Mindy: Welcome to Writer Writer Pants on Fire, where authors talk about things that never happened to people who don't exist. We also cover craft, the agent hunt, query trenches, publishing, industry, marketing and more. I'm your host, Mindy McGinnis. You can check out my books and social media at mindymcginnis dot com and make sure to visit the Writer Writer Pants on Fire blog for additional interviews, query critiques and more as well as full transcriptions of each podcast episode. at WriterWriterPants on Fire.com. And don’t forget to check out the Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire Facebook page. Give me feedback, suggest topics you’d like to hear discussed, and let me know if there is someone you’d love to see a a guest.
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Mindy: We're here with Sarah J Schmitt, author of Where There's A Whisk which is a YA novel about a reality tv show regarding cooking. I think one of the things that people are looking for right now, especially in the wake - well, hopefully in the wake of the pandemic - 's something that I've talked with other guests about, is wanting to find something a little lighter to read something maybe less dark, less heavy. I know that I've seen in talking with agents and editors that they are kind of leaning towards that direction in a lot of cases, not all of course, but trying to find something a little less brooding, which of course has not gone well for me because all of my books tend to be dark and fairly gritty, but I'm curious about how you got the idea for this book and what led you to it.
Sarah: First of all, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here talking with you. Just to preface my answer, I was having a conversation with a librarian friend of mine just this morning about how many dark books are on for Indiana, The Eliot Rosewater Book Award. There's nothing really light and escapist from the dark world we're currently living in. I'm really happy that my book can fill a gap in that area. But actually funny enough, this book, the idea of it came from a really sad situation. I was going to a school visit a couple of years ago and when I got there there was just a real weird vibe in the school. The librarian pulled me aside and she said, I just want you to know that today our state papers came out and listed this county as the worst county in the entire state of Indiana to live in. And so I'm like, okay, well I can't do anything about that, but we're going to create stories and we're going to come up with characters and we're gonna have a lot of fun and you know, maybe it'll be a distraction.
So what I do when I do a school visit is in the morning we create a character and in the afternoon we create a plot. So we started creating these characters, even the protagonist, even the main character is really dark and sad. I'm like, okay, this is gonna be super fun. Get to the afternoon and we start brainstorming the plot and people are throwing ideas like, the main character finds her mom dead from an overdose with a needle still in her arm and all this really traumatic stuff. And I'm like, well there goes the light distraction concept I was going for. And afterwards the librarian told me that, like, some of these students were sharing actual experiences that they've had and they were putting this into the plot and I thought, you know, their lives combined with this public admonishment about where they lived. How do you overcome that? Like, how do you overcome the life you're born into? If it isn't the greatest or it's not what you want?
And so, I went out into the car afterwards and kind of sat there for a minute just reflecting on that experience because it was really profound for me. I ended up on the way home coming up with Peyton just thinking about this character, but I wanted her experience to be really hopeful and really positive. And I thought you know reality television at the time, there weren't a whole lot of books out that we're dealing with the behind the scenes of reality tv and I thought that would be a fun area to explore for research purposes. I got fixated on the cooking aspect and so I started putting that all together, there was that background for her journey to realize that number one, what she thought was successful isn't necessarily success. And number two, these challenges are not just food challenges, like they're really challenging her to look at herself and bring out her best self regardless of where she came from. She has every right to follow her dream and nobody had any right to tell her she couldn't.
Mindy: A couple of things that I want to follow up on. First of all school visits, I get so many questions, Facebook author groups, things like that. How do you do this? Like what do you do and how do you do it? I know I specifically am most often speaking to high school students because my books again - content is pretty dark so I usually am speaking with high schoolers, which a lot of times can be one of the hardest groups to deal with. And I know I have friends that are just terrified to do school visits. They are afraid that they're going to be reliving their high school experiences. I of course worked in high school for 14 years. You were also a librarian for a long time. So you're kind of familiar with that arena and walking in and handling that age group, not letting them bully you off the stage or get heckled.
But also I wanted to touch on what you're saying about environment and essence when you walk in. I have been in high schools where they clearly did not give a shit who I was or why I was there, usually more upper income and their moms and dads make a lot more money than I do. So it's just not that interesting and they're polite but they just don't care. I actually vastly prefer doing lower income schools because those kids are so excited that someone is there, someone cares, someone is talking to them. That's where I come from as well. I'm from a very, very poor rural community and I never met an author until I was one because nobody was going to come and talk to us like it just wasn't in the cards. I'll go anywhere. But I do enjoy going to smaller communities and going to more rural, financially challenged communities.
But also like you were saying sometimes what is going on in the actual environment can really be a challenge. You're like me - even though my books are very dark - I try to keep it light and fun and interesting and I'm making jokes and it's more stand up than anything else And I walked into a school one day and the librarian that set things up, she's like, I'm really sorry, some of the kids have to leave halfway through your presentation because there's a funeral for a student today. Thanks for telling me. And now I'm going to have to kind of reconfigure how I operate. But if you could just talk a little bit about school visits. How do you handle them? What you do, talking about that feeling that you get, as soon as you walk in the door, you can get a feeling for the culture of a school the second you show up. So if you could talk about that, that would be really helpful for my listeners that are maybe a little scared to try a school visit.
Sarah: First of all, I love school visits and I think my biggest challenge with this pandemic has been not being able to go into schools because in some ways that's where my creative energy gets refilled. Because I realized that even if I don't think I'm making an impact on people in those moments I do. And I know what you mean about walking into that school and you're just like these students don't really care if I'm here or not. Like I absolutely know that my books go into that middle grade range. So I actually do more middle school than I do high school. First of all, they're still smart aleck enough that they'll try to mess with you.
I've never had anyone kind of try to bully me, but you do have those class clowns thinking that they're going to stump you and my goal is always to find a place for that kid's idea in the story. That's probably the moment where I'm like - I've done well here - is when that student then, because you put that smart aleck comment into the story and it works. Then they start to get more excited and buy in and they're contributing more.
I get that some authors are afraid of school visits. Most of us who wrote probably were traumatized in our school age years in some way or another. There's always going to be that group of students that looks at you like a rock star because they want to be where you are and those are the students that I really, really like talking to those students and not about my book. I want to learn about what they're doing. If you walk into a school visit and you make it as much or more about the students than about yourself, I think that's the key to a successful school visit. Engaging them, bringing them into the process. And a lot of them when I come in, especially in the middle school years, they're having to write stories for their eighth grade english class or something like that and it can be overwhelming. I kind of break down the development of a plot or the development of character into very simple terms. It's obviously more than just those key moments in the story. You have to fill in the gaps, but it breaks it down so that those gaps are a little bit more manageable in their minds and that's my goal ultimately.
It's very true what you're saying about that kid that thinks they're going to throw you. A school visit to me, it’s a day of you doing stand up and improv. The first time I did a school visit, I came home and crashed for the next day and a half and my husband was like, what? All you did was go and talk to students. And then he saw a pattern every time I did a school visit, I was wiped out. And I finally explained to him, I'm like, no, it’s like being on stage for eight hours, even during lunch, you're still performing. The nice thing about that is you can put yourself in a different headspace when you're performing versus when you're writing or being yourself at home, like, and there is a persona I think you have to develop a little bit and I've seen you with teens and at conferences and stuff that we've been out at the same place and you do that too. Like you're ready for that challenge.
Mindy: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I tell everyone Author Mindy is not Real Mindy, it's a different person, especially with the students. It's fun. I agree. It is exhausting because it is pedal to the metal you're going and it's full send the whole time. One of the keys I think with the kids, like you were saying that one kid that thinks they're going to throw you or they're going to trip you up or whatever. I was in a school for 14 years and I've been substituting ever since I left. You are not going to throw me. We can go. I always have an exchange with these kids and it's always lighthearted. I'm never being mean, always like pulling that kid out a little bit more. It's fun and it's always lighthearted and engaging and usually that rapport, it's like I'm going to get everybody on my side awake and listening because of an exchange with one kid.
Sarah: Absolutely.
Mindy: There's a special recipe for that. I am so grateful for the time that I spent in high schools because it's made me able to do these performances and I am so glad, like you say that it is a persona. It is a different human being than who you are at home or when you're writing. That's so true. It couldn't be more true. I actually had the guy that I was dating at the time, we'd been together for years and he came with me to an event one time and it was just a panel, It wasn't a school visit and it actually rattled him because I was so different. And so when he suddenly had this experience of, oh my God, I don't know who my girlfriend is. It was very upsetting for him.
Sarah: I’ve told my kids. I'm like, I'll do a volunteer visit at your school because they're both in high school now and they're like, please don't. And part of me is really glad because I don't think they would ever look at me the same. Like I do reference them in some of my school visits, especially when I talk about my journey to publication. And I think that they would not appreciate that at all.
Mindy: I’ve been asked to speak to classes and stuff in my own district where I used to work and now where I substitute and I've told them before, it's like, you know, I really can't. I can't show up and be Mindy McGinnis Author because I play fast and loose. I don't have to worry about that because it's like, you know, I don't work for this district. I'm not up there swearing or anything, but I'm being pretty fast and loose with the kids. And it's like when I'm substituting, they have to be listening to me and they have to know that I can get angry and that you will get in trouble and things like that. And it's like Mindy McGinnis the author does not get in trouble. She lets it fly. And so it's like, I can't do that with the kids that I might be in charge of the next day.
Sarah: Yeah, no. Because when you're doing a school visit, you're not there to police the students like that. If anybody's job, it is, it's whoever brought you in and I always tell - because I never know where a story or plots are going to go. So I always tell the librarians and normally librarians or English teachers who brought me in - If you feel like this is going in a direction you're uncomfortable with, it is your job to step in. I'm not going to stop their creative process. If I'm uncomfortable, which it takes a lot to make me uncomfortable in those situations - then I may like, try to turn it a little bit, but I'm not going to step in and be like, nope, we're not going there. You're the one who gets to be the meanie. I am the one to inspire creativity.
Mindy: I’ve done school visits where the person that brought me in or the staff or the principal or whoever goes up ahead of time and they're like Mindy McGinnis is here and this is a big deal and you will listen to her and you will be quiet. Absolutely stomp down on them and then I'm walking in and I'm like, hey kids, you know, let's be silly! And they're just like, we're not allowed. And their little faces are completely shut down. I had that happen at a school visit with 7th graders, which can be the most fun. And it's like I will say things, tell jokes and then the kids because especially that little, the junior high age, they like to then turn to each other and repeat the joke. I don't know why, but that's what they do. They just made the joke again to each other and then they keep laughing. I just let it roll. I just let it be loose and I let them do that and talk to each other a little bit and there's certain times like, you know, not to squash the laugh and there is nothing worse than when you say something that is supposed to be funny and you paused for the laugh and there is no laugh.
Sarah: That is the sound of death on a stage.
Mindy: I don't know how comedians do it. I have told the staff it’s your job to police them if they're actually being rude. But if they are talking to each other a little bit or if somebody falls asleep, great. If somebody doesn't want to be there and they don't want to listen, I don't want you waking them up and saying pay attention! Let them sleep, they don't want to be here. They're going to be a distraction, if you wake them up. You waking them up is a distraction. Leave them alone.
Sarah: Here's the thing in that audience, you know, there are potential writers and they're always the ones who get irritated and self police. Those students who are really pushing that envelope on what's like, funny slash disrespectful. So they kind of self police a little bit, but you know that there are those students who are in there and they're just lapping up you being there and the things that you're teaching. And my goal when I do a school visit is that hopefully at least one or two students have been inspired to like not necessarily be a writer, but follow whatever their passion is, whatever their creative self is and to not be afraid or ashamed or anything of it and just go for it.
Mindy: I agree. Like I really hate it when the students feel like they can't interact or engage with you there.
Sarah: I have some, some things that I'll do in schools where they just want me to come in and talk about my writing journey and I'll do that and that's my least favorite visit to do. Because, number one I'm talking about myself. While I love talking about myself, there's just something really awkward for me about standing in front of a bunch of students who really probably do not care about My 4th grade obsession with Choose Your Own Adventures. Although strangely enough, there are some students who get excited when I say, yeah, my writing was inspired from Choose Your Own Adventures books. So you never know who you're going to reach.
No, I prefer to go into schools and I will give discounts to schools that are underrepresented populations or lower socioeconomic neighborhoods and stuff like that. Because going back to Where There's A Whisk, they have every right to pursue their dreams and to be inspired. And I'm not saying I'm a super inspirational person, but I do hope that the experience makes them think about what brings them joy.
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Mindy: I want to talk about Where There's A Whisk and I want to talk about setting it in the world of reality television. I don't really watch reality tv shows that often. I remember when Survivor was basically the first reality tv show back when I was in college and just being turned off by everything about it. And even though I wasn't really actively engaging in being a writer yet, a lot of me just kind of screamed, no, I don't like this. There's something about this that feels definitely untrue and scripted, but at the same time pretending not to be, I didn't like it. It left a bad taste in my mouth.
But a friend of mine was on a reality tv show, I don't even know which one. He was cut early. I know that he's a drummer, so maybe it was something with music. I don't know. He's a really nice guy and the way they shot his talking head sequences, the way they positioned him in the group and the manipulations that they did. He came off as just like this horrible person, and it was the way that they maneuvered the light, and the way the music that they played with him and the editing that they did with the things that he said, and then just positioning what he would say against what someone else said, that made it sound like these two people have a problem with each other, when really neither one of them was even talking about the other individual. People think I'm a dickhead because of the way that they manipulated my words and my affect. And it was just it really affected him mentally and personally.
Sarah: You can't see this, but the whole time we were talking and I'm just nodding. But I did a lot of research and a lot of bloopers and a lot of articles with people who've been on reality shows to kind of get that back story and what really is happening. That was pivotal to the story line, because there were things happening that were being manipulated behind the scenes for Peyton. And she got to the point where she couldn't tell what was real and what was not real, what was true and what was not true. And trying to decide how much of herself she was willing to give up to be a part of the show and stay on the show. I do delve into that. And it isn't necessarily to do, like, some big expose in reality television. It's an expose in reality because we live in a time now where everybody's pictures are filtered and everybody's choosing what to put out for themselves and narrating their own lives and putting their best face forward, which I think is causing a lot of damage. know my age group because I have friends who are like, oh my gosh, this family is so perfect and we never go on vacation or do this. And I'm like, dude, that's not real. You don't know what kind of fights happened over that vacation. But teenagers, especially, their entire lives have been filtered and I just wanted to pull that curtain back and go, not everything is perfect and it's okay if you're not living up to what you think somebody else is living up to, that's okay. You do you because that's the only thing you can do.
Mindy: It’s funny that you say like our generation. So like I'm 42, I used to use social media very heavily. When I first started in the publishing industry, I never used it that heavily as an individual. Like in my personal life, I would use Facebook especially because that was what was kind of the new thing for a while. I stopped because people would friend me and I would be like, oh yeah, sure you. And then I would post things and I felt like people would then speak to me in public about things that I said on Facebook and I wasn't having interactions with people while I was in front of them. It was weird to me that my interactions with people in real life were about what I had done online. I didn't like it. I don't have a lot to say about the filter because my bullshit detector is always set high. And so I've always just been like, you don't look like that and I know it.
Sarah: Tik Tok’s filter is one of my favorites. So I kind of am obsessed with Tiktok and that's the result of the pandemic. But what I love about Tiktok is that the filter is so obvious. It's comical that anyone can do it. I actually have less problem with Tiktok and the filters on Tiktok, we always think we know because we're, we feel like we know somebody through social media, like what you're talking about. We feel like we know that person. So we assume we know what their life is like and then we have our reality of what our life is like and we as a species tend to compare, or at least us as an American society. We can, you know, it's a whole go all the way back to Keeping up with the Joneses. Like we're always comparing our lives to other people and that's just not healthy. It's just not good for your soul at all.
Mindy: No, I try not to participate in it. Like you said, it is instinctive, like we all do it to a certain degree. I don't use social media as an individual like we were talking about before, you have your author persona and your real persona. Anything you see on social media is the author persona Mindy. Real Mindy is not out there anymore because she thinks it's all a freaking dog and pony show and I won't interact with it. Something else that happened for me Right before the pandemic. So the fall of 2019 - I went through a breakup and I had been with this person for 12 years, we broke up like very suddenly. It was truly traumatic. I had been with this person for 12 years, you know, we lived together and then suddenly they were gone and all their stuff was gone in the space of honestly a day. And it was just really hard and then my dog died.
Sarah: I feel like we were at an event around the time all that this was happening because I think it is a very familiar story.
Mindy: I think so. I was still doing my duties, like I was still going out, like I got on a plane and I flew out west to like a bookseller's convention, like the day that he was packing his stuff and leaving and I got home at two in the morning and I walk in the house and like his stuff's gone. It's like you flew to Missouri and you came back home and everything had changed in your life is different. Just like psychologically it broke me for a while. Then my dog died and then the pandemic came down on us. I was just done. I was not using social media at all, like not even as an author because like you were saying before, you know, author Mindy has energy and is out there whipping up people and being creative and it was like, I couldn't do that, like I couldn't access that at that time, it wasn't there for me so I didn't have anything to say other than everything sucks, right? And that was not something I was going to be putting out there. No one needed to hear that at the beginning of the pandemic. I just didn't use it. I didn't use social media at all, I fell off the map and I didn't even do an announcement like - things in my personal life, I won't be on Twitter anymore. Like I wasn't even gonna do that.
Sarah: You were just like peace out. I'm done.
Mindy: Yeah, nobody needs to know. Interestingly enough, my sales, my sales weren't affected. Of course, like my likes and my retweets and my new follows and all that stuff fell off because I wasn't there anymore, but it didn't have any effect on my career and I was like, well, you know the whole reason I've even been doing this is for my career. So what the hell am I doing?
Sarah: Where There's A Whisk just came out two weeks ago. I did use a little bit of social media to promote it. Probably not near as much as my publisher wanted me to promote it. But it goes back like that pandemic side, like you were talking about like Author Mindy. Pandemic Sarah thought Author Sarah was a pain in the ass and needed to shut up. But I was in the middle of edits. Author Sarah and Pandemic Sarah fought daily to the point that I was like, you know what? I even asked my husband, I'm like, hey, can we just send my advance back and can we just cancel this book? Because I can't do it. Like I just don't have the brain waves to do this anymore. It was a struggle.
I hate that all conversations come back to Covid, but it's such a big part of our lives. And we even have the conversation because Where There's A Whisk is set in New York City and I use the city as a 9th character. And we had a conversation about how this was going to be coming out after Covid and we're trying to pitch it as a contemporary. But I feel like now it's almost historical fiction. But like we had a conversation about do we build any of this in? Do we build it in a post Covid. We basically came down to, you know, we're going to pretend like Covid never happened because there are going to be all those books that come out post Covid about viral infections and that's coming down the line and my experiences in Covid. We all lived that. Like I remember I've been watching Grey's Anatomy the last season, 17, and I had like almost PTSD when they were going through the beginning of the pandemic because I remember like where I was sitting on the day that this happened. It's just too fresh and so we decided no, we're going to pretend it never happened and we're going to create a New York City that is pre Covid.
Mindy: I haven't written it in any of my books either.
Sarah: Your books don't need any more Darkness.
Mindy: No, they don't. They certainly don't. My book that came out, my 2021 release, The Initial Insult, which is based on Edgar Allan Poe short stories, one of them being The Masque of the Red Death, which of course is about a pandemic. And the way I used it in the book was that there's a big, drunken kegger party going on when the stomach flu breaks out because I just love the idea of all these drunk, really drunk teenagers, then also all having a really viral stomach bug. There's a lot of puking in that book.
I wrote that book in like 2018, there's a Tiger King like situation with an exotic animal owner and then there's this viral outbreak and they're talking about it. Like in the book, there's messages coming out from the school and it's like, if you have a fever, you need to stay home. We are monitoring the situation in the next school over where this has broken out. And people were like, oh my gosh, you must have written this right at the beginning of the pandemic, and I'm like, nope.
Sarah: Oh my, you're a prophet. Holy cow.
Mindy: Between that and Tiger King and well, it was so funny because my editor told me he was like, I don't know how we're going to ever pitch this book. This is going to be so difficult. And then 2020 happened and it's like - it's The Tiger King meets Edgar Allan Poe in Appalachia with Covid except it's a stomach flu. My editor was like, oh shit. Netflix did me a favor with the Tiger King toss out. I'm like, oh, this is good.
Sarah: I mean, there was a collective loss of brain function.
Mindy: We got a lot of gifs though.
Sarah: There were so many.
Mindy: Yeah, I'm over here, like reality tv sucks! No, I like this! It’s a documentary that's different. I feel like that's more highbrow, but it's the Tiger King, right?
Sarah: It's like the lowest denominator of highbrow, right?
Mindy: There you go. It really, really is the last thing. Why don't you let listeners know where they can find you online and where they can find Where There's A Whisk?
Sarah: Where There's A Whisk is available anywhere you can find books. If you want to request it from your indie bookseller, I would really appreciate that because we do need to support those indie booksellers, especially, publishing is more and more questionable about how many books and when books are coming out, to support your local booksellers. I am on Tiktok, but barely, but I'm going to be coming on more. That's my favorite platform period. Follow me on Twitter at SJ Schmitt. Yeah, just go to Tiktok and look up SarahJ_Schmitt and you’ll find me.
Mindy: Writer Writer Pants on Fire is produced by Mindy McGinnis. Music by Jack Korbel. Don't forget to check out the blog for additional interviews, writing advice and publication tips at Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com. If the blog or podcast have been helpful to you or if you just enjoy listening, please consider donating. Visit Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com and click “support the blog and podcast” in the sidebar.