First Draft Episode #269: Martha Brockenbrough
September 8, 2020
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Martha Brockenbrough, faculty at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and author of nonfiction for young adults, including Unpresidented, Alexander Hamilton: Revolutionary, and novels like The Game of Love and Death and her newest picture book, This Old Dog.
Today's episode is brought to you by Caveday. Caveday leads group-focused sessions for a worldwide community every day on Zoom. Caveday is awesome. You go to the Caveday website and you sign up for one of many, many, three-hour windows. And then Caveday sends you your Zoom login and you jump on and join a group of other people led by the Caveday host to get three work sprints done during that window. A trained guide leads check-ins, deep work sprints, and energizing breaks.
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This episode was brought to you by Revision Season. Revision Season is a seven-week virtual masterclass in revising your novel led by Elana K. Arnold author of Prince Honor Winner Damsel and National Book Award finalist What Girls Are Made Of, and more. Each week, Elana will send a video lecture and transcript followed by a series of assignments designed to help you put the week's lessons into practice. A weekly live call, recorded if you need to listen later, gives writers the opportunity to ask specific questions. And a private moderated forum provides a space for Revision Season writers to connect with and learn from each other.
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Over the course of seven weeks, Elana's approach with Revision Season seeks to not only get into the weeds of the manuscript that you're ready to wrestle with, but to enrich and deepen your relationship with revision so that you can move into the next phase of your journey as a writer with more confidence. After going through a Revision Season, you'll have Elana's framework to revision that you can use in all of your future projects in any order that works for you.
I'm lucky enough to be taking Revision Season for the following session, which begins on September 20th. And Elana's already sent me my zero week packet. It came with a video lecture, a transcript of that lecture, and three assignments I can do to be ready when the course begins.
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Welcome to First Draft with me, Sarah Enni. This week, I'm talking to Martha Brockenbrough faculty at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and author of nonfiction for young adults, including Unpresidented and Alexander Hamilton: Revolutionary, as well as novels like The Game of Love and Death, and her newest picture book This Old Dog out from Levine Querido now.
I loved what Martha had to say about feeling frozen out of fiction by the canon, the creativity sparked by boredom, and about being slowed down by fear. Everything we talk about in today's episode can be found in the show notes. First Draft participates in affiliate programs specifically with bookshop.org.
So that means that if you shop through the links on FirstDraftPod.com, it helps to support the show and independent bookstores at no additional cost to you. If you'd like to donate to First Draft, either on a one-time or monthly basis, you can do that @paypal.me/FirstDraftPod.
Last week, the final episode of Season One of Track Changes dropped in the First Draft feed. That episode is all about what authors can do to market their own books. And it's also a call to examine your personal metrics for success, early and often, so that you can have a mental health saving perspective during launch. Find the entire season - nine episodes plus four bonus episodes - @FirstDraftPod.com/TrackChanges.
And the publishing info party won't stop for subscribers to the Track Changes newsletter where every Thursday I share more of the information I gathered in researching for this project, as well as give industry updates and more original reporting. You can sign up for a 30-day free trial of the newsletter and learn more about both Track Changes projects @FirstDraftPod.com/TrackChanges.
Okay, now please sit back, relax, and enjoy my conversation with Martha Brockenbrough.
Sarah Enni: Okay. Hi Martha. How are you?
Martha Brockenbrough: I'm great, Sarah, how are you?
Sarah Enni: I'm doing well. Thank you so much for having me over. So excited to meet you. And I have a bunch of questions for you.
Martha Brockenbrough: I'm really excited to answer them... a little nervous too. I want to do a good job.
Sarah Enni: You're already doing great. Well, as you know, I like to start at the very beginning. So I'd like to ask you where you were born and raised.
Martha Brockenbrough: I was born and raised in Bellevue Washington, which is a suburb of Seattle. I can look out my window over there and see the town where I was born. I didn't go far.
Sarah Enni: And I believe is it correct that you went to Lakeside?
Martha Brockenbrough: I did.
Sarah Enni: And is that the same school I'm thinking of that Bill Gates went to et cetera, et cetera?
Martha Brockenbrough: Bill Gates went there, but more importantly, E. Lockhart went there.
Sarah Enni: Oh, fantastic.
Martha Brockenbrough: I know, I know. And actually some of her books, you can tell that they're set there. And so as someone who went to school there, I get a great deal of pleasure out of reading that setting.
Sarah Enni: Oh, that's interesting. Like Frankie Landau-Banks?
Martha Brockenbrough: That one was more of a boarding school although the feeling was very much like our school. But the Boyfriend List, I think is what it's called. So reaching into the way back files. But yeah, if you want to read about where E. Lockhart and I went to high school. And she was a senior when I was a freshman and she was the coolest! And I still feel the same way about her.
Sarah Enni: I love that. Oh my gosh. I got to tour that school. I went to the University of Washington and while I was there, I forget what it was about, but I was writing an article about a class they were teaching or something, and so I got to go walk the campus, which was super cool. It was really fun. So that stood out when I was looking at it.
I want to hear about how reading and writing was a part of growing up for you.
Martha Brockenbrough: Reading and writing, those were my favorite things to do. I learned to read when I was four and my parents were worried that I was slow to pick up on it because apparently my older brother learned more quickly than I did. I was the one though who learned and then kept on reading and I would read everything that I could get my hands on. It was, for whatever reason, my absolute favorite thing to do.
I can remember being about 10 years old and picking up one of my mom's romance novels, and then feeling [makes a swooping sound] as she removed it from my hands just when it was getting to the very interesting page with a man who had tattoos. Anyway, I was in third grade when my teacher told me that actually new books were being written all the time. It hadn't occurred to me.
I just thought that these were the books and they were written. And so when I found out that it was possible for me to be an author, that's what I aspired to do. She was a really incredible teacher. She had sort of a tree, it was just basically a branch, a bare branch in her classroom, but she tied words onto the little sprigs. And so every time I got done with math, I got to go pull a word off of the tree and use that as a story prompt. And I still do things like that.
But then high school and college happened. And you know how in high school you start reading all of these old books by mostly dead white men. You'll get your token woman in there, your token person of color. And what we were writing about was it felt like we were turning stories into codes that had to be decoded. And it really stripped the joy from the process for me. It also made me feel like, "I don't know what I could possibly write."
Remember that piece of advice, "Write what you know." Nothing I knew related in any way to anything that I had been reading. And I did go on to college and I did learn Greek and read the Odyssey and the Medea and other things. And by the time I graduated, I had been the editor of my college paper and I became a journalist because I'm like, "Well, that's writing that I know. And that's writing that I understand." And that was kind of my journey. I really felt frozen out of fiction by the canon.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I mean, that's a really interesting parallel that you, in your head, can attach so directly to that. I mean, there's a lot of damaging writing advice out there and that's probably one of them, "write what you know" kind of limits people. Especially when they're not seeing what they know out in the world, all complicated factors.
Martha Brockenbrough: I wanted to mention something about boredom. Because Laurel Snyder (author of Orphan Island, My Jasper June, and more) and some other friends and I were talking about the times we were bored when we were children, we did some extraordinary creative work. And so allow me to sing the praise of childhood boredom and to say to schools and teachers, we don't need to program every minute. And test scores are not the measure of anything except how the kid did on that test on that day.
And if we can let our students' imaginations run wild and see what they bring to the world, oh my gosh, I wish that we would do that. And as writers, as grownups striving to write, let yourself be bored. Turn off the devices. Stare out the window. And when your mind starts hungering for something feed it.
Sarah Enni: There's a reason we get ideas in the shower, right. You're just in an enclosed space with not a lot to do. And your mind can just go places.
Martha Brockenbrough: Your mind can go places. And the feeling of that water on your brain actually does tap into a certain form of creativity.
Sarah Enni: Really?
Martha Brockenbrough: Yes! It really does. It's not a coincidence. I had read a book, it was a discredited book, by Jonah Lehrer (Jonah Lehrer‘s partially discredited book was Imagine: How Creativity Works and a New York Times article about the scandal around him). Do you remember the book?
Sarah Enni: Yes.
Martha Brockenbrough: Cause he made up some Bob Dylan quotes and then packaged some of his other stuff, but that was one of the points that he made in it. And the whole book isn't garbage, even though there are some problematic parts. And I have personal experience with this. When I was finishing The Game of Love and Death, I had one of my characters up in an airplane with a supernatural being who wanted to kill her.
And I'm like, "Okay, now how do I get her down?" And so I went and I took a shower and I thought of the answer while I was all covered in suds. And I did not rinse, I wrapped myself in a towel. I sat down, covered in soap, and wrote the ending.
Sarah Enni: That's amazing. I was just talking to Maureen Johnson. I was just listening to her episode and she also was explicitly like, "Oh, water. Water needs to be sort of around for me to get good writing done."
Martha Brockenbrough: That's fascinating. Where's home for her?
Sarah Enni: She's in New York City, but travels to write a lot with her friends. So she was kind of talking about like going to the beach, getting the waves, then sitting down and feeling like she was ready to go, which is very interesting.
Martha Brockenbrough: I think that's so great. There's lots of parts of the writing process. I mean, I like looking at water too, but I also find that when I switch to a new book, I like to sit someplace different. And so while I have an office right now, this is my table where I'm working. I wrote much of my Trump book in bed. Other books I've written on those yellow couches over there. And it just made me realize that once I've constructed the space for the project, then I stay there and that helps me.
Sarah Enni: I'm a coffee shop writer. So I'll say that I do very much the same thing. And for two years I went to one coffee shop, religiously. That was about it five days a week. And then I moved on to a new project and I was like, "It just isn't gonna get written there." Like, "That's just not the right one." So I'm rotating all around and I just found new one I'm very excited about. So it's very interesting how you can wake up and be like, "No, I need to be in this other environment."
Martha Brockenbrough: And giving yourself permission to do that. I mean, this is like this whole thing. And I think we've been talking about it in a roundabout way, just because you don't see yourself in a story, just because you don't have any idea how this business works, just because you don't have a space to write, or whatever. Give yourself permission to make everything up. Write what you're curious about and do it in a way that makes you feel good.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I like that. That's perfect advice. Well, I want to talk about nonfiction writing. And then come back to when you were able to dive back into, or reacquaint yourself, with fiction writing. I read a quote from you that was talking about not getting back to fiction until later in life and how you felt that you weren't doing what you were meant to do. So that's kind of what I'm asking.
Martha Brockenbrough: So I was the editor of my college paper. I was a high school teacher for a year while I was trying to get a job in journalism. And then I got a job in journalism and boy did I hate it. I mean, there are certain things that I loved doing. Like there was a kitten that was stuck in a tree for a week. And so when they brought people, it was not the fire department, but they brought a tree service to rescue the kitten.
Fire departments don't actually do that anymore. So don't call the fire department, call the tree service. Anyway, but just watching this kitten get down. I saw a baby beluga whale get born. So there were some really delightful moments, but then there were some moments that were truly unpleasant and the pay was not good.
And so I went and got a job at the Seattle Times online bureau because I thought, "Oh, this whole internet thing." This was in 1995, so it was brand new. It was just the start of the Netscape as a graphical user interface. Anyway, got a job there. And as soon as I could, I went to Microsoft and I eventually became the editor of MSN.com, which at the time was one of the largest websites in the world.
Here was a really interesting thing. So you know Microsoft is a super techie company. They didn't have a lot of people like me who were experts in words. And so the MSN, the browser default page, 99% of people who came to it were immediately leaving. And so you know you've got a repellent product when nobody clicks anything.
And so I started with a little patch of headlines and we started crafting headlines. We started packaging them rather than just scraping data from content partners and automatically populating the page. We started putting some care into writing it and it totally revolutionized the product, revolutionized the network.
And that was fun. And it was interesting. And I learned how in a very short space, I could convey a lot of meaning. It meant that Twitter was easy when Twitter later came invented. But then I had a baby girl and I realized, "Wow, I don't know that I want to be doing this. This is not what I dreamed of doing when I was a kid. And how can I be a good parent to my kid if I'm not actually being brave and trying things."
And so I didn't go back to Microsoft. I did still have bills to pay. And so this is when I started doing lots of freelance. I built websites for people. I freelanced for Cranium, wrote questions for Trivial Pursuit. I actually led teams that did those things. And in the background, I was learning how to write children's books. I was reading a ton of them to my daughter, who's now in college. And learning slowly and carefully how to write fiction.
Sarah Enni: I don't want to skate by this part. This is kind of a really beautiful story to have your daughter inspire you in that way. But I'm interested in, if you can remember back to then, that's also a pretty frightening thing to realize about yourself. That you're not doing what you're meant to do. I mean, how did that feel? What was it like to grapple with that?
Martha Brockenbrough: Well, it was never far below the surface that this was what I wanted to do. And when I travel back in time through my memories, I always think about the moments that I was standing on a beach and looking at clouds and thinking, "How would I describe that scene in a novel?"
And I forgot to mention that I freelanced for Encarta. So I never actually took maternity leave with my first child. Encarta was an online encyclopedia and they had been looking for someone to write these kind of journalistic columns about stuff that could be found in the encyclopedia. And so I volunteered for that job and it was a nice paying gig. And so I took it.
So she was just a wee babe in arms, just a few weeks old. And I was writing this column and that was when it really struck me that, "Oh my gosh, how can I possibly be a parent if I'm being a hypocrite?"" "How can I tell her to go out and be brave in the world and believe in herself, if I hadn't?"
And on the one hand I was lucky cause my husband had a job that had health insurance for all of us. And I had skills that I could immediately ply in the world. And so I was able to make that transition. And I think I would have been able to do it had I continued working full time, it just would've been a lot slower.
And that's one of the things that we have to get used to is the pace of learning, the pace of publishing. It's very slow. But you know what? So is the pace of parenting. My first book for children came out when that daughter was 12. I started writing picture books when she was an infant. And so it took me a really long time.
And I would go to these SCBWI (The Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators) conferences and they would say, "You know, it can take nine years to publish!" Well, let's just say I was behind the curve. It took me longer. And maybe that was the, um, when you walk with fear on your shoulders, your pace is slower. And I had a whole lot of that and that was why I hadn't tried in the first place.
So I mean, here's to children, if they cannot make us more courageous, then that's on us. Because that's the whole point, you know? Wouldn't you, for our young readers, do anything? So I'm incredibly privileged to get to.
Sarah Enni: I'm really relating to what you're saying. And I feel like 2019 was a lot of me learning to recognize that fear is what that was. Whatever that amorphous thing is that's sort of preventing you from doing what you need to do. So I'm interested in what, if any, thoughts you have on where you think that came from for you? What was causing you to fear that so much?
Martha Brockenbrough: I like to say that I come by fear naturally. I have always been kind of an anxious person. I've always been a perfectionist, I want to do things well. And then there's a lot of cultural messages around writing. How many writers do we know died horrible deaths of sadness? So many. And that's kind of glorified in a way that, "Oh, the suffering they did for their art."
And I didn't really want to have that kind of suffering. My parents certainly didn't want me to. They thought that I was wasting a fine lawyer's brain and that kind of conflict was never what lit me up. It was always words. It was always writing. And so when there's something that you want that much and you don't know how to get there, of course you're going to fear it.
Of course, I mean, unless you're just really a super brave person and I'm not, I mean, I'm perhaps less brave than average. So that just means that I had to work a little harder, and allow myself to fail a little more often.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, I think that's good to talk about that, right? That's kind of why I'm prodding these questions is cause I think a lot of people can relate to that feeling.
Martha Brockenbrough: I think that they can, and I was talking with my almost 16 year old who had experienced a disappointment last week and I took her to one of my secret websites that I go to NASA.gov. And we looked at photos taken by the Hubble telescope because, you know, that's about as distant as a perspective on our galaxy as you can get. And it is so beautiful and there is nothing that we could do that would diminish that beauty in any way. And what a pleasure it is to get to look at it and to be inspired by it.
And so that's one of the things that I do when I'm feeling kind of not up to the task. I go look at pictures of space and think, "You know what, I'm here for a short time. It doesn't matter if I succeed or if I fail, it's really does not matter not one bit in the cosmic sense. And so I'm just gonna do my best and not worry. And if other people hate what I do? Well, that's on them. That's not on the effort that I've put in."
And so one of the things that I tell my students all the time is, "Imagine that every success you've dreamed of is going to happen. You don't have to worry about that. It's gonna happen! Just take care of the work." And so that's what I try to remind myself, back when the goal was to get an agent, back when the goal was to get an editor, back when the goal is to get published, to get a starred review, whatever the incredible moving finish-line is. Just know that it will happen and you just have to do the work.
Sarah Enni: I like that. It's so interesting that you had your first child and then felt really the pull back to creativity and children's books in particular, which is really interesting. But your first book that came out was It Can Happen to You, I believe is the title?
Martha Brockenbrough: That's right.
Sarah Enni: About pregnancy.
Martha Brockenbrough: Yeah, it was the diary of my pregnancy. And this was how I got back into writing. As I was growing this thing inside of me, this whole life, this human. And doesn't that feel like what we're doing when we're writing books anyway? And so I was writing about the experience and how it was changing me and all my hopes and fears about it. And this was in some ways taking me directly back to being a child. I don't remember being a baby. I do remember being a very young kid.
But I wrote this column and it became pretty popular. And then it ended up becoming a book. I was one of the first mom bloggers. So I wrote about that. And then I was freelancing. I was doing all sorts of stuff. My high school asked if I would teach the kids there to do journalism and I was very excited about that. I was just doing things and making things and learning things.
Sarah Enni: And part of the reason why I really want to spend time on this is that not only is this very cool that, though you had this goal in mind ultimately of writing fiction, you weren't saying no to other things. And you were also pursuing them like all the way, like going all the way through publication. But I'm sure you were learning a ton about how the publishing industry worked as sort of preparation for when you were really gonna go in with your whole heart with works of fiction. I mean, what was that whole process like?
Martha Brockenbrough: I was doing what I could and learning what I could and seeing how my words affected people. And sometimes I was tactless and stupid. And so those were good lessons to learn in a smaller arena than the one that I'm currently in. It was really just about, I loved doing this stuff. And publication is just one tiny sliver of writing, but to be able to tell stories and to be able to create stuff that didn't exist before you, and to get people liking it, is fun.
And to work with high school students, it reminded me how extraordinary they are, cause there's this tick that our society has that writes off young people, "Oh, they don't know anything." Or, "Oh, this." Or, "Oh, that." And the kids that I taught they're now millennials.
And one of them published an essay in the New York Times, another published in the Christian Science Monitor. I mean, these kids could write as well as any adult out there. And so that was part of what I was learning at the time was respect for the audience.
So I was learning how to write fiction. Actually, with some of the students, started a novel writing club. And so I would tell them what I was working on and they were working on their stuff too. And I was trying to just encourage them to finish as much as I was trying to encourage myself to finish.
The novel that I started when I was teaching ended up becoming Divine Intervention. And that was my debut novel. And I just want to say, you can never tell when the idea is going to take off, you can never tell quite when your skills are there. If you're just creating, that's how you do it.
Sarah Enni: I love that. Let's talk about Divine Intervention a little bit. Do you mind pitching the book for us?
Martha Brockenbrough: I will pitch the book for you. Divine Intervention is about the world's worst guardian angel and the girl he accidentally kills, and the 24 hours they have to sneak her soul into heaven before it disappears forever. So I actually used that as a model. Cause one of the things we have to do as writers is talk about our work and that can be one of the hardest things. And so I have a formula for the book pitch.
So characters, plus exciting incident, plus stakes. What are the characters? What incident starts your character off on the story? And what are the stakes? So The Game of Love and Death is about two young jazz musicians - characters - who fall in love - inciting incident - without realizing they're pawns being played by Love and Death themselves - that's the stakes. And when I work with my students at Vermont College of Fine Arts, often I'll say, "Hey, can you use this formula to crystallize what your story is about?"
And it's been a really useful one. Not all books fit into it. And yet, sometimes if you have a book that doesn't quite fit in it, that's actually telling you that you maybe need to refine your story just a little bit.
Sarah Enni: I love that it started with a novel writing club with your students. That's so interesting. You were writing picture books, very intently. And then how did the idea for a novel come along? Was the novel always in the back of your mind that you wanted to do?
Martha Brockenbrough: You know, it's funny, I started with picture books because I was reading a whole lot of them and because I always loved picture books. I mean, who doesn't? It's the story and it's this art and this beautiful package. I also confess to thinking picture books were easier. They're not easier. There's a whole lot of skills that go into creating that little crystal of narrative. But the nice thing is that you can finish a draft of a picture book at once. And it's a great way of learning narrative structure.
I also had not read enough young adult novels. I always wanted to write a novel, but I am of the generation that we had some YA novels, there wasn't quite the industry that it is. And I know people like to say, "Oh, there's always been YA novels." It's like, "Hmm. It wasn't really quite the way it is today." And so I had a lot of learning to do and a lot of novels to read.
And so I spent hours with Laurie Halse Anderson (author of Speak, Chains, and memoir-in-verse Shout) with Cornelia Funke (author of the Inkheart series), with all sorts of books. I mean, I looked at what was winning the Newbury and then when the Printz Award started like, "What was winning those books?" And then the National Book Award. I had a ton of reading to do, to see what was possible.
Taking more time to understand, not so much what the market was doing, but what was possible on a human level. Because if the bulk of what you read is stuff that was published in other decades, or other centuries, or in languages no longer being spoken or written, then you're not really going to be up to speed with the art form.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Not engaged with the here-and-now of what's going on with it.
Martha Brockenbrough: Also the way that nonfiction is being written for young readers, it's different. It's different than it was. And it's awesome. And so one of the reasons that it took me 12 years to get published is I had a lot of holes to fill.
Sarah Enni: And good for you for researching, I relate to that deeply.
Martha Brockenbrough: I wanted to write stuff that was good. I still want to write stuff that's good. And I still feel like I don't measure up to my idols. And that's actually, I'm gonna be 50 this year. And it makes me really happy to still be hungry and to still feel like, "Oh yeah, there's stuff that I want to learn." Because how boring would life be?
Sarah Enni: What was the timeline? Lead me from Divine Intervention to The Game of Love and Death.
Martha Brockenbrough: So Divine Intervention came out in 2012. Game of Love and Death came out in 2015. And so Game of Love and Death... I tried to step up my game a little bit.
Sarah Enni: I heard that when the book sold, it was its 29th draft.
Martha Brockenbrough: Oh yeah [chuckles]. Yes. I kept on writing it and kept on rewriting it because it's told in four primary viewpoints, Henry, Flora, Love and Death. And Flora is Black. And so I wanted to do that with the utmost care and respect. And there are even versions where I didn't give her a viewpoint because I didn't want to write outside my lane. But then that was a problem too. And so it took a while, and the help of people like Andrea Davis Pinkney (uthor of With the Might of Angels, Sit In: How Four Friends Stood Up By Sitting Down, and MANY more), to get that as good as I could get it.
But just having all of their different strands. Cause when you write in multiple viewpoints, it tends to be most successful when each of those viewpoints has its own character arc. So you're really kind of writing four novels in one. So bringing those arcs, having them converge at the same moment, was really hard. And finding, I mean, it was challenging.
And one of the things like when I was on that 27th, 28th draft, knowing it still wasn't good enough, I did not know how many more drafts it would take and whether it would be good enough. And yet I had the hope that it could be and that I would eventually get there. And it doesn't really matter. A book is not better or more brilliant because it came out of you on the wings of a feverish muse. And that would be super if that were to happen someday, I would accept a muse. I would welcome her fire.
That's just not how it works for me. I'm not good at this. Seriously, I have to just keep trying. And I've tried so many different techniques. I've bought so many craft books. I've Saved the Cat, I've done this. I've tried the Sticky Note Plot method. I've tried all sorts of charts. And for me, the only way through is on my hands and knees in the gravel, in the mud, in my own tears. And I eventually get there. It takes a really long time.
And other people write novels, they're really wonderful and do incredibly well, much more quickly. But there's room for those of us who are slow and weird in this business too.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I love that. And I feel very similarly, I'm really connecting with how you're talking about it. I think about it as the interplay between nonfiction and fiction. And I do find particular joy in when I can incorporate something that's true, but feels fantastic. I like knowing that it's true. And then the tiny number of readers who would even bother to look into that, who then discover that it's true, it's so satisfying for them.
Martha Brockenbrough: It is so satisfying. And you know what? There's like almost zero. And yet I was one of those readers who would have. You know, books are love stories and mine are love stories too. The sad and scared and inadequate and invisible feeling teenage girl that I was. I was one of those kids. I seemed nice and happy. I was nice. I was nice to everyone. And that's one of the things that I'm so glad that I don't have that regret. I was a good student.
I was the editor of my high school paper. I was the captain of four teams. I had 12 varsity letters. I played in the Seattle Youth Symphony. I thought that in order to be lovable, I had to perform. And that meant always feeling judged and always doing things for the sake of other people, and thinking that that was how I was supposed to serve the world.
And actually serving the world as yourself is much more complicated. And being authentically yourself and not feeling all of this anxiety all the time and being able to stop and think more deeply, and give more authentically, is preferable.
And so I know there are teens out there who feel unseen, who feel like if they don't perform at a certain level, they're worthless. And I understand that. And that is one of the things that I would like to write to those dear hearts. I mean, cause there's lots of suffering in the world and I don't mean to say that that particular kind of suffering is more acute than any, but it's certainly one that I know.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, I love that. That's really beautiful and very sweet motivation. I want to talk about the nonfiction writing and a little bit about VCFA and then we'll wrap it up with advice. So that's the trajectory here. But you mentioned that you're working on a nonfiction. I want to ask about Alexander Hamilton and Unpresidented. I just would love to hear how this came about. I love that you got to dip a toe back into reporting and nonfiction writing.
Martha Brockenbrough: It's been so fun. So remember I said that I worked for Encarta and I wrote about Bigfoot. So when Jean Feiwell at Feiwell and Friends... The Discovery Channel sold her a nonfiction project about Bigfoot. They didn't have a writer attached, but the agent who sold it had been my agent for Things That Make Us Sick. And so she said, "Hey, would you be interested in writing this nonfiction book about Bigfoot?"
And I'm like, "What! Nonfiction Bigfoot?!" And Jean Feiwel was on the phone. And I don't know if you know Jean, she's absolutely brilliant and she's ferocious. And you would just want to have her in your trenches. And she's like, "There's lots of evidence for Bigfoot." And so then I like snapped right out of my little jokey mode and I'm like, "All right. So I'm gonna write this nonfiction book about Bigfoot."
This was after Divine Intervention and I was still looking for ways of selling books and making an income in this business. And so I ended up asking lots of questions like, "All right. So what do we know about Bigfoot historically? And where would Bigfoot live? And what kind of science." And so I put together a book proposal and a couple sample chapters, and I got hired. So I did that one.
Then The Discovery Channel also had a Shark Week one. So I did that. And so Jean was pleased with how those turned out and when Hamilton became a thing, she's like, "Hey, Martha, do you want to write about Hamilton?" And this was right after The Game of Love and Death had done really well and had been a Kirkus Prize finalist. And so I had to stop and think, "Do I want to write another nonfiction book when my fiction is taking off?"
And so I thought about Hamilton and my nerdish love for the constitution. And I'm like, "I'm gonna write this book." And so I did, and it was very challenging. It was done on a quick turnaround, but it was awesome. And I adore Jean and love working with her. And so again, you know, that book came out of this stuff that I had done for Encarta and just pursuing things that were fun for me. And so had I not done Bigfoot, had I not done Shark Week, there's no way she would have thought of me for Hamilton.
And then the Hamilton book, that one I was finishing up, I was sitting at the other end of the table going over the page proofs. And this was right when Trump was elected. And I had been reading what Hamilton had to say about demagogues. And this enormous light bulb went off over my head, not literally, but figuratively. And I'm like, "Alright, so Trump is now president. And I want to write a book about Trump."
And I took it to Jean and she said, "No." She said, "I don't have the stomach for it." Which I totally understood because this was late 2016. And it was really an earth-shattering time for those of us who were alarmed by the way he had campaigned and what he represented.
Sarah Enni: A lot of publishing kind of like shut down. I remember that November was tough.
Martha Brockenbrough: It was a tough November, but I woke up thinking about the kinds of books that kids would read because traditionally books about the president, written for young readers, are really positive. And the thought of a really positive book being given to children about Trump struck me as a disgusting idea. Which is not to say that I set out to write a negative book. I set out to write a truthful and accurate book. And it strikes people as negative because that's who he is. That is what it is!
And so anyway, she didn't want it and yet I couldn't let the idea go. And so I kept working on it and a year later I did what you're not supposed to do, and I asked my agent just to ask Jean one more time. Cause once an editor's rejected something, you don't go back. But we did. And she bought it. And then - and then - I was in New York and I was in her office and looking at a sheet of paper, it was upside down - it was right side up to her but upside down to me - and it was when my book was due.
So this was early February of 2018. Yeah, 2018. The book was due in August and I'm like, "Oh my gosh, how do I write this book so fast?" Because everything with the Trump presidency keeps on changing. And so anyway, I did confirm that, in fact, that was my deadline and I hit it. And the book goes through July 22nd of that year.
So I was writing about stuff and handing it in in draft that had just happened three weeks earlier, which is a really rare thing for the children's publishing industry. And I think a credit to the team at Feiwel and Friends and Macmillan that they could turn it around so fast and so beautifully.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. It is a beautiful book. Both of the nonfiction books they did a really beautiful treatment of them, which is key with a nonfiction book. You've got to maintain interest on every level, I think.
Martha Brockenbrough: I think so. And with Hamilton, I mean, that was what we set out to do. I'm like, "Jean, let's just do a beautiful object." And she was, "Yes!" And I don't know if you've ever taken the jacket off of that one. I'll show it to you later, but when you take the jacket off - I sometimes have one in here but I don't - it's gorgeous. The case is absolutely spectacular. And so the Trump book is beautiful in a different sort of way. It's the same designer, Raphael Jerone, and I just think he's awesome. And I've been thrilled to have a couple of books done with him.
But that's stuff that we absolutely set out to do. And I do think that that is an important part of nonfiction. Is having those images, having charts, having back matter, showing readers, "This is where I learned this. Here's other stuff that will help you keep it all straight." And that's fun to do.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I want to ask about that because what struck me with Unpresidented was that it was always very clear, right from the beginning, who your audience was. And partly that was because you took such care with it. It was not only a biography and a history of Trump and his family, but it was sort of guiding the reader along with how to read a biography.
And I thought that was fascinating and really interesting and well done. But I was like, "Oh, this is so great for people who may not be accustomed to reading nonfiction or reporting at all." So I'd love to just hear about the thinking on that.
Martha Brockenbrough: I'm so glad you noticed. Because what's the difference between young adult nonfiction and adult fiction? And, what's the difference between a YA novel and an adult novel? We can feel these differences, right? And so when it comes to nonfiction it's context. So you might expect adults to have a certain amount of context. People our age know about the Vietnam war, the young readers today, they were born after 9/11. So that feels like very remote history. I mean, it's probably as remote to them as World War II felt to us.
And so I tried to think about what these young readers have been exposed to just naturally in the world, and what they might need additional explanation for. And frankly, I think this is also useful for adults. One of the things that makes adult books feel inaccessible is you're like, "What? What's that?" And you feel like you don't know, and we can't know everything.
And so I explained things like, "This is what a mortgage servicer does." Just to help young readers along into that process. I don't talk down to them at all. I have all the information, but it's just, "Here's the context so you know why this is important."
Sarah Enni: It was very interesting because often with nonfiction, history in nonfiction, the narrator is supposed to be absent. And of course we know that's not true and human beings write history. And there's all that interesting stuff that goes along with that. But you were explaining in the book, what your resources were. How you researched, like you were a character in it in this interesting way, which I also thought I was like, "Oh, this is just shining a light on how book came to be. And here's how you can trust that what you read within these pages." And there's like 1400 footnotes. And so it was obviously put together with such care.
Martha Brockenbrough: And for me, that is because I love and respect young people. I think that they deserve what's true and that they don't deserve what makes us as grownups feel comfortable. And I think this extends to all sorts of things, like the climate, like human sexuality and identity, and very often adults just, "Oh, we don't want to talk about this because it's so uncomfortable."
And so I go the other way and talk about things at great length. Maybe too much my own children say to me. I respect these kids and I want them to know what is important to them. And this is profoundly important. Trump's policies will affect their lives. They already are affecting their lives. And so I wanted a really clear guide to this is who he is, and this is how we got here.
And for the paperback that's coming out in September, there's going to be an epilogue that will bring people up to speed on the impeachment, which we're now nearing the tail end of.
Sarah Enni: And, as you said, this is so unusual for you as a children's book writer to be reporting, basically, as things are happening. You're having to update your book, not only when it was released, but as you said, now as a paperback. And in addition to that, you're not removed from this. You are experiencing it at the same time.
So I guess I'm interested how did you, I mean, self-care is a loaded term, but how did you make sure that you weren't just getting bogged down by the kind of depressing nature of writing about this stuff?
Martha Brockenbrough: You know, I got totally bogged down by the depressing nature of it. And the day I handed in my final copy edits, I got a fever that night and I was sick for months. We got our cats February 4th of last year. And I spent most of February in bed with kittens because I was so sick. And so it did affect me. And part of me feels embarrassed that it did, cause I wish that it didn't.
And that wasn't very much, well [pauses], it was pretty fun actually, because it was snowy in Seattle, which was odd for February, and snow and kittens is really an excellent combination. But it affected me and it made me sad. And what I had to keep reminding myself is that I am relatively shielded from the worst of the effects.
And so the people I work for are the ones who are experiencing it every day, so I can take a bit of suffering. Now in terms of how to manage all that information? For me, spreadsheets are really vital. Now, a lot of writers are like, "Oh, I don't like to do math-y kinds of things." Well, you do have to find a way of organizing information. I also use it for fiction. And so the novel that I just wrote, it took place over like 50 years and so I had a timeline.
And this is what I did for the Trump book is I had a timeline. And for the epilogue, I'm also putting together a timeline. And so, you know, "This is when something happened, here's what happened, here's my source for this." So then when I go to write, I know, "This is what happened." Cause that's what we're constructing. Really great nonfiction reads as much like a story as possible, narrative nonfiction, I should say. You can't make stuff up because then it's fiction.
And so every detail I have, like if I've got the color of his neck tile, that's the color of his neck tie, and you can count on that. But otherwise I don't do any composites. I don't make up a single fragment of anything, as well sourced as I can. So to keep track of all that information, I needed to have that chronological spreadsheet.
And it's actually kind of fun to build one because you just work on it a little bit every day over a long period of time, and eventually you've got these thousands of items and it feels like, "Hey, this is it." And for writers who are trying to get a handle on a story, even if it's fiction, just make a spreadsheet of, "This is what happens and here's the date."
And you might start to notice interesting things or patterns. And one of the things with the Trump book is sometimes news stories are about things that happened a few months ago, that journalists have only just discovered. And so once you put everything in chronological order, you can realize, "Wow, that was a really bad week for Trump!" Like, "Wow. Oh, that's why he tweeted about banning transgender people in the military. He was wanting to distract people from the fact that two of his campaign staffers got arrested that week."
And we didn't know it at the time. So anyway, that's when you are trying reconstruct history, you actually can have that more accurate thing. And you remember all of your feelings from those times. And anyway, that all that stuff helps.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Oh my gosh. Okay. Well, I can sit here and ask you questions all day but we have to wrap up eventually. And you've given so much incredible advice already, but I'm just interested in, you were a teacher yourself, so I think you probably have a good sense of the advice that's really useful. So I would just love to hear how you counsel aspiring writers.
Martha Brockenbrough: So there's that first piece of advice is imagine that all the success you dream of will happen because it doesn't do us any good to worry that we're not good enough. We are good enough exactly who we are. And there's always more we can learn no matter who we are. So don't worry whether you'll succeed.
The second is to read widely and deeply. Some of my biggest sources of inspiration are in nonfiction. Don't be afraid to take side routes and have adventures. I was once procrastinating on the internet and I saw what looked like a record, but it also looked like a piece of wood and it turns out it was both.
It was a slice from a tree that a German artist had made and turned into music. And it turned out, I was reading The Hidden Life of Trees by a German forester named Peter Wohlleben. It's a really cool book about this community and sentience that trees actually have. And my work in progress was set in a sentient forest that produced music. And it was so bizarre to me that I found this haunting music and was reading this nonfiction.
And so the stuff that's in our dreams is real and true, and you have permission to write it however you want. And then just give yourself time, time to live, time to be a person, time to connect with other people. It's not a race. And in fact, the world doesn't need a hundred books from the likes of me. You know, maybe 10 great ones. Wouldn't that be awesome? Five? One great book. Some writers just have one great book and that was enough. And so, you have that in you and it's just a matter of letting it find its way out.
Sarah Enni: I love that. Well, thank you so much for all your time today. This has been such a pleasure to talk to you.
Martha Brockenbrough: A pleasure for me too. Thank you, Sarah.
Thank you so much to Martha. Follow her on Twitter @MBrockenbrough and on Instagram @MarthaBee, that's Martha B E E. And You can follow me on both @SarahEnni (Twitter and Instagram) and the show @FirstDraftPod (Twitter and Instagram).
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And, as ever, thanks to you Trump recovery kittens for listening.
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