. It’s particularly refreshing to see a book that portrays teen sexuality in a realistic way. How did you approach that?

CB: Honestly, my approach to portraying teen sexuality was basically just trying to capture that whole awkwardness and scariness that fumbling toward figuring out this very adult thing that, let’s face it, we all know exists from a very early age. I knew that some people would be put off by fifteen-year-olds having sex of any kind in a book, but I think that kind of reader sees the novel as a strictly moral device, and anything in them is somehow condoned by the author. But the novel isn’t always about "instructing".  It can be about portraying, and above all else I want my books to be honest in their portrayal of anything, sex included. For teenagers, they’ve been hearing about and seeing sex in a variety of forms–older siblings, school friends, media, church youth group leaders, etc–for a long time by the time they even get to the point of experimenting, so there’s this whole buildup to the thing that makes it extremely fraught. And also a lot of what they’ve heard or been told is just wrong (because so many parents fail to talk about the reality of sex with their kids at all, and think that is a much better way to prepare their children for the adult world–thanks Mom and Dad!) so there’s a bit of a pleasant surprise to finding out what it is, too, I think. Pleasant surprises, anxieties, fear–I wanted to try to gauge all of those things, especially in the one scene I think most readers are referring to when they talk about the portrayal of teen sexuality in One for Sorrow. It’s a really innocent scene in a lot of ways, I think, actually. And I don’t think it ends with a loss of that innocence, as so many narratives in which teens have sex will have us think happens as a matter of course.

GB: You recently sold your second novel, The Love We Share Without Knowing, and it sounds thoroughly different from One for Sorrow. Can you give us a little preview of what to expect?

CB: The Love We Share Without Knowing is definitely different than One for Sorrow, but I do think at its core it shares something in common. At its heart, it’s a ghost story, too. It’s told from multiple points of view though: an American teenager whose family has moved to Japan for his father’s job, the members of a Japanese suicide club, an American teacher of English who lost her lover in 9/11, a Japanese man who is mysteriously blinded after witnessing a blind man recover his sight on a train, a group of American ex-patriots all clinging to each other for comfort and familiarity in a foreign culture, and a young Japanese woman who may be a ghost or something more than human–she’s the crux of the narrative, I think, around which all the others and their lives spin.  It’s about love, and loss, and how we’re all connected, even if we don’t realize it. Because of the multiple narrators, it ranges through a variety of genres of storytelling and voices. In recent years I really enjoyed novels that used this mosaic structure–David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten, Kevin Brockmeier’s The Truth About Celia, Dan Chaon’s You Remind Me of Me, and Michael Cunningham’s The Hours and Specimen Days–so when I began work on this second novel while I was living in Japan, I decided to try my hand at using a structure like the ones they created. It was a lot of fun, and delivers a completely different narrative pleasure than the one you get from writing a novel in one point of view for the entire trip, like I did with Adam in One for Sorrow.

GB: What are you working on right now? Any short stories due out soon?

CB: Right now I’ve just finished a long short story called "The Ghost Hunter’s Beautiful Daughter" and I’m working on a third novel, which I’m tentatively calling Yesterday’s Child. I have a story due out in the Solaris Book of New Fantasy this December, and another coming up next Fall in Sharyn November’s anthology Firebirds Soaring. There are other stories forthcoming, but they’re far enough down the road that I’m not even sure when the books in which they’ll appear will be released.

GB: And now, the most important question of all. What’s your favorite karaoke number Right This Second?

CB: Oh wow, just one?!? I need three and am going to ruthlessly take the space to list them. "Big Girl’s Don’t Cry" by Fergie. "The Origin of Love" from Hedwig and the Angry Inch. And always, always "Under the Bridge" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers!

Visit today’s other WBBT sites:

Lisa Ann Sandell at Chasing Ray
Perry Moore at Interactive Reader
 Autumn Cornwell at The Ya Ya Yas
Jon Scieszka at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast
Gabrielle Zevin at Jen Robinson’s Book Page
Judy Blume at Not Your Mother’s Book Club
Erik P. Kraft at Bookshelves of Doom
Clare Dunkle at Miss Erin