First Draft Episode #232: Maureen Johnson
FEBRUARY 4, 2020
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Maureen Johnson is the New York Times bestselling author of of several YA novels, including 13 Little Blue Envelopes, Suite Scarlett, The Name of the Star, and Truly Devious: A Mystery. She has also done collaborative works, such as Let It Snow (with John Green and Lauren Myracle), and The Bane Chronicles (with Cassandra Clare and Sarah Rees Brennan).
Sarah Enni: This episode of First Draft is brought to you by our presenting sponsor, The Slow Novel Lab, an online six-week writing and creativity course taught by Nina LaCour. Nina is the bestselling and Prince winning author of We Are Okay, Hold Still, and more. As well as the creator and host of the writing podcast Keeping a Notebook.
Over The Slow Novel Lab's six-week course, Nina will guide you through writing explorations, craft lessons, video lectures and weekly live Q&A calls with Nina herself. A private moderated forum connects you and your fellow writers, and the weekly calls focus on exactly what you want to know. The lessons and video lectures remain yours to keep. The next six-week course of The Slow Novel Lab begins on February 16th. You can enroll now @ninalacour.com.
Sarah Enni: Welcome to First Draft with me Sarah Enni. This week I'm talking to Maureen Johnson, New York Times bestselling author of several YA novels including 13 Little Blue Envelopes, Suite Scarlet, and The Name of the Star. Maureen's latest book, The Hand on the Wall, wraps up her Truly Devious mystery series. In this episode, Maureen takes on the challenge of talking anyone out of getting an MFA, talks about building a mystery from the ground up, and on the surreality of visiting a movie set based on her book. So please sit back, relax, and enjoy the conversation.
Sarah Enni: Hi Maureen, how are you?
Maureen Johnson: I'm great. Welcome to my hotel room.
Sarah Enni: I am in your hotel room. I'm so grateful that you invited me over. I can't wait to chat.
Maureen Johnson: We'll be going through my things. I want to show you some stuff I keep in my suitcase.
Sarah Enni: I love that. I want to see how you pack for book tours.
Maureen Johnson: Book tours, well, this is what a book tour looks like. But I overpacked. That suitcases is overflowing. Cause on a book tour, you're supposed to bring one small, well-packed, carry on. And I was like, "But what if I brought a big suitcase and then overpack that suitcase. What if we did that instead?"
Sarah Enni: Did you, I'm sure you did see this, that Roxanne Gay recently on Twitter was advocating for your side of things. She was like, "Don't tell me not to check a bag. I'm gonna check a bag."
Maureen Johnson: Yeah, just check a bag. I mean, if you were doing an event every day that you're landing at four and your event is at six, then don't check a bag. But the way that this is set up, is I have enough time and I was like, " You know what? You bring swag for people. You bring some stickers. I got some prints." I got, as you can see, video equipment.
Sarah Enni: Yes. Yeah. You have a whole electronic store.
Maureen Johnson: I have a whole little studio I'm carrying with me and also, I'm going to every climate. From here I'll go to Denver and then from there I'll go to the Philadelphia area, which is freezing. And from there I'll go down to Georgia, which was different coats. I'm just saying this is the truth of it.
Sarah Enni: I actually like to start my interviews way, way, back at the very beginning, which is where were you born and raised?
Maureen Johnson: Philadelphia. Northeast Philadelphia to be specific.
Sarah Enni: As a kid, how was reading and writing part of growing up for you?
Maureen Johnson: It was so much of it. I was definitely a reader. I was definitely an indoor child. Definitely one of those kids that when playing kickball, the ball would bounce off my head because I'd just not engaged with that. I'm like, "I don't know why I have to do this. I don't know why they make me play soccer. There's just no point in that." But yes, I was definitely an indoor child.
Sarah Enni: I feel like from recent interviews I've read with you, you were reading a lot of mysteries.
Maureen Johnson: Yes. I was a giant, giant mystery reader. The book that really forged me that I still read constantly, constantly means I reread it every year or so, is The Westing game, which is a perfect book. The first mystery I ever read was The Hound of the Baskervilles in a small children's edition. It was the first book I read, like full little novel. And I was telling this to somebody out here in LA, a producer I went to go meet with, and I noticed that he had an Edgar award in his office.
And I was like, "You have an Edgar award." And he was like, "It was my grandfather's, he was a pulp, author, pioneer." And I was telling him about this little Sherlock Holmes book, which I have not seen since I was a child. And he turned around and whipped a copy of it off his windowsill. And I burst into tears. I was like [tearful voice], "Oh my god, this is the exact book and I'm holding it again."
I could remember every picture, every line, every drawing. I just dug out a pile of books from our attic of books I had when I was little. And it turns out there was another mystery series that I thought they were library books, but they were mine. And it was called Something Queer In. So the one I loved was called Something Queer in the Library.
And it's these two girl detectives and the drawings. So I got this book down and as I flipped through, I realized how much I had internalized all of the drawings. And that they were so embedded in my memory, it was like I could feel the drawings. It makes me kind of go, "Oh, there's Gwen tapping her braces!" But they were all mystery books. They were Encyclopedia Brown's where you flip to the end where it was always Bugs Meany.
"But how did Bugs Meany do it? And how did Encyclopedia know?" Lame, in retrospect, really lame answers. The one I remember was, so Encyclopedia Brown, if you've never read it, he's a boy detective. And he runs a detective agency out of his garage and you pay him a quarter for a case. And he solves your case. Because every crime is done by this local kid called Bugs Meany.
And I think the first hint is that his name is Bugs Meany, and the second hint is that it's always him. So you get to the end of the little mystery, which is like six, seven pages long. And then it'll say, "How did Encyclopedia know that Bugs did it?" And then you have to figure it out and then you flip to the end. So there's an 'answers in the end' section, which was so great.
And the one I remember it was Bugs Meany committed some crime in a cafe, or an ice cream shop restaurant. And the reason Encyclopedia knew he was lying was because Bugs said he got a hot dog with sauerkraut and mustard on top. But you don't put mustard on top of sauerkraut. And I was like, "Wait a minute, that's not a real solve. Get the hell out of here with that."
Sarah Enni: Not every kid grows up loving mysteries. That's a very particular kind of book and kind of structure. It's almost more interactive.
Maureen Johnson: Yes.
Sarah Enni: Did it serve that role for you?
Maureen Johnson: Yes! There's another series called Herewith the Clues that I got a little bit later. And this series was originally published in the 30's. So these aren't novels. I'm holding up my hands, but you should see, it's a book about eight by eleven. So it's a bigger book, and they're hard cover. And what they are, are dossiers. And it's all photographed, copies of police reports, letters, photographs. There's no story,
Sarah Enni: The case information.
Maureen Johnson: The case information. And usually any story comes through witness statements or police statements. So the first letter will be like, "We are referring this case to..." But it's all from the 30's and it looks very cool. One you get an entire newspaper inside of it.
Sarah Enni: This sounds like a dream.
Maureen Johnson: Yeah I want to make these, truly. And then you get to the end, and the solution file in the back is sealed. So you go through all of this. And then if you think you've figured it out, then you slice open and you open this back package and sometimes there's a second one in there. That's like, "Stop. How do you know, blah blah blah blah blah." And then you get to kind of go through the things again. Cause there might be additional evidence. They're so good.
Sarah Enni: That's a really cool concept.
Maureen Johnson: There's only four of them. I have them all. I got two when I was younger, and then I found two used ones from old booksellers. I'm so sad that there are no more. I've thought about making these because they're so cool.
Sarah Enni: So, grew up loved reading, indoor kid reading all the time. What about creative writing?
Maureen Johnson: I always wrote. What I was realizing earlier, was that I had no idea. I was like, "I'm gonna write books. I don't know how that happens, but I'm going to do it." And I started publishing sort of right pre-social media. So there was no information. I just kind of was like, "I'm gonna figure it out as I go."
And I think that that's kind of great because right now there is information out there and some of it is good and some of it is really bad and wrong. And it can be very difficult to differentiate good advice from bad when it's just all advice.
Sarah Enni: When you don't know what you don't know.
Maureen Johnson: When you don't know.
Sarah Enni: I'm interested in this because, as you mentioned, you were sort of not, or at least from what I can tell, it didn't seem you were pursuing writing novels right away cause you went to study theater.
Maureen Johnson: I was though, because I applied to graduate school. So when I was done, my degree was in technical writing. And I got these degrees in technical writing, rhetoric, and nonfiction because I was like, "I just want to be able to write everything, so that I'm always using writing as a way of doing the thing I want to do, in order to get where I want to go."
And I was a theatrical dramaturge, which means I was basically the person who helped get a new play up. Or with an older work, do the research around how it might be staged. I'd work with the actors, but I did a lot of work with new playwrights and new pieces. Mostly what I did was break up fights between actors and a lot of directors.
I broke up a surprising amount of fights and I put out more than one actual literal fire. And I once had to sneak around the back alleys of Philadelphia with a giant prop airplane wing that was 15 feet long cause we had to dump it in someone's garbage. I liked working in theater cause I considered that kind of writing. I liked working with a group and creating something.
But I also did a writing degree. I did them both. I got into both programs at the same time, and I did them both, which is insane. That is the dumbest set of degrees you can possibly get together. And I knew at the time I was like, "This is so ridiculous that children and dogs will laugh at me for this particular combination of degrees. But I am very determined to make this work."
Sarah Enni: Yeah, that's incredible. Okay. So I didn't realize that those were two separate degrees. Of course they are very different.
Maureen Johnson: Yeah, I was in the theater department. So it was two different applications to two entirely different unconnected departments at the Columbia School of Arts. So I was on one floor for one and another floor for another. They do not combine at all. So super dumb. Don't do that.
I will talk anybody out of an MFA anytime of day. They're like, "Should I get an MFA?" I'm like, "Sit down." I am the talker out of MFA'er, and if you're done talking to me and you still want it, I'm like, "You go and get that MFA. Cause if you've heard what I had to say, and you still want to do it, then you're probably destined to do it."
Sarah Enni: I would love to hear your anti pitch.
Maureen Johnson: Really? Okay. Here's what I think about MFAs. There are a lot of MFA programs and they vary wildly in quality. Wildly. Even at some of the best schools. I went to Columbia. So I wanted to go somewhere that I had felt strongly about, and I wanted to live in New York. And I was like, "Okay, this is a really good program and I want to live in New York. So this is the one I want to go to."
And even within Columbia, at the time I went there, the theater program was a mess. The writing program was great. And it can be incredibly expensive. And at the time I went to Columbia, you couldn't have an outside job or anything. Classes were during the day. So you were a student, you're giving a lot of time. So I was there in full-time classes for two, two-and-a-half years plus thesis time.
And you can learn some great stuff. I had some incredible teachers there. But I think sometimes the lesson that you learn is sort of a weird sideways lesson. Like workshop groups, one of the things you have to learn to do is that you'll get ten people telling you ten different things, and you have to learn how to listen and process a lot of information that's all conflicting. And who to ignore. Like, "You give good advice. You give this, this, this. Depends on the day, depends on the context, potentially." You really have to learn how to parse out.
I think programs are expensive and frequently they are sometimes cash cows for other departments. So I feel some programs may take advantage of people that desperately want to write. So research the program that you're going into. Don't go into any writing program if you're like, "I don't know what I want to do with my life. Maybe I'll get an MFA in writing." I will immediately jump on your back like a spider monkey and be like, "No, I'm not gonna let you do it!" Because you can't do it if you're like, "Maybe I wanna do this." It's already loosey-goosey enough. That is a guaranteed, you're tossing away your time and your money.
Sarah Enni: I mean there's a lot there.
Maureen Johnson: But I was hellbent. I was hellbent. So I think you have to be hellbent. I think that's the first step is you need to be like, "I want this MFA really, really bad."
Sarah Enni: But then why do you want it?
Maureen Johnson: Why do you want it? I wanted tremendously good writing teachers at high level. I wanted it to be very hard. And I did have some tremendous teachers there. Some of the teachers were terrifying. So if you made them pleased once, like I remember I had one teacher who was just one of the toughest teachers. And I remember him saying that something I wrote was, "Very, very pleasing." Like a sentence I wrote. Cause he was brutal. I had this class called review with a very famous poet and he had read every single book in every language as far as I could tell.
And he had collected up over fifty or sixty years worth of reviews that he thought were good. And so our entire textbook was this 500 page photocopied set of reviews that he had hand collected for decades. And then every week you had an opportunity to submit, or not, it was up to you. You could turn in a piece every week, or you could turn in - you had to do it at least twice - but you could turn it in as many times as you wanted. And then each class was him going through and critiquing out loud. We'd all read the work, it would be copied and everybody would read what happened. And then he would go through bit by bit, and it was brutal. But it was one of the most instructive classes I ever took.
But I would definitely say be careful of ones that are gonna end up costing you a lot of money. I think there's some good ones now that are more flexible, where you can study at home and then you go in for a couple of weeks and do an intensive. I like those a bit more.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, low residency.
Maureen Johnson: I think the low residencies have a lot to recommend them, because a lot of time you're going to be spending working on your own anyway.
Sarah Enni: Right. There is some kind of like, "Oh that sort of reflects a real working writer's life." Which I think is interesting.
Maureen Johnson: Yeah. I have a lot of time for those. I mean I was committed. But the thing is, I lived in New York. In theater we weren't supposed to have any outside job. And in writing you could, but there wasn't really much time. But I just picked up work. I worked as an editor. I worked as this. I worked at that. I worked as a waitress. So I was living a whole New York life while I was doing this.
Sarah Enni: That sounds like a busy time.
Maureen Johnson: It was busy. It was definitely busy. But that's how the sausage gets made.
Sarah Enni: So when you were at Columbia, when you're pursuing your MFA, was novel writing the goal? Or were you doing short stories?
Maureen Johnson: I was doing non-fiction. I wanted to be kind of a non-fiction essayist. That's still very much a part of my future plan. I was working on a totally different project when someone sidled up to me and said, "Do you want to try writing for YA?" And I was like, "What's that?"
I wanted to write more comedy. Sort of David Sedaris type (author of Me Talk Pretty One Day, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, and When You Are Engulfed in Flames).
Sarah Enni: Got it, kind of personal essay.
Maureen Johnson: Right.
Sarah Enni: So you were in sort of the Dave Sedaris mindset. And if I have my research right, the person that suggested you write YA was your friend and current agent.
Maureen Johnson: Yeah. So I moved to New York with a friend from my undergrad, from university of Delaware, my friend Kate, who is my agent. She was not an agent at the time. We moved to New York together, shared an apartment. A bunch of us all crammed into an apartment and went off to our respective things during the day. And her first job was at a publisher. And then she got a job at a big agency, very incredible agency called Janklow and Nesbit. And she worked her way up through the ranks. And she saw YA coming down the pike early.
Sarah Enni: I was gonna say, that's very prescient.
Maureen Johnson: Yeah, she knew. And she was like, "I think that you'd be great at this." And I was like, "You are wrong." Because I was never allowed to do anything when I was a teenager. Anything. No one has fewer stories than me. No one.
Sarah Enni: About being an actual teen?
Maureen Johnson: Yeah. I didn't do anything. I wasn't allowed to do anything. I wasn't allowed to drive. I wasn't allowed to go out. I lived far away from where I went to school. I went to school in Philadelphia and I lived in the suburbs. I was basically just noodling around all the time and I'm trying to dig my way out. And she was like, "You can, I know you can."
And it turns out that that's a really great background to come from, because that is what being a teenager feels like. "How do I get out of here?" Is a good model for writing for teens.
Sarah Enni: So when Kate suggested YA and you responded with, "I have no teenage stories to tell."
Maureen Johnson: "I have no teenage stories."
Sarah Enni: How'd you move forward from there?
Maureen Johnson: The first thing she had me do was see if I could do part of a pitch for a series book that was already, like one of those series that appears to be written by one person, but it's actually written by a conglomeration of authors. And see if I could do a little sample for that. And I got that job. And then it all happened really fast. It was like, "Write a pitch for another one."
And so I started writing all this stuff and all of it got picked up, all of it at once. So I got the series stuff, then I got a three book deal, and then I got a two book deal. So I got a five book deal. So they took me off the series stuff, and this all happened within a couple months.
Sarah Enni: Wow. Okay.
Maureen Johnson: So suddenly I was on the train.
Sarah Enni: And Kate was working as your agent?
Maureen Johnson: She wasn't working as my agent cause she was not an agent. I forget what actually transpired with that. Something was set up for me, but she became an agent. Usually people didn't work up the way she did, so she really came up through the agency. And so we've always been kind of a partnership.
Sarah Enni: I'm interested in that wild couple of months. So you picked up the series stuff, and the three-book-deal and the two-book-deal, what were those?
Maureen Johnson: The first three were three books for Harper called The Key to the Golden Firebird, 13 Little Blue Envelopes, and Girl at Sea. And two books for Penguin which were The Bermuda's Triangle and Devilish.
Sarah Enni: And had you pitched those story ideas or were they existing story ideas?
Maureen Johnson: How did they... [sighs and pauses] The Key to the Golden Firebird was an existing story idea, and we kind of went on from there. But it was me all along. But yeah, The Key to the Golden Firebird was an existing story idea that I kind of transformed around set actually in my Philadelphia hometown. And 13 Little Blue Envelopes happened when I applied for, and got, this super weird fellowship to go to Scotland.
Sarah Enni: But beyond even just Scotland, what you're describing is, in a matter of months you went from writing something for your friend Kate on a dare, to then having five books under contract. Which that must've been the next five years of your life lined up with deadlines. Or was it quicker than that?
Maureen Johnson: It was a little bit quicker than that. It was more like four.
Sarah Enni: And coming from the MFA program to then, all of a sudden, having to produce full novels at that clip, what was that transition like?
Maureen Johnson: It was bananas. But I will say that right before I went to my MFA program, I put myself on a self regulated writing school that I made up for myself. So during the day I worked in an office and at night I worked as the literary manager of a theater company.
And so the way I did this was I did no work in the office. I just wrote all day long. So I would write on the train on the way in, then I would write at my desk all day, and then I would go to my theater job. And then work from six until eleven, or twelve, or one in the morning. And by then I had a car, I would drive back. I was falling asleep at the wheel. And I was just going and going and going. But I would write four, to eight or ten hours-a-day. I would write something as a novel. Then I would rewrite it as a play. And it wasn't for consumption. It was just to go back and forth between play structure, to this structure, to that structure.
I just put myself through the paces. And that's how I produced a portfolio to get into Brighton School. And you go through that phase where you're like, "No, I'm never going to be good enough. All these other people are better." And I'm like, "No. You put in the time." I think I needed the MFA to feel more legitimate cause I don't come from a literary family. I don't come from an elevated background. I have a lot of relatives in jail for stealing plumbing supplies, more than one. I was like, "Who am I? I'm just some kid from Philadelphia. I don't know how books happen! So I guess I have to go to this fancy school."
Sarah Enni: I feel we hear this with women more often as well, that there's...
Maureen Johnson: "Who am I?"
Sarah Enni: And some need for validation, cause that gives you permission.
Maureen Johnson: It gives you permission. And I was also like, "Well clearly, if I get into this fancy program I will learn many, many, many fancy things." And I did learn some stuff. Was it worth all that? You know what? I'm glad I did it because of the way I came out of it. The lessons I learned were like, "Some of this is bullshit."
Here's another big thing I have against MFA programs. Is that, the one I went to, they did not teach in any of these programs about the business of writing. They seemed to be completely against it. They didn't teach the theater people how to get into theater and they didn't teach the writing people how to get into writing. I had one optional thing where three agents showed up one night and were like, "We're agents." And we're like, "What are agents?" And they're like, "This has been a great talk." And so that was it.
They seemed to be really against it. And I feel that that's really remiss. You should have one class, one class. Just make it one seminar thing that you have to go through that's like, "Here's how a publishing contract works. Here's how this happens. We'll have editors from different houses to explain how they acquire things, and what happens, and here's what you can expect, and here's how you find an agent." None of that was covered. None of it.
Sarah Enni: And it does seem for some programs, they feel that's a principle that they don't want to address.
Maureen Johnson: Like, "We'll teach you craft." And you can still fit one more thing in. We'll still do all this, but you could do one thing on the side. You're basically sending us off to get eaten by wolves.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. So with that, you became a full time writer, pretty much right away, right?
Maureen Johnson: Sort of, yeah. I guess for one year I went and I became an editor as well. And then that happened to be the same exact time I met my husband in England. And then started a long distance relationship between England and New York. And I was like, "Well, none of this is sustainable." So after a year, I was like, "I think I'm going to not do this. It's just too much." So I stopped.
Sarah Enni: I'm so excited that this episode of First Draft is brought to you by our presenting sponsor, The Slow Novel Lab. The Slow Novel Lab is an online six-week writing and creativity course taught by Nina LaCour. The next six-week session begins on February 16th and you can enroll today @ninalacour.com. Nina might sound familiar to those of you who are longterm listeners of First Draft. She's appeared on the show a couple of times.
She's the bestselling and Prince winning author of We are Okay, Hold Still, and more. As well as the creator and host of Keeping a Notebook, which is an excellent writing podcast that you should totally check out. Nina is an acclaimed writer and for good reason. If you listened to her on the show, you know that she's a really thoughtful writer. She really gets deep into the world of her books and she kind of celebrates the mystery of the creative process.
That being said, she's also been teaching the craft for many years. She has some very practical tips to share with aspiring writers, and people who have been doing it for a long time. Nina was moved to develop The Slow Novel Lab as a counterpoint to programs that emphasize speed and word count, over process and exploration. Nina encourages her students to take their time conceptualizing and developing the foundational elements of their novels like the characters, the pivotal scenes, the setting, and the timeline.
Her carefully crafted lesson plan guides you in a deep dive into your own work, which arms you with the tools that you need to draft with intention and direction. And that leads to increased productivity. Over the six-week course, Nina will guide you through writing explorations, craft lessons, video lectures, and weekly live Q&A calls with Nina herself.
A private moderated forum connects you with your fellow writers. And the weekly call focuses on exactly what you need to know. And the lessons and video lectures remain yours to keep, which means you can use them as a template for all of your future writing projects, which honestly is priceless. The next six-week session of The Slow Novel Lab begins on February 16th and you can, and should, enroll today @ninalacour.com
Sarah Enni: So I want to ask about writing and community and writing friends. As you mentioned, you started writing YA when it wasn't the YA that we know today. There wasn't social media, or...
Maureen Johnson: It was happening. It was starting. It started pretty much right afterwards.
Sarah Enni: Your first book was 2004?
Maureen Johnson: Yeah, it was really right afterwards.
Sarah Enni: That was well timed by you. Good job!
Maureen Johnson: Thank you.
Sarah Enni: What was the kind of community that you were discovering? How is it changing? I'd just love to hear about it.
Maureen Johnson: I didn't know any other YA writers. I was like, "I guess I'm one of these now. I don't know." There seemed like there were three books or something. There was Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Sarah Dessen's books including Saint Anything, Once and For All, and her newest, The Rest of the Story (hear Sarah Dessen’s episode of First Draft here). There just weren't that many.
Maureen Johnson: I was very shy at first. And then I started meeting a couple people. The New York group just started to slightly coalesce. And one day I was doing an event at Books of Wonder for my fourth book, which was Devilish. And I was there with John Green who was there because Looking for Alaska had just come out. And he and I did this panel together, and he just turned to me and was like, "You want to write together every day?" And I was like, "Okay." (After John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars was turned into a movie by the same name, his other books Paper Towns and Looking for Alaska were also optioned and turned into a movie and TV show.)
So we just started writing together every day. That was it. That was the whole conversation. So we did. It was John and me, E. Lockhart, Emily Jenkins. And we met every day. And from there, the New York unit started to spread and change. It was Cassie Clare, it was Robin Wasserman. Then if Holly was in town, Holly would come. Scott Westerfeld, Justine Larbalestier. It was a whole group of us that would expand and contract and meet usually in the same three places. If we moved, it was a big deal.
(Some of the crew of YA writers who wrote with Maureen in New York when they were beginning their careers included: John Green; Emily Jenkins a.k.a. E. Lockhart, author of The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks; We Were Liars, and the forthcoming Again Again; Cassandra Clare, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Mortal Instruments series, The Dark Artifices series, and the forthcoming Chain of Gold, which kicks off the Last Hours series; Robin Wasserman, author of Girls on Fire, and the forthcoming Mother Daughter Widow Wife (listen to her First Draft episode here); Holly Black, author of The Cruel Prince series, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown and more (listen to her First Draft episode here); Scott Westerfeld, author of Uglies and Leviathan; Justine Larbalestier, author of Liar).
Maureen Johnson: And that is how it all just started. And we would meet like it was our job. We would all turn up at nine or ten or something, and take our seats and they got to know us like, "Those are writers, they come every day." And a lot of people sadly moved away from New York. I'm still there. All those people moved away except for maybe one, or two.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, Emily...
Maureen Johnson: Emily's still there. Scott and Justine are partially in New York and a lot of time in Australia. Robin has abandoned me for LA. Cassie and Holly live up in Massachusetts. So we get a little more scattered, but Cassie does a lot of writing retreats and so we tend to gather.
Sarah Enni: And I want to ask about that because I love that you guys met and wrote together, and held each other to some degree of accountability.
Maureen Johnson: Because you go crazy sometimes, otherwise.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, I'm with you. I like writing out of the house and I like writing at coffee shops where there are things to be distracted by. And I like writing with other friends. Not everybody can do that of course. But I that you guys sort of banded together and created a world for yourselves. I think that's really nice.
Maureen Johnson: Yeah. I mean, I'm back to writing at home with my dog. But yeah, it's changed over the years, it ebbs and it flows. But that's the thing cause you can pick up and go and do this job in many different circumstances.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Which is a part of the beauty of it. But not only were you writing with people physically, but you've contributed to writing with a lot of friends. You've done anthologies and Let it Snow I want to ask a little bit about, and then you've also written in Cassie's world, which is so interesting to me.
Maureen Johnson: That's super fun to do.
Sarah Enni: I'd love to hear about that, about collaborative writing and how that's worked for you.
Maureen Johnson: So I've done three collections that are part of the Shadowhunter world. And the way those came about, the first one was the Bain Chronicles, which is about Magnus Bain. And it happened because when we go on these retreats, we often allot days to helping each other workshop story problems or things. Going we write, but we also have a lot of time dedicated to somebody talking through their plot, and kind of working it out together.
And it was based on a bunch of jokes about what could happen to Magnus. And we just started throwing out, it was us joking about stuff. And Cassie said, "Well, why don't we, you want to do this? You want to make a short story collection about these things?" And we said, "Alright!" So we did it. I mean it was that simple. And then we did another one, and then we did another one. The second one is called Shadowhunter Academy and the third one was Ghosts of the Shadow Market.
And that's really fun. There was a lot of background work because I remember doing all of Cassie's books, you'd have to definitely know that trilogy inside and out. And so it would be 2000 pages of reading and note taking and I had dossiers of what Magnus wore, and did, and where he was at.
Sarah Enni: I was gonna say that's not a casual world to dip a toe into.
Maureen Johnson: No. I'm familiar, but then you have to really go back in and really nail the details.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, read it an academic almost. And get into the Bible of it. And interesting that you've been sort of involved in helping Cassie build the world or plot things. I guess I'm asking you if it was intimidating to try?
Maureen Johnson: No. I mean, because she's my friend, and I met her even right before the first book was out. So I've known these books. She's easy to work with too. It's just fun. She was like, "What do you want to write?" And I'm like, "Well, I know a lot about Jack the Ripper. I'd like to do something that was White Chapel based." And we talked about that and she's like, "This is great. Let's do something that's White Chapel based."
My stories tend to reflect stuff I'm interested in. I wanted to do one about Marie Antoinette and the Royal family trying to escape from Paris. And that the actual story with the Shadowhunter element that was helping them escape from Paris. It reflected whatever my interests were.
Sarah Enni: That's so great. And what about Let it Snow? I want to ask about that, and having that come back into your life recently.
Maureen Johnson: Yeah, we were all surprised. So Let it Snow, this was I guess 2008, that Penguin came to us and said, "We want a Christmas collection." And John called me and was like, "Penguin would like this Christmas book, do you want to do it?" And I was like, "Yeah, I love Christmas, let's do this thing!" And it was supposed to be three separate stories with Lauren Myracle, John, and I. And we thought, "Well why don't we do something different? Why don't we do something that is the same town, and it's a series of days, and we'll each have our own set of characters, but we'll weave in and out."
We just thought that was more interesting. And we just talked about it, cause we all live in different places. So we talked on the phone about what we wanted to do. And a lot of it was the process of, we figured out I was gonna go first, John was gonna go second, and Lauren was gonna go third. So I got to do all the setup and getting everybody to the town and showing you the tone.
Then John had this whole kind of inter-town thing, and then Lauren's was a different set of characters at the end days and sort of the aftermath. Her characters were dealing with the aftermath of a bunch of Christmas stuff. And so what I got to do was put in a lot of stuff that John had to deal with. And so we were basically just trying to make each other laugh.
I'm like, "Here's what I'm putting in my story. I'm getting all these people to the waffle house." And then he had to pick up whatever ball I'd thrown down. So a lot of it was just as passing stuff back and forth and just messing with each other in a fun way.
Sarah Enni: That's really fun. I like that. You've written so many books, so we're gonna kind of fast forward. Let it Snow, kind of came back.
Maureen Johnson: Let it Snow came back (now available on Netflix).
Sarah Enni: How did you hear that it was actually gonna go?
Maureen Johnson: It had been going for a while. It's been a long process. When The Fault in Our Stars came out, right after that, people were like, "Ooh, this YA, this John Green..." And they looked around and they were like, "Wait, there's this whole Christmas book out there."
So it was optioned. It originally started at Universal and then it moved over to Netflix. But it's been in process for, I want to say, three years or something like that. But when it happened, it suddenly rolled. It was a go. It was like, "Netflix. Okay. Scripts." They wrote one set of scripts. They wrote another set of scripts. It went through multiple iterations with multiple writers, but they were really determined to make it, and they did.
And then, I remember we got the call, cause it came out in November. So it was the Christmas before last. I remember we got a call. I was about to go away for Christmas and they were like, "Here's the cast." And then they started shooting, I think it was February 1st. And then we went out to the set in March. It just went. Suddenly it was just happening.
Sarah Enni: What was it like to have all these instances where you and John and Lauren were together again?
Maureen Johnson: It was great. Going to a set is surreal. There's so many people. So many people, like hundreds of people. There was a set that they did in houses, in Julie's house, and they took over an entire street in Toronto. It was a whole suburban street. There were just huge trucks all the way up and down the street. I was like, "These are all for us?" They were like, "That's the light rig. That's the this rig, that's the this rig. That's the actor's trailers, that's the porta-potties. There's the catering truck. There's the this, there's the that." It's just an extraordinary amount of stuff.
So just the size and scope of it I was like, "All for us?"
Sarah Enni: That's so cool. And for something, you know, ten years after the fact.
Maureen Johnson: Oh, we found it great but hilarious. We're like, "This is happening? This is amazing."
Sarah Enni: It's very cool.
Maureen Johnson: Yeah, it was fun.
Sarah Enni: And is that the first thing of yours to actually go to production and be finished?
Maureen Johnson: Yeah. That's another thing to tell anybody. Things get optioned. Loads of things get options. Scripts get written. And they don't get made necessarily. But some of them do. But they also can linger for a long time. You don't get a lot of information. So if you write something and it gets optioned, it's great. You're lucky. Take the money and say thank you. If you want that, you don't have to do it.
Whenever people ask me about it, I'm like, "It wasn't my goal." Cause if I'd wanted to write movie scripts I would've gone to write movie scripts. I wanted to write books. And I don't think that a book has made it, if it's a movie. It's a different thing. So I think there's just this assumption that you can tell if a book is good or important, cause it's a movie. I'm like, "No it's a movie cause it's a movie. But it's a book. I'm in the book business. Or the story business. Or the reading on a page business." If I want to do a movie business, I'll go and do the movie business. I'll write something that's for that. But I don't see it as the natural progression.
Certainly a lot of my family friends were like, "Did you see that? Maureen was on the TV!" And I was like, "I'm glad you're all happy." It's like, "Yeah, I'm from Philly." I'm like, "Yeah, everybody's happy. As long as everybody's happy."
Sarah Enni: Okay. I want to talk about the Truly Devious series. The Hand on the Wall is the book that came out today, book birthday for The Hand on the Wall!
[Maureen makes a trumpet sound].
Sarah Enni: But I want to talk about coming back to writing mysteries. First of all, actually, do you mind pitching this series for us?
Maureen Johnson: So The Truly Devious series is a three-part mystery trilogy. It's about a girl named Stevie Bell who wants to be a detective. She's obsessed with true crimes and mysteries and she wants to solve cases. Specifically she wants to solve one of the 20th century's most infamous cases, which is the Ellingham Affair. So the story is told in two timelines. In the 1930's, you see a crime that took place in the 30's, and the present day. I do realize this book sometimes does not lead itself to an elevator pitch. I have to say, "Well, it's got two timelines."
The 1930's, there was a very famous man named Albert Ellingham who was a tycoon, one of the richest, most powerful men in the country. And he made this school called Ellingham Academy. And he built a house there. It was this wild, wonderful Academy where learning was a game. And his wife and his daughter were kidnapped, and a student from the school was murdered on the same night. And his wife was found dead. His daughter was never found. And it became one of these great crimes of the century unsolved. And Stevie Bell wants to solve it.
And Ellingham Academy is this school that doesn't cost any money to go, has no known admissions criteria. You just write and apply and they select a class. Everybody has a thing that they do. And she's like, "I want to be a detective. I want to solve this cold case." And they take her. And she tries to solve it. And when she's up there, one of her fellow students dies in an accident, and she doesn't believe it's an accident. She's like, "I want to solve this case too!" And what you find out is that no, it was not an accident. It was murder. And the past case and the present case slowly intertwine and weave together into the final pages of The Hand on the Wall.
Sarah Enni: Yes. So you set yourself a mighty task.
Maureen Johnson: It was a big... it was like a four-year-long word problem.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, like a logic puzzle. Did the idea come to you as three different books? How did you even approach something this massive?
Maureen Johnson: So I wanted to write a mystery, and I wanted to specifically write the sub-genre of a detective story. And I wanted it to be a very classic mansion, isolated location, locked room. I knew the elements I wanted in it. So I started with those principles. And then I really had to stop and think of, not even the how or the who, but the why. So I started building out from there. And so everything was custom built, from how Ellingham Academy functions, to its architecture, to its layout, to its map to accommodate what I wanted to make.
The Westing Game, what I love about it is, it's this house, and there's a mystery, and there's a puzzle within the house. And I wanted it to have a ransom note and these elements of puzzles and riddles and twists and tunnels. I wanted there to be logical reasons for all of these things to exist. So I really started from first principles of what it was I wanted to make and what I wanted to see in it. And then I built out slowly. So it was a lot of planning. It was not a book that was written by the seat of the pants. It was very carefully constructed.
I wrote all the solutions, the solutions were in a file from the beginning. Because with a mystery, you really start with the end. You start with what happened and then everything else that spirals around it, it's further out in the story. So it was a lot of planning, a lot of notes, a lot of post it notes, occasional spreadsheet planning. So many planning. So many organizers.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, and that's exactly what I meant by big task is that mysteries are such a specific beast. Did you have Stevie as a character right from the start?
Maureen Johnson: Stevie is a true-crime, mystery obsessive. She's a very indoor person. She has a very specific want. She wants to solve a crime, but she realizes that's a difficult thing to do when you're sixteen. You don't just get to go out and be a detective. So she goes to a place where she can be a detective. She likes true-crime podcasts. She likes all the stuff I like.
She's got anxiety disorder, a not disorder, just anxiety. I put a lot of my own experience in there. And anxiety... it's just part of her life. So she's just got it. And she has to develop some work-arounds to deal with it. Cause I did that. One of the things I did to deal with anxiety was, you really concentrate on a problem, or listening to something and I think that's what she does. So I took a lot of my own personal experience to make her.
Sarah Enni: I mean I love that you got to put so much of yourself in Stevie. It feels kind of special to have a book that's about, I mean, you talked a lot about you haven't written a true mystery until this series, I think.
Maureen Johnson: Yeah, I wrote sort of mysteries in The Name of the Star. But this was a pure mystery.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Detective story, the whole thing. And that was so special to you as a kid. So, does it feel special to come back and write something in that genre?
Maureen Johnson: Yes, and I have a lot of confidence in it because I'm like, "This, I can tell you everything about. This, I know. Backwards, forwards, upside down. You come at me, you best not miss." But I also wanted it to be like those books, the hardback books with the clues and the dossiers. There's stuff in there, you can find it. I made sure it's in the right places, that if you go through, it's there.
Sarah Enni: I think in several interviews you've promised readers that they will know the answer to all of the questions in this book. Which felt to me reassuring as someone who watched Lost [chuckles].
Maureen Johnson: Yeah, I don't think I left any unanswered questions.
Sarah Enni: Which is great. And would have taken a lot of planning.
Maureen Johnson: And if you go back, you'll look and you'll hopefully be able to see like, "Oh, here it was seeded here. I can see it was here. I can see it."
Sarah Enni: Yeah, I love that. You also mentioned in one interview, that in the course of researching for this book, you obviously were researching a lot of the Lindbergh kidnapping. And you mentioned that it was just the process of investigating that. Can you talk a little bit about your research on that case?
Maureen Johnson: Into the Lindbergh?
Sarah Enni: Yeah.
Maureen Johnson: So in case you're unfamiliar, this is the reference to Charles Lindbergh, who was a famous aviator. He was basically the most famous man on the planet because he was the first man to fly across the Atlantic. I mean, he was a worldwide superstar. I'm trying to think of the equivalent of who we'd be talking about. Beyonce. That kind of worldwide fame. And he's not a great guy. Not a great guy, really into eugenics, as it turns out. But at the time, I don't think people knew about that.
And he had a little son. They were this idyllic perfect little family. Everybody loved them. They lived in New Jersey in a beautiful house. And one day, they were in the house that just hanging out at night. They heard a little bump and they were like, "What's that?" And they went up to check on their son and he was gone. And there was a weird note on the window sill. And the baby was gone. And there was a weird ladder outside on the property.
But it was a ransom note, and it was the biggest case in the world. And everybody was looking for this baby. Everybody was looking for the Lindbergh baby. And it turned into this crazy series of ransom demands where this guy, this random guy, became the go-between. And meeting with various people in graveyards. And Charles Lindbergh followed every lead. He literally flew around, cause he was a pilot, and he would fly around following leads. And eventually the baby was found in a field. The baby was just found dead. He had probably fallen during the kidnapping and he had a head injury.
Sarah Enni: I didn't realize that.
Maureen Johnson: He probably died on the night of a kidnapping. They may have dropped him when they were climbing out the window. So it had this terrible tragic end. But he had not suffered a prolonged period of time. He had been gone from the beginning. But ransom money had been paid. And they eventually arrested a man named Bruno Hauptmann who was a German immigrant. They found some money in his house. One of the fascinating things was one of the people that helped on the case was a guy whose specialty was wood.
He was a wood professor. And he was sent some of the wood of the ladder. And he looked at it, and this was before any of this other stuff ever happened. And he figured out what type of wood it was. And then he went and he figured out where it would have been cut from, and then what sawmills would have had it. And he managed to trace it back all the way to figure out what sawmill would have produced the wood load that produced this particular wood that became this ladder. Nobody had ever done anything like this ever before.
So that was just fascinating. This guy comes out of nowhere. He's like, "I'm a scientist and my specialty is wood."
Sarah Enni: And we have to follow the clues.
Maureen Johnson: And he puts it together.
Sarah Enni: It was a written interview where you were just talking about, this is not what happens when there's a crime scene today.
Maureen Johnson: Oh people were just walking all around. And there was a note on the window sill. And literally people just tramped all over the ground, wandered throughout the house, moved stuff. They found the ladder in one place, they moved it to another. People were sightseeing. Old crime scenes are just a nightmare in terms of people wandering in and out, picking stuff up, going through the belongs.
Sarah Enni: A lack of procedure.
Maureen Johnson: No procedures. It was all kind of new. And also, what were they going to do with the information?
Sarah Enni: Right. It's interesting to think about you doing these two timelines and doing this research into almost anything goes. And this is kind of a retro...
Maureen Johnson: Well you get a lot of good clue stuff you can do because all the clues are things pieces of paper, pieces of wood. It's not like you just swab for DNA. Although, I think actual crime solving, is a lot of paperwork and patience and talking to people. But you get a lot more tangible clues. And I wanted to set it into a time that you could get tangible clues. And in order to be able to solve a case in the 30's I had to be able to create bits of evidence that I could reproduce in a book, that wouldn't rely on say DNA testing, or things that.
Sarah Enni: Which is an interesting challenge in itself.
Maureen Johnson: It was about facts and words and things that you can link, that you could piece together.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. And I read somewhere that you said, "I'm so excited for the story to end. And this is an achievement for sure. I have three books all concluded. One major... well, two major interwoven mysteries." But I read somewhere you saying that you would never write a trilogy mystery again.
Maureen Johnson: No, cause it is breaking the rules of mysteries. You really should get a mystery all in one.
Sarah Enni: So that's why. Not because it was so challenging.
Maureen Johnson: No, no, because it was challenging, but I'm glad I did it the way I did, cause it really sets everything up. It's sort of one giant, giant [unintelligible]. But in the future ones, and there will be future ones, they're gonna be one a book mystery.
Sarah Enni: That's very cool. And that's exciting that there's gonna be more. Listen, I saw Knives Out.
Maureen Johnson: People [pauses], we love it.
Sarah Enni: We love it. It's something very gratifying.
Maureen Johnson: Yes!
Sarah Enni: Also, this is partly why we turned to fiction is like the world is full of chaos and we don't know if we're gonna get answers to a lot of the questions we have right now. But in a mystery, I feel certain that someone will be held responsible.
Maureen Johnson: That's what they're for. And I think that's what they came out of, the real mystery genre, comes between the World Wars. Everybody died. There was a war and everybody died. Everybody had death, and bombs, and loss, and fighter planes overhead, and rations, and fear. And what comes out of it is this giant country house, mystery- satisfying puzzle genre.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Yeah. It definitely makes sense and it feels very, I don't know, I'm glad you chose the big mansion and all that stuff. It's still very accessible.
Maureen Johnson:
I want my mansion. I will say that the setting for the next, there is gonna be another Stevie bell book, the setting is a different, very satisfying setting.
Sarah Enni: Amazing. Okay, good. Well I will look forward to that. Well, I like to wrap up with advice. You've already given so much amazing advice, but I guess I'd love to hear your thoughts on someone that's getting into YA now. It's gone through so many changes, but for young aspiring writers, what do you counsel them?
Maureen Johnson: I don't really know. Don't take advice, I guess. A lot of times that's it. If someone tells you that this is the way something gets done like, "This is the way it happens." Do not take that person at their word. Books get written in the way they get written. Everybody writes their books their own way, and then they also individually write their individual books their own way. So if anyone's like, "This is the way you write a book." Disregard. That is not the case.
Your mileage may vary wildly and there's absolutely, positively, no one way to write a book. Never ever listen to anyone like, "It needs to take you X, Y amount of time to write a book. You have to be able to do X number of words into it. You have to be able to do X." No. No, no, no, no, no. Disregard.
Sarah Enni: People who have specifics.
Maureen Johnson: People that have specific things that they think are the only way, that is wrong.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. They're probably selling something.
Maureen Johnson: Or they just don't have that much experience. It's like someone saying, "There's only one kind of food and that food is pancakes." It's like, "No, that's not the case. It's just that maybe you don't know that there are other things besides pancakes." But it's that absurd. It's literally that absurd.
Sarah Enni: And what about someone looking to write a mystery? Where would you suggest...?
Maureen Johnson: What do you love? What do you love about mysteries? What do you love about mysteries? What do you want to see in a mystery that you love? Are you a police procedural? Are you noir? What ones do you like and why do you like them?
Sarah Enni: Just pick that apart.
Maureen Johnson: Yeah. But be methodical.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I mean it's a very specific kind of planning.
Maureen Johnson: It is a very specific kind of planning.
Sarah Enni: Well thank you so much for sharing all your information Maureen, I appreciate it so much.
Maureen Johnson: Thank you.
Sarah Enni: Thanks so much to Maureen. Follow her on Twitter @MaureenJohnson and on Instagram @MaureenJohnsonBooks and follow me on both Twitter and Instagram @SarahEnni and the show @FirstDraftPod (Twitter and Instagram). For links to everything that was discussed in this episode, check out the show notes which are available @firstdraftpod.com. Handy tip; If you want to help support the show, you can go to those show notes @FirstDraftPod and if any of the books or movies or TV shows, or anything that we mentioned on this episode, strikes your fancy and you want to purchase that thing, if you make the purchase through the link on the show notes, part of the proceeds comes back to First Draft and it helps keep the podcast free. And it's very appreciated by me.
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Hayley Hershman produced this episode. The theme music is by Dan Bailey, and the logo was designed by Collin Keith. Thanks to production assistant to Tasneem Daud, and transcriptionist-at-large Julie Anderson, and as ever thanks to you teen sleuths for listening.
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