First Draft Episode #266: Adele Griffin
August 18, 2020
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Adele Griffin, two-time National Book Award honoree and author of almost thirty books for Young Adult and middle grade readers, including The Unfinished Life of Addison Stone, The Becket List, and Sons of Liberty and Where I want to Be.
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Welcome to First Draft with me, Sarah Enni. This week, I'm talking to Adele Griffin, two-time National Book Award honoree and author of almost 30 books for young adult and middle-grade readers, including The Unfinished Life of Addison Stone, The Vampire Island series, The Becket List, and Sons of Liberty, and Where I Want To Be.
I so loved what Adele had to say about how she has seen publishing change over the course of her career. How her life as a young writer would have been so different if social media had been around, and her totally unique hand dot writing process. You kind of have to hear her explain it - it makes sense.
Everything Adele and I talk about on today's episode can be found in the show notes. First Draft participates in affiliate programs, that's specifically bookshop.org. The benefit to that is when you shop through and buy books through the links on FirstDraftPod.com, a portion of the proceeds support the show and independent bookstores at no additional cost to you. If you'd like to donate directly to FirstDraft either on a one-time or monthly basis, you can do that at paypal.me/FirstDraftPod.
I hope you've been listening to the Track Changes episodes that have been dropping in the First Draft feed the last few months. The latest episode, which came out last week, was about Marketing and Publicity and it seems to have sparked a lot of interest.
If you're looking to get even more in-depth about the publishing industry I've also created the Track Changes newsletter where every Thursday, sometimes Friday, I share more of the information that I gathered in researching for this project. All of which is just to contextualize the industry that you're in and to kind of hopefully give you a little more confidence as you move forward in your writing career. You can sign up for a 30-day free trial of the newsletter and learn more about both Track Changes projects @FirstDraftPod.com/TrackChanges.
Okay, now please sit back, relax, and enjoy my conversation with Adele Griffin.
Sarah Enni: All right. Hi Adele. How are you?
Adele Griffin: Hi, Sarah. I'm good.
Sarah Enni: Good. It's so nice to meet you again. I like to start my interviews with a little bit of bio. So I'm gonna go way back to the beginning of where were you born and raised?
Adele Griffin: I was born in Philadelphia. My dad was in the army and so I was raised kind of all over the world, California, D.C., Panama. It depended on where he was sent, he was in Special Forces. And then back to Pennsylvania after my parents' divorce.
Sarah Enni: Okay. How old were you at that point?
Adele Griffin: Fifteen, so a little bit of high school and then college in Philly. And then off to New York.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. So, you have had a very illustrious career in publishing books and yet you are someone that was kind of difficult for me to research for this interview.
Adele Griffin: Because I'm pre-online.
Sarah Enni: Pre-online, and I couldn't find as many interviews and things like that. So I'm gonna be doing a little exploring with you and asking, cause I genuinely don't know.
Adele Griffin: That's really funny.
Sarah Enni: But let's back up, actually, before I start talking about college and onto working in publishing, I want to know about how reading and writing was a part of your young life.
Adele Griffin: Sure. I think a lot of my joy in becoming the reader that I was as a kid was because we moved around so much and libraries tended to keep hold of some of the same series. And even though with military television and different places that I moved not being consistent, the library was always consistent. So if I wanted to do Nancy Drew in Fayetteville, North Carolina, I could still get the next book in the Nancy Drew series out in Fort Ord, California. So no matter where I went on the army base, there would be the series books.
And I could feel that sense of my old friends reclaiming in the pages of, usually, mysteries. Agatha Christie or Nancy Drew was big, Anne of Green Gables, but I didn't even care. It was really just the sense of continuing my private little world of stories. Even as I was constantly, well, we were all constantly the new kids coming in and everything was unfamiliar, but the books were familiar. So always I loved a library.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Did you find yourself most often reading series, do you think, like seeking out?
Adele Griffin: I think for a time, middle-grade, that was a big time for series. And then I was so hooked on libraries as places to read that when I got to college, I loved my college library and it just felt like this is where I will read. And this is where I'll like be with my big pack of Twizzlers until they kick me out. Like a library was always sane.
I worked in a library in high school for a little bit. And so it just made a kind of a sense to hold onto all the things that I loved, which was quiet, and peace, and books, and being by myself.
Sarah Enni: I like that the libraries are kind of always a little bit the same, even though they're all different, which is very sweet.
Adele Griffin: Yes, they are. When we founded a little book festival a few years ago, the OMG Book Festival, we always have a field trip to the library, which was my favorite part of it. And I love to see the libraries of different cities.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I love that. And I'm definitely gonna ask about that in a little bit cause that's so fun. Oh my gosh, I read that, this is one thing I did find in my research. I read that you would write novels to your grandma, or to your grandparents.
Adele Griffin: I did! I used to not get to see my grandparents except once a year, usually because we were so far away. And so it was a way of keeping something going, knowing that I was going to present my grandmother with this big, terrible book in December. Because we usually, if we could, try to get back to my grandparents. And she was a school principal. She was really such as an enthusiastic supporter of these terribly... they were so overwrought. They were all plagiarized from the Bronte's.
They're just illustrated with so many different plot lines that you couldn't possibly know what was going on. I don't know, they were like weird Gothic thought experiments. My grandmother read them. She read them on the night, on the night that I presented, and then she would review and talk to me about them. And it gave me such a thrill. It was so validating.
She seemed to realize how important this was for me to get all of this feedback. And I loved her so much and I respected her as a reader. She read so much. And I don't know what, she and my grandfather were probably laughing their heads off, but she was so kind and really thoughtful. And I got addicted to that feeling. So that all year I would think about, "Oh, I wonder what she's gonna think about..." Because she would give me such a granular read, critique really. A kind... the critique that you want, you know? Affirming. "You're so talented."
Sarah Enni: Yes, a very good beta reader.
Adele Griffin: Yes.
Sarah Enni: And part of the reason to bring that up is just to illustrate that at a young age, you were also creatively writing and expressing yourself that way.
Adele Griffin: Yes. Long form. I loved writing novels. I was not very interested in being a reporter. I worked at the school papers, but I really loved fiction and writing fiction. And I was sort of unwavering.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I love that because I think a lot of people are at that age, certainly also writing Bronte inspired, maybe poems or things like that. But that is like, "We're getting 200 pages in this year." That's a commitment.
Adele Griffin: It was. And I loved the feeling of completing. I really enjoy the feeling of winding it all up. And it's hard even for me today to abandon something. Even if I feel like, "Oh, this isn't going anywhere." I'll plow through. Write the fizzled-out wrong ending. And then I'll put it on a shelf before I abandon in the middle of it. I'll make all the characters come to some kind of conclusion. And won't do anything with it, just so that everybody ends. It's a little OCD.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. They can rest in your own mind.
Adele Griffin: They can just be somewhere and then they live on my hard drive forever.
Sarah Enni: Wow. I love that. I very rarely run into people that say that they love, and are driven, by endings.
Adele Griffin: It's just a little rest for them. You know, they have to find their way through. Maybe it's a fear of being lost. I don't know.
Sarah Enni: Maybe. I want to ask about, what did you study in college? What did you think you were going to...?
Adele Griffin: My dad was really gunning for me to study political science. And I think because my parents had divorced and he lived in Honduras and Panama and Frankfurt, and he was just really out of touch. And I think that was a miscalculation for me to be a poli-sci major. It was really just to sort of say, "Look! Look at me." And I took that degree and didn't know what to do with it. So I found an ad in The Village Voice to be an editorial assistant at Macmillan. And the old Macmillan building was 866 Third Avenue. And then I found an apartment, like a little sublet over a deli, on Third and 56th.
And I didn't know New York City at all, but I recognized that, "Oh, if your job is on Third and 53rd and your apartment is on Second and 56th, I could walk. So I moved, I got the job. I got the apartment. I mean, when I say apartment that's very loose, it was like a space. It was like a crawl space over a deli. And then I moved and just started working for Judith Whipple and Beverly Rheingold who were at Macmillan in the nineties.
Sarah Enni: That is amazing. That's amazing that you found it in The Village Voice. Had you been thinking about books or publishing or writing?
Adele Griffin: I was thinking about New York. I was thinking, "What am I gonna do with this poli-sci degree? I'm not good at anything that would draw me to any kind of job that this degree was presenting." But I loved reading and I knew I could be an editorial assistant, that made sense. But mostly it was just this real will to move to New York. I had enormous romanticism about it and loved reading about like, old... that's why my apartment is sometimes a disco because I read a lot about old seventies discos and Studio 54 in New York. And I thought, "Oh, this will be nightclubs." And I mean, I never went to nightclubs, but I had to be at a place, I had to have proximity to nightclubs. So it was everything. I loved that time.
My friend ended up moving and then we got an apartment together, she and I. My friend from high school. And we had a couple of great years. And then I lived by myself here and then met my husband and we never left. I mean, we moved to Brooklyn. That was our big move.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Yeah. Wow. That's amazing. I mean, it's really special when people find where they're supposed to be and actually it works.
Adele Griffin: Yes. Well, the idea of permanence was very exciting to me. I think when you're always living kind of packing boxes and packing up and moving and in the army, you would have furnished homes too. So you never had to really, you wouldn't get attached to things. And in a way I'm still not attached to things, but I loved the feeling of what does it feel like to have a neighborhood? I loved Sesame Street. I loved that neighborhood and Brooklyn reminds me of living in Sesame Street a little bit.
Sarah Enni: This is amazing, assistant editor, you get the gig. And I have a very romantic vision of publishing during that time. What was it like getting started there and how did you acclimate to the industry?
Adele Griffin: It was a time of great change because we were going online, you with the AOL and everybody shared one computer and we had a typesetter and that was changing. And it was a little bit strange to be at Macmillan because then Simon and Schuster took over in '94. I think a lot of jobs, what I saw, was publishing kind of cleaned house and it was sort of scary to see just the whole department, and all these people who had been there for a long time, get wiped out by just this day where everybody got fired.
And because I was in such a lowly position, I immediately found another lowly position at Hyperion. But it was transitioning. We were logging slush pile onto computers. And it had never happened before that the slush pile was now getting into these... we were putting things into automated systems, or the managing editor was putting things onto spreadsheets. And it had gone from never that to these, now they would be such antiquated systems, but it was big.
The fax machine always going. And the fax machine was the most important piece of machinery in the office. So it was really weird. There was a lot more talking on the phone. There was a lot more paper, physical paper, I'm guessing. And I was in charge, like all editorial assistants, were in charge of just logging because of this enormous amount of paper we were responsible for. A lot of record keeping that you could do it with one hand in half an hour, but it could be, you know, four or five hours in a day.
So it was, you know, old and creaky watching those creaky systems start to streamline. I didn't realize it was any particular time I was living through, but it doesn't bear any resemblance to the way a WeWork looks.
Sarah Enni: Oh my gosh, yeah!
Adele Griffin: Or what anything looks like at all today,
Sarah Enni: And clean offices can exist because everything is on your computer. It's funny, I was looking at, for some reason, this collection of images of the president's desk over time, over different administrations. And it was like, all that paperwork, all those ink pots.
Adele Griffin: Oh, fascinating. Ink pots!
Sarah Enni: You know, now it's just like Obama with his Mac book, you know?
Adele Griffin: Everything on a Mac book. Yeah. I mean, everything was so cluttered. Every office was so cluttered and shoe boxes you would have with things. So it really was, everybody looked like a nutty professor in publishing.
Sarah Enni: Which is part of the charm and romance of that industry.
Adele Griffin: It was, I mean, it was vastly ineffective, but there was something kind of charming about it, I guess, now that I don't have to do it.
Sarah Enni: That's true. I know all those paper cuts, dry skin, I can imagine.
Adele Griffin: Yeah. It was just crazy.
Sarah Enni: So you were in the industry kind of seeing the nuts and bolts of how books get made. I'd love to just hear what kind of an impact that made on you and how you started thinking about writing yourself?
Adele Griffin: What I realized pretty early on was how fascinated I was by copy. Writing flap-copy and back-copy, and how reader reports became the only things I wanted to do. And there was so much else that would have helped me had I been more editorially focused, that I didn't like. So I loved that I started recognizing what I liked to do. Who I was versus what I didn't like to do, and how that kept pushing me toward more of a writing job.
I hadn't realized that going in. It was a big thing to think, "Oh, I should maybe write, because all I like to do is write." That seems so obvious, but it was a striking thought. And I started writing after work and I had a lot of interest in writing about Panama because I had been an army brat in Panama. And I thought this could be my setting. And I was reading all the time. I was reading a lot of middle-grade and thinking about voice and what my voice was.
And I think it's interesting to write when you are young. It seems like a lot of talent in young adult and middle-grade comes from younger people. There's a straddling between childhood and full adulthood. It's that sort of, I don't know, it's this charming Peter Pan moment where you can speak to young people, you haven't forgotten, but you have a grip on language.
And I think that's what defined a lot of my first books was that youthful voice. If I went back and read some of my early things, I don't know that I would even know who that was. And you know, who is that anymore? That was my twenties. And so many books, so many authors in their twenties have come out with wonderful things that really, now that I have a tween of my own, I could really see how a youthful voice is so energetic.
Sarah Enni: Yes. And I totally agree with what you're saying that you get into your early twenties or throughout your twenties, and you can remember what it's like to be a teen, but you're also have processed it or are processing it. And then your voice speaking to YA is, I think, really useful. It's like wonderful to have people who are freshly out of teenage-dom talk about what it means and be very relatable.Adele Griffin: Yes. It's the relatability and I think it's a window that closes a little bit. I don't know that I would know, you know, kids born in [chuckles] when would they have been born? '05?
[Both laugh]
Sarah Enni: Yes.
Adele Griffin: [Laughing] I don't know what their childhoods where. I can't make a connection there. And when I look at what my 12 year old is reading, those are all very young voices and interesting voices that I couldn't even crack into. Although I have to say, I still love reading them because I love seeing his eyes so open to the love of reading and the joy of finding a great book.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. And Rainy Season, I think is the...?
Adele Griffin: Yeah, Rainy Season was my first book and I sent it under a different name and I sent it to Boston. I was so humiliated. And I don't know, that feels sort of old-fashioned too, to not be able to have ownership. I thought, "Who am I a lowly editorial assistant writing my book? I can't send it to anywhere in the state. I'll send it to Houghton Mifflin."
Sarah Enni: "To anywhere in the state!"
Adele Griffin: I was like, "Duh, my name will be... The shame, the shame of my impudence." I don't know what I was thinking.
Sarah Enni: This is really interesting. I just got the opportunity to talk to Elizabeth Eulberg (author of The Great Shelby Holmes, Past Perfect Life, and more) on Saturday.
Adele Griffin: Oh, Elizabeth!
Sarah Enni: Yeah, and she expressed very similar... she wrote in secret for five years, I think. Didn't tell anybody cause she was working at Scholastic and she'd told no one that she was daring to write because she thought, "Who am I?"
Adele Griffin: Yes, it is a who am I? It is a feeling of, "I can't own this space." And all the respect that you have for established authors and the thought that you could think that you could touch their space. And so, yeah, I'm sure that... it's funny. Elizabeth must have [chuckles] she's funny.
And so yeah, I sent it, I sent it with my dad's last name. So I was cloak and dagger and I just braced myself for the rejection. And instead, the editor I had sent it to called me and said, "I think we can publish this." And I was in Seattle, I was visiting my boyfriend, and I started crying in the bathroom. I was so excited. And his parents were like, "What's wrong with you? Get out."
Sarah Enni: Was that your now husband? Or was it a different boyfriend?
Adele Griffin: No it wasn't. I then also sneaked a call to my now husband.
[Both laughing]
Sarah Enni: Oh, that's the juicy stuff.
Adele Griffin: Yeah, that's the good stuff of kid's books. I was like [loud whispering], "I sold my book!"
Sarah Enni: I love how you're talking about kind of thinking about where your voice fit or what your voice was and finding that. But also, I'm so intrigued to hear what the state of YA was then? Middle-grades always been so rich, but the YA that we know now, hasn't been around for very long.
Adele Griffin: That's true. There wasn't even a thought about writing for teens. This is before Twilight or John Green (author of The Fault in Our Stars, Looking for Alaska, and many more). I don't remember that I was thinking that I was writing for YA. I was writing middle-grade, really, because my protagonist was 12. And I didn't think about categorizing YA until I had written 10 years later, because then I went into a series, The Witch Twin series, and I kept writing twelve-year-old protagonists, eleven-year-old protagonist.
And then in 2005, I wrote my first 17 year old protagonist and my editor at the time, Nancy Paulson over at Penguin, said, "You know, this is a young adult book. This is something different. We're going to do it with this different cover." And I thought, "Oh, I hadn't been... I just thought I'd just write about some high school kids. I didn't realize I was..."
Sarah Enni: Switching categories.
Adele Griffin: Yeah. It felt like it was just something that was coming from within, intuitively, to write about this pair of sisters who happened to be teens. And then I think what happened was because that book ended up, you know, I did publicity for the book and then I became a lot more familiar with, "Oh, this is what Sarah Dessen is doing. And Meg Cabot is doing. And this is this whole big world."
I really wasn't online and doing a lot of socializing, really, with the YA people. It wasn't until a few years even after that, that I really connected to all my colleagues and friends. I was just a little bit quiet, off to the side, still an army kid.
Sarah Enni: Right. I mean, were you still working in the industry?
Adele Griffin: I had by then stopped, but I was collaborating with my friend Lisa Brown. We were doing this collaborative, she's a graphic novelist, and we had been working on this hybrid book for a while. So I felt connected, but that wasn't really a straight-forward YA. And it was something that just sort of had off-roaded me a little bit from thinking about, again, that my books were YA.
I thought, "Oh, I just want to do this hybrid book." Which was my next project after Where I Want To Be. Although I did a few things in between. And I was writing screenplays with my brother and that was also really interesting. And I loved doing that for a time.
Sarah Enni: See! I didn't know you did that. I don't want to skip over Sons of Liberty which came relatively early in your career. If I wrote all this stuff down right. I couldn't get to all of them.
Adele Griffin: Yeah, that's right. It was 1997.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, '97. And you'd done Vampire Island and The Witch Twins.
Adele Griffin: Yes. I love those series. Those were really fun.
Sarah Enni: I love that you have a broad array of types of books that you write. And Rainy Season, your debut, was a little more serious and much like a lot of the other YA that we still see from you. But then you did a lot of fun, younger series stuff, too. I'm just interested in what was the appeal to doing both? Or was it your frame of mind at the time? Or how did you think about balancing those things?
Adele Griffin: I did The Witch Twins because I had just gotten married and my two identical twin nieces were suddenly this wonderful part of my life. And it was such a straight line to wanting to impress them and be the cool aunt. So I wrote those really quickly and had The Witch Twin series, and then Vampire Island a little bit more of the same. I had this built-in audience of two little girls who just were really fun.
And that was a nice series books, you know? It just made sense to me. They were fun to do. And I loved keeping the adventure going. In fact, right now I'm working on the second book in the middle-grade. There's something that is comforting to me about series. And I will always, I think, go back if I keep writing books. It's hard for me to stay away from series, or brainstorming with other people about their series, or reading series with my kids. I think of it as very much of a homecoming, in terms of reading, to get the next, and the next book.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. It's addictive in the best way. I want to talk about Sons of Liberty. And I want to talk about it a little bit in specific. So if you don't mind, this is like many years later, but do you mind pitching that story for us?
Adele Griffin: It was about two brothers who live in a violent home, up in Rhode Island, with an abusive father. And they befriend, or they've been friends, with a kid in the neighborhood who has a sort of different kind of abuse going on in her home. And she runs away from home and they help her. It's sort of a very sad story, I guess. That's a very sad pitch, but I think it's also about this friendship. It's really a book about friendship and loyalty and an adventure, but underpinned, probably, by these two parallel problematic family situations.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. And it was, like I said, a little bit early in your career and then Sons of Liberty was long listed for the National Book Award. Is that right? It was a finalist for the National Book Award.
Adele Griffin: Yeah. It was a finalist.
Sarah Enni: Which is really special and a big deal.
Adele Griffin: Oh yeah. You know, It was fun to sort of meet people. I hadn't really met anybody. And I can't remember much about the award ceremony or anything. I was quieter then than I am now, but I didn't like any of doing that. I was a very quiet person. I thought it was sort of a horrible thing that had happened to me. And I think in an age of sort of the friendliness, well at times, of social media, that things like that would be a lot more comfortable. But it felt like, "Ugh, now I have to do all this weird stuff. And I can't write because I'm going to a lunch."
I know that sounds really bratty, but it was actually terror. I was really scared to meet people. I didn't like it. I was very shy. I was very young. And I was embarrassed.
Sarah Enni: Why?
Adele Griffin: I don't know. I didn't like the attention.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. It can be hard. Book world doesn't attract people who are always bounding into the spotlight.
Adele Griffin: Right, right. I see a lot more of people who feel more comfortable in the spotlight, and I just didn't have any readiness for it. I didn't even have a wedding. I didn't have birthday parties. I don't like stuff like that.
Sarah Enni: And that's actually a really good point. And I just got the opportunity to talk to Kate DiCamillo (is one of six people to win two Newbery Medals, for her novels The Tale of Despereaux and Flora & Ulysses, and author of Newbery Honor book Because of Winn-Dixie, National Book Award finalist The Tiger Rising, as well as New York Times bestselling novels The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, The Magician’s Elephant, the Mercy Watson series, and more. DiCamillo was the U.S. National Ambassador for Young People's Literature for 2014 and 2015. Listen to her First Draft interview here) who was so wonderful.
And I kind of asked her the same thing, like, "How does your life change after something like that happens?" And she was saying like, "Well, it comes with a lot of responsibility or... not writing." Like engagements and commitments that you make. Which is real. I'm just interested in how that changed... did it change your perspective on your own career? Or how did it impact you?
Adele Griffin: I remember thinking, "Wow, I'm a terrible marketer."
[Both laughing].
Adele Griffin: And thinking how important marketing was, and how I was not going to be good at it, was really hard. I couldn't seem to make myself be better at it. Even when I was doing more school visits or attempting to do a blog for a minute-and-a-half. And I really didn't enjoy that and I felt exposed. And so that was hard because I felt like I had almost brought it on myself by having this book need to be more in the world. And the traveling was really, I wasn't a good traveler. Things that I feel like, "This is almost like a scrapbook from someone else's life." But when I was in my twenties, I really didn't like talking in public. I didn't like panels.
And when I say dislike, I mean, abject fear of panic attacks. So scared to get on trains and planes. So scared, but also dutiful in wanting to be a company person and respect the publishing house, but battling very real fears of being out in the world. So I think that was just a part of my journey.
These things weren't in place by age 40, that was all sort of over. But that was, to me, the wonderful and the bad happened together in terms of recognizing that I had to go promote my books, and feeling completely unequipped to do it. That writing and marketing did not feel like they had any intersection at all. In fact, I was being called upon to do a job that I was shockingly bad at.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, no, and a lot of people talk now about how writers have to be their own publicists, or their own brand managers, or whatever. But yeah, it was not as de rigueur then, as it is now. Or as obvious or easy, I don't know.
Adele Griffin: Yeah, there is something, I think, that people can find their space. And you can do things today, I mean, by doing book giveaways or figuring out, "Oh, what..." I know a lot more people. I think it was the loneliness and the fear of checking into a hotel and not actually knowing where I was. But Google maps really changed my life. Knowing people changed my life, knowing that I could be in touch. I was really at a loss at how to network when I didn't know anybody.
And today, none of these things would be fierce. I think it's almost quaint and sad and sweet to think about myself that way. Because what would be more fun than, you know, hanging out with a bunch of friends and doing stuff and promoting? That all seems great. But in the nineties it was terrible. I don't know if it felt terrible or if it actually was terrible, maybe it was some combination of the two. But none of those things feel the same today.
Sarah Enni: That's so interesting. And really interesting to be at a point where you can have perspective on that. And yeah, I don't know, I like that. You're bringing up a lot of the ways that the social media we're inundated with now, can also be a positive thing.
Adele Griffin: It can be. It can be familiar and connective. And certainly if it had been in place, even a little bit when I started, I would have been greatly helped by it.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. There was an interview I read with you, you said that your books should come with a warning, "Unlikeable female" sticker on them.
Adele Griffin: Oh! [Laughs] When did I say that? That sounds very glib of me.
Sarah Enni: I think it was possibly in the context of you talking with another writer about exploring, and exploring female relationships too. And it struck me that many of your books have dealt with sisters or siblings or friendships that are changing over time.
Adele Griffin: That's true. And I have also been very interested in [pauses] you know, when I was in school, I was on financial aid. I was a work-study kid and I had a strange shame of it. Sort of wanting to present myself differently and wanting to be aspirational. Hanging out with probably groups of people that I felt like, "If they knew that I was running off to my thousandth job."
So sort of a strange YA plot that I had created in my own life, I think carried through in a lot of the books that I wrote about. The lies, the creating false identities, sort of this illusory idea of who you want to present yourself as versus who you are. And being false versus an authentic person in the world. How to be authentic. All the things that I aspired and wanted to be and how that became sort of a Teflon.
I was very interested in writing those kinds of characters for a while. And when I looked at, I would say more looking at college and then rewriting it into YA, I definitely went through a phase of looking at that and thinking, "What was I doing that I was so phony and so striving and so false?" You know? And I think that that was a whole other phase of writing YA for me.
And I disliked it in myself when I thought about it and sort of had a reckoning with it and thought, "Oh, this isn't what I would want my kids to be like." But there is something sort of scrappy about it too, you know, wanting just, "I want to run in this pack. I want to hang out with these people. So I'm just going to pretend."
Sarah Enni: But for you, when you look at your career and your continued work, are there markers of growth or change? Or a definition of success that you've come to, or that you think about?
Adele Griffin: That's a really good question. As I am working on this manuscript that I've been working on for the past couple of years, I know that when I finally crack it and figure it out, that the success will be right here on this, like nothing will equal what that will feel like when I read it in my living room by myself. And I think, "I did it! I failed it, and I failed it, and I failed it and I kept showing up for it. And it sucked for so long. And now I got it." And nothing will be better than that moment.
So I agree. My markers are so internal. There's just nothing that could happen that would make that day better. And in fact, I think that when things happen outside of that, I feel a little bit clenched up from them because I think, "Well, now, what does that mean?" You know, "What does this review even mean?" A review can make me feel, in some ways, not as upset as something bad, but it can make me feel disorganized and ruffled-up, you know, sort of, "Oh, no! Well, my next book is bad. I hope people know."
Sarah Enni: That's really funny.
Adele Griffin: So I don't think I have any kind of good, positive connection to what's coming at me because I can't control it. And I love all the feelings of writing.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Well, let's dive into that because I can't help but ask how in the world you managed to be so productive? You have written many books. Many, many books and consistently. So I'm just curious about what your process was? Or how, or if, it has changed over time and how you kind of commit yourself to your work?
Adele Griffin: It certainly changed having kids because I had to adjust a little bit of my life to their schedules and I stopped being a night owl because I like to be awake for their awake time. And I used to write from like 10:00 PM to 2:00 AM. That was my old schedule. I loved night. And now I won't even touch this laptop after 6:30. And I've been, I always have these weird habits, markers. But then I stopped doing it. Now I'm back on it where I write 30 minutes, sometimes 20 minutes, on a timer. And then I put a dot on my hand.
Sarah Enni: Really?
Adele Griffin: Yeah. And then I add up the dots at the end of the day.
Sarah Enni: That's amazing.
Adele Griffin: Just so that time doesn't trickle away, you know?
Sarah Enni: Right. Are you looking to get a certain number?
Adele Griffin: I like to get between 10 and 15 dots on 20 minutes.
Sarah Enni: Okay. Yeah.
Adele Griffin: And then less if I'm doing 30 minutes, eight would be great. But 20 minutes feels also just like that I'm not diving as deep in. I've been a little bit more 20 minutes. And then I make the dots...I'm usually working on two things. So I have to add the dots from one project to the other.
Sarah Enni: They're different colors.
Adele Griffin: I know it's like punching a clock, but otherwise I don't know what the day was. And I've also stopped... I used to do 'to do" lists every day and I've changed that. I decided that was really too hard on me to kind of poke at myself this way. So I've changed that into more of an observational, loose journal of thinking And not of just self-reproach. The way I feel like "to do" lists do.
Sarah Enni: Do you still approach it in like the morning before you write? Or is it a reflection after you've written?
Adele Griffin: It's all through the day. I just thought, "I need something that's a little bit more diary and a little less laundry list-y. Even if it's a "to do" list editorially, I've gotten rid of that aspect. It wasn't helping me. It felt mean-spirited, but I just stopped doing that. So that's been a big, big change for me.
Sarah Enni: Wow! I love that. I like when people change their routines or are interrogating how they have always done things.
Adele Griffin: Yeah, it was good not to open a book and say, "Fix this!" You know, I thought, "Oh, come on. I don't know if I can fix it today."
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Oh my gosh. The number of times, I mean, in Track Changes, I'll be like, "This chapter's terrible."
Adele Griffin: Yeah. There's so many opportunities to just give yourself a smack. So I thought, "I'm just, I'm done with that now." And also, I think probably giving a little more time. I would have called this project that I'm working on a failure a couple of years ago. And I think just saying maybe it just needed time. Maybe it needs more readers. Maybe it needs a deeper think.
Sarah Enni: I love that. I mean, I want to ask about what you're working on now and what you have been working on for a while. The most recent stuff... I do want to ask about the Becket List, it's just such a sweet....
Adele Griffin: I loved working on Becket List.
Sarah Enni: Do you mind pitching that one for us?
Adele Griffin: It's about a family that moves from the city to a farm and Becket Branch the sort of the middle child, she's a twin but she has a middle child personality, has to use her city smarts to make sense of this completely new environment. And she has this enormous enthusiasm for life, and she's just dialed up to 11 all the time and she's a little bit unfiltered, but she's a great character. She's so spirited. And she just brings kind of a "first day of my life" to every day that she wakes up and I really enjoyed doing Becket List.
And now the next book, All Pets Allowed, and LeUyen Pham is the illustrator and has, I think, created this wonderful visual component to the book that makes this next, as I work on it, I keep thinking, "Oh, I'm going to put in this character and this animal, which has made this next book in progress, really, really fun, a really fun project.
She and her brother get pets for their ninth birthday.
Sarah Enni: Oh my gosh.
Adele Griffin: It's so fun. I love writing for middle-grade. Middle-grade's always fun. And unlike YA I don't think that that window closes, I think you can rediscover a love of middle-grade as a parent. It doesn't feel as mysterious or it's more generous. I don't know exactly what it is, but just as I probably won't write anymore YA, I feel that I could keep writing chapter, even picture books, early middle-grade, older middle-grade, that all feels still accessible to me.
Sarah Enni: I am so interested to talk about that because I think that's been expressed by, you know, you're not alone in feeling that I don't think. And middle-grade has this timelessness to it. Middle-grade has always been a rich category, whereas YA has shifted a lot, I think, over the last 15, 20 years.
But there's also some element of like, especially with picture books and chapter books, like parents are reading that to kids. It's this sort of interactive inter-generational thing. And YA is sort of so singular, I think. It's meant for you as the reader. And it's not necessarily as much about sharing. I dunno, I'm just coming up with that and it might not be true.
Adele Griffin: I think you're right though. I think it's a private journey and the wonderful thing about YA expanding to so many different voices is that it is private and singular. And my 12 year old's YA is very specific to, you know, he is a transgendered kid and the material that's available to him has been... I feel very grateful to it all because it is so eloquent in a delivery of things that I don't know that he could have claimed without some of these books.
He's given them to me to read. I feel like I'm a better parent for having read them and I could no more write into what he needs. You know, it's a closed door for me now. But I'm also so happy that I'm not. That's not a good idea for me to write that kind of fiction. I don't think that I would give an authentic voice to that fiction.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I want to ask about that experience, or that feeling that you're expressing, that the window is closed maybe on your time to contribute to YA the way that you want to. I mean, I'm just interested to hear how that thought came to you or how you grappled with that.
Adele Griffin: I think it's a combination of having a child and seeing my child's friends and seeing what they're reading and recognizing that what they're reading is just nothing that I could do. You know, just the disconnect, it's a generational disconnect. And he just read something, Wilder Girls, he just read that, it's new. And it's a great YA, exciting. And I could never have, you know, I just couldn't. And it felt like that old, the best feeling of what YA is where the energy is just jumping off the page. I wish I could remember the name Rory anyway... (Rory Power).
Sarah Enni: We'll link to it in the show notes for sure.
Adele Griffin: Okay. And his grandmother read it and I read it and we were like, "Oh, we love to be part of this." But I was saying to my mom, "It's amazing. I could never have written that. I would love to have had that fever." I hope that, you know, 20 years ago that somebody had that feeling for one of my books, but I never think that I could capture that today. I will only speak to my personal experience... my window closed.
Sarah Enni: Yes, that's fair. That's fair. I'm interested in what you have been writing and how you've kind of been thinking about the next phase of your career?
Adele Griffin: I'm writing an adult novel that I've been really fascinated by. And it's been really interesting. I think every time I write it again, I learn new things. And I'm in it for the long haul. I think once I finish this and get this the way I want it, or even if I don't, it feels a little bit like I'm changing how I write. That I'm coming out of this experience learning how to do something in a different way. You know, it feels like a clear shift.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Has that felt gratifying? I mean, you've talked about writing it several times over a couple of years.
Adele Griffin: It's a very day by day. At least it keeps me really interested. And I'm happy to have Becket just so that I can reset. And I've been writing some essays about parenting, and I think those have been helpful for me just because I have this child, I have two kids, but my non-binary child has been really [pauses], I want to keep paying close attention. And sometimes the way I pay attention is to write it down.
Sarah Enni: I do want to ask about OMG Book Fest and not everybody has started a book festival. I'd love to hear about its origin and how it was putting a big event like that together.
Adele Griffin: The origin was funny, I think, because it was New Year's Day and I had Sarah (Mlynowski, author of Just a Girl and a Boy in a Little Canoe, the Whatever After series, and co-author of Upside-Down Magic) and Julia DeVillers (author of Liberty Porter, First Daughter series and the coauthor of the Trading Faces series) and Michael Buckley (author of The Sisters Grimm series, the National Espionage, Rescue, and Defense Society (N.E.R.D.S.), and I were all up at, um, we had a little place upstate and they were all just there.
We had done a New Year's Eve dinner and they were there the next day. They hadn't gone home! No, they were invited to stay. And Sarah said, "I want more than anything to do a book festival." It was certainly Sarah. It came out of her mouth. She said, "And I'm going to name it OMG, how can we do it?"
And I mean, she really gets a ball rolling pretty hard because she had assigned us all jobs. By the time everybody had left, we all had to figure out... we were gonna do it in New York. But then last minute, Julia, who's from Columbus, Ohio said, "You know, I know a lot of small businesses who could maybe sponsor for the swag bags. And I know a school and I can make a lot of these puzzle pieces fit." We were having a very hard time figuring out how to do it in New York City.
So the first one was so fun. And it wasn't easy, it was nuts. It was a bananas amount of work. But it kicked off the idea that it would be a traveling pop-up just by virtue of the fact that we had inaugurated it in Columbus. And it really worked well. And after the election, when we were saying, "This great big United States of ours, what is it all about?" And it was just that conversation was coming up.
And so we did it in Denver and then we did it in St. Louis. And I'm not part of this one this year, but it's in Chicago and in partnership with Anderson's, which is always great. So I'm sure it'll be wonderful. I might even just go out and just go. It's really worthy. And Christina Soontornvat is also now a big part of it too, and has really gotten it to be sort of that next step of wonderfulness.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I love that. I want to just ask about what, I mean, I'm kind of jumping around a little bit. I could have organized this better. But about what going forward in your work do you think you'll be looking at? Your middle-grade and YA to this point, a lot of it has been families, siblings, and growing and shifting relationships. I'm just curious if you have any idea of what you want to explore?
Adele Griffin: Well I'm very close with Courtney Sheinmel, and she and I did the Agnes and Clarabell series, which was for younger. And she's a new mom. And I know that she's thinking about a younger audience and Agnes and Clarabell was the youngest that I did. And we were sort of... I love collaboration.
When we did the book festival, that was what was so fun, the collaboration of that. And when I did Picture the Dead, it was collaborating with Lisa Brown. And Courtney and I loved doing that collaboration. So I could see doing something younger and maybe even looking at it for television or some different kind of delivery. But we both bring a lot of very young books and friendship stories. And I think I wouldn't be surprised if she and I hatched some more plans to do something fun with the younger set. She's feeling very inspired right now. And my youngest is seven. So he's still just like a little first grader and it's a fun age.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. It is a fun age. So curious. Well, was there anything else about any of your books or your projects that you wanted to talk about?
Adele Griffin: Oh, I would say, of all of the projects that I loved the most doing was my last YA project, Addison Stone. Where I created the fake biography. And I think that even as I go into doing adult, that's sort of my hinge feeling that I felt like I created this whole person's life with photos. It really sharpened my desire to want to write adult because it felt just that next degree of a whole re-imagining of a world. And sometimes I don't lose myself as much with the younger things. I'm still just authoring it.
But I think when I'm always seeking out the experience of completely losing myself, I almost got myself believing in this fake person. I had co-opted this person's life in photographs and made this hybrid of her. She had all these different people remembering her life. And I thought, "Oh, I love this feeling. I love this feeling. I want to do this again, and again, and again." So that was an interesting project for me, because I think that's what also made me want to stop writing YA and move into writing a longer...
Sarah Enni: Right and Addison was, the full title is?
Adele Griffin: The Unfinished Life of Addison Stone.
Sarah Enni: The Unfinished Life of Addison Stone. I read a lot about that one, all of the artwork you commissioned for it. Tell me if I have this right, but it's a story of a young woman who is no longer with us.
Adele Griffin: She starts out, it's sort of like a memory of this artist who has died. And it's a memoir. And it's a memoir told by all the different people in her life. So it's all these different voices. And then it's friends talking about her. But the fun that I had with it was finding three different artists to create the artwork and then finding a model and going and taking pictures of her. I just took pictures of her with my iPhone and gave her a fake life. And we pretended this was her home and we used the upstairs apartment. And found her fake boyfriends, and fake enemies.
And it was just really almost like a television show. I remember I was setting up something and I thought, "Oh, I loved putting all of these weird things together." And I was chasing something down with it that I thought, "I have to catch the fire of how much I love to do something."
If I don't get super excited about something, I won't do it. Or I'll do it at this sort of this depressed perfunctory way where I'll finish it out and then put it away. But with Addison, I thought, "Oh, there's so much that's available. I want to explore different people's lives." And it just was a real shot in the arm that I needed but really inspired what I'm trying to work on today.
Sarah Enni: That's awesome.
Adele Griffin: It was helpful.
Sarah Enni: It felt, hearing you talk about it, this immersive, almost art experiment as much as it is a novel.
Adele Griffin: Yes. I like the feeling of experimenting. I realized that as much as I love the comfort of a series, and writing a series, it's a completely different part of what I like to do. Which is like at the mac and cheese of a series, knowing that there are not too many twists. If I could, in a perfect day, write one book in a series and then write one book out on a ledge... that's the right dots.
Sarah Enni: I love that. I love that. That is so energizing. And it did feel Ripley-esque a little bit. Like, "Who is this person constructing a reality based on all the different viewpoints? And what's real, what's not? Who thinks what and why."
Adele Griffin: Yes. I loved it. It felt like a clue game. And you know, who was she really? And if I had had another year, I would have probably, or if I had double my budget, I feel like I could have done so much. I would, in some ways, love to go back and do a similar project, but tapped into all the things that I know now that I didn't know then.
But it is interesting because I think a long writing career can hit lots of peaks and troughs, and it can hit these creative ruts. And I'm so aware of how they can very dispiriting. It can be really sort of, "Oh my gosh, I'm not working on anything that I love." And trying to find the love of something again, and fall in love again, is sort of the endless quest to keep going. Because it's very hard to keep going just by punching in.
Sarah Enni: Right. Although it seems like you can make yourself do that.
Adele Griffin: I will punch in, but that's not my best life.
Sarah Enni: Yes. And I'm so excited. We'll have to talk again when you have an adult project.
Adele Griffin: I know that will be a great day.
Sarah Enni: I like to wrap up my interviews with advice. So I would love to just hear perhaps for people who have a couple of books under their belt, or maybe more than that, and are looking to find an enduring sense of purpose or creativity, what advice you have for that person?
Adele Griffin: I think there's a lot of noise. I think it's really hard when you see people getting deals and getting numbers and all of the extraneous things that surround the day that can lead to just making you feel untalented. I think people can really fall back upon themselves and see themselves as just a collection of shortcomings. I know that I can if I pay too much attention, or really any attention at all, to any of that.
And then I feel like, "Ugh, my talent is not enough because so much is happening." And to that, I would say in terms of advice that I give myself, is that I really think talent is overrated. I think it is all about desire and flexing that muscle of just desire. More desire, the will to do it, the will to do it, the tenacity. The attention that you pay to your day and your work are the much more important things. And to not care about that noise and to not care even about the quota of talent within you, and to really make sure that the day is about desire.
Sarah Enni: I love that. I think that's a wonderful message and a good reminder for anybody. Well, this has been so fun Adele I really hope that we get to talk again.
Adele Griffin: Sarah, thank you. I'm gonna hold onto this microphone.
Sarah Enni: It's fun, right?
Adele Griffin: For my whole rest of the year.
Thank you so much to Adele. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @AdeleGriffin. And follow me on both @SarahEnni (Twitter and Instagram), and the show @FirstDraftPod (Twitter and Instagram).
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