First Draft Episode #228: Stuart Gibbs
JANUARY 13, 2020
LISTEN TO THE EPISODE
Stuart Gibbs, New York Times bestselling author of the Spy School series, the FunJungle series, the Moon Base Alpha series, and The Last Musketeer series. His newest series kicked off in 2019 with Charlie Thorne and the Last Equation. The newest FunJungle book, Tyrannosaurus Wrecks, is out March 24, and Spy School Revolution will come out in fall 2020.
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Sarah Enni: Happy New Year to you all, and thank you for everything you've already done to get the podcast where it is today. I am incredibly grateful. Okay. Now on with the show,
Sarah Enni: Welcome to First Draft with me, Sarah Enni. This week I'm talking to Stuart Gibbs, New York Times bestselling author of the Spy School series, the Funjungle series, and his newest series which kicked off in 2019 with Charlie Thorne and the Last Equation. The newest Funjungle book, Tyrannosaurus Wrecks, is out March 24th and Spy School Revolution will come out in fall 2020.
Sarah Enni: I loved what Stuart had to say about persevering with his ideas, trying them in multiple formats over many years. How his background as a screenwriter taught him about structuring mystery novels. And how becoming a father made him think about his work in film and TV differently, eventually leading him to write books. So please sit back, relax and enjoy the conversation.
Sarah Enni: Alright. Hi Stuart, how are you?
Stuart Gibbs: I'm very good. How are you doing today?
Sarah Enni: I'm doing well! Thanks for having me over, I appreciate it. I'm excited to chat about your prolific career. But first I wanna start with your bio. I want to start at the very beginning, which is, where were you born and raised?
Stuart Gibbs: I was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but I really grew up in San Antonio, Texas.
Sarah Enni: Okay. That's so interesting. And Texas is a very specific place.
Stuart Gibbs: It is, yes. It's kind of its own world. They never let you forget that they were their own country.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, and It's not the South, it's Texas.
Stuart Gibbs: Right, yes. It was its own country for like thirteen years and then they asked the United States if they could be part of the United States [chuckles]. But it was a very interesting place to grow up. I feel like I had a very Tom Sawyer childhood because we were going off into the woods and catching lizards and snakes. And if we'd had a picket fence to paint, we probably would have painted it, or conned people into doing that.
Sarah Enni: We're gonna get to it in a second, but I heard a story about you breaking into zoos, which I want to ask about.
Stuart Gibbs: That's a story I told quite some time ago, and it's still out there.
Sarah Enni: Well before we get to that, I want to ask about, as a kid, it sounds like an outdoors, running around, adventure-based childhood. But how was reading and writing a part of growing up?
Stuart Gibbs: It was a huge part of growing up. I was one of those writers who was writing from the moment I could remember reading. I really have things that I wrote when I was a very, very young. And in fact, my first grade teacher actually knew I was writing a book and tried to help me get it published.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, I read an interview where you said that. That's so interesting.
Stuart Gibbs: Yeah, she knew somebody in publishing. I wrote a story about a dog and a cat who were friends. And it did not get published, which is not surprising. But actually, the school was so supportive of my trying to write. And my librarian there even had this idea that I should write a book, and really created it. We made a fake cover and made it out of duct tape, and things like that. And it was called The Day the Dinosaurs Came Back and we put it in the school library. I was allowed to take it out afterwards and I still have it. But it's something I wrote in kindergarten, so I know I was writing stuff back then. And then I always kept writing. I really wanted to be a published author as soon as I possibly could in life.
Sarah Enni: It's so interesting to me that you had people who not only were supportive of you expressing yourself that way, but like, "Oh, we should take this super seriously." I mean, it's interesting to have it professionalized so early for you.
Stuart Gibbs: Right, yeah. It meant a huge amount. Getting a rejection was terrible. In fact, I had already moved to Texas by the time the rejection got to me and so I was in second grade. It was devastating. They're all devastating. But to be in second grade and be like, "What?" But the fact that people supported me and tried to encourage my writing from that age, was just amazing.
Sarah Enni: It's not common? [Laughs].
Stuart Gibbs: Apparently.
Sarah Enni: I mean, do you think on your own, it sounds like you were serious about writing, but do you think on your own that you would have thought about, "How can my book be in the world in this bigger way?"
Stuart Gibbs: Probably not that early. I think that was really inspired by that librarian and teacher who really said like, "Look, this is something that could happen."
Sarah Enni: I think the reason I asked that is because I read an interview where you were saying, and I'm jumping around a little bit here, but where you were saying that by the time you left college, you decided to go into screenwriting because you were frustrated that you hadn't been published already.
Stuart Gibbs: I was trying to get it published, and I fully understand why I wasn't published. I was writing stuff, it wasn't ready for some time yet, so to speak. And I just was trying to figure out like, "Well, what's the best way for me to make a living as writer?" And I perceived, at the time, that publishing wasn't quite working out for me. So maybe the movie business would be a better place for me to go.
Sarah Enni: It's a true gift to recognize your passion in life so early. Which, not everyone gets that, which is awesome.
Stuart Gibbs: No, it's true. My sister always just gave me a ton of crap because she was like, "Not everybody knows what they want to do their whole life." But yeah, it's very rare. I think there are a good number of authors who I found feel that way, but then it almost surprises me more when I find one who was like, "Oh, I didn't like reading at all." And I'm like, "How's that possible?"
Sarah Enni: Yeah, I know. The great benefit of doing this podcast is seeing how different everyone's paths are, which is nice. I read a bunch of interviews with you, so... but you mentioned going into college, you didn't study writing. And that Michael Crichton was an influence on you.
Stuart Gibbs: Yeah. Well, I mean, there were a couple of people who were huge influences, but yeah. I got an agent when I was in high school. And he was the only agent in San Antonio, as far as I know. His name was Charles Neighbors and he actually didn't live particularly far from my middle school, or my high school. And so I used the literary marketplace, which is what you did back in the day, and found the one agent in San Antonio, and I called him up.
Stuart Gibbs: He was not able to get anything of mine sold, which again, is not necessarily on him. That's a lot on what I was writing. But he was really supportive. And he gave me what was maybe one of the best pieces of advice I'd ever gotten, which was that he said he didn't think I needed to study writing, cause he felt like I knew what I was doing. He thought that I should study things that interested me, as well as writing, so that I could broaden my scope.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Well I can imagine also someone as young as you who is writing, if you don't need to be motivated to write, then certainly filling the well with other stuff, is probably a good thing to do.
Stuart Gibbs: Right. I took courses in literature, and comparative literature, and such in college, which were hugely influential. But when I was in college, I was writing books as well, or trying to write books. And so I didn't really need to go to a class to have them kick me in the butt and say, "Go write something."
Sarah Enni: And the Michael Crichton connection is that he was a doctor, right?
Stuart Gibbs: Right. So when I went to college, pre-internet, and you had no idea how anybody became an author at all. He was one of the few people I knew how he'd become an author. And he was well on his way to becoming a doctor. I actually now know somebody whose father was in medical school with him. And the story is even more fascinating because Michael Crichton was actually not just in residency, which is enough for most people, but he was actually disappearing for weekends and writing. Like pounding out entire novels in a weekend while he was a resident.
Stuart Gibbs: So he was doing all this amazing stuff. So he was certainly trying to write. And so I really got to college and thought, "Okay, I guess what you do is you go into premed and you go through the whole thing." I really was fascinated by medicine. So I thought, "Okay, well I'll just do that. And then if I get published on the way, then I'm an author. But if I don't, I'm a doctor. And that's how it all works." And I was maybe two days through my premed training where I thought like, "I really don't want to be a doctor so badly that I want to take organic chemistry."
Sarah Enni: But you did study biology.
Stuart Gibbs: Yes.
Sarah Enni: Which is super interesting. And I want to hear about studying biology, and how that also connects to having broken into zoos that night [laughs].
Stuart Gibbs: Well, the breaking into zoos came first. So... disclaimer here first of all is, "Kids don't do this." But I loved going to the zoo my whole life. Anything outdoors involving animals. I thought everybody did. I thought that was just how everybody's mind worked. That everybody just wanted to be at the zoo every day. So I wanted to go to the zoo a lot more than my family. My family was very supportive of this. They were happy to take me to the zoo, but just not as much as I wanted to go.
Stuart Gibbs: And at some point, I was outside the zoo in San Antonio at some picnic or something, and was frustrated that I was not inside the zoo. And I was looking at the fence and thinking like, "There's a spot right there that you could really just sort of..." And so I hopped over the fence and I wandered around the zoo. And then I might've gone and told friends that I'd done this, and then they wanted to go. And then we actually did this quite often. We never hurt anything. We never stole anything. Just going into the zoo for free at night.
Stuart Gibbs: And then the upshot of the story is that at some point other people started going, and finding out that we were doing this, and learning from me how to do it. And at some point, I was like hanging out with a friend one night and he said, "There's this rumor you've been breaking into the zoo." And I said, "Yeah." And he said, "You've never run into the guards?." And I said, "I had no idea there were guards there. I've never seen one ever." And he's like, "No! There's guards at that zoo." And it turned out that that very night friends of mine were breaking into the zoo and got busted by the guards there. So that ended that. Never did it again.
Sarah Enni: A beautiful phase. I love that story too though, because you write about kids that do hi-jinks, for lack of a better word. And I think some people would think that stretches believability, but...
Stuart Gibbs: There's so much I find now as... the Funjungle series in particular, takes place close to where I grew up. And it is becoming more and more, in a sense, based on things that I did as a kid, or things that are true. And I've discovered now that often my editor, who grew up in Chicago, will question these. She's more likely to question things that actually happened than the things that I made up.
Sarah Enni: That's amazing. Oh my god, I love that. And you studied biology in college, and obviously you're passionate about animals and wildlife. And I actually need help pronouncing this, but I need to ask about capybara?
Stuart Gibbs: Yes, I think capybara is just as acceptable. So I was studying everything I could in college. And so I studied psychology, I studied communications, I did not get very far in premed, but I really liked biology. And so at a certain point I was very fascinated by field biology. So I was taking this field biology class, which was my favorite class I ever took in college, because we were never in college.
Stuart Gibbs: We would go off and every other week we'd do a different thing. We would band birds one week and learn how to track birds in the wild. And then we would do a field biology project where you picked an animal. And this was, I had gone back to Philadelphia for school, so this is at the University of Pennsylvania. There are not a lot of wild animals in Philadelphia except pigeons and rats.
Stuart Gibbs: And we would just go to the zoo and practice our field biology. And so you'd pick an animal that you could watch. And we would go there really Wednesdays from about 6:00 AM until noon. And you watched your animal for six hours and you figured out what you could tell. And so most people picked monkeys because monkeys are very active. And it was the morning and the monkeys were indoors and it was warm. And I picked Capybaras because I didn't know anything about them and they had just shown up at the zoo.
Stuart Gibbs: And then there was this very bizarre thing that happened where, it turned out that nobody had studied capybaras.
Sarah Enni: Nobody knew about them.
Stuart Gibbs: Nobody knew anything about them. And it's the world's largest rodent and you would think... I mean, obviously people who lived near the capybaras knew. But from our westernized point of view, nobody had done any research on them.
Stuart Gibbs: So therefore I was noting things that had not been documented in Western society or maybe Northern, because we're north of where they are. I don't know.
Sarah Enni: Where is their native...?
Stuart Gibbs: They live in the rainforest of South America, most of the Amazon basin. And they're in the Orinoco and that thing. So it was just this ridiculous thing where, first of all my professor couldn't even check my work, because there was nothing to check it against. There was zero on these animals. But then he was like, "This is crazy. I've never had a student who's actually documenting stuff."
Stuart Gibbs: And so what we would do is, he knew people who were working in the Amazon. He was a bird specialist and there were people down there, and I would document a behavior at the zoo, and then he would say to them like, "If you see these animals in the wild, see if you see this behavior." And then they would. And then he'd say like, "Okay, that's something that hasn't been documented."
Stuart Gibbs: So that led to me getting a grant from the university to keep my project going long beyond that class.
Sarah Enni: Wow! With studying at the zoo?
Stuart Gibbs: Right. So it was just studying at the zoo. And then because you're always trying to study the animals when they're most active, which is first thing in the morning and in the evening. So, I was given a special pass that let me into the zoo first thing in the morning. And I could go in the afternoon if I wanted, and stay afterwards. And so obviously I had a fascination with zoos, because I was breaking into them. Now I was legally allowed to be in the zoo whenever I wanted, whenever other people were there really.
Stuart Gibbs: And so that was really where I started to get this window into how a zoo worked. And while I was there, you're sitting there, you're not just staring at your animals for six hours. You're saying like, "I'm gonna get off and wander around the zoo for a bit." And I could go behind the scenes, and I could talk to other keepers, and I could talk to administrators at the zoo. And I just started putting together this idea of like, "Well maybe there's a story set in a zoo."
Sarah Enni: Let's talk about that because I want to track developing that as an idea, and moving to LA, and shifting your medium of choice. How did you develop this idea?
Stuart Gibbs: So much of writing is, you have an idea, and there's so many different ways to tell it. And you're trying to figure out what you can do with that idea. And so that idea went through a couple different permutations as I was trying to figure out what to do with it. Was I gonna do a whole story set at zero, or was I not?
Stuart Gibbs: At that point I had decided to move to LA. So I really went right from working at the zoo, studying my capybaras, to packing up a car and moving out to Los Angeles and trying to get a job in the movie business, which took a while. And so there were times in that, I would repeatedly try to do a comedy, set at a zoo. And there were various ways that I did it. So I did sell a movie, a comedy set in a zoo, at one point. I sold the movie version and I also sold them the TV version of that, twice. And it just didn't ever work out. That's the fact in the movie business. And so I would go back to that well every once in a while try it out.
Stuart Gibbs: And after a couple years, this is where the segue into the book world comes, where the writers went on strike. That was the Hollywood writer strike, so in 2008, I guess. And we were not allowed to work for hire. And so I thought, "This is a really good time to think about writing a book again." And so I was represented by ICM for my screenwriting and TV. And so they have a very good book division. So I said, "Can I talk to somebody in that book division?"
Stuart Gibbs: And so feelers were put out. And my agent, who was not my agent at the time Jennifer Joel, called me up and said, "Had I ever thought about writing middle-grade?" And up until the point she said that, I really had thought that I was going to be writing books for adults. I really had not thought about writing middle-grade at all.
Stuart Gibbs: But when she mentioned that, and she said, "Do you have any ideas?" I thought of this idea for a mystery set in a zoo was the perfect thing to do, middle-grade. I had really thought, "Oh, this will be something that the young junior vet would investigate or something." But then I thought, "Oh, middle-grade. No, you could have a kid investigate this crime, because the police don't really care about hippopotamus murders. There's no hippo homicide division of any police force in America." So the kid could go and say like, "Hey, somebody murdered the hippo!" And the police are gonna say, "That's just not possible." And not taken seriously. And then he would go and do it. And then that made total sense to me. And that all happened in the space of about five seconds in my mind.
Sarah Enni: Wow. Oh my gosh. I love that. I don't want to skip entirely over the writing for TV and movies. I'd like to just hear what that time was like. And where are you feeling... I know it took a strike for you to turn to books, but were you feeling frustrated? Or were you satisfied with that work? Or how'd you like it?
Stuart Gibbs: When I first came out, I ended up locking into getting screenwriting jobs relatively quickly. Because I wrote for B movies. So the very first job I got out here, through a friend of a friend of a friend, was to be a script reader at a company that made kickboxing, movies. And kickboxing movies were very exciting at the time. And they were really movies where people fought by kicking each other. It sounds ridiculous, right?
Sarah Enni: Hey Jean Claude Van Damme had a career.
Stuart Gibbs: Exactly. No, they had made some Jean Claude Van Damme movies and then he'd gotten like too big for this company. So I went to work for this company, reading scripts, trying to find them kickboxing movies. And after a couple of weeks, just went to them and I convinced them, I said, "Why don't you just pay me to write the kickboxing movie you want?" So they were paying me nothing, but it was still more money than most of my friends were making.
Stuart Gibbs: And so I wrote B movies for a while. And I was getting paid to write, and it was fun. And they were all getting made.
Sarah Enni: That's cool.
Stuart Gibbs: I would write a movie and then like within weeks it was shooting. And I knew it was ridiculous, and they weren't paying me anything, but that was fun for a bit. And it took me a little while longer than that to... I was writing movies on spec, to try and work for the studios. So I did my B movies for a while. Eventually was able to sell to the major studios, but that's the nature of the business, which is, that you write stuff and it has a very small chance of coming out. And when it does come out, sometimes you like it [pauses] and sometimes you don't.
Stuart Gibbs: And there's a lot of people with their hands in that pie. But for awhile that was fun too. And then I really did get to 2008 and that writers' strike. And that was about the time when my son was two years old, and my wife was pregnant with our daughter, and I really was thinking one day, "One day my son is gonna say to me like, "What do you do for a living?" And I'm gonna say, "I write things that don't come out."
Stuart Gibbs: And it really felt like I was saying like, "I make air." I make stuff but nobody sees it and it just goes nowhere, or it comes out and I'm not happy with it. And that made me very reflective. The film business is full of ups and downs and some people have very different careers. There are people who've done incredibly well and never had anything come out. But I was just getting the point where I was getting a little cynical about it.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I feel like when I've gotten the chance to talk to people who straddle both industries, especially if they start in film and TV, they're drawn to books for that reason. Like when a publishing house buys your book, it's coming out, short of a major disaster. Which is a huge relief, I think, to people who are used to the vagaries of the entertainment industry.
Stuart Gibbs: Yeah, when I turned in my first, well not my first draft of Belly Up, when I turned in the final draft of Belly Up, I was still so cynical about the film business, that my editor said like, "Okay, so the book will be out in six months." And I was like, "Yeah, right. But I'll understand if everything falls apart." And she was like, "No, no, no."
Sarah Enni: "It doesn't fall apart."
Stuart Gibbs: "It doesn't fall apart. It's gonna come out." And I'm like, "I've heard this a million times. I know." And that was all very amusing to the publishing people. I just could not get my head around the fact that it would come out. But we knew that in the film business, like I wrote this movie called See Spot Run with my friend Craig Titley.
Stuart Gibbs: And we were the first out of, really, like forty writers on it. But the executives, we'd be working on this, and they would say like, "We think this movie is gonna get made." And we'd be like, "No, no." And they were like, "Why are you so cynical?" And at one point Greg and I looked at each other, and we said, "We could be at the premiere of this movie, and be like, "This movie's never coming out. We just don't believe it."
Sarah Enni: It's funny too, the path from the second grader who was devastated at a rejection, to having so built up this, I dunno, callous against.
Stuart Gibbs: Yeah. I mean, you still see it all the time in the movie business where, the execs are saying to you like, "Why are you so cynical?" Not just me. I mean, I have all these friends who go through this. And we're always like, "We're not being cynical. We're being realistic." You can't go through this business saying like, "Yeah, this one's gonna get made." Because then at some point somebody is gonna yank the carpet out from under you.
Sarah Enni: You're gonna have your heartbroken. Oh my gosh, that's so funny. Before we talk more about Funjungle and Belly Up, do you mind pitching that series for us?
Stuart Gibbs: Okay, so the Funjungle series is really a mystery series that takes place at a zoo. It's not an actually existing zoo because I did not want to single out a real zoo. So I created a theme park zoo, which is sort of like somebody took Disney World and combined it with a zoo and created this huge new theme park called Funjungle. Which is located in the Texas Hill Country not far from where I grew up.
Stuart Gibbs: And our hero is a kid named Teddy Fitzroy. Both of his parents work at Funjungle and they basically live in employee housing, which is behind the park. So Teddy essentially lives in this giant theme park zoo. And so when crimes occur, the first one being in Belly Up, that somebody has murdered Henry the Hippo who is the live mascot of Funjungle. And Teddy thinks that foul play is involved, cannot get the police to believe him, so decides to investigate himself and ends up in a whole mess of trouble.
Sarah Enni: It's such a fun concept. And also the covers, I mean, you have covers across the board that are so great, but the covers for these books are so fun.
Stuart Gibbs: They are. And I'm happy to talk about the covers. They're done by Lucy Cummins, who is actually an art director at Simon and Schuster. The story I've been told is that Lucy was fiddling with ideas and Justin Chanda, my publisher, looked at what she was doing and said like, "I think maybe you should just do these." And they're phenomenal. I still blatantly remember them sending me the cover for Belly Up. And I mean, I was just in love with it. And I printed it out and I stuck it on the wall at one end of my house and I went as far away as I could. And I sat there and I thought like, "You can see this cover from across a bookstore and it grabs your attention."
Sarah Enni: Yeah. It's bright yellow. It's so simple. It's beautiful. It's such a fun one. You didn't set yourself an easy task. So from what I understand, you sold Belly Up on proposal?
Stuart Gibbs: Yes.
Sarah Enni: Okay. Which means you had a few chapters.
Stuart Gibbs: Right.
Sarah Enni: But you're not only tackling a book for the first time, you're writing for kids for the first time, and it's a mystery, which are incredibly hard stories to plot, I feel like [chuckles]. What was it like to dive into this project?
Stuart Gibbs: Well, everybody's brain works differently. So mine tends to work in mystery format. So for me, coming from screenwriting which is very structured, and I think anybody you talk to who's come from screenwriting to book writing will say like, "That's the one thing we learned. We learned structure from writing a screenplay."
Stuart Gibbs: And now you've got this book which is a lot bigger and can go all these other different places. So you're figuring out like, "Well how am I gonna structure this thing?" And it just turns out that a mystery actually is a great way. If you want to explore a world, like a theme park zoo, you can say, "Oh, a mystery's great. I know where it starts. I know where it ends. And so I've got to create these clues to get through it. And maybe I can create a red herring or something like that. And I want to go to this scene, and I want to go to this scene, and I want to go to this scene. So I can build this story to get through here."
Stuart Gibbs: So I feel like the mystery thing, I kind of keep going back to that well. Not because I'm like, "Oh I want to write a mystery." But it's just how my mind is working. We can jump ahead a little bit to Moon Base Alpha and Space Case, but the idea there was not to do a mystery in space. It was to do a story set in space and yet I just kept thinking of mysteries set in space.
Stuart Gibbs: So the mystery angle wasn't so tricky. When I came into it, I thought like, "Okay, I don't want to..." I really did not want to write-down to my audience. And I wanted to just write to them pretty much like they were adults, and tell them a story that I would write for an adult. So the one big change from my sample chapters was that Belly Up was originally written in third person. And my editor at the time pointed out, and rightfully so, that you would lose the track that it was about a kid. And so if I shifted it into first person, you would never forget that a kid was at the center of the book. And shifting that, the first chapter completely had to change, because my third person... I wouldn't have started at the same place as the first person.
Stuart Gibbs: So that was what I had to do to prove myself. He'd seen the first couple chapters and then he said, "Well, you have to go back and rewrite these chapters from first person and see if you can do it." So I did that. And the starting of the book was the heaviest lifting, figuring out like, "How did I shift that?" But it was the right note. And obviously, writing in first person is what I've done for most of the other books I've done since then, because it just worked for me.
Sarah Enni: It's really so immediate. It feels very appropriate for kids' books in general. And I write in first person, or have to this point, but that is the polar opposite of a movie. So that's a challenge.
Stuart Gibbs: But there's a lot of fun stuff in writing a book. There are some constraints in writing movies that you really are locked into this structure. And you're not given a whole lot of freedom to wander over and explore stuff, except unless you're Quentin Tarantino, maybe. But for the most part, you're really like, "Okay, I've got to tell this story, this fast tonight, and I can't have big long dialogue sequences, or things like that."
Stuart Gibbs: So the idea that you could really have a chapter that was ten pages long, and it was just a dialogue sequence that you just wanted to write how it just flowed, was really fun. The fact that I could say like, "Oh, I'm gonna just describe this thing, or talk about how the zoo had decided to make Henry the Hippo their live mascot." And I could just go off on these digressions, and that was really new and exciting. Obviously, I had written books before, but I'd been working in screenwriting for so long, I had not had that freedom.
Stuart Gibbs: Then the flip side is that when you have to change things in a book, it's a lot more work.
Sarah Enni: So Belly Up came out in 2010.
Stuart Gibbs: Yes.
Sarah Enni: And then you were doing a book a year for a couple of years.
Stuart Gibbs: Right.
Sarah Enni: But you didn't immediately do a followup to Belly Up. How did you decide to move forward?
Stuart Gibbs: Well, that was all with publishing. So actually what happened was, I did Belly Up and then I was approached by Dan Ehrenhaft, who you may know.
Sarah Enni: Oh, yeah.
Stuart Gibbs: So Dan was at Harper Collins at the time. And Harper Collins was trying to create its own intellectual property. So they were trying to go on the Alloy method. And so Dan was running that division, and this was his first idea, was to do this thing called The Last Musketeer. Which was about a kid going back in time, four hundred years, and ending up in France and uniting the Three Musketeers for their first project.
Stuart Gibbs: And I had just done Belly Up. And he'd read Belly Up, I don't know how he necessarily got this, now that I think about it. But he'd read it. And so he came knocking and at the time they were very, very excited about this project over at Harper Collins. And they were like, "You're not gonna have a whole lot of time to write this. And you've got to clear out September cause you're gonna be going all over the country touring."
Stuart Gibbs: And Simon and Schuster, who published Belly Up was sort of like, "Hey, if they want to go promote you, great." So I turned to do that. And it didn't work out quite as well as we thought, not any fault of Dan's. But I got the first book done in this trilogy that I was contracted for, and they fired Dan, and shuttered the division. And so I was left trying to figure this out.
Stuart Gibbs: And then in the midst of that, Simon and Schuster had liked Belly Up, but said to me, 'Is there something else that you would like to do as well?" And I don't know if that was my option then to say, "I'd like to do a sequel." Or, if they were just really pushing me to come up with something else. But I had this other idea, that I had had for a very long time, called Spy School. And the Spy School actually dates back to me being a child.
Sarah Enni: Yeah! I love this story. Can you tell this story?
Stuart Gibbs: Oh yeah! I'm not exactly sure when it was, but I saw my first James Bond movie. So I can kind of peg the time because the first James Bond movie I saw was Moonraker, which is like the worst James Bond movie they ever made. But we didn't know that at the time cause you only see one James Bond... I didn't even see it in the theater. I saw it in a hotel room while we were on vacation. Like, my parents were at a convention or something.
Stuart Gibbs: And so, my friends and I were all like, "James Bond is the coolest guy ever." And we were running around pretending to be James Bond. And I actually wrote some James Bond fan fiction, which was not called fan fiction then, it was called plagiarism. I dunno what it was called. And it was not a James Bond story, it was a Jimmy Bond story. It was a story called The Golden Water Pistol, which was a riff on The Man with the Golden Gun.
Stuart Gibbs: And so it was about Jimmy Bond, James Bond's son, who was well aware that his father was a secret agent. Jimmy's just pretending to be a secret agent, he's just thwarting a bully at his school. But I had the idea while I was writing that, that maybe Jimmy went to a top secret spy school. But yeah, I came up the idea for Spy School while I was writing that story. And that was another idea that I just kept in my pocket for years and sold in various forms.
Sarah Enni: You developed it as a TV show at some point.
Stuart Gibbs: Yes. Two times. And actually when I was in college, there was a point where we got some money to make a film. And there was a whole thing about whose film it was gonna be. And I wrote a little spy school movie there, which it was like my first screenplay rejection. That film did not get made, they made another film by somebody else.
Stuart Gibbs: But yeah, I was trying to figure out how to make Spy School for a long time. I'll throw out an industry story... I was pitching to a network that specialized in making things for kids, and they said, "Gosh, you know, this is a great idea, but we already have a project called Butler School and we don't want to do two projects set in a school." And I was really like, "Butler school?
Sarah Enni: Butler School?! [Laughs out loud].
Stuart Gibbs: What kid wants to see that? Isn't spy...? You can't do two school things, right, but....?" But I was like, "Great." So Butler School, as far as I know... I don't know, maybe it came out and it was a huge hit. I don't think so.
Sarah Enni: I don't recall [laughing]. Oh, that's funny.
Stuart Gibbs: So yeah, trying to get something set up is always like shoving a rock up a Hill. Which is one of the great joys of the book business, is that you sell it, and it's going to come out. And there's something psychologically so different about writing something that you know is going to come out, as opposed to writing something that you feel has a one chance in a hundred of coming out.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. That's a really interesting point. I mean, do you feel more motivated?
Stuart Gibbs: Oh yeah, yeah. It's so much easier to get started writing. Look, I had fun writing for film and TV for a long time. I think I was starting to get frustrated with that, and that's when I made the shift over to books. And I did not recognize at the time... I really thought I was gonna maybe do one book. And I did one book, and I loved doing it so much, that when the opportunities to do other books kept presenting themselves, I was saying, "Okay, yes. I will take that, and I will take that, I will take that. These things will actually come out." And it was so much more interesting to me to do that, than to take a screenwriting job to do something that probably was not ever going to see the light of day.
Sarah Enni: Right. With Spy School. I also want to ask about tone. Because middle-grade, it's interesting to me, they're humorous action adventure stories. They're really funny. But, especially with the Spy School books, it's always like, "And they might die." And people die, and animals die, and there's a lot of real stakes. So how do you think about tone? And how do you make those stakes feel real while not being too intense.
Stuart Gibbs: Well that's an interesting question. Again, this is one of the advantages of doing a book. I'm doing the Spy School movie now, and it's much different. In a book, you can refer to somebody having a gun. Sometimes people don't like that, but for the most part, people are okay. In a movie, you can't put a gun in a kid's hand. So you can make these offhand jokes about kids and having guns, or death, or the threat of death, in a book. And you can do it in an offhanded way. Cause it's not like kids don't know that this is out there in the world.
Stuart Gibbs: To me, much of the humor from Spy School stems from the idea that, as kids and adults, we're exposed to the spy world through movies mostly. We really don't know what's going on in the spy world. But if you look at the movies, it looks like the most glamorous, amazing, action adventure profession. And yet in real life, it probably is nothing remotely close to that.
Sarah Enni: There's a lot of paperwork.
Stuart Gibbs: A lot of paperwork. Yes, exactly. Exactly. And so I thought that that juxtaposition was really funny. On one hand throwing kids into this, and the kid thinking like, "Ooh, I'm gonna get turned in James Bond." And people going like, "No, it really doesn't happen that way." But then even when he ends up in James Bond situations, realizing that like... James Bond might as well be a superhero, right? There's no way anybody can do everything that James Bond can do. Which is the fascination of him when you're a kid. And even as adults you say like, "Okay, he's super cool but it's just..."
Stuart Gibbs: And now I think the Mission Impossible movies have kind of taken over this mantle. And that Tom Cruise can do... that he's actually training to do all this insane stuff when he's doing them, but that he's just this guy who can fly a helicopter...
Sarah Enni: And hold onto a plane. And scale a skyscraper, or whatever.
Stuart Gibbs: Yes. He can do all this amazing stuff. And to me, I love talking to kids about this, where I say like, "Look, if you put anybody, any real competent person. You can take the most competent person you know, and you could put them in that situation, and they're still going to fail." And if you take a kid who is a little, maybe, wise beyond his years, and you keep throwing him into these situations... like Ben's reaction to these situations is always, really, what my reaction would be. The moment somebody hands him a grappling hook and says like, "You know how to use this, don't you?" The thought is, nobody knows how to use a grappling hook. Nobody's seen a grappling hook. They're only in movies. Now you've given me one and I really don't have the slightest idea how to use this thing.
Sarah Enni: Which is great. And that also is, as an avenue for humor, is so rich. And that kind of undercuts the life and death stakes, or whatever's going on.
Stuart Gibbs: Right. So you can throw out these offhanded jokes about having his life in jeopardy in a book, in a way that you can't really do it in a movie. And so you can make light of it. So every time he ends up in danger, I really try to make light of the situation. So yes, there are kids who are really doing things that no child should be asked to do.
Sarah Enni: And it's interesting, and I do want to ask a little bit about writing the script for the movie, and how the [unintelligible] process of getting that done, which you talked about in a blog post recently.
Stuart Gibbs: I've trying to stay as close to the book as possible. Although, I constantly am explaining on my blog to young readers that you have to also recognize that a movie is not a book. And that changes are going to have to be made. And the same guy I mentioned before, Craig Titley who I'd written See Spot Run with, Craig did the adaptation of Percy Jackson, which I think Craig actually did a very good job of adapting that book. He figured out a way to streamline it in a way that worked. But kids are very upset about it. And partly because they made Percy older, I think in attempt to get more... That was not Craig's call, but the idea was to draw in more adults.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, it was right when all the YA big movie adaptations... I mean, I think there was a lot at stake there.
Stuart Gibbs: Right. And Harry Potter gave us unrealistic expectations because it was huge and they said, "We're gonna stick as close to this as possible, and we're gonna make all movies, one after the other. And the kids are gonna age up at the right speed." And that's not a luxury that most of us have.
Stuart Gibbs: So you're trying to figure this out, and you really are saying like, "I don't know how we're gonna make something and not have our kids age up so that they're thirty-eight by the time we finish!" There's no real way to solve that problem. So there are these issues with saying like, Okay, we're just gonna try and stay as true to the book as we can, but we've got to make some changes."
Stuart Gibbs: And I'm actually working with a very good executive who I really like at Fox, and he has really good ideas. And so he's come to me with things like saying, "Look, because it's a movie, we have to bring this issue up a little bit earlier." The story is changing in some ways. We're trying to keep it as true as possible. And hopefully, people will go and see it, and they'll say like, "That was pretty much the same in the movie." Now, there are things that we can do in the movie that I couldn't do it in a book. I can make the final action sequence a lot bigger. I can also recognize that when I wrote the book, I did not know that Zoe and Warren were going to be such major characters as the series went on. And so I can make their roles bigger now than they were in the book.
Sarah Enni: Which is cool. It's kind of your chance to dive back in there and correct things. Which I think a lot of writers wish they could do for the first book of a series.
Stuart Gibbs: So some of the reinvention has been fun to say like, "Okay, here's how I can play around with this and make it a little better." The hardest part has been just actually figuring out what to cut. Having never adapted any book before, let alone my own, I told the studio, "Well, I'm just gonna put everything in." It was by far the longest screenplay I had ever turned in.
Sarah Enni: How long did it...?
Stuart Gibbs: It was a hundred-and-thirty something pages, which is way too long. Ideally it should be like ninety-five.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, and for a kid's movie too.
Stuart Gibbs: And that was my thought was, "I'll just make it big and then cut stuff." And that was maybe not the wisest decision. I don't know. So I'm really desperately trying to... so I have gotten it, over subsequent drafts, it has gotten down to about a hundred-and-ten pages. I've got a meeting on Monday to try and see.
Sarah Enni: Work that out.
Stuart Gibbs: Right. See if we really need to go any lower or if we're like, "No, it's close enough."
Sarah Enni: So, you sold it to Fox and then the entertainment business happened. And Disney bought Fox and it became this huge thing.
Stuart Gibbs: Right. Well, and I knew that was gonna happen. I mean, it was not a shock to me. I knew Disney was gonna buy Fox. What I did not know was that my executive on it, who was such a huge champion of it, was going to decamp for Netflix.
Stuart Gibbs: So then I had this option to say, "Oh, she would love for me to bring it over to Netflix." But I'm like, "You got me over here." So I lost an executive. And it took a while for me to get the new executive on it. And by his own admission, there was a several month gap where he described as like, "Pencils down everyone." And they just sat there at their desks waiting to see what was gonna happen. But now Disney is up and running. Disney has multiple new, I mean, they've got Disney Plus, which is a whole new platform, which everyone is going like, "Okay, maybe is that the way we go now?" Streaming has really changed this business in such a major way.
Sarah Enni: It's wild!
Stuart Gibbs: And you're getting to make things. I mean like, nobody made romantic comedies for five years, maybe ten years. And that was a lot of what I did before was, again, a lot of them didn't come out, but I did a lot of those and there was no market for them. Now suddenly streaming is like, "Hey, romantic comedies. Let's make 'em."
Sarah Enni: Which is awesome. And it's a fascinating time for you to step back in as it's changing more than ever, faster than ever.
Stuart Gibbs: Right. And they all need intellectual property. But with that said, there's this wild wild West aspect of it. But again, in terms of say making Funjungle, they're still not necessarily gonna be like, "Hey, we don't have $250 million to build a theme park zoo you can shoot this in."
Sarah Enni: Right! Practical hippos. Yeah, that's so funny. But Spy School feels like...
Stuart Gibbs: Spy School is my most popular series, and it's the one that... especially the first book, which is not insanely expensive. It's relatively contained in the world that it takes place in.
Sarah Enni: I mean that's the other thing that struck me as I was reading your books, was doing books versus screenplay can be so... I mean, the fun thing about writing a book is there are no budgetary constraints. You can, for example, write Space Case which takes place on the moon [chuckles] and do whatever you want on the moon. Which is so fun and such a blast. So really quick, let's talk about Space Case and then we'll talk about Charlie?
Stuart Gibbs: Sure. So when I was at the University of Pennsylvania, I became very good friends with this incredibly intelligent guy named Garrett Reisman. Then when I moved out here to work in the movie business, came out here to Cal Tech to go to grad school. And so Garrett and I became very good friends through this transition. And then Garrett always knew he wanted to apply to become an astronaut. But I was with him through this whole process. And he got in. And he became one of the youngest people ever accepted to be an astronaut.
Stuart Gibbs: And growing up in San Antonio, it's not that far from Houston where the Johnson Space Center is. So that was a place we'd go visit when I was a teenager. I've mentioned this to other people, I did write to NASA and volunteer to be the first teenager to go into space.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, I love it [laughs].
Stuart Gibbs: And I played up my writing chops and I said, "Look, I could write something about this." And they rejected me, as well as every other civilian whoever volunteered to go in space, pretty much. But so when I had got this friend who was an astronaut, I was instantly like, "I am taking advantage of everything." And I mean, Garrett and I, we're good friends, so I was afforded some opportunities to do things that even most people are not allowed to.
Stuart Gibbs: So I really got to go behind the scenes a lot at the Johnson Space Center. Whenever he went off into space, we got the VIP seats to watch space shuttle launches and such. So when he went into space the first time, which was sort of a parallel in the film industry, there were some hiccups along the way, did not go quite as well as he thought. There was a long gap between the time he got in and the time he first went in space.
Stuart Gibbs: I had just gotten the arc [Advanced Readers Copy] of Belly Up. And when he was preparing to go he said, "Could he take anything of mine into space?" And I was like, "Yeah, cool." But I was trying not to weight him down. So I thought, "Okay. I will send photos." So I gave him pictures. I gave him a picture of my son, a sonogram of my daughter, and I tore the cover off the arc of Belly Up and I gave that to him. And so he went up and he was on the International Space Station for three months. And one day he took these various things out and he took pictures of them up against the window of the International Space Station with the earth in the background. And then he emailed me these photos from space, which is amazing.
Stuart Gibbs: So then I turned around and I forwarded the email of Belly Up... I mean, I put it on Facebook, I put it everywhere. My publisher, and my editor at the time was Kristen Osby, called me and said like, "You know an astronaut. That's incredible! Could you write something set in space?" I think at time, was saying like, "Could you and Garrett even create something?" And so when Garrett came back down I said, "Let's talk about what we could do."
Stuart Gibbs: Garrett actually had a brilliant idea, which was to do Swiss Family Robinson on Mars. And I was playing around with it, and playing around with it, and I actually said, "The problem is..." And It seems like a weird line to people to draw sometimes to say like, "Okay, I could do the moon, but I couldn't do Mars." And I was like, "Mars is too technically complicated."
Stuart Gibbs: Whereas the moon was close enough that...when Garrett was on the space station, he wrote a diary and he would send his diary entries to a few people. And so I had all this stuff. And I recognized I had an idea of how to set something on the moon, but not Mars. Mars was too distant and survival was a little too tricky. And I said said to him like, "I could do this, but I would be calling you constantly."
Stuart Gibbs: So I came up with the idea for Space Case instead. And it's kind of a good thing I didn't do Swiss Family Robinson on Mars because while I was doing Space Case, that's when the Martian came out, which is really Robinson Crusoe on Mars (listen to Andy Weir’s episode of First Draft here). And when I read that, I was like, "Oh my gosh!" Like, "He did this so much better than I could have."
Sarah Enni: It's so deeply technical too. I mean it's just, yeah, yeah.
Stuart Gibbs: Right. And then actually it's funny because I called Garrett and I said, "This is the book you were talking about!" Like, "You have to read this." And it took him a while to get to it. And then one day I was over at his place and he was reading it, and I said, "What do you think of the Martian?" And he goes, "Oh, it's so boring." And I said, "Why?" He's like, "It's like work. If I have to read one more boring calculation about how to keep the food growing." And I was like, "Yeah, but that's not boring to the rest of us." The rest of us don't go, "Oh yeah, this is how I would do it." Whereas he was like, "Of course you would cut the potatoes up and adjust the oxygen content and everything."
Sarah Enni: Oh my God. That's so funny. Good thing he didn't get wrapped up in writing a book about work. That would have been a lot for him.
Stuart Gibbs: Yes, right.
Sarah Enni: Oh, that's so funny. Yeah, those books were so fun. And again, the covers so cute. So funny.
Stuart Gibbs: Yeah, it's all Lucy.
Sarah Enni: Okay. I don't want to take up all of your day. So let's talk about Charlie and then I have a question about developing a structure and how you actually write the books. So Charlie Thorne and the Last Equation is your most recent new series. It came out, I think September last year. And features a female protagonists for the first time. So, oh, first of all, can you pitch the series for us?
Stuart Gibbs: So essentially the idea of the first book is that Einstein discovered an equation that we don't know about. He found an equation that's sort of a corollary to "e equals mc squared" and says like, "Okay, there's all this tremendous amount of energy in every atom, but as far as we know, it's very hard to get out. So Einstein figures out, "Hey, I know where to get this, which is great for us creating energy, but terrible for the security of earth." So what would Einstein do if he had come up with something like this? He probably would realize he couldn't trust us with it.
Stuart Gibbs: So he hides it away, creates a series of clues leading to it. Where somebody at some point in the future finds it. And even actually decides to destroy it at some point, but fails. And so seventy years after Einstein's death, nobody's been able to find this equation.
Stuart Gibbs: Our government's been looking for it. Other governments. Good guys, bad guys. And our government realizes there's some really bad guys who seem to be closer to finding this equation than we are, and we can't let this happen. So out of desperation, one small division of the CIA says, "We're gonna recruit the closest person to Einstein we can, to help us track this down. We're gonna find the biggest genius we have in the United States right now." Who happens to be a twelve-year-old girl named Charlie Thorne.
Stuart Gibbs: And Charlie, who has the brains of Einstein, has not behaved like Einstein. She has actually used her brilliance to possibly commit a crime or two. So she's really blackmailed into joining forces with the CIA, and is thrown, against her will, into this world of action, and adventure, and danger around every corner.
Sarah Enni: Which is interesting. Well, I guess... maybe this isn't necessarily true. But it's interesting to have a main character that's reluctantly solving the crimes.
Stuart Gibbs: So when I was a kid, there was not so much middle-grade and YA, and most of us went and read our parent's stuff. And what was very popular when I was growing up were Robert Ludlum novels, which had a little bit of a resurgence with the Borne Identity. But those were always these books where, it was always someone who was thrown into this against their will, and ended up having these amazing adventures traveling around the world. And the closest thing was maybe when the DaVinci code exploded in about 2003.
Stuart Gibbs: And to be honest, Charlie Thorne sort of has its inception around that. Because again, I was screenwriting, I was playing around with the idea about trying to do a book at some point. And I was at the American Museum of Natural History in New York where there was this amazing exhibit on Albert Einstein.
Stuart Gibbs: And I saw that and thought, "Okay, there's something in this about having this equation someone's going after." And again, was not thinking middle-grade. Was thinking that they would go recruit an adult criminal who would come back for this. And it wasn't till I had done all these other middle-grade books, and was wrapping up the Moon Base Alpha series, and my publisher said like, "What do you want to do next?" And this idea I'd been kicking around for fifteen years, at that point maybe, like, "I would like to try and do this."
Sarah Enni: So what made you think that Charlie should be a girl?
Stuart Gibbs: So when I was putting together the idea for this whole series, obviously, the first one is Einstein. And you say, "Okay, well what else could I do?" And I began to think that, "What if Einstein was not the only person who had made a great discovery and hidden something away?" So then you start to say, "Okay, well who are the great iconic scientists?" And I would go to schools and I would ask kids like, "Give me the most iconic scientists." And you just started to hit the same list. It was Einstein, Darwin, Galileo, Newton. And maybe at some point, there would be people who'd be like, "Okay Marie Curie." And you say, "Okay, right, yeah." But you've got to get much closer to our time before you even see... obviously, there's Jane Goodall, there's Diane Fossey and there are female scientists but they're not as famous as the men.
Stuart Gibbs: And there were no female scientists for a tremendous amount of...
Sarah Enni: Or, no credited.
Stuart Gibbs: Yes, exactly right. Yes, because there are definitely ones who did not get the credit. But even then you're still talking about 1900's, for the most part. And so all my protagonists, up to this point, had been young boys. And I just was thinking like, "I have a daughter." I had been getting a lot of kids saying like, "When are you gonna do a female protagonist?" My choice is to always have no protagonist usually, based on two things. One that I was a young boy and I was writing from first person, but also that there was a lot of pressure in the business to write for boys. Because boys are not as awesome as girls in the sense that they will not necessarily read a book with a female protagonist.
Stuart Gibbs: Whereas girls are totally cool with reading a book with a male protagonist. Not true for every boy. I mean, obviously boys read the Hunger Games and things. But it just felt wrong to say, "Okay, here are all these great scientists throughout history. All men. All white men, really. And now I'm going to create another genius along those lines. And that is also a guy" And I was like, "I can't do that. I'll alienate every girl on earth." But it also just felt wrong.
Stuart Gibbs: And I talked with my daughter and her friends.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, I was gonna say, you had access to resources.
Stuart Gibbs: I was gonna do this one in third person anyhow, because I wanted to do something in third person. It changed the way I could tell the story. And I did want to do something where I got into the bad guys' heads and switched perspective a lot more. But I wouldn't have written a first person from a girl's perspective just because I didn't feel that was something that I should be doing necessarily.
Stuart Gibbs: And when I got to third person, I thought, "Okay, well I can describe what she's doing, get in her head a little bit." I talked to my daughter, I mean, she just wanted this super kick ass female protagonist that it was probably, in the first round was too kick ass. She could do everything and that was a bit much. And then the solve for that, was to just let her be really cocky and think that she could do everything, and then discover that she couldn't necessarily do everything.
Sarah Enni: Love that, which is like a trope. Those are like characters we all love. That's kind of what I was thinking, that it's a book series that could be all STEM all the time. So it's fun to have that as a way in, the encouraging girls to go into STEM.
Stuart Gibbs: Right. Yeah. I mean, hopefully it's encouraging boys too. But yeah, it predates our, on one hand, our desire to push everybody to STEM, which is a little behind the curve of where it should be. One of the interesting things, I mean, I talk a lot about this when I go to schools is why Charlie had to be a girl. That's the main piece of trying to get across when I'm talking to kids, is that women were not encouraged to do this until so recently, that I have multiple friends who are women who were discouraged from doing it, by professors a lot of the time, or teachers. And every time I talk about this as a school, at least one teacher will come up to me and say that exact same thing happened to me.
Stuart Gibbs: I hope that we have turned a corner and that this is not going to keep happening.
Sarah Enni: I want to talk about how you outline and prepare to write a story, and then we'll wrap up with advice.
Stuart Gibbs: Okay. I play around with ideas at first to work them out. I do all my brainstorming on yellow pads.
Sarah Enni: Okay, long hand?
Stuart Gibbs: Long hand, yeah. Now I've been, this was not originally part of my process, because I guess in a sense, some of like Belly Up and such, were semi-research by my having been at the zoo, or knowing Garrett for the Moon Base Alpha. But now to start getting ideas, I'm actually talking to experts a lot more. So after I wrote Big Game, which is about the poaching of rhino horns, I was approached by a woman named Giovanna [unintelligible] who works for the World Wildlife Fund's Animal Crimes Division, which I did not know existed.
Stuart Gibbs: And they invited me in. I met with some of the most incredible people dealing with poaching and animal trafficking and all these things. And so talking to them, they've given me ideas for crimes that are actually being committed. Animal trafficking is really, after drug trafficking, the second biggest crime on earth by the amount of money that people make. And so you talk to people about this.
Stuart Gibbs: When I wanted to do Tyrannosaurus Wrecks, I said like, "I'm gonna talk to somebody at the Natural History Museum here about how you prepare fossils, and went in with my son, and thought we were gonna be there for an hour and we were there for the entire day. So those sorts of things. So then I have a little notepad and I start taking notes and building up ideas that way.
Stuart Gibbs: So I get my outlines together. And then even when I'm ready to write, I start the day by walking around the neighborhood. I just walk with the dog, which I have to do anyhow, but he and I work on ideas, come up with what I'm gonna do.
Sarah Enni: I love that. And I read that you say that you outline the first half, and then let the second half...
Stuart Gibbs: Yes. Well that sort of was a function of trying to figure out how to make this work. Right? So when I first wrote books I didn't outline, which is probably part of the reason they weren't good enough to get published. And then I got into screenwriting, and screenwriting is all about outlining. So coming back to it was this halfway point.
Stuart Gibbs: So what had happened was that I had really outlined Belly Up and then found out when I was writing it, that once I got about halfway through, I started to realize that the outline didn't quite [pauses] I was just veering off of it. So I ended up going to where the story ended. But there were things that were changed. I was realizing I needed new characters. It was hard to see the whole book ahead of time when you are outlining. So now what I do is I outline the first half, I start writing, and as I'm writing I start to build the outline at the same time for the rest of the book. So I do go back to it. So ultimately, by the time I'm halfway through, I have the whole outline.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, that's kind of how I've been...
Stuart Gibbs: Oh yeah?
Sarah Enni: That's what I've settled... I just got to the end of the first third, or first act if you will, and then I was like, "Okay, let's look at this and see." Cause you have to totally re-iron it all out and adjust. There's so much in books that the first act is 40,000 words. So things change.
Stuart Gibbs: Yeah. Yeah. Right. And again, obviously there are people who don't outline, but one of the conversations that seems to occur a lot of the time when authors get together, is that those of us who are outlining are throwing out a lot less of what we've written, than the people who are not outlining. So you see a lot of people who don't outline going like, "Hm. Maybe I'll try and outline." But you never see people who outline going like, "Well maybe I'm just gonna free wheel this."
Sarah Enni: That's so true. The thought of that is like terrifying. So I do want to wrap up with just advice. I haven't gotten the chance, unfortunately, to talk to too many middle-grade writers. I'd love to hear advice for writing for younger readers like that.
Stuart Gibbs: I mean, like I said earlier, I really believe you should not be writing down to them. I think they are capable of handling pretty much anything. Every once in a while I have a teacher write and get on me for the language. Like I'm using language that they can't quite figure out from context. And I'm like, "But you know what? If they can't, they can skim it, or they can just go look the definition in the dictionary."
Sarah Enni: Yeah, go look it up!
Stuart Gibbs: Right. But I never really pulled back from a word and say like, "They don't know what this word means, so I'm not gonna use it."
Sarah Enni: Kids are curious. That's how I got my vocabulary.
Stuart Gibbs: They can figure it out. If it's a fun word, it's a fun word. So that's my thought. I recognize that sometimes my characters don't necessarily behave like maybe a normal kid their age would. I make them really smart. So they just behave like a really smart kid would behave. I mean, there are people out there who are still trying to get published. I talk to kids about this all the time, cause I think there are a lot of kids who were in my position and they're in elementary school and thinking, "If I don't get published by the time I graduate high school, that means I'm a bad writer." It does not mean you're a bad writer. It means you're a young writer. And this goes through your whole life.
Stuart Gibbs: Getting rejected is not... you've got to have the right idea, and be in the right place, at the right time, and get to the right person. And the important thing to know is that... most people took, who knows how many times, to get published. And if everybody quit, there'd be no books in our libraries, or our homes, or our bookstores. Except for maybe books by Gordon Korman [chuckles].
Stuart Gibbs: So I talk to kids about that a lot. Rejection does not mean it's you. And obviously, if anything, my career has been about saying like, "Okay, this idea didn't work this way, so now I'm going to try it this way. I'm gonna try it in this format." And the world of writing is changing constantly, so if you couldn't get a romantic comedy made ten years ago, you can take that same romantic comedy and try and get it made now, now that people are actually wanting to make them again.
Sarah Enni: Which I'm grateful for. This has been so fun Stuart, thank you for giving me so much time.
Stuart Gibbs: Oh, yeah. Well, thank you for inviting me to be on this wonderful podcast.
Sarah Enni: Thank you so much to Stuart. Follow him on Twitter @AuthorStuGibbs and Instagram @StuartGibbs1 and follow me on both @SarahEnni (Twitter and Instagram), and the show @FirstDraftPod (Twitter and Instagram). For links to everything that Stuart and I talked about in this episode, check out FirstDraftPod.com. There were so many great things that he brought up over the course of this chat. You can get links to all of them and kind of go down some rabbit holes. It's really a fun time, I encourage you to check out the show notes.
Sarah Enni: If you have any writing or creativity questions that you'd like me and a guest to answer in an upcoming mailbag episode, please leave a voicemail at 818-533-1998. The questions you guys have been sending are so fun and really fantastic. I've really enjoyed the mailbag episodes and I want to keep doing them. So please call and leave your comments. There are a lot of ways to support First Draft. Buying books through the links on the First Draft website is one of them. As I mentioned, the show notes are replete with links to fun things. Not only books but movies and TV shows, so if you go and follow the links and purchase anything, it contributes to making the podcast free, which I very much appreciate.
Sarah Enni: An easy way to support the show is to subscribe to the podcast wherever you're listening now, and if you have a few minutes you can leave a rating or review on iTunes. I'll read one right now that was left by MTN GRL 73 which I'm guessing is Mountain Girl 73. Mountain Girl says, "Coffee break with storytellers. Five Stars. I'm new to this podcast and have listened to only three episodes, even though a writer friend recommended it to me nearly a year ago. What I like about it best is that it feels less like an interview and more like eavesdropping on two writers just chatting. The conversation flows naturally from light icebreaker chitchat, to difficult topics about how the writers' manage stress, disappointment, or the surprise reality of the publishing business."
Sarah Enni: I love that Mountain Girl. I'm glad that a writer friend recommended it to you. I hope that by now you've listened to more than three episodes, although, no presh! Thank you so much for taking the time to leave a review. That really does help the show grow organically and get us in front of other people that might not find us otherwise. I love that. Thank you so much.
Sarah Enni: Halyey Hershman produced this episode. The theme music is by Dan Bailey, and the logo was designed by Collin Keith. Thanks to production assistant Tasneem Daud, and transcriptionist-at-large Julie Anderson. And, as ever, thanks to all you kid spies in training for listening.
I want to hear from you!
Have a question about writing or creativity for Sarah Enni or her guests to answer? To leave a voicemail, call (818) 533-1998 or send an email to mailbag @ firstdraftpod dot com!
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Every Tuesday, I speak to storytellers like Veronica Roth, author of Divergent; National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature Jason Reynolds; Creator of Sex and the City Candace Bushnell; YouTube empresario and author Hank Green; Actors, comedians and screenwriters Jessica St. Clair and Lennon Parham; author and host of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast Linda Holmes; Bestselling authors and co-hosts of the Call Your Girlfriend podcast, Ann Friedman and Aminatou Sow; Michael Dante DiMartino, co-creator of Avatar: The Last Airbender; John August, screenwriter of Big Fish and co-host of the Sciptnotes podcast; or Rhett Miller, musician and frontman for The Old 97s. Together, we take deep dives on their careers and creative works.
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