First Draft Episode #158: Nic Stone
OCTOBER 2, 2018
LISTEN TO THE EPISODE
Nic Stone, New York Times bestselling author of Dear Martin, talks about her newest young adult novel, Odd One Out, out October 9! Nic talks about lies of imagination versus lies of convenience, “high taste” readers, and the benefits of eavesdropping.
Sarah ENNI: Welcome to First Draft with me Sarah Enni. Today I’m talking to Nic Stone, New York Times Best Selling Author of Dear Martin, about her newest Young Adult Novel Odd One Out which is out now. I loved what Nic had to say about finding meaning in living history, being yourself when you can’t find yourself, and the pro-tip to eavesdrop more often. I hope you enjoy the conversation.
SARAH ENNI: Hi Nic, how are you?
NIC STONE: Hi Sarah, oaky wait… fan-girling because when you asked me to be on this podcast, I kind of lost my mind inside.
ENNI: WHAT??
STONE: I’m a fan.
ENNI: We met at BEA (Book Expo America) not this last year but the year before.
STONE: Yeah, we did. Down in the food court.
ENNI: Yes. And we talked for about five minutes and I was like, “What?” You had so many interesting stories. I was like, “I need this to happen on a recording immediately.”
STONE: I’m into it.
ENNI: I was very excited to meet you and have you. And I’m happy I could make it to Atlanta.
STONE: This is the best place on earth. You need to tell everyone.
ENNI: Okay! I will spread the word.
STONE: Yes.
ENNI: Speaking of Atlanta, I like to start these podcasts at the very beginning which is, where were you born and raised?
STONE: I was born here in Atlanta. Part of my childhood I spent in Kansas City, Kansas. Don’t go there, there’s nothing. And then I came back at about age ten and was in Norcross, Georgia which is about twenty minutes north of here, and I pretty much stuck around ever since. I’m down in the city now raising my children here. It’s delightful.
ENNI: Atlanta is one of those cities that’s so… you can’t just say Atlanta… it’s so big. There’s something for everyone in this city I feel like.
STONE: My favorite thing about this city is that the residential areas feel like the suburbs. You’re in the city, but I could walk. We’re looking out the window here and it looks like a forest because there’s a residential neighborhood half a mile to the left. And they feel very neighborhood-y and residential and I just love it so much.
ENNI: It’s nice, I feel that way about LA too. It can feel very neighborhood-y and yet you’re very close to whatever you need. It’s super fun.
So, I’d love to hear how reading and writing was a part of growing up.
STONE: Okay so, my mom was adamant about us being literate. Being able to read, being able to write. If you ask her, she says I started reading at eighteen months which, as a parent who has had two people go through that eighteen months, I’m like, “Naw bro, you tripping. But I’m gonna let you rock. We gonna let you slide with this eighteen month thing. Feel good about yourself, that’s fine.”
But I have been reading for a very long time. We spent a lot of time as kids in the library. And they were some of the best days. There was this one… the library in Kansas City had this treehouse like nook, reading nook, and I remember taking my Encyclopedia Brown books in there and just eating them. So yeah, reading was a huge, huge part of growing up.
Now what’s interesting is that the writing piece, I didn’t actively write when I was younger, but I told a lot of lies. I had a very big imagination. I remember telling my aunt that I had – this is like first grade – I told her I had three classmates who were triplets named April, May, and June. And she bought it, hook, line, and sinker. No questions asked. So, clearly, I’ve had a gift for a long time.
But it’s wild looking back at my “tall tales” and seeing how they’ve influenced where I’m at. My brother and I are both Harry Potter fanatics and would, not necessarily quote “fight” over the books when we were younger, but we were both like, “Yo! Are you done yet? Can I read it? I want to read it.” It was that kind of thing. And to this day, he’s still this voracious reader and so is my sister. It’s great, it’s great. Because now I have these beta readers built into the family.
ENNI: That’s amazing. I was talking to my mom about this the other day. I feel so lucky – especially my mom’s side of the family – is avid readers. Also, really adventurous TV and movie watchers. So, every time the family gets together everyone is like, “What have you been watching?” And then they deep-dive into [it]. And books, and all that stuff. So, it’s like this life-style section come-to-life. So, I grew up in like this family salon. I grew up feeling like, “Well, everybody talks about books.” And I realize now that, of course, I’m very lucky. Not everybody is encouraged in that way.
STONE: Which is interesting because what were they talking about? I look back and I’m like, “Wait. So, if you weren’t talking about books, what were you talking about?”
ENNI: How did you have a common ground of discussion?
STONE: Right.
ENNI: For every family, it’s different. My dad’s side of the family it’s sports, which I get too, but… I was just talking to Rashani about lying [chuckles] because her middle grade Aru Shah and the END of Time is about a middle grade girl who gets caught in a big lie (listen to her First Draft interview here).
STONE: A little liar, yeah!
ENNI: Yeah. And she said that was from her personal experience. It’s so fascinating to me because it makes sense. You’re telling a story. To me, I can’t suss out exactly what it is that’s in there about this, but the connection between being a storyteller and being a liar is so interesting to me.
STONE: Yeah! Okay, so the most fascinating thing to me about being a storyteller and being a liar, I’m actually really a bad liar. I can make ridiculous stories… but if it comes down to little white lies… I am not good at those. It’s fascinating! I can make up just about anything on the fly, but if you put me in a situation where I need to lie to get myself out of something? I’m screwed! Because I just don’t… that part I don’t know how to do.
I have this very vivid memory of – I don’t know, I was probably fifteen or sixteen – and my family is driving through downtown Lawrenceville, which is forty minutes north of here, and it was raining and this cop car speeds by us and my mom was like, “Wow, he should really slow down.” And I was like, “Don’t worry Mom, they have special tread on the tires.” I have no idea where that even came from! It’s not real. Obviously, it’s not true. It just comes out of nowhere. But I do think that that is a marker of maybe a person who eventually might tell some stories.
ENNI: Those are lies of imagination rather than lies of convenience.
STONE: Yes, yeah. So, they don’t hit your conscience I guess.
ENNI: Yeah, that’s so interesting. Anyway, talking with Rashani, I was like, “Oh. What is that?” I think a lot of us – when I was a kid, I was totally a liar. I did lie to get out of stuff though [laughs].
STONE: Yeah, see, I tried to it just never worked.
ENNI: It also didn’t work for me, but I was confident. And my parents were like, “We can hear you, that you’re awake, so don’t try to pretend you’re asleep.” So, when did writing actually factor in?
STONE: So, I remember being eleven, twelve, this is sixth through eighth-ish grade, I had this wonderful, wonderful friend named Golda. Golda is Ghanaian and I met her when I tested into the quote “gifted program.” She was the other Black kid in the gifted program. And she and I would stay on the phone for hours at a time making up these ridiculous tall tales. We basically were trying to write a soap opera in sixth grade, right?
But I never thought to write it down, you know? I think that had a lot to do with the lack of representation. I had a really good friend, Alexandra, tell me that when we were in eighth grade I told her I was gonna be a New York Times Bestseller one day. I don’t even remember the conversation. But, I didn’t start writing until I was twenty-eight.
There was obviously a disconnect for sixteen years! There was a gap, right? And I really do think it had a lot to do with not seeing the people who looked like me doing this thing that I wanted to do. There was always Toni Morrison and Alice Walker are the women we hold up as these African American female bastions of literature. But ain’t nobody trying to be Toni Morrison! She’s untouchable. It’s like trying to be J.K. Rowling. You just don’t. That’s not something you even aspire to. You aspire to maybe do something similar.
And they also wrote books that were difficult for me to understand when I was younger. So not having that, I think, was a hindrance for me. But it’s also the reason I eventually started. I was just a little older and had gotten it into my head – finally – that like, “Oh wait. If I don’t do this, the kids now aren’t gonna see it either.” And there’s this thing that I say on my school visits, “If you don’t see yourself, go be yourself.” Because it’s important to have representation, but at some point, somebody has to be the spark.
It took me a while to get started. But what’s interesting is that once I did start, I was like, “Oh, duh!” It was like this thing that was just in me and I was glad to discover that I’m actually not bad at it.
ENNI: [laughing] Yeah, right! Let’s build to that a little bit because I don’t want to skip over post high school and…
STONE: Oh, lord.
ENNI: I was at the LA Times Festival of Books when you were on a wonderful panel with Brandy Colbert [Listen to her First Draft interviews here and here author of Little And Lion and The Revolution of Birdie Randolph] Brandy Colbert was the moderator. And you were talking about going to Spelman, which is a historically Black university.
STONE: I’m like dancing right now.
ENNI: Yes! Can you tell me about going to that school, and what you studied, and what your experience was there?
STONE: What’s so funny is I literally today had lunch with this group of girls who came down from North Carolina to visit Spelman today. One of them is a rising ninth grader and the other three are rising sophomores, so they are starting their college tours and doing all of this stuff super early, but it was so cool to interact with these girls.
So, something that I told them… I started at Georgia Tech. I started college at Georgia Tech in International Affairs and Modern Languages. Which… why the hell would you study that? At Georgia Tech.
ENNI: I don’t know, it sounds interesting.
STONE: I know, but this is not a Liberal Arts school.
ENNI: Right.
STONE: And this is a very Liberal Arts major. But what was interesting about Georgia Tech – so, I grew up like Justyce from DEAR MARTIN – only Black kid in most of my classes. The tokenism was so, so real. I thought that, my mom went to Spelman. My aunt went to Spelman. So, clearly it would have been a natural path to follow but I thought that because I had had the experience of being the Black kid in a class of twenty, I’d be fine at Georgia Tech.
But then I got there and you go from being the Black kid in the class of twenty to the Black kid in a Calculus auditorium and there’s three of you in four-hundred. Well, that’s actually an exaggeration, it was probably more like two-hundred… but still. It was a lot. That’s like one to two percent. And that was overwhelming. And trying to adjust to that level of tokenism… I just couldn’t do it. I lasted a semester and then I was like, “Okay, I gotta go.”
So, I wound up applying to transfer and my two options were Spelman and Auburn. And I was like, “I think I might go to Auburn but’s probably gonna be more of this… so let’s just try this Spelman thing.” And it ended up being the best decision – the second-best decision I’ve ever made in my life. The first best decision was the hot man that I wound up marrying, which I’m sure we will get to eventually.
But it ended up being this really great decision because there was something so powerful about… when you are Black in this country, there’s this cloak – this coat, if you will – that you wear around that has all of this shit on it, right? It’s got “otherness” and “Low expectations from people” and there are all of these things that are just heaped on you as an African-American person here. At Spelman, I got to take that coat off. And it was… I can’t even explain how amazing it was to step into an environment where I wasn’t worried about whether or not the person two desks over was thinking about whether or not I was qualified to be there.
Even though I feel like there is this element, especially in this country, of, “Well don’t let other people’s things affect you.” It’s just not that simple. As much as I wanted to ignore the gawks and side-eye that I would get from people at Georgia Tech… I was one of literally two African American people in my entire dorm building. And the other girl was actually bi-racial. It was a lot.
So, I go into Spelman and it’s like, “Oh! Oh wait! You’re a Black girl. You’re a Black girl. You’re a Black girl. I don’t have to worry about what you guys are thinking of me.” Like, “I don’t have to worry about you wondering whether or not I’m supposed to be here. I’m just here. And you’re here. And how did you do on that last test? Because I didn’t do so well. Can we maybe study together?” There’s just this different level of freedom in these HBCU’s [Historically Black Colleges and Universities]. And it’s so nice to be in an environment where you are just bolstered and boosted and people want to see you succeed.
I would not trade that experience for anything in the world. It was formative. I don’t think I would be as settled within myself without spending time in that incubator. So, every time I get a chance, I encourage when I interact with African American high schoolers and middle schoolers, I’m like, “You guys, make sure you’re considering HBCU’s because it’s a really good experience.” It’s a great place to just find your feet and figure out where you’re wanting to go.
ENNI: I want to share this story, not because I’ll put it in the podcast – and I’m not relating this to that experience at all – but it’s reminding me of the feeling I had when I went to Burning Man.
STONE: Really?
ENNI: It’s so out – and it’s from a feminist perspective – I was there and the minute I came back, it’s such a weird, cool, bizarre place, but one of the things is that you sort of feel like everyone’s chosen to be there and so we all have this minimum bar of understanding about why we’re here.
STONE: Yes!
ENNI: And then the minute we left we go into a casino to spend the night when you get to Reno, and you’re all covered in dust, and the first thing I do as I walk in the door and some old guy whistles at me, and I was like, “There it is.” It came right back over me.
STONE: Please keep this in the podcast. And I mean that because I think it’s important that we are able to find these points of connection, right? Is that not why story exists? I think that… there’s this metaphor [from] Rudine Sims Bishop; “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors”. Of course, I think they should be all three, right? You have the mirror that you see through the window and you realize, “Oh wait, I can actually slide this open.”
Because I think there’s something… obviously, we’re all human, right? So, there are obviously points of connection that we can make. And I think a lot of those points of connection just come through emotion. Knowing that somebody feels something similar to you, even if what caused the feeling is different, it gives you this entry into other people’s experiences. And that’s exactly what it is, the Burning Man Experience… can we just call it that?
ENNI: Yeah! Oh, please!
STONE: I love it. I love it.
ENNI: It was a funny thing because it’s only then, and I wonder if you felt this way too, I didn’t understand how light I felt not worrying about being street harassed until it then happened again and you’re like, “Oh I was carrying that the whole time.”
STONE: Oh yeah, absolutely. I got profiled in a Barnes and Noble a couple of months ago – wild experience! This is a Barnes and Noble with my book on the shelf. It was so surreal that in the moment I couldn’t even process. Which is interesting because that also says a lot about how I’ve gotten to this point of feeling myself, thinking that I’m… the fact that it surprised me says a lot about where my head has been.
ENNI: When you say profiled, what kind of behavior…
STONE: Oh, I’ll tell you the whole story.
ENNI: Please.
STONE: So, my best friend and I – my best friend is this very tom-boyish lesbian. She’s got shoulder-length dreadlocks, and she gets profiled fairly often. Largely because she is a girl who is more masculine presenting and so she’s got that intersection of being black and being gay, and presenting in a way that people automatically assume that she is gay.
So, we’re sitting in this Barnes and Noble - she’s on the floor - we’re in the cookbook section. Which, anybody who’s been in a Barnes and Noble… the cookbooks be like back in the cut. You can’t even find them. You gotta figure out even where they are but they’re usually in one of those sections that there’s nobody ever in there.
ENNI: It’s like puzzles are more prominent than that.
STONE: Absolutely! So, we’re back in this corner that you gotta go through the matrix to get to this corner. She’s back there, I find her, I’ve got seven books that I was intending to purchase. I had a bunch of friends who had books coming out on this particular day. And I put all these books out on the floor so that I could do my Instagram story. Clearly you can’t leave the store without doing the story. You just have to do it immediately.
So, anyway, I put the books on the floor, and I’m doing the story and this white lady who works there, I don’t know – I’m guessing she was the manager – but she comes around the corner and she looks at us and she’s like, “I’m sorry, you can’t sit back here. You’re blocking the aisles.” And I, in the moment, looked around like, “Is there an aisle? I don’t see an aisle. Okay, but I’m-a-chill, I’m chill.” So, I was like, “Okay, we’ll move.” And she said something about like, “If the tables are full, you need to find a bench something, something.”
Clearly somebody told her that we were back there. Because you couldn’t walk by and see us, so clearly somebody had complained about us being back there.
The wild part, the wildest part, is that she hovered over us until we had gathered everything and then she followed us through the store as we left. I could feel the cloak in the moment, but it was such this weird experience that I was not expecting at all. It took a few hours for it to really even settle in. That I, with this New York Times Best Seller across the top of a book I saw on the shelf in that store, legit just got profiled. Like, “Why?”
ENNI: That’s so needlessly threatening to follow you all of the way out.
STONE: It’s ridiculous.
ENNI: Every step of it.
STONE: And I’m very glad that I was with my friend because she’s not the type to just comply typically [chuckles]. She didn’t want to move, but I was like, “Come on. Oh. We gotta… come on!” But then looking back I kind of regret not popping off a little bit and being like, “Yo, why do we have to move? What aisle are we blocking? I’m not actually seeing an aisle. Also, do you mind if I sign my books that are in here?”
You know? There’s so many ways… actually, there was actually this one time I went into a Barnes and Noble and I brought the stack of books that was on the shelf and I asked to sign them and opened the book so the lady could see the picture in the back, and she was like, “Mm, I don’t know if that’s really you. I need to see some ID.”
ENNI: [laughing]
STONE: “Are you… you’re serious right now? Okay. I’m a, okay, I’ll let that one go. I do look exactly like this picture, but that’s cool. Here’s my ID… I guess?” It’s an interesting world that we live in. It made me miss Spelman, both of those instances, did make me miss Spelman quite a bit.
ENNI: But it is interesting what you’re saying that it’s almost like you would have been more ready to say something If you’d been prepared for that experience.
STONE: Right, yes. So, I had these moments when I had the Burning Man Experience where I’m surrounded by people who are really into what I’m doing, who are looking at me like, “Hey, how do we do better?” And then you step out of those spaces, like you said, and somebody’s commenting on your dirty body.
ENNI: Crashing back to earth.
STONE: It’s wild. I hope you popped on that guy. I can’t deal with the cat-callers, Sarah.
ENNI: Oh, it’s bad.
STONE: I go off! I really go off. I can’t do it.
ENNI: It’s rough. I was just in New York and I had a couple of – I was with my mom so I was like, “Don’t lose your shit in front of your mom.”
STONE: Oh, my mom would lose her shit.
ENNI: [Laughs] I love that. When you were at Spelman did you finally see representation? Did you see women writing things that you were interested in? Or, was that still later?
STONE: Not at all. This is actually a sad statistic but I think that there are like two HBCU’s in the entire country that have writing programs.
ENNI: Oh. Oh, that’s a bummer.
STONE: It is, it is. And I think a lot of that has to do with the lack of representation so you just don’t have a lot of Black people who see writing as a viable career option. I do my best to maybe plant the seed that you can do it. We’re in this really interesting time in the publishing industry where we have all of these questions about representation, and diversity, and inclusivity, and they’re really great.
But the thing is we need it at every level. From the writers to the editors to the people in publicity to the people in marketing. The gatekeepers. Even the publishers. I’ll say that the major publishers… I can’t think of a single Black publisher. Actually no, that’s not true. Chris Myers and Chris Jackson are both at Random House. And then Kwame Alexander (author of Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky ) just announced his imprint at H&H. But Black women? I don’t know of any.
ENNI: No.
STONE: But I also don’t know of a lot of people, I don’t know of a lot of African-Americans who want to go into publishing, you know? But it’s one of those things. Yeah, I knew at ten-years-old, I knew I could be an astronaut. I will never, ever forget the image of Mae Jemison with her big-ass space helmet under her arm in her orange jumpsuit. She’s on my bucket list of people I have to meet one day and If I do ever get that opportunity I will absolutely burst into tears.
But seeing her, I knew that I could be an astronaut. But I didn’t know I could be a writer. I still don’t know that I could be an editor. There are all of these things that, “Well, I don’t actually see that so I’m not sure…” So, it actually doesn’t surprise me much that there aren’t writing programs at HBCU’s. And until people are starting to see that, “Oh, this is a viable career path for somebody like me.” I don’t know that it will change.
ENNI: And what you mentioned earlier is still true that we do see Toni Morrison but who would dare to say like, “I’m gonna be the next Toni…”
STONE: The only people I’ve ever heard say I’m gonna be the next Toni Morrison follow it up with, and then I realized that’s impossible. I’ve heard Shonda Rhimes say it and she’s like, “I thought I was gonna be the next Toni Morrison… but…” And there’s always the but! I’m like, “No, no, no. You be Shonda Rhimes. It’s cool. It’s great.”
ENNI: I was gonna say, and then she’s the first Shonda Rhimes. Which is fantastic.
STONE: Yeah, you became Shonda Rhimes, which is great.
ENNI: Thank you for sharing that cause I think it goes to show that you were in this incredibly supportive environment but it’s still not – it still didn’t give you fully all the way to where you are now. It still took a lot of you on your own.
STONE: Yeah. I mean, it gave me a sense of self which I think is foundational. If you don’t know who you are, how can you know where you’re going? And that sense of self gave me this competence to just try different things. I feel like at Spelman I got the message that I have value because I exist. If I didn’t exist – there would be nothing for me to contribute to the world. But the fact that I exist means that there are things that I have to give that nobody else can give. I think that’s something everybody should internalize.
ENNI: I’m so glad that you had that experience. And I’ve heard that from many, many people who go to HBCU’s which is great. So, what I know from there, is that you went to Israel.
STONE: Huh!
ENNI: And then got married. Flush that out for me [laughing].
STONE: Lord. So, I dropped out of college twice. I dropped out of Georgia Tech after a semester. A year-and-a-half later I did the transfer process and I went to Spelman. And then a week into senior year at Spelman I dropped out again because I didn’t know what I wanted to do and it’s not a cheap school. The idea of going that much more money in debt, because I was taking out loans. I left and I got a job [pauses] I think. What did I do right after? Let’s see, that was what, 2006?
So, okay. This is where things got really interesting and actually having to look back at it I’m like, “Sarah! You’re making me dredge up these painful things!”
ENNI: [singing] “I want to know!”
STONE: But, I got very heavily involved in church. That was fall 2006 is when I initially left Georgia Tech and I just started working. I started training, I was a personal trainer for a while.
ENNI: Oooh! Okay
STONE: Yes. And then I also was working as a shoe salesperson at DSW. During that time, I was also intensely, intensely involved in the church that I was attending at the time. Like seven days a week.
ENNI: Oh?
STONE: Yeah, yeah. I remember, so 2006 and the entire year of 2007, I was just working and doing church. So, during this time that I was becoming devout – I guess is the best way to put it – I got really obsessed with the Bible. And not in a creepy, smack-people-over-the-head-with-it type of way, but just in the lyricism, and the stories, and the way that it was written. There’s actually some really cool shit in the Bible and there’s some really fucked up shit in the Bible too.
ENNI: There are some stories that are deeply weird.
STONE: There’s some stuff in there where I’m like, “Yo! Why don’t we talk about this one more? For instance, there’s this story of – the English translation is Jael, but it’s actually Yael because there’s no “J” in Hebrew. So, this woman – this badass woman – lures this dude from the opposing army into her tent and stabs him in the head with a tent peg. Thus, the war was over.
ENNI: As one does! She’s like, “Why don’t I end this right now?”
STONE: This is like feminism 101, right? You use what you got, like, “Alright bro, you up here mess’n with my people…look how sexy I am… let me stab you in the head.” I just thought it was the most fascinating story. So, I get really involved in church and that led me to – I spent five months in Kansas City at this place that honestly, looking back, was kind of cultish, I think. And I don’t say that lightly.
ENNI: What denomination were you?
STONE: I was Non-Denominational. Which is absolutely a denomination.
ENNI: Yeah right, it is.
STONE: I wound up going to get involved with this program that looking back I’m like, “Mmmm, it’s kind of questionable.” But that led me to this similar program, in Israel. There was this internship in Jerusalem that I decided to apply for. And I got into it and I got on the plane to Israel with forty dollars in my pocket. And just on a literal leap of faith decided I was gonna go to Israel for a summer.
Initially, I was kind of searching for more of God. Because what’s interesting despite the fact that I, quote, “Became a Believer” at nineteen and at this point I think I was twenty-two. So, it had been about three years of daily Bible study. I was studying it in the original languages. I really love learning and words and stuff, so I was like, “Okay, let me actually pick this thing apart.” So, I go to Israel, right? I’m there. I get there with forty dollars in my pocket. And I’m there deciding I’m really just trying to find out more about this God person, right? And what’s interesting, is my faith completely unraveled.
ENNI: In Israel?
STONE: In Israel. I go there and I’m going there looking for God, and I found this really hot guy instead, or in addition, depending on how you look at it. But this first summer in Israel, it was like everything I thought I understood just fell apart. It was one of the best things to happen to me. Because I find that, as a person of a faith that now is a bit more nebulous, it’s not as concrete as I go to church every Sunday and this is what I believe, boom, boom, boom.
Now, I have this much wider world view. There was something very powerful about being in a place where I was the minority faith, and coming to understand what Christians, what we put people through here.
So, I wound up in Israel that first time I met this smokin’ hot guy… good lord [laughs]. What’s interesting is I was also like closeted bi-sexual – it’s just very bizarre. I was questioning hardcore… the first girl I ever had a crush on, I was six. I have a picture of us, because we both went to the circus together.
And this picture… I will never, ever let go because this is like… you know? But I spent my entire, from like six through twenty-four or so, I spent having a good time but not telling anybody about it. Well, of course, I wasn’t having a good time at six, you know? But once I got to the age where you know, you can… “Alright, alright… let’s do that.”
[both laughing]
It became this hyper shameful thing though because I was also beginning to lean into the faith a bit more. So, there were all of the contradictions that I discovered this first summer in Israel.
ENNI: So, just so I have the chronology a little bit, were you, or were you not, raised religious?
STONE: My mom has gone to church every Sunday for as long as I can remember, but she never made us go with her.
ENNI: Okay, bless her!
STONE: It was there, in the air. The first time I got “Saved” quote, I was probably twelve or thirteen and it was after seeing a play called “Heaven’s Gates and Hell’s Flames.” It was one of those trying to scare the hell out of you. And then I read this book called “A Divine Revelation of Hell” not too long after. Honestly, a lot of my faith was built on the fear of going to hell.
ENNI: Yeah, scared. Scared into it. A hundred percent.
STONE: Which is, I think, a lot of people’s faith. Which is something that I’ve since, come out of because… anyway, we’re not gonna get into all of that.
ENNI: But… I understand what you’re saying.
STONE: So, I go to Israel and I meet this guy. I’m there for a summer and I go home. He and I keep in touch and so I go back a second summer to be an Au Pair, which was totally just a cover for dating this guy. So, the second summer I was in Israel, this guy and I, we went straight into pre-marital counseling. Mind you, I’m still grappling with the sexuality question, but I’m also still wildly religious.
So, we go to pre-marital counseling because it was like, “I can’t move here and be your girlfriend… legally. You can’t move to America and be my boyfriend.” Because there’s these things called visa’s, so you can’t.
ENNI: Right. Is he born and raised in Israel?
STONE: He was born in Nigeria. So, his father is Nigerian and his mother is Russian so he’s this bi-racial, beautiful, Black Jewish man. In American, he’s Black. He’s wonderful. But, we go straight into counseling and decide that we’re gonna get married, and so we got married six months later. So, we dated for six months.
ENNI: Oh, my goodness!
STONE: And then I moved to Israel. And where the faith had begun to unravel, it completely came apart. I lived there for three years and over the course of that three years, most of the things that I thought – no, not even thought – that I held in this clinched palm as truth, I found to have a lot of holes in them. For me.
And I know there are a lot of people who would disagree with some of the things that I feel like I discovered… and that’s totally cool. I think that the beauty of faith, and what I learned through this whole experience, is that the beauty of faith is that it’s personal. You do what you need for yourself.
ENNI: Well listen, we are people who believe in the power of books and words and couldn’t get more subjective, right? Some books change your life and then you meet someone who hates that book. Doesn’t mean that I think that person is wrong.
STONE: I mean, I do when it comes to Harry Potter!
ENNI: Anyone who hates Harry Potter… we can agree on that.
STONE: Like, “Girl…whatch ya mean?”
ENNI: [Laughing] Like, “I don’t think you read it right.”
STONE: Yeah! I go into these schools and I have kids be like, “Nuh-uh, Percy Jackson is better!”
ENNI: [Gasps]
STONE: I’m like, “Yo! Listen. This is apples and oranges. I feel you, Percy Jackson’s amazing.” But this is not the same thing.
ENNI: They don’t need to win, you know? They don’t need to be pitted against each other. You can have Percy and Harry.
STONE: Right! I have Percy and Harry and Carter Kane. I have all of them in my pocket and on my backpack. Like, Snape [undistinguishable], they live with me.
ENNI: And your now husband is Jewish?
STONE: He is. He never practiced. So, I joke about like, “Dude, I’m more Jewish than you are.” Our older son went to Jewish preschool. I want that to be alive in him and I want him to be aware of all of the pieces of his heritage because there’s something very powerful about knowing where you come from and knowing your background and understanding your own history as brought together by these different pieces of ancestry.
So, we’ve talked. He went to Jewish preschool for three years and he will be Bar Mitzvahed, both of my boys will be Bar Mitzvahed. That’s just, it is what it is.
ENNI: This is a tough question, but I would love to hear from you what you found in Israel. When you think back to that time in Israel, what do you think you discovered? What do you take with you?
STONE: Compassion. I met a lot of people in Israel. My best, best, best, best friend in Israel, her name is Shaneeh [sp.?] and she’s this wicked, amazing musician. She does worship music, Hebrew worship music. She’s got five kids and I just admire her so much. But something that she said to me once was, “If you don’t leave Israel un-offendable, something went wrong.
ENNI: Whoa.
STONE: And it’s valid. Israel is this place where no one gives a fuck about your feelings. Something that I took from there is this over-arching sense of compassion. It’s a place where you have two people groups, in the major sense, you have two major people groups. You have your Jewish population, you have your Palestinian population. There’s this whole history between them, but the conflict is on-going. And honestly, the conflict will probably continue to be on-going. What I learned though, is that there are situations where everybody’s wrong.
I feel like, especially in this country, in America we are so solution oriented that a lot of the time we don’t even want to look at the problems. And somebody’s is always wrong, right? But that’s not the case. What I learned from being in Israel is that everybody, everybody, including people that I’m not gonna name, but everybody is deserving of empathy and compassion. There’s a reason for the things that people say and do. Always. There’s always a reason.
ENNI: That is all so fascinating! During all of this time, I love that you’re talking about breaking down the Bible and getting enchanted by the stories of it. When you come back to Atlanta, what’s it like when you get here? Take me to finding your creative voice.
STONE: I worked in tourism when I was in Israel and my last year in Israel, while I was pregnant with my son, my boss at the tour company looked at me and he said, “You have to read the Hunger Games.” And at that point I was just reading these hoity-toity lit-fic. I think the last book I read before I read the Hunger Games was Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, or something like that. Which was like, “Everybody’s talking about this book. Why’s everybody talking about this book?”
So, I was like, “Okay.” I read all three books over the course of five days. I just ate them. And I had another friend tell me that I should read Divergent [By Veronica Roth. Listen to her First Draft interviews here and here]. And Divergent cracked… it just cracked me open. Christina, I was twenty-seven? Christina is the first African-American character I ever met in a book who stayed alive. I’d never seen myself in a book before. She was the first person… well, not in a book that stayed alive… but you know what I mean?
She was the first time I felt like I was actually seeing myself on the pages. I will forever be thankful to her, and I’ve told her this. I’m like, “I will forever be thankful to Veronica Roth for creating this character who looked like me.” Because in the book she was brown-skinned. And I constantly imagined myself as her. And twenty-seven-years-old was the first time I was actually able to do that.
But seeing her made me realize like, “Huh?” And she lived through the whole series. She didn’t die in book one like Rue did.
ENNI: She did admirably. I was gonna say Rue was the only other…
STONE: And she was the shit! Christina was the shit. To this day, she is one of my favorite characters.
ENNI: And, spoiler alert, she does quite well after the series ends as well.
STONE: Right! Right! She doin’ her damn thing! So, I meet Christina and it sparks this thing in me that’s like, “Oh? Black girls can do this kind of stuff in books.” So, in 2013 I was twenty-eight, this is a year later – because I read Divergent and then I read Insurgent because those were the only two out at that point – and I devoured them. I read Divergent and I read Insurgent and then I immediately went back and read them both again.
It sparked this thing and so I decided I was going to try and write some kind of spec-fic Black girl. It was a trash fire, but I got through it. And that was really kind of the moment when I finished this 125,000-word manuscript. Guys that’s too long for a debut by-the-way. Just gonna tell you don’t do it, it’s not a good idea [laughing].
ENNI: That’s quite long.
STONE: That’s very long. It was five-hundred pages. It’s totally unnecessary. To this day, I don’t know what the hell that book was about. But the fact was that I finished it.
ENNI: So, you hadn’t been doing creative writing at all.
STONE: No... at all.
ENNI: And you were like [claps hands] closing Insurgent, opening your word doc, and going bananas.
STONE: I read the Hunger Games. I read Divergent and Insurgent. And then I read Delirium and Requiem, which again, were two books that, again, I was like, “Ahhh” [heavy sigh]. Because Lauren’s prose is like bathing in word magic. If I could pour all of the words out of her book into a bathtub, I think it would smell like roses and magic and it would look like glitter and I would have the time of my life luxuriating in it.
ENNI: It’s a bath balm. A bath balm of a book.
STONE: Yes. Lauren Oliver’s words are bath balms. So, I read those two as well and then I got into John Green. And that’s when the contemporary thing… I was like, “Oh! This is different, but I like it.” It really just took me reading the right books to figure out genre, first of all. That was when I realized I wanted to write Young Adult because it was like, “Oh wow. This is speaking to me in a way that nothing else ever has.”
ENNI: You talked about when you were young, eating books. And then it sort of comes back.
STONE: It comes back and I think Young Adult really spoke to me because that was the point when I started to understand my adolescence. I hit twenty-seven, twenty-eight and I was like, “Oh, this is what I was going through as a teenager.”
ENNI: And also, if I’m following this, it seems like getting really heavy into church was also a form of identity seeking, right?
STONE: Mm-hmm. Absolutely.
ENNI: So, then you are in Israel and you have this whole other transformation of thought and then you come back to the U.S., and it was like, “What was all that?”
STONE: Oh my gosh. I came back to the U.S. and was like, “What the hell is going on?” I remember going to Kroeger for the first time after coming back to the U.S. and going down the cereal aisle and going like, “Why is there so much cereal?” I had this crisis. Because we just have so much, so much. It’s a thing I didn’t realize. But I had started writing this book, I started writing this terrible book in 2013. This was actually after we moved back to the U.S. and I just needed something to do because I was going back to school.
The reason we moved back to the U.S. is because, like I said I had dropped out of college a week into senior year, and I decided before we left Israel, “Okay. If I have a baby…” Listen, this is completely illogical, I’m going to forewarn you. But in my head, I was like, “Okay. If I get pregnant and have a baby, that means I need to go to the U.S. and go back to school.” I don’t know. I don’t know.
But I did get pregnant and I did have a baby, so we decided we were going to go to the U.S. so that I could go finish this final year.
ENNI: Good for you, by the way, that’s great.
STONE: Thank you. Thank you. We came back in January and school didn’t start until August so I had this eight month window where I literally had nothing to do. So, I was like, “I’m gonna write a book!” I started writing this book. It bled into that senior year, and then in February of 2014 I had the utter and complete privilege of meeting Jodi Picoult. First of all, if you have never read a Jodi Picoult book… number one, what are you doing with your life?
She was coming to Spelman because she was coming to interview the president of our college for her book called Small Great Things. Side note [clears throat] … authors who want to write outside of your experience, please follow the Jodi Picoult model and do your research.
ENNI: Yeah, can we interview the president of your school. I love that, by the way, when your Jodi Picoult, you’re like, “I think I’m gonna write about this. Let me call the president of a university and fly down and have a one-on-one meeting.”
STONE: Basically. Apparently, she had read one of Dr. Tatum’s books. Dr. Tatum wrote this book called Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? Jodi read that book and was like, “I need to interview this woman.” Because she stumbled upon this … oaky, Small Great Things is based on a true story.
There was this Black nurse who wound up being taken to court because a pair of white supremacist’s parents – she was an OB nurse – and these parents, who were Neo-Nazis, told her that they didn’t want her touching their child. Didn’t want her caring for their child.
And a situation arose where the child went into this… I don’t know, it wasn’t cardiac arrest, it was like a respiratory disorder. He went into respiratory distress. I won’t spoil the book by telling you the actual story, but long story short, this woman wound up being prosecuted for murder of this baby and Jodi latched onto that story because it was infuriating for her.
So, she decided, she read all these books, she did all this research, and decided she was coming down to Spelman to interview the president of our college. Well… then “snowpocalypse” happened. I got invited to this luncheon. They were gonna have a luncheon for the handful of writers that were on campus, with Jodi Picoult. She agrees to do this luncheon. And then, not only did we get snowed out – the city got snowed out – this was during, we literally call it “Snowmageddon”.
ENNI: I remember this.
STONE: Oh yeah, I’m sure most people do.
ENNI: Because it was Atlanta, specifically, that was like, “We can’t handle this.”
STONE: It was very specifically Atlanta. “We don’t do well with snow” was the message to the rest of the world.
ENNI: I don’t mean to demean your experience but I do recall that it was not a great deal of snow.
STONE: It wasn’t. But you know, it was ice that was the problem.
ENNI: It was like roads were impassable.
STONE: Yeah, exactly. Not only were they impassable, people left their car on the highway for a week.
ENNI: Which, by the way, I was in DC and we were like… people abandoned… going to Virginia was impossible. I was like, “God forbid there be an emergency at the Capital of the country because we are not equipped for that.”
STONE: I can’t even handle it, right? So, because of that though, the luncheon got cancelled. But I was like, “Um, Jodi Picoult is here. I’m definitely not missing this opportunity to meet her.” So, I emailed her and I was like, “Yo! I don’t know if you’re still having your meeting, but if not, I’d really love to meet you for coffee. I will brave these icy roads just for the chance to meet you.” And she told me that she was still going to go onto campus and interview Dr. Tatum, and that I should just come beforehand so that I can meet her. And I met her and we just totally clicked.
This is when I told her that I was working on my own thing and she actually connected me with her agent, who had never done YA before. The way that we discovered how terrible this book I wrote was, is that this agent – who is the most wonderful woman – took this book out on submission. And the responses she got made her pull the submission. It was so bad.
It was an experience that I needed to have. She wound up firing me as a client in the most sweet, polite – she’s British too – so, it was the most polite…
ENNI: You can do worse than being fired by Jodi Picoult’s agent.
STONE: Seriously. So, I wound up finding another agent. That’s really how I got plugged in. So first, it was finishing the book, and second it was having somebody who had been in the industry for a while – which was Jodi’s agent – be like, “I actually really like this.” Of course, despite the fact that she liked it… nobody else did! But that’s okay. That’s all it took.
ENNI: Jodi and her [agent], these are all huge green lights.
STONE: They were and it was… it really is what gave me hutzpah to keep pushing. And something Jodi says that I take to the bank every day, is “Publishing is designed to weed out those without fortitude.” It’s a quote that needs to be up on a wall somewhere because it’s so true.
If you don’t have some thick-ass skin… this is where I go back to being thankful for my time in Israel and becoming un-offendable. If you let my friend tell it, because it gave me this resilience to deal with the stunning amount of rejection that most people go through in this industry.
ENNI: Yeah, and don’t stop going through. There’s no expiration date on hearing “no”.
STONE: I don’t care how long or how successful you are, there’s always gonna be somebody who doesn’t like your book, which is a form of rejection.
ENNI: I just interviewed Sarah Dessen (author of Once and for All, Just Listen, The Truth About Forever , listen to her First Draft interview here). An unbelievable amount of that conversation was her being like, “I don’t know, I think I’m not doing it right.” I was like, “What? But your Sarah Dessen?!” I was like, “Do you know who you are?” It’s good to know that.
And I think that experience of Israel…if you have that as a foundation? If you know who you are outside of publishing, then you can survive publishing. I don’t think it works the other way around.
STONE: No. So, Spelman pus Israel [chuckles] led to Nic Stone.
ENNI: I want to make sure not too much time passes before we actually speak, in specific, about your books.
STONE: Oh, books! Is that what we’re here to talk about?
ENNI: So, let’s get to Dear Martin cause it’s actually a little bit of an unusual sale experience.
STONE: Mm-hmm!
ENNI: Lead me to the selling of Dear Martin.
STONE: So, we’ll go back to before I got fired. The book that I was working on was a spec-fic thing that was actually very bad. So, I wrote something new that was contemporary. It was about a… and this book is going to be on a shelf one day, dammit! But it was about a Black girl who was living with Bi-Polar Disorder. Because mental illness is something that is not discussed nearly enough in the Black community. The stigma is kind of quadrupled in the Black community.
So, I wanted to write this book about this girl who is having this experience. I sent that to the previous agent and she was like, “Okay, this is great. But I really think that you should try to find another agent who actually does this YA thing, cause I think I’m out of my wheelhouse.” So, I queried. I thought I had surpassed this like [takes on an overdramatized British accent], “Oh, I don’t have to query. I have Jodi Picoult’s agent.”
And then I wound up having to query, and I had a lot of rejections on this book. But I got a few people who were interested. One of them was Rena Rossner who just so happens to be an agent in Israel. I sent her the query and was like, “Oh, by the way, I used to live in Israel. It’s so cool that you’re there.” And she was like, “Okay, send me your full.” Instantly, right?
So, we cleaned it up a little bit. She loved it. We cleaned it up a little bit and then we went out on submission with it and the first person to respond, and she responded within a couple of hours, was Phoebe Yeh. And what Phoebe Yeh said though was, “Love this voice. This writer definitely has talent, but I’m not sure this is the right story. What else is she working on?”
The answer to that was nothing! I had things spinning in my head but nothing had been put down on paper. I wound up having twelve hours to pull together a proposal [chuckles overdramatically]!
ENNI: By the way, this is the root of all the writing advice of keep working on the next thing.
STONE: But seriously, do absolutely! And I will tell you, I learned my lesson. So, I had this twelve hour window where I managed to pull together thirteen pages of a manuscript about a boy who is killed over loud music and it turns out that six months before he was killed over loud music, he had been racially profiled and he had started this journal of letters to Dr. King to process his experiences as he moved through the world, and boom… Dear Martin.
So, I submitted the synopsis and a couple of sample chapters. The proposal was thirteen pages long. And she offered me a two-book deal on it. But then I turned in my initial draft, I had eight weeks to pull a draft out of my ass – is how it felt – but I did, right?
I had to do the research and the writing simultaneously, not the best eight weeks of my life I will tell you. What was a shower? I don’t know what showers are. I had no idea what showers were during that eight weeks.
ENNI: No, not when you have eight weeks. You’re jumping in a pool and then getting back out…
STONE: I’m like, “What’s happening? I don’t know what’s happening.”
ENNI: Just really quick, you had the twelve hours, it sounds like you must have had a seed of something.
STONE: I did, absolutely. There was something that had been spinning in my head, but it was something I was deathly afraid of. So, Jordan Davis was killed in 2012. He’s a young man in Jacksonville, Florida who was in the parking lot of a convenience store with his friends. They went inside to get some snacks, they had their music turned up loud in the car, this white guy Michael Dunn, pulls up next to them. Didn’t like the volume of the music, didn’t like the type of music they were listening to, and apparently, he felt quote “threatened” after an argument and he pulled out his gun and started shooting. And Jordan Davis was killed.
I was in Israel when this happened, but it was something that stuck down in me, especially because I had had a kid five months earlier, a Black kid, five months earlier. And shortly before I graduated from Spelman, Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson. And this whole thing erupted. Black Lives Matter went from a hashtag to a movement. And I kept seeing people quote Dr. King in opposition to the movement. I was like, “What the F*? Are you all serious right now?”
I think the tip of the iceberg, not the tip of the iceberg but the tipping point is what I should say. The tipping point was really hearing the mayor of Atlanta say out loud, on the news – there was a march happening – “All I ask is that you don’t take the freeways. Dr. King would never take the freeway.”
“What?! What?! Are you serious? Have you seen Selma? What do you mean Dr. King would never take a freeway?” It was one of those moments where I was like, “Okay, this is a problem. We have gotten so far removed from the civil rights movement, that ya’ll have just started making shit up. I don’t understand.”
So, it was all in there, but I was really afraid. I was deathly afraid number one of disrespecting the families of these boys who had been victims of police violence. Police violence and also civilian violence. These boys who had been killed simply because they were Black boys. That was nerve-wracking.
And also, I just didn’t want to fuck it up. And then the third piece is that my dad was a cop! So, the first twenty-four years of my life I had a cop for a father. So, trying to create this thing that had nuance, and presented cops as human beings but also pointed out how sometimes these snap judgements can lead to – these snap judgements rooted in racism – they’re not just, “Oh, in the moment I feel threatened.” Why do you feel threatened? Having to dissect all of these pieces of the puzzle, I was really scared to do that because I didn’t want to get it wrong. So, I hadn’t written anything down. But then when she was like, “Well, if there’s something else that you have that you’re working on?” It was the only thing that I had in my arsenal to write anything about.
So, I pulled this thing together and Jodi actually had been a bit instrumental in that because I told her about the idea when it first occurred to me. It was while I was trying to get a new agent, I told her about this idea that had been scratching at my skin and wouldn’t let me go, and she’s like, “That’s the book I want to read.” And so, I had it in the back of my mind. And I was able to pull together – I’m a huge believer in the muse, by the way - and I do think that she can be seduced. So, the muse was all over me with this thing, thank god!
So, I pulled together this proposal and we sent the proposal and I got the offer. I was just like, “Okay, well shit [laughs] now I have to actually write this thing.”
ENNI: Eight weeks.
STONE: Eight weeks. And it was wild. The first draft was double the length of the final draft. I think it landed at seventy-nine thousand words, which is still a lot less – like fifty-thousand words less – than that first book I wrote.
ENNI: You made an improvement!
STONE: I made a hell of an improvement because fifty-thousand words is a solid book on its own. So, seventy-nine thousand words, there were eight points of view.
ENNI: Oh?
STONE: Yeah. It was a very different book, and Justyce died on page three. Of course, my agent was like, “Maybe you shouldn’t kill the main character on the third page.” And I was like, “Why not?!” Anyway, he died and then it jumped back six months to the opening scene in the version that was published, where he’s profiled and he decides to start this journal.
That first version she was like, “Nope.” And this is the interesting thing about selling on proposal, your vision and the editor’s vision do actually have to align. She’s the most patient, wonderful, loving, feisty little woman. She spent five hours on the phone with me over the course of two days basically trying to talk me into making the edits that she wanted. Because I was very adamant about the book being what I wanted it to be.
She’s the first person to really point out to me the importance of target audience. Because this wasn’t a book for me. That’s something I had to recognize. It took me a minute to recognize that. There’s a difference between writing for self and writing for consumption. When I’m writing for myself I can write whatever the hell I want to, but when you’re writing for people to consume, when you’re writing stuff for other people to read, things have to make sense. They have to be presented in a certain way.
ENNI: Yep. And when that audience is young people…
STONE: Yeah, yeah. What’s interesting, is she had this very heavy focus in her mind on what I call “high-taste-readers.” I hate, hate with a passion the phrase “reluctant readers.” Because the kids aren’t reluctant, we’re reluctant to give them the right book. So, they just have higher taste, I think. We live in this world where social media has made kids so much more aware of themselves and their peers and their surroundings. So, they want things that actually reflect the lives that they’re living.
ENNI: They’re very demanding!
STONE: And they should be!
ENNI: There’s a lot of other ways for them to spend their time. Kids are discerning consumers.
STONE: They are, and I love it. I absolutely love it.
ENNI: Because the other stuff that they’re consuming, and not to derail this, but that’s such a good alternative term, or better term…
STONE: “High-taste-readers”, yeah.
ENNI: Because there’s super-smart video games. There’s super-smart TV. They’re not turning to popcorn, there’s…
STONE: There are more interesting things, right?
ENNI: Yeah, there’s great stuff out there.
STONE: So, if I am going to make a career out of writing books, these books have to be able to compete with the shit that they can access. And my editor got that long before I did. Honestly, obviously she did. She edited Walter Dean Myers (author of Monster and Fallen Angels) for twenty years. Clearly, she knew what she was talking about, because I was an ass-hole, and was an arrogant ass-hole initially, it took me being knocked down a few notches before I began to understand.
ENNI: But that’s such a wonderful… that is the editorial process.
STONE: Absolutely. And if you can’t trust your editor, you might have the wrong editor. The pieces that she was able to connect – I was writing a book about a young African-American male who is racially profiled. The young African-American males who are racially profiled, would not have read the book that I wrote. And that’s something that I couldn’t see until she pointed it out to me.
She was like, “You need to streamline this. This needs to be linear.” Because it was non-linear before. She was like, “One point of view.” And she was absolutely right. To this day I get DM’s on Instagram with boys specifically who are like, “Yo miss!” Cause they always start with “Yo Miss” for some reason. But it’s like, “Yo Miss, I just gotta tell you, I ain’t never read a book before. But I read yours. What else do you write?”
To have a kid have their reading bug sparked by something that I created, I owe that a hundred percent to Phoebe Yeh because that wasn’t initially what I was going for. So, to know that my editor is a boss [chuckles] and she knows what she’s talking about, it’s really comforting. I just actually sold her two more books, so it’s great.
ENNI: That’s a huge level of trust.
STONE: I’m obviously thankful for all of my readers. But to have human beings, like the guy I wrote about, come to me and be like, “This is the first time I’ve ever seen myself in a story. This is the first story I’ve actually ever read to the end. This is the first thing to hold my attention.” “Yo, Miss! My moms got mad at me because I didn’t come to dinner, cause I was reading your book.”
ENNI: The highest compliment.
STONE: I totally beat the video games and the TV! It’s a really good feeling. And hopefully I continue to make content that grips kids in that way.
ENNI: That’s amazing. Let’s see what you think about this parallel. I’m struck by the early part of your life where you were taking the Bible and applying it to your life, now. As actually now in the U.S. and now in Israel – where you’re standing where things happened – and then the impulse to turn around and say, “It’s time to look at speeches and the movement of the Civil Rights in the sixties and say, “What does it mean now? How is this living still?” That seems parallel to me.
STONE: Absolutely. I completely agree. There’s something very cool, I would say, about being able to connect the dots between history and the present. And it’s fun! It’s so much fun because there’s so much we lose by not looking at history. Elie Wiesel (activist and author of Night) won the Nobel in 1986. He was a Holocaust survivor. He’s got a number of books out. One of the things Elie Wiesel said though was, “It is the memory of evil that will serve as a shield against evil.” Which means we actually have to look at evil, we have to look at the evil, the evils in history. And look at them as they were.
The thing that I discovered as I was working on Dear Martin, is that we have super sanitized the Civil Rights Movement. The fact that people can hold up the Civil Rights Movement, and hold up Black Lives Matter and say that they’re different… says a whole hell of a lot to me. Because the way the Civil Rights Movement was received by most of America is literally the same, if not worse, than the way Black Lives Matter has been received.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, (author of Between the World and Me and Black Panther ) I heard him speak to high schoolers once in Philadelphia, and the one thing that I will never, ever forget from his talk was this quote where he basically said, “Activism is about agitation.” And I feel because we’re such a solution-oriented society sometimes we get too stuck on this idea of, “Is it working?” And I’m like, “But that’s not the point. The point is to draw attention to the issue and to make people uncomfortable.” Because only when people are uncomfortable do they start wanting to make change.
Which is so fascinating, right? Humans are… we are quite the species! (Laughs)
ENNI: We are and I am really compelled by that way of talking about the U.S. We are solution-oriented and you can’t even try something before it’s a failure because it didn’t work.
STONE: Right. In order for the world to become a better place for everyone, I think we have to get okay with being wrong, and we also have to get okay with being uncomfortable. I look at some of these school shootings and systemic racism is negatively affecting all of us. You have these white boys who basically come up in the world being told that they’re owed something. That things are going to go a certain way for you because of, “This is how things are going to go for you.” Even if nobody is specifically saying that, those are the messages that are imbedded in American society.
And when things don’t go that way it’s like, “She snubbed me. I’m gonna shoot my school up.” Which sounds super extreme but I do think that a lot of these things are connected. I look at Dylann Roof, the young man that shot up that AME Church [Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church] in Charleston and some of the things that he said, and some of the things that he thought, and some of the things that he believed, I feel like those things were avoidable if we were all just willing to get a little bit uncomfortable.
Willing to examine the foundations of our society. The foundations of our country and the thought processes, the norms that were put into place when this country was founded. If we were willing to examine those things and peel the layers back and just flat out be like, “Actually no, Black people are not inferior!” I think that would be really helpful in a lot of ways.
ENNI: The desire for certitude means in some cases not stating the obvious, which is also detrimental.
STONE: It’s so wild to me.
ENNI: It is. And it’s like going back to that panel you were on that Brandi was moderating at LA Times. I’ve mentioned this more than once in the Podcast, so I’m very upset that I can’t remember his name, but that illustrator who was on the panel with you guys, he spoke about – the question was – “What makes a good ally? What can someone do to be a good ally?” And regardless that ally is not the perfect word, he was saying like, “More than anything, don’t be afraid to be wrong.” And that really made me sit for a minute and think about how many times I don’t say something because I’m worried I’ll say it wrong. And at the end of the day, the need to do the right thing is bigger than that.
STONE: Girl! You better preach!
ENNI: [Laughs] So, it really was like being, “That isn’t an acceptable excuse.” But it is for an unexamined person living in the world – a white person in America right now – has plenty of opportunity to not do something. It’s more of a choice to be like, “I’m gonna be uncomfortable and risk being wrong.” And having, god forbid, learn something and listen to other people and keep going despite being wrong. That’s not easy. That’s not a path of ease, but it doesn’t mean that it’s not the path worth taking, or that you have to take.
STONE: There’s also a level of being willing to face the fear of death. I feel that so many things, a lot of the hierarchies and things that societies are built on, I can’t think of a single society that’s not built on a hierarchy, right? And there’s always this notion of, “These people are at the top, these people are at the bottom. That’s just how things work.” But all of that is rooted in the fear of death. We’re all just trying to survive. So, when it comes down to, “Am I willing to forsake my privilege so that somebody else has a chance to survive?” A lot of people aren’t willing to do that.
ENNI: It’s like you’re saying about stating the obvious. It’s so easily avoidable to teach boys that girls don’t have to respond to your crushes so that they literally don’t kill someone. But what we are talking about, and I’m just speaking for me as a white person, you have to take a moment to understand that what you are experiencing – the risks that I have – versus people are dying. And that’s what needs to sink in to understand the scale of what you need to be talking about. Or doing. Or saying. Or believing.
STONE: We just got real deep!
ENNI: I know! And we also want to talk about your new book!
STONE: This is the perfect segue because you were just talking about boys needing to be taught that you do not have unlimited access to girls’ bodies.
ENNI: Yes, please execute the segue. Lead me into Odd One Out.
STONE: Odd One Out is the book I needed when I was younger and questioning. Loving being a woman but also aware of the hindrances and the stop-hand, I’ll call it, that would be pushed towards me as a woman. Especially as a Black woman. A Black queer woman is a whole different level of [unintelligible] as we say in Hebrew, which is basically chaos.
So, Odd One Out follows three high schoolers. What’s cool about this book, my favorite thing about this book, is that it’s written as a trilogy of novellas. You have book one, book two, book three and each book is from the perspective of a different character. It is this chronological story arc, so where book one ends book two begins and it covers a different part of the story.
ENNI: It is a trilogy.
STONE: It is a trilogy, exactly. You have these three very imperfect kids trying to navigate the intersections of friendship and romance and figure out who it’s okay to love. Did I mention this already? The first time I had a crush on a girl, I was six. I have this picture of us at the circus and in this picture, I’m gazing at her. When I was going through my own questioning process, this picture was tantamount for me. Seeing like, “No, this was a thing when you were younger.”
So, 2015 is kind of when the scale shifted, thank god. And it didn’t shift with regards to people’s mindset. It’s just like the Civil Rights Movement didn’t change people’s minds, it just made it illegal to discriminate. 2015… same thing. It’s illegal to discriminate against people who are on the LGBTQIA spectrum. But when I was younger, when I was having these questions, I spent middle school and high school denying this thing about myself while doing, secretly, “Oh, we’re just experimenting.” There were other things going on while I was in this stage of denial. But if I had had something to tell me that it was okay to have these questions, I think things in my life would have gone a lot differently.
I do a lot of school visits, so I interact with a lot of these kids who have these questions now. I actually did a writing workshop in Raleigh, North Carolina last week. I was there Monday through Thursday of last week, and Monday I was with teachers. But Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday I had two sessions and, in both sessions, I had questioning kids in both of them.
In the first session, I read the first chapter of Odd One Out because there was this chunk of time where we were waiting for the pizza to arrive. I was done with the lesson for the day, so I was like, “You guys want to hear part of my new book?” And they were all like, “Oh my gosh yes!” I had a non-binary kid in there, I had a trans-boy in there, and I had a couple of girls who I could tell were at least having some questions. One of them was quiet through the entire workshop. But I’m like, “I’ll let her rock.” I think it’s important to feel out the room.
At the end of the three days, I go to the desk where my stuff is and there’s this sticky note on the desk. And this sticky note says, “I was just hoping we could stay in touch.” And it had her name. I just smiled because I was like, “I knew you were paying attention!”
So, I texted her because I was like, “Let’s just be buddies.” So, I text this young lady and her soul just flowed out. She came out to me. She told me she’s been struggling at home and her mom is not accepting. Her mom doesn’t like that she dresses a certain way. I do not like the term “dresses like a boy” because I think gender-dressing is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of. If a boy wants to wear a dress – what’s your problem? And if a girl wants to wear sweats and a sweatshirt [laughs] “Oh, you want to wear pants and dress like a boy?”
But, interacting with these kids and seeing them latch on to even the idea of this book, has meant the world to me. It’s also this hyper-feminist manifesto [laughs]. So, it’s this Black, queer, feminist book but what’s fascinating is that the first character you meet is a straight boy. I felt that was important too. Number one, like I said, I have sons, right? It’s important to me to grab those boy readers. I’m a huge believer in the literary Trojan horse, as I refer to it. So, basically you do what you have to do to get inside the gate and then you blow people’s spot up.
I did that with Dear Martin. I broke into “white-landia” [chuckles], or “caucasia-ville” or whatever you want to call it.
ENNI: It’s so similar to “Portlandia” that it just feels right!
STONE: Right, exactly. So, I have this palatable narrative where I sneak in there and then I just blow your shit all up. It’s the same thing with this book. I’m trying to sneak into people’s psyche and subtly point out the areas where maybe they should do some rethinking. I’m excited about it.
There are two female characters. One of them, her name is Rae. She is bi-racial. Her mother is Irish and her father is Chinese-American. Her person, not her sexuality, but her person and her appearance is based on one of my best, best friends Alexandra, who I was telling you earlier told me that when I was younger I said I was gonna be a New York Times Bestseller. So, this girl in this book looks just like Alexandra.
And then Jupiter is this Afro-Latina. Her father is Cuban and her mother is African-American. She actually has two dads; her surrogate was African-American. She identifies as Black but you see this girl who knows she likes girls and is cool with liking girls, and you see the ways that she interacts with the guys around her. And the male character, his name is Courtney, has no doubt that there are boundaries. I think that is an important thing for boys to see.
You need to see this male character, who yes, she might unwittingly lead him on every now and then, but does that give him permission to do as he pleases? Of course, it doesn’t. So, it’s an interesting book. I’m excited about it. So far, the response seems to be pretty good. We’ll see what people say when it comes out.
ENNI: That’s exciting. I also love that the OG draft of Dear Martin was eight points-of-view [chuckles] then you got pulled back to one. But I love that you are now back to three points-of-view. And you said earlier, before we started recording actually, that you are a character driven writer.
STONE: Super character driven, yeah.
ENNI: Do you think getting in their heads is necessary for you to see the full story?
STONE: Oh absolutely. But I cheated, I feel like. Part of the reason, it was my editor again who saved my ass on this, cause she’s the one who suggested that if I was gonna do more than one point-of-view, that I do them in chunks. That made it a lot easier, I think. Focusing on one-hundred pages from one person was easier than having a chapter and then the next chapter is a different perspective and then the next chapter is a different perspective. Like, “No bro, I can’t do that.”
ENNI: Flipping then ends up becoming this sort of mystery which requires a lot of planning.
STONE: And I’ve read books that are multiple points-of-view, and I have to flip back to remind myself who’s talking. I’ve been told, I should say, that these character’s voices are distinct enough that you know who’s talking, but I didn’t want to run the risk of people not knowing. Or, them sounding too much alike.
This is a book that definitely needed to be the three points-of-view. I think of it as a three-act-play with each act coming from the character who’s affected the most during that act.
ENNI: Which is a really useful way to use point-of-view. I was just thinking last night, this is so random, I was thinking last night – I couldn’t sleep – I was thinking, “You know, it’s so crazy that Bring It On, the movie, is from the point-of-view of Kirsten Dunst.”
STONE: Yeah?
ENNI: Yeah. And then I was thinking through I was like, “What happens in that movie?” I was remembering all of it. I was like, “Okay, well that is a story.” Like Kirsten Dunst’s story is obviously a story. But I was like, “Who the fuck doesn’t want to watch the Clover movie?”
STONE:Yeah!
ENNI: The Clover’s is the movie.
STONE: Do you want to hear a really fun… it’s kind of a secret... but not really. My, I call her my wife, but Ashley Woodfolk, her debut novel is called The Beauty That Remains, and it is stunning. It is a beautiful, beautiful book. But, she tweeted one day randomly, I guess somebody asked, “If you could collaborate with another author, who would it be? And what would you write?” And she did this throwaway tweet that was like, “I would collaborate with Nic Stone and we would write a Bring It On retelling where the squad captains fall in love.”
And all I will say is that it has become a thing.
ENNI: AH! Oh, my god. That makes me so happy. I’m glad that my throwaway story ties in [laughs].
STONE: Absolutely.
ENNI: I want to talk about upcoming stuff too, but was there anything else about Odd One Out that we make sure we get too?
STONE: I just… shameless self-promotion, I think everybody should read it.
ENNI: Did you also… I think the photos on the cover…
STONE: Oooh, yo! So, okay, typically you’ll ask an author, “What about the cover?” And the author will be like, “I had no say in any of that.” My husband shot both of my covers. And I’m sure will probably shoot subsequent ones, because they’ve been such great covers. My goal is to have the cover models at the launch because they’re all local here. I got to pick the models, I got to direct the photo shoot. That was so dope!
It means the world to me to have three characters of color on one cover, that’s about gay shit. I’m like, “Yes!”
ENNI: They’re not hidden, they’re not in the shadow.
STONE: No. It’s like Odd One Out. This is a book about LGBTQIA stuff. This is a rainbow book, that’s what I’ve been calling it. It’s the book that I wish existed, and now it does exist. And it feels really good to know that it exists because I decided to put it out there.
ENNI: That’s amazing.
STONE: Is that arrogant? Is that an arrogant thing to say?
ENNI: No! No. By the way, all art is born of arrogance so that doesn’t mean it’s not helpful.
STONE: Oh, absolutely. I am probably one of the biggest narcissists [laughs].
ENNI: My friend Maurene Goo and I talk about that all the time. You have to have this… Aminah Mae Safi (author of Not the Girls You’re Looking For ) had this great advice to people at the end of her podcast [you can listen to her First Draft interview here] was, “You just have to have bat-shit belief in yourself.”
And that’s what I’m gonna put on a pillow.
STONE: Yeah, for real. You have to be a little bit overconfident.
ENNI: You have to believe that there’s a story and that you have to be the one to tell it.
STONE: Last year I made the decision, and I can’t remember where I saw this, but I made the decision that I’m going to move through the world like a mediocre white man. Because they have this banana’s level of confidence, this bravado. This notion that the world owes you something. I’m like, “Okay, yes, absolutely it does. This is my new philosophy. I am just as entitled as you are.”
ENNI: Mindy Kaling (actress and author of Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?) ,I think, has said that too.
STONE: Yes! It was Mindy Kaling. You’re right.
ENNI: Which is a wonderful quote and I love that she was like, “I was raised like a white man. So, I just believed that I am owed.” And look at her now.
STONE: That’s beautiful.
ENNI: [claps hands] Let’s talk about what’s coming up. So, Odd One Out was the second one of a two-book-deal. It really takes off and Dear Martin is a big deal.
STONE: Freak’n weird man. I’m still like, “Wait. What’s happening?”
ENNI: What was it like shifting and thinking about what you wanted to do next?
STONE: I already knew. So… Pro Tip! People who want to be writers!... while you are waiting, write the next thing. Odd One Out I wrote while waiting for notes on Dear Martin. There was a six-month window where I was waiting for notes because things were really shifty. My editor lost her assistant, or, her assistant moved on to greener pastures – I should say. Let’s make it positive. So, she had a new assistant and there was all of this discombobulation so I was waiting for notes for a while.
During that time, I just went ahead and wrote the second book. I got the notes, did a draft, turned it in, and just decided to write another book. Every time you turn in a book… write a new book. Because the book that I wrote after I turned in that first round of notes, is a book that - I’m not gonna say the name of because who knows whether or not it will change - but it comes out in October of 2019. It is about a young lady who is the impoverished kid in this upper middle-class area. Because there are pockets in every high-class suburb there is an area where there is lower income housing. At least in Atlanta, I don’t know about around the rest of the world.
So, this girl grows up in relative poverty. This is really a book about relative poverty and the trauma of relative poverty in a society that is highly consumeristic. This girl works at a gas station and there’s this night where she sells a winning lottery ticket. She believes she sells the winning lottery ticket worth One Hundred and Six Million dollars. And when the person that she believes she sold it to fails to come forward, she tapped the only other person who was in the convenience store when she sold the ticket – who just happens to be the richest boy in school.
It’s basically this collision of worlds and it’s examination of wealth and relative poverty. And how does money actually function in this country. And how does it affect the way that we feel about ourselves? How does it affect the way that we interact with other people? If you are poor, and you happen to stumble upon a One Hundred and Six Million Lottery ticket will that actually help you? What are the things that affect the way that people spend money?
There are all of these questions about money that I had because we are in this hyper-capitalist society where the gap between the rich and the poor is steadily widening. I have a lot of cognitive dissidence working on this book. I’m in edits right now. It’s due on Monday [guffaws]. But anyway, what’s interesting is that I wrote it in 2015, right after Dear Martin. We saw that Dear Martin was doing okay and it was ready so we went on submission with it and I wound up selling it. I was talked into doing a Dear Martin sequel – and this has already been announced so it’s fine for me to talk about it.
So, 2019 is this book about the lottery ticket and about money, and 2020 I’m releasing a novel called Dear Justice . Which is a play on words and it is a book that follows – if you’ve read the book Dear Martin – it follows the character Kwan. Kwan is currently in juvenile hall awaiting trial on murder charges. For a murder that he may or may not have committed.
I don’t even know if he committed the murder yet, so we’ll find out. It’s really about the flaws. The way Dear Martin was me punching and kicking at systemic racism in a hoity-toity intellectual way, this will be the same thing but with regards to the criminal justice system. Especially the juvenile criminal justice system because it is a fucking trash fire. Especially when it comes to Black and Brown kids.
So, Dear Justice is Fall 2020. About a month ago today, so this will be announced by the time the podcast comes out, but I sold two middle grade novels. I’m really excited about stepping down. My goals is to do middle grade, and then do chapter books, and then do picture books so my kids can actually read the stuff that I write without waiting ten years.
I sold two middle grade novels actually. The first is about this little Black boy who goes on an impromptu road trip down the memory lane of his white grandmother – his father is bi-racial. But this grandmother may, or may not be, a jewel thief on the run.
ENNI: Ooo!
STONE: It was both fun and gut wrenching to write. I think at its core, that book, which is called Clean Getaway, is really about coming to grips with the humanity of your heroes. Which is not a fun process but it’s a necessary one.
And the second book – actually, I’m not gonna talk about it yet because I might change my mind. The idea I have for the second book, which will be April 2021, is a fun idea. We’ll see if I stick with it.
ENNI: Ooo, okay! So, you’re booked.
STONE: Yes. And hoping to get more booked. I feel like the only way to succeed in this industry is to just keep writing and keep selling. You gotta have the “go-getter-tude” to keep pushing, and writing, and selling. “Don’t wait to write the next book friends!”
ENNI: That’s the persistence part, right? No one’s gonna knock down your door and beg you to write a book.
Okay… I’m gonna we have to wrap it up because we’re just gonna have to talk more next time.
STONE: Absolutely.
ENNI: Volume two and three and four because we know you’ve got a bunch of stuff coming out! We’ll just have to get together and chat about that. I love to wrap up with advice. You’ve already given so much amazing advice, but I’d love to hear some of the typical advice that you give when you’re at your school visits for young writers.
STONE: My main piece of advice I give to young writers is to eavesdrop… be a creep, okay! Just have headphones on so nobody can tell. Listening to other people’s conversations will teach you so much about not only the human experience, but human emotions and the things that make people tick. Every story is about people. I don’t care if it’s about trucks or animals when it comes down to it, it’s about the human experience, right?
My older kid, one of his favorite books when growing up was Little Blue Truck. It’s about this little truck who’s passing all these animals. “Beep said blue to the little green toad. Little Blue Truck went down the road beep said blue to the little green toad.” So, he’s passing these animals and saying hello and he comes across this dump truck. And this dump truck is kind of a jerk, but the dump truck has gotten stuck in the mud. The Little Blue Truck decides he’s gonna help the dump truck.
Not only does he decide he’s gonna help the dump truck, he solicits help from all of the friends that he was kind to, to help this dump truck. And of course, this is obviously a human story. Okay, it’s about a truck, but it’s a truck with anthropomorphic qualities. Same thing with Charlotte’s Web.
So, listening to people and hearing what makes people think, hearing what makes people tick is such an amazing way to even just figure out story in general. So, do what I do friends, and go to Starbucks and put your headphones on, but don’t actually turn on any music. Listen to the girl talking about finding her boyfriend cheating on her. The myriad of emotions that she experienced. “Is it my fault? I’m so furious. But it was my best friend.” There’s all of these things that you can take from that and just insert yourself and figure out how you would feel and boom! You have a story.
ENNI: It’s true!
STONE: So, be a creep. That’s my advice.
ENNI: [laughing] That’s wonderful advice, I love that. This has been such a joy. Thank you for giving all of this time, I so appreciate it.
STONE: Oh, it’s been fun. I like talking if you couldn’t tell.
[Both laugh]
ENNI: Well, I love listening to you, so thank you so much Nic.
ENNI: Thank you so much to Nic. Follow her on Twitter @getnicced and Instagram @nicstone and follow me on both @sarahenni (Twitter and Instagram) and the show @firstdraftpod (Twitter and Instagram).
For links to everything Nic and I talked about today, check out the show notes for this episode on FirstDraftPod.com. Seriously, I’ve done all of the googling for you. While you’re there on the website, you can also signup for the First Draft newsletter which I send at totally un-obnoxious intervals and it’s a great way to stay up-to-date on who’s being featured on the show, get my recommendations for other podcasts, and also get some info on my upcoming debut novel TELL ME EVERYTHING.
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Heyley Hershman produced this episode. The theme music is by Hashbrown and the logo was designed by Collin Keith. Thanks to super intern Carter Elwood and transcriptionist-at-large Julie Anderson.
And, as ever, thanks to you fortitudinous souls for listening.
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