Would you please tell us about the inspiration and creative process behind your most recent publication?
Author: Peni R. Griffin
“Inspiration” sounds so simple and surprising compared to what really happens! First of all, you’ve got to remember that I’m always going to be writing something, so nothing comes out of the blue – I exist in active search mode, examining the story potential of practically everything that comes within my notice. Also, my biggest financial success in the 20th century was with Switching Well, a time travel story picked up by Texas history classes, so I was attuned to ideas that were both storyworthy in their own right and with potential to tie in with school curricula. That was my state of mind at the time I picked up a book by Bjőrn Kurtén, illustrated by Margaret Lambert Newton and Hubert Pepper, called Before the Indians. Kurtén is a palaeontologist and the book is basically an art book about the last three million years or so of American palaeontology. Which is always cool. So it occurred to me that what I needed to write was a time travel book with a mammoth on the cover.
Then I researched, and researched, and researched some more. I read archaeology journals and talked to some archaeologists and went on newsgroups and visited a dig. It’s been my experience that, once you’ve done sufficient research, your plot and characters form
themselves in your head, and all you have to do is bring them up to consciousness to write the story. So I wrote a book, couldn’t sell it, couldn’t sell it,
11,000 Years Lost by Peni R. Griffin
couldn’t sell it; and suddenly realized I had made a serious error in Chapter 7 – at about the time that Susan Van Metre, who had the manuscript, was saying she’d like to buy it. I told her she couldn’t have it with that error in it, took it back, and realized that the error in chapter 7 served, I think, three plot and two thematic functions. Meantime, between 1996 and 2001, vast and astonishing work had been done on the late American Ice Age, controversies had erupted, and I had to research it again. At that time, I had a day job, and you can’t work fulltime and research properly, so I talked my boss into letting me have Mondays off. I researched till blood came out my ears, visited more sites, rewrote almost from scratch, and finally let Susan have it back, a whole new and much better book.
I’m going to write another Pleistocene book, although I don’t know much about it yet. I could write about nothing but the Pleistocene for the rest of my life and not exhaust the untapped possibilities. I think megafauna are way cooler than dinosaurs and the work being done today in the Americas is the most interesting archaeology you can do, turning up questions we didn’t even know how to ask. Once the Ice Age bug bites you, you stay bit.
What inspired you to start writing children’s books?
At the time I reached adulthood, all the libraries and bookstores were still automatically shelving their fantasy in the children’s section. Few places even had YA sections! I had always presumed, from the time I read Lord of the Rings, that I would write fantasy, so I never got out of the habit of visiting the children’s section. As more and more fantasy was published in adult imprints, I began to realize that I preferred children’s books to adult books. They have to be interesting on every page, and they are written for growing brains; I think those are the two most important factors.
At first I assumed I didn’t write well enough to write for children. I was writing short stories for the magazines in those days, and trying to work out what my novel should be. I still think some of my novel ideas have potential, but I wasn’t getting anywhere with them. At one point, my husband, who worked near an artificial lake – Woodlawn Lake, one of San Antonio’s landmarks that’s primarily meaningful to the locals, not tourists – came home and said that the fog was so thick on the lake that morning it looked as if somebody could walk over from another world on it. So I started a short story about a kid who does that – walks from his world into ours. It wasn’t working as a short story, and I suddenly realized that it was because I was trying to write from the point of view of the grandmother, but all the interesting things would happen to the children. Once I saw that, I saw what kind of book it would be. So I wrote Otto from Otherwhere, and – this is how long ago it was! – I sold it on complete manuscript, unsolicited, without an agent, to the second editor I sent it to, who was Margaret K. McElderry.
Well! Having proved I could do it, I didn’t see any point in writing for adults anymore. Good enough or not, this is the field for me.
How do you get into the mind of a child in order to write in a way they can relate to?
I don’t. I get into the character’s mind, and since the character is a child, it works out. As to how I go about that – it’s a knack. I learned it early and found it so easy, I couldn’t tell you how it’s done. The main thing, but this is true of most parts of writing, is to get out of your own way. Turn that ego off and make room for the story.
What do you know now that you wish you’d known when you started writing children’s books?
How soon the business would arrive at the point where I did, in fact, need an agent. I should have one by now and I don’t. It’s a pain in the neck looking, too, but it’s not optional anymore.
That’s not the first thing I’d tell myself if I could communicate through time and give my younger self advice, though. I never expected to have one of those brilliant careers, and though there’s much
Switching Well by Peni R. Griffin
to be dissatisfied with where I am, there’s also a lot that couldn’t realistically be bettered. I have some personal advice and warnings I’d give myself before getting to the agent stuff – and at that, I might not make anything better. I might wind up with a different set of regrets. In business and in life, I’d still have the same basic material to work with – me. Twelve books in twenty years is better than a lot of people do.
For a parent, who has a child only interested in watching TV what advice, would you give them to interest their child in reading books?
As I have no children, I would not presume to advise parents on how to raise their children! That would be obnoxious. Besides which, when parents say their kids are only interested in one thing, it isn’t always the problem they think it is. Kids can get obsessive. It’s part of learning. You have to see a lot of dreck to recognize the good stuff – and there is good stuff on TV. It obeys Sturgeon’s Law (90% of everything is crud). However, if there is a real problem – if the kid is passive, nervy, doesn’t sleep – then I think you’ve got to start with role modelling. If you keep the TV turned off when not watching some specific show for a specific reason, if you read, if you read to the kid – and don’t read things you think he “ought” to like, but read things that reflect his real interests – you can redirect him. If the kid watches pro wrestling, take him to the comic store and let him read superheroes; get a tabletop roleplaying system and teach him to play superheroes. If the kid watches monster truck rallies, take him to the library and let him check out books about cars that are too old for him. And while you’re at it, get him some stuff to tinker with. Find out what he’s getting from TV, and show him other ways, better ways, to get that satisfaction. Listen to him. Pay attention. Don’t assume that there’s something wrong with him you have to fix. Assume that he’s a separate person who will be just fine if given a chance, and give him the chance.
How would you involve and educate kids about green issues?
This is role-modelling again. Live like the person you want your kid to be. Don’t make a big crusade out of anything, but discuss the
choices you make, and give him choices, in terms of the larger implications of your individual actions. Many green actions are easier than the non-green options – cloth bags carry more than plastic ones and don’t hurt your hands; all you have to do is remember to take them! – and many are simple habits. It’s as easy to pick up a good habit as a bad one. And give yourself, and him, a break! He may not always make the green choice, but that doesn’t make him a bad person and that’s not the last choice he’ll make. I myself drive a car that isn’t as efficient as it could be; but we can’t buy a new car right now. We try to make it up in other ways, and I bike and take the bus when I can. Be realistic. Be honest. Don’t think too big and get discouraged; the world is made of small stuff. All you can do is the best you can do.
Would you please tell us about your causes or charities you are involved with?
I’m not particularly active outside of my work and personal life (there’s always more I want to do than I have time and energy to do!), but I give money to Planned Parenthood, Sierra Club, Audubon, and the Nature Conservancy; and I have been known to sign petitions and write to politicians on issues of marriage equality (how gay marriage is supposed to harm heterosexual marriage is beyond me), the environment, human rights, and certain health issues, especially sex education and HIV.
What are your dreams?
My funeral will be attended by dozens of archaeologists who will all say: “I got into the field because of her books.” Someday fifty years after I’m dead, a kid will find one of my books, and reading my words will spark an idea in that kid’s head that I am incapable of having. Eleven Thousand Years Lost will have a faithful movie adaptation with animatronic megafauna (not CGI, except in the long shots) and a sound track by Melissa Etheridge. My hundred-year-old house will be fixed up exactly the way I like it, with plenty of time left in my life for me to enjoy it. My name will become so well-known that people stop spelling it wrong; in fact, single-n-I will become the second most popular spelling!
Or maybe I’ll just get an agent and keep producing books, about one a year, that sell reasonably well and maintain me comfortably until the day I die quietly in my sleep, in full possession of my faculties. That’s good enough.
Would you tell us a little about you are working on now?
I’m doing the research for a historical novel set in Texas at the end of the American Civil War. Lee surrendered at Appomattox on April 9, 1865. Kirby-Smith, the general in charge of the western theatre, surrendered in Galveston on June 2nd. Occupying forces didn’t arrive in Texas until June 15th – Juneteenth, as we call it, the day the Emancipation Proclamation was implemented. In
Otto from Otherware
between was chaos. Years ago I had some dead time in the day job and started writing to pass the time, coming out with a full chapter in the voice of a young woman who is living through that period. I couldn’t do the research necessary then, but the time has come to find out what her story is. It’s not quite as hard to research as the Ice Age, but it’s close. People weren’t writing things down in 1865. For one thing, few people did anything they can be proud of with those two months. For another, most of them had run out of paper the previous fall. Most memoirists talk at length about the forties and fifties, then say: “The war came. That was a bad time. I hauled cotton to Mexico. In 1868 –“ and off they go into the boom years.
What were your favourite childhood books and why?
Does anybody really have a favourite book? And are there really discernible reasons? Little Women is huge in my life. Louisa May Alcott knew a lot of things that my mother didn’t understand and I needed to know. I started reading Alcott when I was 7 and have never stopped. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it, but Carol Kendall’s The Gammage Cup blew me away when I was twelve. The first time I checked it out of the library I read it five times! Something about the way she told the story – a balance of frankness and subtlety - misfits and cliques, action, one of the few emotionally mature love stories I’ve ever read folded into it. Not romance, just love. The Lord of the Rings, of course, though it doesn’t hit its stride till the Mines of Moria. I cut my teeth on Victorians, so I knew how to wallow in Tolkien’s style and get the most out of it. I love that there’s always more to it however often I read it, that as huge and sprawling as it is everything holds together; and I love Sam, who is a hero because he isn’t heroic and doesn’t go looking at big pictures. The next step and then next one, okay this is the end of all things but don’t you think we should move away from the mouth of this volcano? I feel bigger at the end of LotR; exalted. Also Narnia. And Oz – oh, Dorothy is the Great American Heroine! I’d go to the ends of the earth with her.
But I loved, and love, so many books there’s nothing to do but shut up about it.
How do you keep in touch with your audience?
I don’t as much as I’d like. I have the website and the blog (but nobody comments on the blog and anyway middle schoolers aren’t blog-readers generally), and I’ll do school visits if I can. I don’t answer fan mail as often as I should, but that’s not entirely my fault, as so often I get it in batches forwarded from the publisher two or three years after it’s written. I’m not what you’d call a people person, though. It’s hard for me to keep in touch with individuals; big amorphous groups like “my audience” are hard to envision, much less reach out to. But I do my best to be approachable.
First of all, there are a lot of children’s books that specifically focus on climate change. However, the majority of them are non-fiction. This list looks at 15 of the best stories about the environment, global warming and related green issues.
