Writing Tough Topics for Middle Grade with Marie Miranda Cruz

Mindy:             Today's guest is Marie Miranda Cruz, author of Everlasting Nora, an uplifting young reader debut about perseverance against all odds. Marie joined me today to talk about the difficulty of querying a middle grade novel with complicated and heavy themes.

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Mindy:             A lot of my listeners are aspiring authors and many are in the query trenches trying to get an agent. So can you talk a little bit about your experience at landing an agent?

Marie:              It took me about four years to land my agent. My agent is Paula Munier of Talcott Notch. Basically my query journey probably began in 2009. I started out querying my debut, actually Everlasting Nora back then it was, it had a different title and it was called Nora's Grave. I started out with that. I received a lot of requests to read, but at the time agents just weren't willing to take a chance. I think they thought it was a bit of a conundrum in a way. First of all, how to categorize the story. They weren't sure if it was middle-grade or young adult. And then also because they thought it was a little scary too. The elements I had in the book, they just didn't know whether or not they could sell it. I did that for a couple of years. From 2009 to 2010 I queried that book and in the meantime I thought, well I, I really wanted to write a YA.

Marie:              So I wrote a YA book and this one was a story set in San Francisco this time. Because my first book, the one that came out in October is set in the Philippines. So I wrote one that was set in San Francisco about a teenage girl who has psychic powers. I queried that book for a of years, well, maybe more like a year and a half from between 2011 and 2012. And I was basically still actually querying both books at the same time. Although the first book I decided to shelve, towards later of 2011. And that's how I found my agent. In 2012 I queried Paula Munier who was new to agenting. Publishing was cutting back on staff and there was a lot of layoffs and she had been an editor. She decided to go into agenting lucky for me and she offered representation. That's how my journey began basically.

Mindy:             So you mentioned that your first book Everlasting Nora is a middle-grade. It has a very specific voice and that it was a struggle actually in the beginning to land an agent because of the fact that it does have some darker themes yet is middle grade. So people that were reading it were struggling with categorizing it. How did you come to the decision to write middle grade in the first place and when you are writing middle grade, knowing that you intend to make it a middle grade book, do you ever look at what you're working on and think that it's leaning too young or too old?

Marie:              I don't know that I approached this project necessarily thinking about whether or not this book was one thing or another. All I wanted to do was tell a story that was very honest to the character and to the situation she finds herself in. As I was writing it though, talking with my critique group, they felt the voice was definitely middle-grade, but considering the content they felt, it was more YA. And one of the, one of the comp books I had used when I was querying was Sold by Patricia McCormick, the character in that book at 12 year old girl, her father I think sold her into prostitution. And so that was my conflict initially. And I think when, when I started querying, I felt that my book was, was young adult, despite the fact that my character is only 12. It Was a little bit difficult. And when I had to decide how to pitch it to some of the agents that did come back to me at that time did make that comment that, oh, you know, if your character, she's a kid, you know, and the voice is very middle grade. But I said, yeah, so what do I do?

Marie:              Like I said, I never really intended to write one way or the other. I just really wanted to tell this kid's story.

Mindy:             It is a kind of a tough age range right there and they're capable of looking at those darker themes. But you also don't want to be impacting them in ways that are negative. Everlasting Nora is set in a shanty town in the Philippines, in a graveyard. And you deal with a lot of the harder topics in this book. So can you talk about the issues that you address in the book, some of those harder themes and the difficult topics and how you decided to frame them for Middle Grade.

Marie:              Poverty, addiction, and violence and crime. When my agent was um, pitching the book, we had a conversation and she was the one that actually said to me, you know, we need to work out the tone of this book. And she felt that the first part of my book had a different tone that was, that was more about just the poverty and about the family and about the community. And the, the second half of the book was different in tone, more violent, it focused a lot more on the crime aspect and the addiction. She said to me that I needed to do something to balance that and to make it a little bit more focused. And so there were some elements that I had in there, in that version of the story, the mom in the story didn't have a gambling addiction. She did something totally different to make money.

Marie:              One of the things that I really wanted to talk about in the story was the the black market in the Philippines. People were selling their kidneys basically. This was actually based on an article I read of someone's experience. Some of the poor people in the Philippines were being taken advantage of, offered lots of money through a middleman to donate a kidney basically, and then getting cheated out of the money. I decided to mellow that out a little bit more. Gambling addiction is not something to be treated lightly. But I thought that might be a little bit easier to understand. I had to kind of steer the story more towards the relationship of mom and daughter when the book was finally acquired and I was working with my editor. My editor is the fantastic Diana Pho of Tor Books. When I was working with her, we made the focus a little bit more family-centric at that point,.

Marie:              The issue of poverty. That was something I really wanted to sort of illustrate to show the American audience how some children in the Philippines live. It'll make them feel sad, that's for sure. I wanted it to be an experience for them just to see, to share in what, what it is to live and how to live that way. The issue of poverty, I definitely wanted to illustrate it for them to share in that experience and see what that's like as far as the addiction and some of the violence, because there is a part in the book where Nora's friend is attacked. There's theft in the novel and a certain kidnapping. I wanted to show those issues because those are some of the real dangers for children and for families that live in squatter communities. I wanted it to be as honest as possible, but in a, way that wouldn't cause trauma and I hope it didn't. Some book bloggers in the Philippines when they reviewed my book, they did offer trigger warnings, you know, to warn people to say that, you know, there is some violence in the book to be warned if you were going to buy this for a young reader. American librarians and the book bloggers abroad did recommend this for upper middle grade, more than lower middle grade readers.

Mindy:             There's some things that a 12 year old obviously is going to be able to process and handle that an eight year old is not, and so middle grade has always been that way. It's always been a tough area. Tough to write for. Tough to target, tough to market to. There's always been, I think, I mean I wouldn't want to write middle grade. I don't think I could do it. I think it's way more difficult. It's probably the most difficult in my mind,

Mindy:             Coming up, writing about tough topics for middle graders as a way to build empathy and where to find Marie online.

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Mindy:             I'm curious, the agent that did finally pick you up, was she thinking we're going to try to reframe this as YA or was she thinking middle-grade all along and what really sold it for her?

Marie:              She really felt it was middle grade. The strength of the novel was the Middle Grade Voice. What she found, I think the most compelling, and I believe that's how she pitched the book, was the idea of the community and the story is so strong that Nora lived among people who were there to support her. I mean an absentee mom for the most part, her eventual disappearance. And then her mother's eventual illness, she found that she had friends among the people there. And so that was what uh, my agent thought was the most compelling of a story and that would make it definitely more middle grade so that it would be more appealing to a middle grade audience. It is difficult because I've been reading a lot of middle grade books lately and they do tend to skew from stories that that would definitely appeal to very young kids. Simpler stories that centered just around the family and on um, little adventures and mysteries. And then you go to the upper middle grade where it does deal with other issues. One parent who is in prison and how a child deals with that. An older sibling who went away because they got pregnant. So those definitely are for older kids.

Mindy:             Do you have any concerns when you're writing about these tough topics for the younger age range or do you think that your audience is equipped to handle it if you're giving it to them appropriately?

Marie:              I think definitely the audience would be able to handle it. Kids tend to observe and understand more than people give them credit for. Life itself is a difficult journey and there are lots and lots of kids, probably more kids than we can say who are in situations that are difficult and I think books that deal with tough issues and difficult situations could be good for them to read so they can see how the kids in the story deal with it to sympathize and connect with that, with that character and feel like they're not alone. There's a good number of kids who you know are in really good family and situations and probably have no idea what these things are like and in a way it's also good for them to read these stories with kids who are experiencing tough situations. It could generate empathy as well. In kids who don't live those lives, they may know a classmate or a friend who is experiencing those things. Reading those stories helps build empathy I think as well. Of course you have to be very judicious in how you handle it and how you tell a story, imagery you want to use, send a message, but without frightening them.

Mindy:             Very good. I agree. I think empathy is always the goal, especially when you're writing fiction and when you're writing for younger ages. I think even more so.

Marie:              I was a kid in the what in the late seventies early eighties I was living in the Philippines and so my access to books was totally different and the kind of books that we had, my household weren't children's books. So I imagine that that must be the experience of a lot of kids. I think, you know, and they're rummaging around for something to read, at least back then. And you know, they ended up reading adult books. The fact that the, there's so much available now is wonderful. You know, every, anything from the scope of realistic fiction and contemporary fiction to fantasy. Even in fantasy books, there's a lot of things to learn and a lot of things for a child to connect with. Anything that they could be dealing with or anything that their friends can be dealing with in their lives.

Mindy:             Definitely. Definitely. Last question. What are you working on right now and where can listeners find you online?

Marie:              I'm working on my next middle grade novel. I think I mentioned when I signed with my agent, I wrote a YA, so I actually have a couple of YA books. The one YA book unfortunately didn't sell. So young adults was really my passion. I'm really loving writing middle grade right now. And so I'm writing my next book. It's about a girl who finds it hard to say she's sorry and, and later figures out that sometimes the words, the things that we keep inside and the words that we hold back could hurt other people and ourselves even more. And that's, that's basically the essence of my next project. And uh, people can find me on www.cruzwrites.com

Melissa DeLaCruz On Maintaining Creative Spark Through 50 Novels

Mindy:             Today's guest is Melissa DeLa Cruz, Number One New York Times bestselling author of many critically acclaimed and award-winning novels for readers of all ages. With her 50th novel, The Birthday Girl releasing earlier this month, Melissa joined me to talk about longevity in publishing, retaining the spark of creativity, and how writers need community.

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Mindy:             So your newest release The Birthday Girl is your 50th book. That is amazing.

Melissa:            Oh, thank you. I'm glad I'm younger than my book count.

Mindy:             Well actually that's a lovely way to put it. I myself have eight books out and I know that the bloom comes off the rose pretty quickly in publishing and it can be a drag sometimes because you do have to focus on the business side of it as well, and the creativity side can get a little drained sometimes. I think. So, any thoughts on that here at your 50th book?

Melissa:            Yeah, and I think as a fellow writer, writers kind of understand what it's like, right? I mean when you say the bloom comes off the rose, I think we all want to be writers. We want to be authors, but then how do we make a living at it? I think that is like the biggest question and I heard it's not even really about selling your first book, it's about selling your second. I think that there's not really a path to it. Everybody kind of finds their own way. I started out wanting to write adult fiction and wanting to write commercial adult fiction. You know, Terry McMillan was one of my favorite writers. I wanted to write fun books for women. And my first book was adult book, but my editor said, I think you need to try out this new genre that we're kind of promoting. It was called young adult. And she said, I don't know if you've read The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants or Gossip Girl, but we kind of want to be in that genre. Do you think you want to try it? And I said, okay, well I'll try it. Because her other idea was a murder mystery. And I said, okay, I'm going to try a murder mystery. And she was like, yeah, you can’t write these.

Melissa:            And she said, my next idea is YA. I said, okay. So I wrote The Au Pairs and as I was writing this book about three teenagers and the Hamptons who are nannies by day party girls at night - that was our tagline. I just really enjoyed it and I thought, oh my God, this is what I'm meant to do. This is what my voice is meant to do. And I have written 50 books because I started out writing series. The books will either come out every eight months or every three months. We tell the stories through several books and I think J K Rowling made everybody think, oh, you have to write seven books. That's how it is. So I explain that it's not, you know, that I'm writing 50 huge long adult novels. Some of my middle grade books are only 50,000 words long and they would come out every three months. So that's how the count gets so high, so early,

Mindy:             Certainly. But 50,000 every three months, that is still a ton of work.

Melissa:            Yes it is. And it was a really difficult, because my career kinda took off right when I also became a mom. So I always joked that I never saw her. The nanny would say, oh, she's rolling over. Oh, she's doing this. I'm like, oh, that's great. You know, I never saw any of those.

Mindy:             Yeah, yeah. No, it's true. When you cross that line from writing being a hobby into being your career, that is part of where that bloom does start to come off the rose where it becomes not so much I want to write today, but I have to write and that's a distinction.

Melissa:            Oh yeah, no, definitely. And I think what happens sometimes is people forget about how fun it is. Try to always remember that you, you wanted this, this is your dream. And writers always roll their eyes saying, oh, we're living the dream. But we really are. I mean, I get to, we get to imagine things and play and even though it does sometimes feel not as fun as we imagined it to be, maybe more of a chore and a stressor. This fun, creative thing that we get to do. You have to find that spark in your work still, to be able to work, I think. Like it has to be fun and it has to be something that you want to spend time with.

Mindy:             I remind myself, I remind myself every day, whatever my complaint might be, if I am upset about, I don't know, Amazon not having my book in stock or if I'm upset about a bad review or like whatever. It's just like Mindy. You write for a living. Be quiet. You're all right. You're all right.

Melissa:            My friend Ally Carter said, you're not a $20 bill. Not Everybody's gonna like you.

Mindy:             You gotta roll with it. When you're a writer, you're, you are creating content for the public and your public is, it's the public. They are not a monolith.

Melissa:            Not your mom.

Mindy:             Not your mom. That is the absolute best way to put it. It is not your mom. You mentioned YA, and you mentioned a lot of titles that are really familiar to me because I was actually a librarian in high school for 14 years. Yes. Loved it so much. So you mentioned Traveling Pants and Gossip Girls and um, of course Twilight. And those all happened right at the time when YA just kind of blew up. And of course I remember your Blue Bloods series, handing those out to kids. I see on my handout here, there are 3 million copies in print now, which is amazing.

Melissa:            It was fun. And it was interesting when YA became YA and became something that people paid attention to because when I started out in the genre had like maybe one tiny stand in the Barnes and Noble, just kind of added to the children's section. And now you go and it's almost half the books are like YA. It's a little crazy.

Mindy:             It is. It's completely changed. It is a completely changed market. And when I was growing up, it didn't even exist. Like there were a handful of authors. Middle grade plus. They weren't touching most, not all - obviously some authors, Judy Bloom of course comes to mind - would touch things that others would not. But yeah, it is changed. It's a changed market. That is for sure.

Melissa:            50 books later you're returning to that initial push that you wanted to write adult and you're jumping in with The Birthday Girl, a domestic suspense. So why specifically domestic suspense as you're jumping into the adult market?

Melissa:            So my first novel was adult contemporary and then, Witches of East End was an adult urban fantasy. This is my fifth book for adults. I wanted to write in the genre that I basically read as my escape. So I try not to read a lot of YA and kid lit because I write in that and I want my reading to be just for me, just for pleasure, just for escape. So I usually read in a genre that I don't write in. So I read a lot of literary fiction and I read a lot of thrillers and I got really into domestic suspense genre. Basically I'm a Target mom. I go to Target, I buy whatever the books are at Target and they put a lot of these books out there and I read them all. I read Ruth Ware. I read The Wife, you know, While You Were Sleeping.

Melissa:            So those kinds of books that I was really drawn to and I always wanted to write a mystery but I don't think I had the chops for it 20 years ago. And I think after having written all these books and understanding plot and structure, I think I was like old enough and experienced enough as a writer to write the book I wanted to write. And it also came from an idea of wanting to write a mystery in Palm Springs because I think it's a place in America that has a little bit of historic uh, glamorous, mythical, Frank Sinatra, the Rat Pack and you can still go there and it is like going backwards in time. So I wanted to set it in Palm Springs. And then about 10 years ago when I was 38, we bought this house in Palm Springs and I joked that I bought it to throw my 40th birthday party in. I was going to have this massive elaborate extravagant 40th birthday and like it was a revenge party.

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Melissa:            I was going to show everybody who had been mean to me in high school. Look, where the bitch is now! It was just this huge monstrous kind of delusion. I thought, oh my God, that's so gross to want that much attention and that much validation. We don't need that. But I remember that feeling of being on the cusp of 40 and 40 meaning something that was like so big and terrible that you wanted to squash that and kind of celebrate this milestone in a way that was kind of in your face. So I thought, okay, I'm going to have this woman planning this huge party, but then everything goes wrong. This party that's supposed to meant to be amazing celebration of her life is also like a time when all the ghosts of her past haunt her. And the book really came alive when I realized I could write it in two different timelines because I do write for YA I was like, Ooh, I can sneak in kind of this dark YA book into it? So that made me happy.

Mindy:             The cover is amazing.

Melissa:            Thank you. I'm not good with covers and I never really know what a good cover is. And I remember when we did The Descendants books The Isle of the Lost cover with the big apple. They're like, this is so great. And I'm like, really? And my husband was like, you're crazy. That is a great cover. And with The Birthday Girl too. He was like, that's a great cover. Everybody's like, it's awesome. Like really? Are you sure? Like, I never know. So thank you.

Mindy:             It's great. Like as soon as I saw it as a librarian, my immediate reaction was, oh, people pick this book up.

Melissa:            Oh, I'm so glad. Thank you.

Mindy:             Yes, most definitely.

Melissa:            I cannot take any credit. My notes make the cover worse.

Mindy:             No, absolutely. And that's the kind of thing whenever I get any compliments on my covers, I'm like, well thank you. But it has nothing to do with me. You are also a co director of YALLFEST, which is a huge celebration that takes place in Charleston every year. I've been lucky enough to be invited and it's awesome. So thank you for all the immense amount of work. I'm sure it goes into that.

Melissa:            Oh my God, thank you! I was like, Mindy, we've had you! Awesome.

Mindy:             Lovely, lovely event.

Melissa:            We're very proud of it. I think we're almost at 10 years. I can't remember if it is our 10th which it might be. We will have big party, I think 10 years is next year. Actually. I think it's next year.

Mindy:             That's cool. It's emblematic of the YA community and how tight knit it is, and it really is truly a celebration and you can see authors interacting with each other, but there's also 30000 teens. It's an amazing kind of coming together of book minded people and a great love of, of course, the YA age range. So do you feel a similar type of community among the adult authorship or is it a different kind of setting?

Melissa:            We started YALLFEST because we wanted a book festival just for our genre, just for the people in our industry, who were writing our books. Because before there were all these teen book festivals, they would send you to these book festivals and you would be kind of the redheaded stepchild and you would meet these adult authors. They'd never knew what to do with you or like, What? You write YA? What is that? And you kind of feel a little bit not left out, but you not maybe really belong. And so we thought, let's have a festival that's just for us. It's just for teens. But Not even an age range. You know, it's a mindset. Youth and optimism and you can be a YA reader no matter how old you are. And so that's where it came from, from going to these other festivals and feeling like they don't really get me or my books.

Melissa:            And then the teen festivals are now so big that all the mainstream festivals now have a whole YA track. So that's kind of nice to see. We did start it because we wanted a place where the writers were celebrated. Writers kind of, um, make communities around genre. Thriller writers are kind of like, YA writers in a way where they all know each other and support each other. And it's a small kind of close knit community. I do look forward to that. People tend to band together with the kind of books that they write and there are communities in the publishing world, murder mystery. Thriller writers. They're always a lot of fun.

Mindy:             That's really cool. That's really cool. So when it comes to writing a dual timeline, that is always kind of challenging, I think. You're basically operating pacing, character building and everything within two different stories, kind of writing two novels to create one story. So how did you go about keeping yourself organized for one thing, but also just planning that out - or do you pants it?

Melissa:            No, I'm a plotter. I definitely am a planner. I like outlines. I think structure is really important. While the book was in my head, I also wrote like a pretty detailed outline of where I wanted to be because I wanted each chapter to kind of inform the other. So you would see something in the past and then something in the present and you would know that happened, uh, in the present because it's something that happened in the past and I wanted it to in the same time. I didn't write each chapter one after the other. I would write five Palm Springs in her forties chapters and then I'd write five Portland in her 16 year old mindset chapters. So it's like once I was in that certain POV, I would stick to it and kind of jump ahead. But then I also had to make sure that the chapters were still aligning in that way. Yeah. It was a lot of planning and then also like some kind of alchemy where, oh, it kind of all works. I don't know. I don't know how it works. When you're in it just kind of playing and writing and hoping, and then you rewrite it a lot and then you know, hopefully it's done.

Mindy:             Sometimes you step back and you're like, oh look, that worked cool.

Melissa:            Exactly. And it's kind of like, phew. Subconscious writing.

Mindy:             Totally. I feel that way often. So you're writing not only two timelines but you're writing someone as a younger person and then writing the same person in their forties so I am interested in the challenge of that because you have to have the voice there so that we know it's the same person. I'm curious about your approach. Were you imagining her first as a 16 year old and then wondering what kind of 40 year old person would the 16 year old evolve into or were you looking at the 40 year old and saying what happened to her when she was young?

Melissa:            I think when I thought of the character, I kind of knew everything. I knew that she had grown up poor and I knew that she had successfully built her own business. You know, kind of picked herself up from her bootstraps using her beauty and then I knew that something would happen at her 40th birthday because something happened at her 16th. But I didn't know I was going to do, like you said, two novels in one/ and when I realized, oh I could do that, that's how I'm going to show what happened in the past. It kind of clicked. I always knew who she was her entire life. I just didn't realize where I was going to put the camera. I was like, Oh yeah, right there at 16 and definitely at 40. She kind of was whole in my head. Like I knew who she was. I knew her background and her present.

Mindy:             Very cool. Very cool. Last question. What's up next for you? What are you working on?

Melissa:            So right now I'm taking a little bit of a break because I have a couple of books coming out next year. So I'm working on a couple of things that haven't been announced yet. This next year I have a new YA fantasy romance. It's called The Queens Assassin. It's coming out in February. They came to me in a dream. I dreamt about this assassin, this girl hiding in the bushes. And I was like, what are they doing? And I always joke when I wrote my vampire books, Blue Bloods, I would be on panels with Stephanie Meyer and Stephanie would talk about how Edward and Bella came to her in a dream. And I'd be like, please and roll my eyes. And now I want to apologize because now these characters came to me in a dream and I wrote a book about them. So you know, I guess it does happen.

Mindy:             My first book came about because of a dream and, and I guess you can't question inspiration right when it lands.

Melissa:            Oh yeah. You got to go with it. And then my next work after that's coming out in April is Gotham High, which is the first graphic novel that I've written. I've had my books adapted into graphic novels, but I've never written an original graphic novel. And it is the story of Bruce Wayne and the Joker and the Catwoman in high school. That's Gotham High.

Mindy:   Yes, that's exciting. Tell listeners where they can find you online.

Melissa:            I am at https://melissa-delacruz.com/

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Writing Tough Topics for Teens with Jamie Beth Cohen

Mindy:             Today's guest is Jamie Beth Cohen, author of Wasted Pretty. A writer and storyteller who works in higher education, her nonfiction has appeared in the Baltimore Sun, the Washington Post and Teen Vogue. Jamie joined me today to talk about writing tough topics for teens.

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Mindy:             Wasted Pretty, that's your debut. It deals with some heavy topics such as sexual assault. I know that I get this question all the time because of my own content. Why write about dark topics for teens?I always say because it happens to them. So what is your answer?

Jamie:              Well, I like your answer very much and it's much more concise than what I generally say. But I'd add that my goal in any writing that I do is to connect with people. I spent a lot of time thinking that the dark things that were happening to me were only happening to me. And I thought other kids came from uncomplicated families or were better at dealing with trauma than I was. Um, but as an adult, I've come to believe that we're all just really doing the best we can with what life has handed us and knowing that other people are also dealing with heavy, heavy stuff can be really helpful when you're going through it. So my, why do I write about it? I agree with you. I write about it because it happens.

Mindy:             Yes, it does. And it happens to, unfortunately it happens across the gamut. It happens on all age levels and however, like you're saying, when you're young, you do make some assumptions and you do worry a lot about being different. That's something that pops up a lot. Like socially, you don't want to be different. Thinking you're the only one that this is happening to, that you're the only one who has suffered in this way is really common. Like that is a very, for younger people, that is something that contributes to them not vocalizing when there's any type of assault or abuse. And also of course the self-blame, which I think comes in at any age, but especially when you're younger and you don't know better and don't know about all of the baggage and the history that comes along with sexual assault and victim blaming. So what are your thoughts on that when it comes to the youth and how they have to process some of these harder topics?

Jamie:              I agree with you. It happens at all ages. And I think the victim blaming specifically is, I'm not sure if it's the way just women or girls are wired, but I know it's the way I'm wired. And also that the alienation makes it so much worse. I mean, I had surgery when I was in first grade on my ureters. Your ureters go from your kidneys to your bladder. So the surgery was in that sort of private part area and I was in first grade and I was petrified and I was embarrassed and I think I probably had some shame that went along with it and my parents couldn't figure out. I think they thought that I was maybe reacting more strongly than they expected me to. And when my mom finally drilled down to it, I told her it was because I thought the doctor had never performed this surgery before because I assumed nobody else had problems like that. This is all he does. Like this is the surgery he performs like 10 times a day. And then as soon as she said that, I mean I was still afraid, but I was no longer alone. And so to think that you're only one to think it's your fault to think I, you know, I had this problem that I didn't even realize the doctor knew how to deal with is very common at many ages.

Mindy:             Yeah. It's so true. And especially when it comes to dealing with anything in your private area or anything like that, that deals with something that perhaps some of us have been taught is gross or Yucky or bad or we've already been taught to be ashamed of. It contributes to the guilt and the shame and the, and the feelings of alienation or isolation. Your novel Wasted Pretty deals with sexual assault. And in the case of the novel, it deals with specifically a girl who is just kind of getting some positive attention that she's really been looking for from someone for a while. But then she also has attention coming to her from someone that is completely inappropriate. So if you could talk about that for a little bit and how your character is juggling those two things and comparing them.

Jamie:              I wanted it to be okay for it to be exciting that she was getting attention for her looks and this was something that she hadn't had for a very long time and then all of a sudden she did and how exciting that was and then to sort of have that double whammy of, Oh wait a minute, I'm not in control of how this affects other people, so nothing changes internally for the girl. All of her changes are external and she remains the same person inside but is now dealing with a whole host of different reactions to her. And so I wanted to look at that because I think that's true to life. I mean I think that happened, that happened to me, that happened to many of my friends. I worked in a high school, I watched it happen to other girls, but on top of that I was also looking to explore in the book the person she wants to be attracted to her is someone her parents do not want her spending time with and the person she doesn't want attention from is her father's best friend.

Jamie:              And so he has this unfettered access to her that he really shouldn't have. And I wanted to explore this area of things that look one way from the outside but are really something else on the inside. And so sort of a former bad boy who's really trying to clean up his act is actually someone much safer to be around. Then a sort of a famous professional athlete that has no checks on him whatsoever. In the book, the professional baseball player is her father's best friend. He's also bankrolling her mom's business. So he has money, he has influence, he has celebrity and he's been a family friend for a really long time. So he has unfettered access and I sort of poked at the notion that, you know, parents understand what their kids are going through because oftentimes they don't and certainly feels like they don't. More often than not.

Mindy:             Yeah. And parental trust in other adults is occasionally misguided. We'd all like to think that we know other people, especially our own friends inside and out. But that's not necessarily true. Did you see the documentary, um, Kidnapped in Plain Sight?

Jamie:              No. I've heard about that one. But I did see the movie The Tale. Do you know about The Tale?

Mindy:             I have not seen that or heard of it. No,

Jamie:              it wrecked me. So The Tale is, it is not a documentary, but it was a movie made by a documentarian about her life. So it's like a fictionalized version of her life. And in it she explores her memory of a situation and then she sort of goes back and fact checks it and realizes that in her memory, what she thought was a borderline inappropriate relationship went down, she was 16. But in actuality when it went down, she was 13.

Mindy:             Oh my. That sounds fascinating.

Jamie:              I saw it just in the last couple months. So long after my book was written and published, but listening to people talk about it in interviews, I knew I had to see it and it was, and again it was an adult, it was a coach, it was someone that her parents put their trust in who was completely inappropriate, but as an adult or as she was growing up, she basically told herself the story that it was okay because she was also basically an adult. But when she looked back on it and the actual timeline, that was not the case.

Mindy:             And there again you just have a girl who is making excuses and like even self editing for someone that she has been told that this person is safe, this person is okay. And so she's like, well I must be wrong. Wow, I will have to check that out. That sounds pretty fascinating.

Mindy:             Coming up, getting nonfiction pieces published - talent, hard work and luck.

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Mindy:             You also have nonfiction that has appeared in places like Teen Vogue and The Washington Post. So talk about getting smaller pieces like that place. That is a difficult thing to do is my understanding.

Jamie:              It is really difficult. It is talent and hard work, but it is also luck. I need to be really transparent about that. The way it was happening was I had written my novel, I was trying to get an agent and I wasn't having any luck, but at the same time I do live storytelling and preparing to do live storytelling because the stories have to be true. It's a lot like writing an essay, so while I was trying to get my agent, I decided to start sending out some of my storytelling pieces as essays and I basically educated myself on how one does that. There is not a central database of who's editing what, where. I don't know why. I don't know if it's because people move around so much. I don't know because people haven't figured out a way to monetize that, but basically I taught myself how to research on Twitter to find editors' email addresses.

Jamie:              There are also a couple of groups on Facebook that I'm a part of, mostly for women and non-binary writers that are great for sharing information like that. But I basically educated myself on this process and really went after it hardcore because I was, the novel was something I couldn't work on while I was trying to find an agent. I had sort of frozen it in time, but I still wanted to be writing and this I thought would be a great way to sort of raise my profile and have something to put in that bio paragraph at the end of the query letter.

Mindy:             That bio is a killer. Such a concern.

Jamie:              Yes. So I really wanted something to beef up that bio and I got really lucky. One of my first by-lines was the Washington Post on parenting piece and it really took off and I had been telling stories for several years, so I had a lot of material to pull from and it was a lot of fun actually for me to go back over.

Jamie:              When I prepare for storytelling, I write it out like it's an essay and then I practice it just verbally because we're not allowed to have notes. And so it was interesting to go back and look at the videos of the storytelling and then figure out how to craft a piece that would work better on the page. So that was a lot of fun. It taught me a new skill. The Teen Vogue piece was hilarious because I pitched it as a personal essay and got a response that said, oh, but you'd be interviewing teens for this piece. Right? And I wrote back and said, sure, yes I will. And so then I sort of taught myself about journalism and about, I mean, I hadn't done a reported piece since I was in grade school. You know, when I interviewed my classmates for something, I think it was their favorite song of the year or something. So I, it's like some really quick research on journalistic ethics and conducting interviews. And somehow I turned that piece in on time though I have not pitched a reported piece since, and it's not something I enjoyed. It's not what I like to do.

Mindy:             So tell me more about this live storytelling. What is it? I mean I think it's pretty self explanatory, but I, I'm curious about this. Tell me about your live storytelling and how this informs your physical writing as well. The act of moving those words onto the page.

Jamie:              So for anyone who's heard The Moth podcast or anything like that, I mean that's similar to what we do. So I live in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and we have something called the Lancaster Story Slam. And the rules are five minutes, no notes, no props, no music, as true as you remember it. And that always gets a really big laugh when we're doing the rules because no one is up there fact checking with you. So that's a little bit different. When I turned in an essay, I need to be totally 100% sure that when it's fact checked, if it's fact checked, that everything's going to come out correctly. When you're up there telling the story on stage, no one is standing next to you, fact checking you. So that is a little bit different. But I do really aim for authenticity and honesty.

Jamie:              So we have a monthly story slam in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and a monthly stories slam in New York, Pennsylvania. I'm driving distance to both. I live between the two. What it's been great for over the years is actually prompts. Because every month has a theme. When I was querying and waiting to hear back from people and didn't want to be working on the novel, it gave me a writing prompt every month or two if I was going to both slams. That really helped me get words on paper and there's an, you know, a deadline, it's like show business, right? Like the curtain's going to go up whether or not you're ready. So there was a hard deadline, there was a prompt that's usually pretty open ended and that was a really great way to just keep writing while I was waiting between hearing back from agents.

Mindy:             So I want to return to the idea of your Lancaster group and your other writing groups. But first I want to talk a little bit about the fact that you have worked on both fiction, orally and nonfiction orally and written, so when you are approaching something, when you're approaching a piece of fiction versus a piece of nonfiction, do you have a different way of preparing yourself for those or is there a different writing procedure that you use or do you mix it up to put your brain in a different place? Like you were saying, when it comes to something like fact-checking, if you're working on nonfiction, is your brain in the same place when you're working on fiction versus nonfiction?

Jamie:              It absolutely is not in the same place. But I will say with both I'm always aiming for emotional authenticity, so Wasted Pretty, it's a novel. It's a young adult coming of age novel. Nothing in that book happened the way it happened in my life. The character is 16 and in Pittsburgh and goes to an all girls school. I grew up in Pittsburgh and was a 16 year old in an all girls school. Aside from that, the characters, the plot, everything is made up except for the scene - I always have to say this - in which the main character accidentally locks herself in the bathroom of a boy she has a crush on. I am talented. I did that. That was wonderful and horrible all at the same time. So that actually happened. But aside from that scene, that book is completely made up. But what I tried to do was stay true to the emotions and the feelings that I was having as a 16 year old girl in Pittsburgh.

Jamie:              So that emotional authenticity is there. When I'm writing nonfiction, when I'm writing an essay or like a hot take or response piece that comes from I have just seen something or experienced something and I need to make it make sense. I need to take that sort of real life, real experience and get my head around it. And the only way I know how to do that is by writing. So when I'm writing nonfiction, I'm often going for a message. I'm often trying to take something that's horrible and not necessarily find a silver lining, but at least make it worthwhile so that it's just not horrible. One of my pieces that I love is about taking my daughter to a rally in support of immigrants. It's hard. I mean, I think she was seven at the time. I hated that we had to be there. I loved that we were there, but I hated that we had to be there. I needed it to make sense, and so when I'm writing nonfiction, I'm going more for a message. Whereas when I'm writing fiction, there may be a message, but it is not what's central. The process, what's central to the process is creating an arc that is fun and that is engaging and that makes sense. I will say that I am a terribly literal person and very on the nose writer, so in fiction I'm always working against that tendency and in nonfiction I'm leaning into that tendency.

Mindy:             That makes sense to me. Myself, I've never attempted any essays or anything of that type. Do you have any advice for people who want to attempt essays? Particularly personal based essays?

Jamie:              Not from a craft perspective, but from a pitching perspective. Timely pieces are so much easier to place. I, it's counterintuitive to what I thought going into it. So there are two types of pieces or there are many types, but I write either evergreen pieces, so pieces that really could be published at any time throughout the year and timely pieces which are tied to a news event or something that has just happened in the news cycle. You can send a timely essay to more than one editor at a time, as long as you disclose that you've done that. An evergreen piece, you really have to pitch to somebody, wait to hear back from them, follow up with them a week or two later, maybe never hear back from them or hear back from them that they're passing, and then you can go to the next person. So with an evergreen piece, it could take you six months to get through 10 editors before you find someone to take it.

Jamie:              Whereas with a timely piece you can write to 10 editors at the same time and say, hey, this is timely because it's tied to an event that's happening next Friday. It's being pitched simultaneously and can you get back to me soon if you're interested. So I've had better luck placing timely pieces. So that's one facet of it. As far as the actual craft, it's sort of like what we were talking about, the dark themes. For me, the only thing that works is really leaning into the things I'd rather not think about, but the only way I know how to think about them is writing. That gut level honesty is what is going to make a piece resonate. And then I also got a great piece of advice from Jia Tolentino who just today I think her, her nonfiction essay collection came out and I was in a talk with her last year and she said if what you learn in one of my essays is about me, I haven't done my job. When I'm talking about myself in an essay, it is solely to illuminate a larger issue. I think it's what I'd been doing, but when I heard her say it, I leaned into that even further. So it's not, let me tell you about this horrible thing I experienced when I was 16 but it's, I experienced this thing when I was 16 and why is it still happening to girls and how can we get it to stop?

Mindy:             It's interesting, you were talking about timely pieces and evergreen pieces and unfortunately when we're talking about sexual assault, sometimes things can be both.

Jamie:              That is for sure, but if you can hook it to something concrete, it's more likely that you're going to get it picked up. It's a numbers game. It's more likely that one of those 10 editors will read it and take it as opposed to spacing that out over a six months. I mean, I was talking about luck before and timing my second piece in the Washington Post - I can't say it's solely happened for this reason, but I know for a fact that the editor wrote back and said, I love this. It's really clean. And I had to pull something from tomorrow. So you're going in tomorrow?

Mindy:             Oh my gosh. Did you just pee your pants?

Jamie:              Pretty much. I don't know what she pulled. I don't know why she had to pull it, but for whatever reason she had to pull something. She needed a filler and that's when she opened my email and thankfully it was clean copy. We didn't have to go back and forth on many edits and she just dropped it in. But again, that's the luck part. It's showing up. It's doing the work. It's great that it was clean copy. That was timing and luck and I have no idea why.

Mindy:             That's amazing. Well, and I love that you are so honest about the luck aspect because luck is a huge part. It's a huge part in, uh, the larger placement of novels as well.

Mindy:             Lastly, the dangers of embracing the myth of the solitary writer, how community can help and where to find Jamie online.

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Mindy:             I want to talk a little bit more about the writer's group you mentioned that meets once a month in Lancaster. I think it's really fascinating what you were talking about with the the free storytelling, but also if you could just talk for a little bit about what having a community like that means for you as a writer.

Jamie:              I founded Write Now Lancaster with my friend Michelle Lombardo, who's also a local writer back in 2015 and we are very different writers with very different situations, so at the time she was home writing full time and didn't really know anyone in Lancaster. She had recently moved back here after growing up, sort of in the general area. I had a full time job. I knew a bunch of people from the storytelling community, but I had no time to write. So I was looking for a time, a dedicated time to write and she was looking to meet more people who were writing. And it's interesting that when we founded this together, we sort of hit both of those needs and they've benefited us both and the community really well. So what we do is we come together in a coworking space, a local coworking space called The Candy Factory because it was founded in a candy factory.

Jamie:              And um, we come together once a month and we bring food and drink and we hang out and we chat for about a half an hour. And then I set the timer for 60 minutes and we write silently for 60 minutes and then we hang out and chat for about a half an hour after. So it really hits both of those needs for people who are just looking for the motivation, um, to, to sit and get their butt in the seat and write and also hits the need for people to be in community. So I'm an extrovert who is also a procrastinator. So being in a room with a lot of other people writing, I get energy from them, but I also get motivation because if I'm like surfing the Internet, they're going to see that. And so I, it's like positive peer pressure to know that everyone is working on their writing.

Jamie:              But a lot of things have grown out of that. So we met monthly for two years and realized we didn't know what anyone else was working on. The beauty of a silent writing time meetup is you can be writing poetry, you can be writing non fiction, you can be writing fiction, you can be writing... we had people writing comedy, we had people writing cooking blogs. You're not a fiction writer who is trying to critique poetry. It's not a, it's not a workshop group, it's not a critique group. So after two years we decided to host a public reading and it was the first time we'd ever heard each other's writing. And some of us knew each other better and had swapped before. But really we were so impressed with what everyone was doing. So now every other year we do a public reading so that we can see what everyone's been working on and and you know, give positive reinforcement and get really excited about it. But mostly we are there to write. It's great for beginner writers. It's great for seasoned writers because you're not measuring yourself against people. You're just there because you want to write and you want to be around other people who are writing.

Mindy:             It's much like going to the gym. So I go to the gym about three times a week and I really have to force myself to go sometimes. But once I get there, when I'm in my class and I'm around other people that are really pushing themselves to lift, it will really motivate you to kick up your own game. Being around other people is the same is true of writers. When I see other people writing and other people taking it seriously and sitting there and hitting their laptops, I'm like, oh, I should be doing that too. And it is great motivation, right?

Jamie:              I agree. And I definitely have some friends who are more on the introverted side get distracted easily. So I have a, I have a friend, I mean I love his writing, he's just doing really wonderful things. I met him through storytelling and I love what he's doing and I invite him every month and he's like, I don't want to be around other people when I'm writing. I'm like, that's?? No. Who does that?? And so I definitely get that. It's not for everyone. But it is so for me,

Mindy:             I had the experience of being at an event where a friend needed just kind of to have some space to herself and not have a bunch of people around her. Cause it was a large event and I happened to have a room at the conference. So I was like, you know, you can come up to my room and we'll just, you know, you can chill out here. And she was like, okay. And she whips out her laptop and I whip out mine and we're there and we're together and it's social in the sense that we're in the same place at the same time doing the same thing. But we're both in our own little worlds and we're doing our work. I find it tremendously motivating.

Jamie:              For me, it's important to push back against the idea of all writers are introverts, right? Oh, writing is so solitary. People are miserable. When people lean into that, I often feel like, well wait a minute, am I a real writer? If I like people and I'm generally nice and outgoing and so I know that there are outgoing, lovely, fully functional writers. I mean, and I love to be surrounded by them, but I also, I really like to, whenever possible talk about how much it is about community and how much it is about, hey, take a look at this for me or what can I look at for you? I was just listening to one of your earlier episodes about how, you know, getting readings is often from knowing other people. I mean, I'm from Pittsburgh. And so Kit Frick just moved back to Pittsburgh and I saw that you were there with her and I thought, oh, I wonder how that came about.

Jamie:              And then I was listening to your podcast and you talked about how that came about. So I had an event there two weeks ago and she came out to that event and I introduced her to my friends there. And so my writing is about connecting people. My sort of ethos is about connecting people. And so I guess I would just like to say to any writer listening who feels alienated when people say, Oh, writing. So solitary, it never has been for me. I would, I've written in hotel lobbies, like in my home town, I will go to a hotel lobby with my laptop because I need that background noise and that energy of people

Mindy:             Definitely. I've had the similar experience where I will just go somewhere public because I need that motivation of having people around me. And it really can be something different. And you know, you're right about the isolation too. It is, you know, I mean you can decide whether or not that's who you want to be or what you want to be doing. I know a lot of people that write in groups and they find that uh, you know, very motivating.

Jamie:              It's helpful to hear that there are lots of different ways to be a real writer. I think we get caught up in that a lot.

Mindy:             The poor tortured, starving artists thing is, it's not attractive to actually be that person. Last question, what are you working on right now and where can listeners find you online?

Jamie:              I am working on a sequel to Wasted Pretty, but I recently scrapped 40,000 words. That was really intense, but it was the right thing to do. I have trouble plotting, so I really write my way into the story and I had actually plotted a broad sort of arc for where I thought this was going, but the 40,000 words in it no longer matched the characters. So some people would say that was poor plotting or planning on my part, which it very well may be, but I just don't enjoy plotting. I got to know the characters as I was writing this, and I can't say that none of those 40,000 words are going to end up in the next draft, but I just, I, I paused, I opened up a clean document. I plotted a new arc that made more sense for who the characters had become and now I'm going to write into that and see if that happens.

Jamie:              So hopefully there'll be a sequel. I initially I had wanted to have a zero draft or a first draft by the end of this calendar year. I think that's still possible. Uh, but I do have a full time job and two kids and a husband and friends that I like to spend time with. So we'll see. We'll see what happens with that. I did spend all of July only working on the novel, which meant that for the month of July I didn't write any essays and I learned a lot about myself in that process. Mainly that I'm not a very nice person to be around when I'm not writing essays.

Jamie:              It's all of the stuff that I need to work through gets pent up in there. So that was fascinating. But I did find that when I was writing the novel every day there was much less sort of gear up time. You had asked about what it's like to get into the head space of fiction. And when I was writing the novel every day, I could just sort of sit down and write it. I didn't have to sort of remember where the characters were and get back into those characters heads. They were just right there. So I think if I didn't have a full time job and I could really write every day the way many people do, I understand the benefit of it. But it also, it did zap some of the fun for me. And so I really as a writer need to balance those two things. And as far as where people can find me, I am on Twitter. And I'm on Instagram at I have a Facebook page. And my website where you can find links to all of those things is http://www.jamiebethcohen.com/