First Draft Episode #255: Robyn Schneider
JUNE 16, 2020
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Robyn Schneider is the author of The Beginning of Everything, Extraordinary Means, Invisible Ghosts, and more. Her newest book, You Don’t Live Here, is out now!
Sarah Enni: First Draft is brought to you by HIGHLAND 2 a writing software created by John August screenwriter and cohost of the Scriptnotes podcast. Also, a guest on this very podcast, his episode is fantastic. And after talking to John and listening to hundreds of episodes of Scriptnotes, I heard him talk about developing this writing software, and I decided to give it a try.
I just finished writing a first draft entirely in Highland 2 and I'm obsessed with it. And here's why I love Highland. It's so simple, but it's still really powerful. There's one navigation sidebar. And within that sidebar, you have tons of different tools at your disposal. You can drag bits of text in there that you might want to come back to later, or you can monitor your stats like word count and page count, or new words and new page count.
The main screen where you write is this simple, endless scroll of plain text. But with just a few keystrokes, you can add notes to yourself in-line, without them showing up in the final automatically formatted version of your book. And you can export into many formats, including as a Word doc. Highland 2 is clean, beautiful and organized, which is to say it didn't distract me, it just let me get in there and focus and write.
I highly encourage you to go check it out. You can find it @highland2.app that's Highland and the number two dot app. Or you can also find the link in this episode's show notes. And if you do try Highland and enjoy it, let me know, I'm so interested. I was tracking my progress on my First Draft in the Instagram story feed. You can go in there and see, you know, my struggle. But Highland was the number one thing that people asked me. Everyone wanted to know what the software was that I was using, and this is it. So go check it out.
Sarah Enni: Welcome to First Draft with me, Sarah Enni. This week, I'm talking to Robyn Schneider, author of The Beginning of Everything, Extraordinary Means, Invisible Ghosts and more. Her newest book, You Don't Live Here is out now. Everything Robyn and I talk about on today's episode can be found in the show notes.
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Track Changes has been appearing in the First Draft feed for a minute now. It's the mini series within First Draft that gets to everything you don't know you don't know about traditional publishing in the U. S. We've covered Publishing 101, Agents, Selling Your Book, both from the perspective of the author/agent, and from the editor and publisher point of view. And the most recent episode, which just came out last week, is all about how, and how much, authors get paid.
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Okay, now please sit back, relax and enjoy my conversation with Robyn Schneider.
Sarah Enni: So hi Robyn, how are you?
Robyn Schneider: I'm doing well. How are you?
Sarah Enni: I'm doing well. I'm really excited to talk today. I can't believe it took me this long to get you on the show. I'm excited to chat.
Robyn Schneider: I'm really excited for this. I've been listening for awhile and I have thought about what it would be like to be a guest. Now this is like a dream.
Sarah Enni: Yay! Oh, well, I'm so excited. You have one of the more interesting publishing careers that I've ever researched, so we're gonna get right into it. But as you know, I like to start at the beginning. So I'd love to hear where you were born and raised.
Robyn Schneider: Sure. I was born in Miami, Florida. I have never lived in Miami, Florida. My parents were staying in a hotel. So I just like to say that I probably liked the hotel so much that I wanted to order room service, so there I arrived. But I mostly grew up in Southern California in different cities in Orange County. I lived in Laguna when I was like eight to ten, and then Irvine for the rest of it.
Sarah Enni: As a kid growing up, how was reading and writing a part of your life?
Robyn Schneider: It was a huge part of my life. I was just a very lonely child. I think it had to do with moving a lot. And my mom was in her forties when she had me. So she didn't have a lot of young mom friends. So I think that played into it, but I always just sat in my bedroom reading books, and I loved it. And that was never lonely for me that was amazing. So I read books all the time.
I think since I was maybe four, my mom found me in her closet. I had found a bag of books in there and I taught myself how to read, sitting on the floor of her closet. And, yeah, I never looked back.
Sarah Enni: That's amazing.
Robyn Schneider: She was a former elementary school teacher, so it wasn't like she found me reading like John Grisham on the floor of her closet, you know. She had like her teaching materials.
Sarah Enni: That would have been amazing though.
Robyn Schneider: I wish! But yeah, I think the big book series for me that I read as a kid was Harry Potter.
Sarah Enni: I read an interview that you said that reading that series is what made you wanna be a writer.
Robyn Schneider: It did. I was twelve, I think. And we were going on this big family vacation and my mom bought me Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and she gave it to me right before I got on the airplane. And I read it all the way and I finished the book, and I put it down, and I was just like blown away by it. And I knew that I wanted to write books like J.K. Rowling.
So that was my thing. And then we were on a trip and I got a notebook and I just started writing what I now know is Harry Potter fan fiction. But what I thought in 1999 was definitely my own original novel about wizard summer camp, because where do they go when Hogwart's isn't in session? And I finished it, I finished this thing. I wrote it out for months. I actually read Harry Potter, put it down, reached for notebook and wrote a whole novel.
Sarah Enni: That's amazing. Wow. Okay. Well, there's a couple parts of that that are interesting to me. Which is, not everybody makes the leap from loving books to understanding that people write them, and that you could write them. I'm just interested if you have any thoughts on what it was that made you understand that, and kind of really jumped to like, "I can do this!"
Robyn Schneider: I feel like around that time I came across these books by this author, Amelia Atwater-Rhodes (author of Hawksong and In the Forests of Night) who was thirteen when she had her first book published. And I remember looking it up, and I don't think I realized at the time, was her next door neighbor was a literary agent or something. And so she had had this very easy form of access to the publishing world as a young woman.
But for me, I just saw that someone else had done it. And if someone has done it, there's gotta be more people who have done it or who will do it. So it just felt like something that I could try, or at least it was worth trying to write a book because no one can take the action of writing away from you, even if it doesn't get published. And like spoiler, the Harry Potter wizard summer camp book I wrote it at fourteen is not on bookshelves.
Sarah Enni: Although I would totally read that. I would love for you to lead me to the fact that you did sell a book at eighteen. Is that right?
Robyn Schneider: I did. Yeah. I sold my first novel when I was eighteen to Random House.
Sarah Enni: How did that happen? [Laughing]. That is really unusual.
Robyn Schneider: I know! I just kept writing after my wizard summer camp book. I saved up. I saved up all my birthday money, all of my Hanukkah money, all of my odd jobs, and having yard sales, and I bought a laptop. And I typed out my books on it. And I had my mom take me to the post office, and she paid for the postage, and I sent them to literary agents.
And while I was waiting, I sat down, I wrote another book and this one was not wizard summer camp. It was an actual book. That one didn't get published either, but I just kept going with it. I just really persevered. I felt like writing a novel was the first big hurdle and having written one is great. But if you haven't written one that you can share with people, it's a personal thing.
And it's a very different thing than being a novelist or an author. And that was, I think, my goal back then. But of course, my parents said to come up with something a little more practical. For me, I was always really, really academic. And I was really good in math and science, which is not usually the case with people who wind up with a career in the arts.
So my parents were really pushing me academically, like doctor, lawyer, a PhD, something like that. And they kept saying writing books would be a hobby. But to me it felt like, "Well, a hobby is fine because that means I still get to be a published author." So I kept working toward it. And then I went off to college. I wound up at Hofstra on Long Island and they had a publishing degree.
So I went into that immediately. I bullied them into letting me take graduate writing seminars as a freshmen. So I was in like critiques and everything and it was great. And my first semester there, I got a literary agent. And my second semester I wound up selling this book that I had been writing, which was a contemporary realistic, YA novel, to an editor at Delacorte.
And then, obviously, I wound up getting into some better colleges. Because suddenly I was this curiosity of an eighteen-year-old with a book deal who didn't live next door to a literary agent, or anything like that, but had just sent email queries out and it had worked.
Sarah Enni: Right. Oh my gosh. Okay. That's really interesting. Now is where I've done my research, but I can't tell exactly what order things happened in.
Robyn Schneider: Oh, it's so murky. This is like the lost years or what happens next? So the day that I sold my book to Random House, I don't talk about this a lot. It hurts to talk about. I was, um [pauses]... oh gosh, I was sexually assaulted at my internship by my boss that day. So I wound up not telling anybody because I got a book deal. So I called up everyone I knew. And I said, "It's the best day of my life." Um... [Somewhat choking up].
Sarah Enni: Oh my god, Robyn. I'm so sorry.
Robyn Schneider: Thank you. Yeah, it was really rough and I didn't really know what to do about it. And so there was a lot of negativity in my head about being a published author, and especially about that book. It all just felt really tied together and really disheartening and really bleak. And getting this clean slate of getting into one of my dream colleges. I was at Columbia and I just felt like, "If I could just have it all behind me, then maybe it was a little bit like it never happened."
So yeah, my book came out. It did pretty mediocre. Pretty badly. And I wound up selling a few more books that year, which was amazing. One of them was published by S&S, it's nonfiction. And the other two wound up being canceled. It was when Random House over bought and they just had way too many books for their lists. So they just started canceling books. But I didn't know a lot of novelists cause I was a teenager. So it felt extremely personal and just really rough.
It was like lightning struck and hit me in the face. And then I walked to the other side of the field and then lightening struck again. It was such a confluence of awful things. So I walked away. I left school for a year and I said, "I am done. I am done with book publishing. I'm out." This was supposed to be a dream. The practicality of it, not as a teenage girl with like dreams in her head thirteen-years-old with a Harry Potter book on her lap. But as now a twenty-year-old woman living in New York City, a sexual assault survivor, with so many cancelled books and so many failed books. I was like, "Screw it. I'm gonna be a doctor."
Sarah Enni: A lot of people come to book events, or talk to authors online and elsewhere, about wanting to get published as young people. So that is sort of the spirit at which I'm coming in these questions of, you sort of achieved the dream for a lot of people. But as you're explaining, it's so complicated. It's far from perfect when you are suddenly on the other side of the story.
And there's a quote on your website where you talk about those first books and you say, "I can't believe that's what I was doing in college instead of staying up till 2:00 AM drinking bad wine and stargazing, and getting my heartbroken." Which I thought was such an interesting reflection on that. I mean, how do you think about that time now?
Robyn Schneider: I look back at it and I think there's so many more things that I could have done. I'm happy with where I've wound up in life. But I think back then, having that terrible thing happened to me, it made me really frightened of pursuing romantic relationships. And also looking inwardly at myself. That was the year that I realized that I was bisexual and I was too afraid to date anybody for a long time. I just felt so broken. And so not worthy of love or affection or, you know, being somebody's 'happily for now' because I wasn't so happy.
So it just felt like I threw myself into writing books because it felt like something that I could control and something that I could succeed in. And then when I couldn't, I just pivoted hard into medicine and was like, "I have found almost an impossible hill to climb." Needing to do all of premed in two years with very little background in it. And premed was extremely rough. We had lab from five to 10:00 PM every Friday night.
Sarah Enni: Wow. Well, yeah, that'll take dating right off the table.
Robyn Schneider: It was gone. It was off the table. And I did it to myself, I think, because it was a way of coping. And then my way of coping turned out to maybe not be the most happy thing. So that's why the story gets all fraught and tangled. But I do wish, and I wish circumstances had been different. I wish I had spoken up about what happened to me and been brave.
But I didn't want to be that girl. I wanted to be the girl who had a book deal and who got into the college of her dreams. I didn't want to be that sad girl. That girl going to court or anything like that. So I tried to leave it behind and then I realized that I never really would. So a lot of regrets tied up in a lot of things that couldn't have changed.
Sarah Enni: Absolutely. Well, you and I are basically the same age. And when we were in college, it still was very much not...it was very hard to talk about. And people were still very victim blaming and there was really complicated. So I completely relate to just not wanting to even bother. It just felt so impossible at the time. Do you think you were processing any of this complicated stuff in your work at the time? Or were you allowing yourself creatively to deal with it?
Robyn Schneider: I wasn't. I was trying to write really frothy, chic-lit style, happily ever afters because I don't think I was a good enough writer at that age to process it. And I think in my later books, there is a lot of content that circles back to the feeling of being an outsider, of being a failure. Of feeling inside like, you're somebody very different from who people see you as, or perceived you as. Because by all accounts back then I was a roaring success. I had everything I had ever wanted essentially. And I was not a sympathetic protagonist, so to speak.
But if people only knew. And also processing bisexuality and coming of age as a young woman in New York City who loves shoes, and fashion, and also really likes boys. And all of that just making a confluence in my mind as I was reading so many books, and watching other people live these lives that seemed so enviable. So I think I tried to live someone else's enviable life through storytelling, once I was a good enough writer to find a way in, and tell stories that were thematic not just plot driven.
Sarah Enni: Right, right. Well, and we're certainly going to get to that with your later works, which really do deal with a lot of these things. And I don't want to harp on this too much, so let me know if you want to move on, but the thing that also strikes me is the degree to which we can sort of look at [pauses]. It just strikes me that at that age, dealing with all of this traumatic and identity issues you were struggling with, that then you put a lot of your hopes in publishing, which, oh my god.
Robyn Schneider: Not a very good place to put all of your hopes and dreams as I have learned.
Sarah Enni: Which I mean, and I'm not trying to make light of this at all, but again, just thinking about all the young people who think, as you did, that getting a book deal will maybe solve problems that they're having. It doesn't. And also publishing is a very unreliable pursuit, right? And business.
Robyn Schneider: Of course, I mean, I was not making a living wage as a writer. I think I had a deal for like $15K, and once your agent takes a commission and taxes are out, you know, I had friends make more at a summer internship. And I was having to juggle this full time career, which had a lot of admin work and wasn't just sitting down and writing fairy tales in a coffee shop. I had to juggle that with an extremely demanding full time course load as a student. And it really wasn't whatever the Instagram aesthetic version of getting published as a young person is. It was a real lot of work.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I want to talk about, okay, you switched to premed, which is amazing. And so you did all the premed in two years, is that what you're saying?
Robyn Schneider: Yeah. I did summers on with full time course loads as well. So I actually finished it in a year-and-a-half. Because I was really ambitious and was not dating [laughs].
Sarah Enni: [Laughs] Clears up a lot of time.
Robyn Schneider: Yeah. I mean, I dated a little. So I wound up finishing it up. And one summer when I was doing physics, which was just so draining, like I loved chemistry, but physics was not for me. I would just go to this coffee shop where all the MFA students went, the Hungarian pastry shop. And I would sit and I wrote this like steampunk fantasy novel in my spare time.
And I had a friend who had been one of my classmates, who I had sort of introduced to the publishing world who had just become a literary agent. And he was like, "Can I represent it?" It was half a manuscript. He's like, "Can I try and sell it?" So I applied, I got into Penn, I was doing the dual degree program there, I was about to. And he wound up selling a two book middle-grade deal for me on this steampunk series.
And I deferred med school for this. I was like, "OK, fine. I moved to London to be a writer. It was like a bucket list thing. And it all went so wrong. Everything that could've gone wrong with the series went wrong. My editor was fired before I could get the manuscript in. My next two editors got cancer and retired in like rapid...
Sarah Enni: Both of them?
Robyn Schneider: Both of them. Rapid fire. And the imprint wasn't gonna be putting out books that were similar to mine at all. It was a trilogy, it got canceled halfway through. The agency I was with stole my advance check and closed down. I had to threaten them with an outing in local media if they didn't wire the money to me immediately.
Sarah Enni: Oh my god.
Robyn Schneider: It was bad. I had such a negative experience with that, that I was just like, "Med school, take me." Like, "Thank god!" And then I arrived and I had never given much thought to what other medical students would be like. And it was really interesting. It was definitely, I felt like Elle Woods. I think it was my program specifically, like my cohort or my group was specifically, but I just did not fit in. And I had never experienced anything to that extent. And it was just so strange having this disconnect.
And I was just like, "Publishing has not worked for me. This does not work. This is not viable." Like, "I can get A's in this medical coursework." Like, "Come on, Robyn, let's go." And it didn't matter that my bones were in one place and my heart was in another. I just kept trying to slog forward. And I wound up starting to write The Beginning of Everything while I was in school.
I actually just got my master's, I didn't finish, I don't have my doctorate cause the book sold in this like incredibly fairy tale auction. And I was able to quit school and support myself as a novelist. I was twenty-five and that was seven years in from my first book deal. And it felt like a lifetime.
Sarah Enni: So wild!
Robyn Schneider: I know. It was a crazy journey.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Okay. So there's a couple of things there that I want to ask about. Because you got your master's in Bioethics. It's interesting to me that you went from having these incredibly difficult experiences, and disappointing experiences, and unethical experiences, to something that was so black. I mean, Bioethics is fascinating, but it does seem very much like not only talking about going into something black and white; a degree in anatomy, human bodies, medicine, and also the ethics therein. It seems very comforting to study something like that, as opposed to the vagaries of writing books.
Robyn Schneider: Science and [unintelligible] are cool. I enjoy them. They are comforting because there was a correct answer. And that answer is not subjective. It's not up to your instructor of the day. It's not up to your classmates to critique. The answer is melanoma. Or the answer is 7.2. And I loved that. I loved that also I was studying toward something where once I got there, I could be it.
There was no canceling. There was no having things pulled out from under me, unsuspectingly. If I worked hard, if I got there, I was pretty much guaranteed. And that felt really like something I needed. I needed a guarantee.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Doctors are not subject to trends.
Robyn Schneider: No. You don't have to pitch your next patient idea. That would be weird.
Sarah Enni: [Laughing] That would be weird. But that's a very funny thing to imagine. That was, I mean, Bioethics, can you just [pauses], I've never spoken to someone that got a masters in Bioethics before. Were you writing a thesis? Or was there a particular thing you were focused on?
Robyn Schneider: So I wound up writing a very last minute thesis. I was not planning to finish the program. When I did, I was planning to do the MBE, which is the Bioethics degree alongside becoming a doctor. Because you can't use the master's degree without a doctorate. It is useless. It's like having an accessory for a piece of electronics that you don't own, you know? Like it just goes in a drawer.
So I wound up having to go quick, I had half a semester. And I had to do edits on the book. And what I wound up doing was this extremely half-hearted thesis, but fascinating in retrospect, on young adult disease narratives. Because most adult's memoirs, that are medical memoirs, they exist in this space where people can be really comforted by finding a story written by someone else who went through what they were going through. Like you're diagnosed with whatever you can pick up books about people who went through that.
And for teenagers you can't, because teenagers aren't writing books about their lives. So everything is fiction. So all of the stories are fictionalized. So they're being told through this adult or fictionalized lens. And I thought that was so interesting. And so I went through and I was comparing... and this was the month that The Fault in Our Stars was published.
So, a teen medical narrative was not a huge thing. So I was going through a couple of them and I was looking at like use of metaphor, and how these stories use language to relate to teenagers who might be going through the same patient experiences as the characters they were reading about. So that is what I did my thesis on.
Sarah Enni: That's amazing! You gave yourself a masters in English, in analyzing young adult books.
Robyn Schneider: A masters in medical English? Almost.
Sarah Enni: I want to talk about writing The Beginning of Everything while you were doing all of that work. Do you mind, before we talk about that, do you mind pitching that book for us really quick?
Robyn Schneider: Sure. My goodness. I feel like I'm floundering. How do I even pitch that book?
Sarah Enni: I know it's been a minute. You can take a second.
Robyn Schneider: It's been a minute. It's the story of a fallen golden boy who has to redefine himself after his personal tragedy. And everyone saw him as this leader and as this jock. And when he really figures out what he's passionate about and interested in, it turns out that it's debate. And he reconnects with his former best friend and falls in with this crowd of misfits who encourage him to be a misfit as well.
And he falls in love with a girl who has a lot of secrets. And while he mis-credits her for changing him and transforming his life, she very much corrects him that, "No, he did all of that on his own." And also he has a dog that talks in his head as though he's the reincarnation of Jay Gatsby. And it sounds sad, but I promise it's very quirky.
Sarah Enni: Well, all your books have a lot of humor in them which really makes them shine. So it is a fun, funny read, but yeah, it deals with some serious stuff as well. It's just so impressive to me that you went through so much and then were taking on an enormous amount academically, but were still... I mean, tell me how you feel about this. Was it that you couldn't keep yourself from writing? Or were you really intent on continuing to write? How did you manage to keep that as a part of your life?
Robyn Schneider: I really tried to stop. I think my brain just processes information as stories. There's this example, I think I was in class at Penn. I think it was Conceptual Foundations of Bioethics. And we were studying when patients can't consent. And one of the examples was postumus sperm retrieval, which is when a dead body comes in and their relatives or loved ones ask a doctor to extract viable sperm from the dead body so that they can raise this person's child, via a posthumous fertilization.
And so we were learning about that and discussing ethically like, "What do you do in this case versus that case?" And I raised my hand, all I could think about was like, "Okay, obviously I have a real answer here, but if you were born from the sperm of a dead man, wouldn't you be able to see ghosts?" Everyone was just like, "Robyn. No!" And I was like, "Coma babies are psychic. Probably!"
I was just in love with the world building in my head. And I was not processing this information as information that I was going to need in medical practice. I was writing a story. And my brain has always, always done that. It's so unfortunate. And I just can't help myself from writing books. I have tried. I have done everything.
Sarah Enni: Well, it's so interesting that that book blew up the way that it did, when you wrote it in such, you know, trying to keep yourself from writing. Really actively pursuing this completely other career day job life. What did it feel like writing that book? Were you thinking you'd try to get it published still? Or was it just trying to survive? Or how did you feel while you were writing it?
Robyn Schneider: I felt like it had been awhile since I had tried a contemporary story and I was really a lot improved over maybe the five years that I had taken a hiatus from that kind of fiction. And obviously I had grown a lot from age twenty to twenty-five. And I was really shocked how the book just sort of poured through me. I had a friend who was getting her MFA and we met at Think Coffee near NYU. And we were just supposed to hang out and she's like, "No, no, no. I have this story due. It's due tonight." Like, "I have to go." And I was just like, "Okay." So she's just sitting there writing. And I was like, "Well, I guess." And I sat down and I wrote the entire first chapter of The Beginning of Everything. And it's pretty much published unchanged.
So it just came out of nowhere, and I thought it was better than what I was doing. But I told my literary agent at the time, and he said, "YA is dead. I don't even want to read it." And I did not know what to do. So I wrote the book in secret and when I had like a hundred pages, I asked him again like, "Would you read it?" And he said, "No." And I said, "I'm leaving. I don't want you as my agent anymore."
Sarah Enni: Yeah, YA is dead in what? 2012?
Robyn Schneider: 2010, I think. Yeah. '11 maybe? So he's not a literary agent anymore.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. That's a good call for him.
Robyn Schneider: Yeah, good call. So I left and I had this 100 pages of a manuscript. I read it over and I gave it to my roommate at the time who weirdly is Jennifer Ung, who is an editor at S&S now. But back when she was in college and I was figuring out grad school, we were roommates in Brooklyn. And she's the first person who read this and gave me editorial suggestions before I was a contemporary YA writer, and before she was an editor of contemporary YA.
So she said it was great and I should really try and get an agent for it. So I sent it out and within 30 minutes of e-querying, I had two replies. Within a week, I had a new agent and an impressive agent who terrified me, who really believed in it. And then I wrote the rest of it thinking like, "Hopefully this will be something." And she wasn't thinking it would be a huge thing. There really were not a lot of comp titles. The Fault in Our Stars was not published. There was not a lot of contemporary, realistic YA doing well in that moment.
The comp titles that we had were like The Perks of Being a Wallflower. And then it sold. We had a three house auction within a week and I was not expecting that at all. I mean, I was hoping that maybe it could be published and I could at least be proud of one book that I had published in my life. That was, sort of, the goal.
Sarah Enni: Right. Which is amazing. And that's so funny to think back when contemporary was really out to lunch, there was not a ton going on there. It was paranormal or dystopian, or get the fuck out basically.
Robyn Schneider: Right. I mean, that was the moment of The Hunger Games and Twilight. Sitting down and writing a book about a boy who walks with a cane who joins the debate team, it did not sound exciting.
Sarah Enni: Oh my gosh. So then you have the three house auction, and it sells for enough money for you to make a life choice. I'm interested in what made you decide to take another chance on being a full-time writer and to step back from the medical career.
Robyn Schneider: It felt different this time. It felt like I had really written something great. Like my ability as an author had finally caught up with my taste, which is no small thing. You start out writing and you have these grand ambitions and you look at what's on the paper and it's like you sneezed. It's like, not even a sentence, it's just like a noise that's damp.
[Sarah Laughing]
Robyn Schneider: We've all looked down at our papers and gone, "Oh god, clean this up!" So, yeah, it felt like a lot of my earlier books were closer to a sneeze and this one actually felt like a fully formed thought. And the agent that I got was so impressive and terrifying to me. And the houses that were bidding on this book and the amounts that they were throwing behind their excitement, it was completely new territory.
And then the week after it sold, I had to do a very, very quick turnaround revision for foreign rights sales for Bologna. So I just did not go to class for two weeks. They were like, "Just, don't go. Just do your edits." So I did all of my edits and then we had a lot of foreign deals pour in very, very, very quickly. So it really felt like a safe bet. And I also realized that there were two versions of who I could be.
I could be this doctor who was extremely bitter while she saved lives, that she was not a novelist. Which seems like not a great person to be. Or, I could be this writer who got to tell stories and be so grateful for it, but who realized that she had given up on doing something incredibly meaningful and impactful. And to never forget that and to always try and do something important with my stories.
So I just went there. That seemed like the choice.
Sarah Enni: I think that's a really beautiful way to put it. I want to ask about getting the chance to write the screenplay for The Beginning of Everything and what you've been able to do with writing for film and TV. It sounds like, even when you were applying for MFAs in that time, that you'd been thinking about that kind of writing.
Robyn Schneider: Yeah, I had been. So writing the screenplay for The Beginning of Everything, was a dream of mine from childhood. I dreamed that I wanted to have a published novel and I want it to be the one hired to adapt the book to film. Of course I was like fourteen, so I forgot to add the part of the dream of like, "And then I want that movie to get made."
Sarah Enni: Right.
Robyn Schneider: Small thing that I did not wish for. In retrospect I should have. But yeah, I wrote the script. And I was hired to write it, so it was work for hire. I did the first draft. I did the second draft. I think they had one joke polish, but I have full credit on the screenplay.
Sarah Enni: Wow.
Robyn Schneider: Yeah, it's cool. I mean, we got so close. We had a director, we had a sizzle reel. We had our actors and then it didn't go. The option lapsed for a year. And recently they got back in touch. So we are going again. So we're gonna see if we could actually get this movie made, which would be amazing. But I've been really, really involved with the process, like heavily, with the other producers. Who all are very delightful men who live on the East Coast and have PhDs and doctorates and come from a science and medicine background.
And I'm just like, "Oh my gosh! This is the least Hollywood version of making this possible." So it's super entertaining. I don't know if it will go. I hope so. But yeah, I moved out to LA thinking, like I just needed a clean break from all of my friends and everyone I knew being in this career that I had pretty much rejected. I didn't know anyone who was really in the arts. I didn't know a lot of novelists or writers and I wanted to meet people.
So I moved to Hollywood into an apartment by myself, and worked from home for a living. Which, as you know, is a perfect way to meet people. Oh god. Yeah. I just wound up making YouTube videos and then I made internet friends.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I want to ask about that, the YouTube year, from what I can tell on your website. I just want to hear about how you got started doing that. And then I understand you stopped doing that for reasons that are also complicated.
Robyn Schneider: It's all a journey. I started making YouTube videos. I had met John Green (author of The Fault in Our Stars and Looking for Alaska) many, many years ago. I was an undergrad and his wife was a grad student, and David Levithan's amazing editor and children's book writer would have these YA author meetups. If you were a published YA author you could go.
The only problem was that they were in a bar and I was not twenty-one. So I went anyway and I had ginger ales and everyone was like, "Who is this child?" And I would have to ride the subway back uptown with John every time after. We were really the only people going back on the one train all the way up to like 116th. And gosh, we had like nothing to talk about. I look back and I'm like, "Oh my god, you had so much in common. You could have just chatted away."
But yeah, he was having to ride up with this sober college undergrad just sitting there. I was just so Hermione. It was just "Ugh." So when he started making YouTube videos for the first time I watched the very first Vlogbrothers and I was like, "This is amazing!" And I was terrible. I tried to make YouTube videos. I was awful. I kept trying, I wound up being an alternate for this grant from YouTube, for their Next Step Program, which went really, really wrong, really, really fast. And I was going to be making scripted content for them.
So when it didn't happen, I wound up moving out to LA. And I was at a YouTube convention and hanging out with the people I knew from the internet and talking to a YouTuber I knew from the internet and saying, "I've had this really cool idea for a digital series and I don't know how to get it made." And he said, "Oh, my wife runs a production company. Do you want to meet her?" And she was right there.
And I took a meeting. I did a pitch. And I sold this series right at the time that the Lizzie Bennet Diaries was doing really well. And I had my writer's room. We got together. They were UK based so it was digital. And I pulled in a lot of my friends from the Doctor Who world, and we wrote the entire first season and did not get paid. And the whole thing got scrubbed the week Beginning of Everything was published.
But I was able to parlay having written that into representation at CAA. So I used that as a jumping off point to pitch and try and write for TV in the background from writing books. Because, you know, when you write one thing and it's successful, your editor wants you to write only that thing, but just a little bit different. And I wanted to write so many things, all the things. So if I wanted to put magic in a story, or if I wanted to write about doctors or something... wrote it for TV. Never sold it for TV, but wrote it for TV.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. That was gonna be my question. So from what I understand, you've lived in LA since 2012, does that sound right?
Robyn Schneider: Yes.
Sarah Enni: Okay. And since then, you've been consistently writing young adult contemporary books, but I know that the whole time you've been writing scripts for TV shows. So I'm just interested in how the heck have you been doing that at the same time? It's a lot of time consuming multiple projects at the same time.
Robyn Schneider: I know. Well, I'm really fast on scripts and I'm agonizingly slow on books. So whenever I'm just really, really down on myself, I'm like, "You know, I could write a script like, next week". And I can! I mean, I can't do it for a book. God, if I could even write like a chapter in a day, that would be a miracle. But for some reason, I can churn through scripts because they just feel like blueprints. They don't feel like the finished product and books feel so final. I just scare myself about them. And I comb through the sentences, take out a comma, put back in a comma, that kind of thing.
But mostly I had a slow editorial schedule and I had a contract that had me writing for only one imprint and I couldn't really go elsewhere. So I had a bit of downtime and when I wasn't making YouTube videos, which was pretty unappealing after having the digital series fall apart, because they own my YouTube channel at that point.
Sarah Enni: Yeah.
Robyn Schneider: Yeah, no thank you. So I wound up writing a lot of scripts and just hoping that some of them would get made and having some really incredible producers attached. It was really, really flattering. Nothing ever went except The Beginning of Everything script. And then of course I'd been secretly writing a historical fantasy series out here, which everyone will be hearing more about and reading in 2022. Um, yes, spoilers.
Sarah Enni: Yay. I love that. Okay. We're gonna come back and ask about that in a second. How do you think writing screenplays and writing books at the same time, how have they influenced one another? Or have you used structure for the other thing? How do you think about the interplay of those two mediums at the same time?
Robyn Schneider: Oh, I really love that question. I can't focus on two books at the same time, but when I'm really burned out and I've finished writing a novel, what I need to do is just refill my creative well. And a lot of the time I will just binge a TV series. And when I binge TV series, I process TV structure. So it's really great to have a project that I want to write, like a TV project, lined up in my head after that. Because I can kind of recharge my batteries by watching a lot of TV.
And yet in my brain I'm like, "No, no, no, no. This is a useful day." And then when I feel like I'm a little bit back to normal speed, I can work on something that feels really low stakes, and build up my confidence and kind of have the concept for a book on the back burner there.
I definitely watch a lot of TV and read a lot of scripts when I'm writing scripts. And then it's almost entirely books and movies when I'm writing books, just due to the structure. But also books to me, feel so much less rigid. And I did not know that coming into it. Being told to write to a budget for screenplay, for the first time, was incredible. I had never had any of those thought constraints, like adapting Beginning of Everything to be a movie with like this certain budget where it's like, "Oh, well Disneyland has to not be a part of the story. So how do I make that happen? What's the trick?" It felt like a lot of fun problem solving, adapting in that space.
And then writing original stories, it felt like I could play with my imagination again. I think I'm a person who's always in danger of falling out of love with storytelling and thinking like, "Is there something else?" Or, "Is there another story, or a next story?" And leaving a lot of unfinished things in my wake. And one of the ways that I can stop myself from doing that is getting things that I'm excited about out of my system. Like the kinds of stories that commercially just do not fit with what I do.
And then, of course, I came across this 16th century thing that I don't know how much I can talk about, but I wanted it to be a TV series...it was not. I could not get rid of it. I could not shake it. It's a book series. It's a YA trilogy. And I did everything I could to make it not be, but it is. And of course now I'm so excited that I get to work on it. And it's been this thing that's been boiling for the past few years on the back of the stove, whatever. The back of my mind oven. God, mind oven is such a bad phrase.
Sarah Enni: I love that [laughs]. I love it.
Robyn Schneider: So I have a lot of things on my mind oven and some of them are scripts and some of them are books, but the scripts are so rigid. Like if you don't hit a certain downbeat on page 90, you are off. And with books you don't have that. You can have an entire chapter of somebody staring out a window thinking about something that happened when they were seven.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, I know. It's bliss. Sometimes you just want to describe a bedroom for a couple of pages and get away with it. That is so helpful, actually, to hear from you because right now I'm writing a script with a friend of mine and I'm writing a book at the same time. And that is possible in a way that, especially co-writing, I found that to be possible in a way that it hasn't been for two books, certainly at the same time.
But this is what struck me looking at your body of work too, is that you write standalone books. I just can't get over the fact that you write TV too. TV feels so impossible to me. Movies and standalone books feel like the same thing.
Robyn Schneider: Oh really?
Sarah Enni: And then writing a pilot I was like, "But I don't know what happens next." Like I write standalone books and then I don't know what happens to my characters when they're done.
Robyn Schneider: So when I was working on my first TV script, it was with the guys at Ghost House. So it was with Rob Tapert and Sam Raimi and their team. And they said something to me that was so important cause they wanted me to adapt a YA novel to film that they had optioned as well, while we were working on a show. And I was like, "I've never written a screenplay. I've written TV though."
So what they said to me is, "Well, you've written books. So books are the most complex in terms of story and character and plot. Next is TV. And after that, once you pare it down and you make it really bare bones, then you get a movie." And so I think it's going from A to B or going back and forth from A to B are books and TV. And it's going from A to C to go from books to features.
Sarah Enni: Interesting. Yeah, that's really interesting.
Robyn Schneider: Maybe you're somebody who can work really well on two very divergent things. And I kind of like to work on things that are similar actions, but different effects.
Sarah Enni: Mm-hm. Ooh, that's so interesting. And it makes sense to me that you would then binge a lot of TV and write TV. And then while you're writing a book, want to stick to movies. There's some structural similarities, at least as far as three acts and all that stuff.
Robyn Schneider: Yeah. The structure of movies is really, really similar. It's the act structure because TV isn't. Especially 44's or hour long TV, it's like the five act. And oh god, it's so much work, especially having to do a series bible before you even sit down. But to me that was the most fun part was writing a document about what is this world going to be like? I am a big fantasy geek and sitting down and writing out the rules of a magic system is so fun for me because it's like doing a math problem. Or it's like knowing the rules of a physics experiment. My science brain perks up and I'm like, "Oh, there's constraints? Tell me more!"
Because didn't you ever, in school, have like, "Write an essay on any book we've read this semester." And you're like, "Oh my god, my brain is jello." And then they're like, "Okay. So here's four essay prompts that are very, very specific about like threads of feminism through one of these three books." And you're like, "Boom, I can do that." So yeah, TV, I just felt like, "Boom. I can do that."
Sarah Enni: That is so interesting. I love that. Okay. I hope you don't mind, but I kind of want to skip to You Don't Live Here and then let's talk about that. Extraordinary Means and Invisible Ghosts are the other wonderful books that you've published in the meantime, but I want to make sure that we get to your most recent novel. And before I ask questions in detail about it, do you mind pitching it for us?
Robyn Schneider: Sure. It's my queer love letter to Gilmore Girls and The O.C., which were the shows of my teenage years. And it's the story of a girl named Sasha who survives a very terrible fictional earthquake, which her mom does not survive. And she has to move in with her estranged conservative grandparents in a wealthy Orange County town. And her grandparents have a lot of ideas about who they want her to be and who they want her to date.
And she doesn't agree with them. She tries to go along with them, but she's also bisexual, which her grandparents don't know about. And she finds herself having this amazingly huge crush on the girl next door, Lily. And she doesn't know whether to follow her heart. And so she has to sort of figure out how to share her identity, how to live a life that she feels she wasn't meant to live, and how to be stuck in a repeat of the life that her mom ran away from.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. And it's very subtle and beautiful. I loved reading it. The 'hours passed without realizing it' kind of read. Which was really lovely. What came first wanting to write a queer love story or having the comp with the Gilmore Girls or The O.C.? How did you generate this idea?
Robyn Schneider: I think it generated on autopilot in my head because I remember watching Gilmore Girls with my mom growing up and always feeling that we were more Lorelai and Emily than Rory and Lorelai. And so I was very interested in that relationship. And I remember watching and just thinking like, "I'm supposed to identify with Rory, why don't I identify with Rory?"
And then I remember watching The O.C. and Seth Cohen being this revelation as, like me, one of the few Jewish kids down in Orange County, who was a nerd and lived in the right neighborhood, but just did not have friends. I was like, "Oh, I get you! You are me, but you're also a straight white kid." And it just felt like there was a version of these stories that was almost being told that I really would have gotten so much more from.
And I guess I had that in my head like that, "Oh, I was so excited because I thought the story was about X and then it turned out to be about Y." Which means that there is no story about X. And so it's like, "Great! Why don't I write that?" But yeah, I think there was a time where I remember watching Gilmore Girls and seeing Rory and Lane and being like, "Now kiss?"
Sarah Enni: [Laughing] For sure.
Robyn Schneider: And they didn't! They never did. And you know, two girls never now kissed on that show.
Sarah Enni: I know. Justice for Lane Kim, always. The show did that do her right.
Robyn Schneider: No, it absolutely did not. Oh my god. With the twins and everything.
Sarah Enni: I can't.
Robyn Schneider: No, same. I'm still mad at it.
Sarah Enni: I do love that. And people are always saying, "Write the book that you wish was on shelves." And so you kind of wrote the book that you wish was on a TV channel.
Robyn Schneider: Kind of. Yeah. I mean, also I think I never really saw a queer book, like a girl who liked shoes, liked makeup, liked hair. You know, really was straight passing, but also liked boys too. I just was not finding that. Maybe I wasn't looking in the right places, but it just wasn't there for me. And so I felt like maybe I was just wrong or different or my own thing. And I realize now I'm such a type. I think it's called like a disaster bi, or like dark academia or whatever these aesthetics are on Tumblr, or TikTok now at this point. But yeah, it was like, "Oh, I'm a type. I'm not girl in the coffee shop in the vintage dress with the dyed hair who just wants to go home and read her fantasy novel. And there's tons of me out there. And so many of them like each other... what?!"
Yeah. I missed that for a moment and I kind of wrote the story that I really wish I could go back in time and give to my teenage self.
Sarah Enni: And the other thing about it being an 'own voices' book, and a book that's definitely about bi-visibility, is that you in promoting it, I'm just curious about how you feel about, in the course of promoting this book, you then do have to come out and talk about this experience as a part of it. I'm just interested in whether that feels onerous to you, or if that was something you were actually really excited to engage with. There's something of a burden put on 'own voices' stories as far as representing and speaking for a large swath of people. So I don't know... Anything you have to say about that experience. I'd love to hear.
Robyn Schneider: At first it felt really intimidating and terrifying. And I was really upset that that was something that was expected of me. As I watched publishing change, as I was writing this book, I was very terrified all of a sudden. And then I interrogated inwardly like, "Why do I have this fear?" And I spoke to a lot of other authors and I've never been closeted, not in my real life. I just am not tweeting to a bunch of teenagers like, "Hey, that girl I asked to queer prom when I was twenty-four said no. FYI, pass it on." Send tweet. That wasn't part of the dialogue. But I've always made no secret in promoting and sharing books with queer stories, queer characters, queer voices.
And yeah, I think as I found more of the queer YA writing community, it felt like such a gift to be able to share that this story is 'own voices' and that the story is personal. And I met so many young readers of mine and I was like, "Oh my god, you're like little baby bi's." And it was great. I kind of felt like I had been scared to unlock my childhood bedroom, just in case what was inside made me feel a certain way. And then I walked in and I just felt like I was home. And actually, a lot of people when I did my 'coming out' Instagram posts, which was so like, "Just in case you don't know me in real life." Because everyone who knows me in real life is like, "Oh yeah, Robyn... bi."
But, "Just in case you don't know me in real life, teen readers, I am bi." I had a few people who I went to high school with, who I hadn't heard from for a long time, reach out and slide into my DM's and come out to me. And it was really powerful. And it was really empowering. And it made me feel like my whole life, I was afraid of invisible things that I thought if I just colored them in, they would be scary. And then I colored them in and they were Rainbow Pride.
Sarah Enni: That's beautiful. I love that. The other thing is in all of your fiction there's a lot of humor in it. There's a lot of also pop culture references. You're definitely not someone who shies away from fixing your books in a moment with recognizable things in them. Which is, I'm trying to think about how to [pauses]. I really get frustrated with books that try to be timeless. And it's like, "Well, what is happening in your books?" Like, "Who are these teens?"
I think it takes away a lot of specificity. So you give me a lot of that, which I love. Including in this book, really explicit conversations about the Trump administration and about current political moments. And I'm just interested in what was the thinking around putting him in by name and referencing stuff like that? That's very current.
Robyn Schneider: I think I didn't quite realize what a radical action it was until I got my edit letter. But what happened was I was working on a version of this book right when the last presidential election happened. And everyone started reeling in the aftermath of Trump being elected. But one thing that I saw that was so interesting was suddenly people were being forced to confront their family members and their loved ones and realize that they didn't have the same fundamental beliefs about what it means to be human.
And it was shocking to me that almost everybody experienced that within their families, everyone had some disconnect politically with a loved one. And I had that as well. And it made me really wonder what that would feel like if I weren't a thirty-year-old woman with a fiance at that time. But if I were my sixteen-year-old self and that person, that classmate, that I had a crush on that year happened to be a girl.
So I wanted to write a story about this. I was just wondering what it felt like for teens, especially, to grow up in this empowering - gay marriage is legal, everybody is accepting - moment that I really did not have growing up in conservative Orange County. And to come out in that and have everyone be accepting and have all of these great pop culture things. And then to suddenly feel like the world had gone backwards, but they had done something that was like untake-backable. Or they had been planning on doing something, or they had come to terms with who they were and then realized that maybe everyone around them wasn't gonna be so lovely about it.
And I think there was just a lot of fear and uncertainty about family in that time. And I had friends who weren't talking to their parents over their political views. And it felt huge and it felt like a rift and it felt like something that needed to be encapsulated in a story because it was such a specific moment. And it felt like everyone knew where they were and what that year was like. So I always try and set my stories in a specific year. I think I've read books where a character is on Snapchat and then they're wearing Capri pants or something. I'm like, "What is this? My brain is melting!" It's something like that. And I'm like, "Oh dear."
So I'm like, "Alright, cool. We're gonna reference stalking Reformation dresses on like Instagram influencers. And then we're gonna reference Trump." Because this book takes place in a very specific year so it was easy for me to go into it with those pop culture references, and with that slang, and with what that moment felt like. And to write about it rather than writing about like an amalgamation that needed to be current two years later.
Sarah Enni: So I'd love to, to whatever extent, I'd love to hear about this fantasy trilogy. And I'm a huge historical fantasy fan, so I'm really excited that you're moving into that space. What's it been like to jump into genre in novel form?
Robyn Schneider: I feel like I've been reading genre fiction more often than I've been reading contemporary realistic fiction. I mean, it started with Harry Potter, and it really never ended. But I'm just such a huge fantasy fan that I never really differentiated. I just assumed everybody was reading both. And so I just decided to write it. It felt like I wanted to tell a story about being an outsider and figuring out who you truly are, but maybe I wanted to set it in like 16th century.
And have wizards doing kissing, and swords that cure hangovers, and all of this fun, magical stuff that you never really get to write about when it's always having a crush on your classmate in third period, AP English. Is how I like to describe writing contemporary realistic fiction.
Sarah Enni: The thing that's so interesting for me looking at your arc toward fantasy is cause I'm like you, I've been a fantasy reader my whole life. Fantasy would be like my, "Ahh!" Like, "Maybe one day I'll feel good enough to tackle it." But I love contemporary fiction. I love reading it, and I love writing it.
But I do think I'm sort of like running down the runway to try to eventually get to the point where I can tackle something as big and intimidating as fantasies. So I'm just interested, did you have any of those feelings? Or were you just ready for it? Or how did it feel?
Robyn Schneider: I mean, I've always wanted to write it. My middle grade series was a 19th century and it was steam punk, so it was technology rather than magic. So I've gotten close to it, but I've never done it in a really thought out way. As what I like to think of as myself as a fully finished writer and not a twenty-year-old just trying something out after class.
I think actually writing a lot of TV series bibles made me figure out how to do it. Because that was one of the first things I did. I sat down and I wrote out a magic system, and I wrote out a lot of the history of what I wanted to do. And I actually got into it on a research tangent on almond milk, which is so weird. I don't know, sometimes I'll just find things on the internet, I'm sure everybody does this. They go down the Wikipedia spiral.
And they're like, "Queen Elizabeth had an entire carriage that was just a toilet that just followed her around?" Like, "What?! There was just a toilet carriage at all times. And that was normal?" Like, "Shakespeare lived in a time of toilet carriages and no one talks about this?" You know? So it's just sometimes I'll get that kind of thing in my head. And I don't know, I really am interested in trying to write stories that are super character driven and that speak metaphorically about a lot of the issues that we're dealing with, but do it in a way that's just fun and different and makes a mess of history in a beautiful way. Like I love anachronisms.
I am such a fan of like Hamilton and The Great and really all of these things. A Knight's Tale, oh my god. Growing up, A Knight's Tale was the movie. So anything that just is a little bit anachronistic, a little bit historical, a little bit of kissing, a little bit of chivalry, or revolution, I am down. And also, god I don't know if this is giving too much away, but I came at it from a queer lens for the first time.
Recognizing what it was that made me feel so uncomfortable about certain gender bender stories. I always was fans of things like She's the Man or Move On. And a lot of K dramas go into this territory as well. And I just would watch them. I've binge watched them on the treadmill at the gym.
And there's always this moment where there's a woman who's had to disguise herself as a boy where her male love interest thinks he's falling for another dude and goes like, "Ugh! That's awful. I can't. Gross!" And in that moment I fall a little bit out of love with him and I don't want them to be together. I stop rooting for it. And I'm just like, "What's so wrong with if it was another guy?" Like, "What's so scary about that?" And I couldn't answer it.
Sarah Enni: The presumption of that trope is that the guy would never...
Robyn Schneider: Right. Never fall for another guy. It's such a queer baity trope because I know that so many bi girls are so obsessed with gender bender stories because they're stories that play with the idea of gender presentation and identity in really, really fun ways and allow you to step outside of the cultural norm. They're stories that are almost like cosplay, you know? They're deliciously fun and frothy and they're not realistic, but isn't it fun?
So I was like, "Is there a way to write that trope that is very queer positive and queer friendly and doesn't make you fall out of love with the guy? Like, "Is there a way to write him as an ally? Is there a way to tell this story differently so that it isn't essentially a negative story about queerness?" And that was what I was working with. Plus almond milk and toilets and magical things.
Sarah Enni: [Laughing] I love that, it's such a great pitch. Oh my gosh I can't wait.
Robyn Schneider: I know. Honestly, I really can't say much. I literally have not even signed the contracts yet. Although I do have an edit letter already.
Sarah Enni: Oh, intense.
Robyn Schneider: And like a publication date, delivery dates. It is on. I am supposed to be working on this. So it's been fun. Especially writing magic because it's like, "Well, you know, none of the history really has to be right." And I just let myself have fun with it. I think there are moments where you write a really intense or personal story and you fall out of love with writing because it feels like a chore. And the amount of work you have to do, especially in terms of getting sensitivity reads, and checking on yourself, and making sure that you are doing the work, and you're putting in the effort, and you're getting it right.
You know, you can just feel really drained and like, "Ugh, book writing is such a nine to five." And it shouldn't be. It should be your fingers flying over the keyboard in a coffee shop. And I think writing fantasy for me just felt like a return to fingers flying over the keyboard in the coffee shop. And I thought that I had lost that forever. And it felt really magical to find a story that gave me that back. But I think also fantasy has always been so intimidating, like you said, because for me, I think, "Well, I need to figure out not just the characters, but the right world to tell a story in." Versus just the right plot.
Sarah Enni: Right, right. That makes total sense. Yeah, the world is everything. Oh, I love that writing the story bible was so helpful. And that's a great kind of an exercise, even for someone who might be intimidated by fantasy, but wants to find a way in. Look at a story bible and see how they did it.
Robyn Schneider: It's hard because I really couldn't find story bibles online. The first time I was asked to write one, I didn't know what they were. I said like, "Can I have three days to do it? Can you send me an example?" I think there are more online now, but I started out with a one-pager that's just like tone, world, characters, and character emotional arcs on the one page.
Then it's like the rules of magic. Then it's like the history of the world on one page. Then you go through the plot of what's gonna happen. And then you go through the character's journeys or arcs like each character and how they're interconnected. And then at that point, you don't even have a synopsis. You don't even have a word down on the page, but you feel confident enough to know that you could without info dumping, without scrambling to find a name that sounds wizardry.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I like to wrap up with advice. So you've just given such amazing advice, but I'd love to hear, I guess maybe someone who's interested in writing a story that's very personal like this. That's touching on many personal parts of their life and weaving a narrative out of it. If you have any advice for tackling something like that?
Robyn Schneider: I would say, make sure that you want to write the story for other people and not just for yourself. Because a lot of writing about personal issues can be really, really cathartic, but it can also feel like it belongs to you and you don't want to change parts of it that could make it more commercial. Or make it fit more in terms of a publisher's brand or an imprint, or what the publishing trend is this year.
So if you're writing the story because you want to give it to the world, and you're not gonna be precious about it, then absolutely go for it. But there's nothing wrong with just writing something down for yourself as a way to process and grieve. But if you're looking to tell a story and answer questions about what it's like to go through something for other people, then probably the thing that you're considering writing about is a good topic.
But also, don't be afraid to fictionalize it and to heighten the experience and to heighten all of the stakes and drama. And just to make sure that you're not writing from a place of pain, but you're writing from a place of crafting story.
Sarah Enni: I think that's such good advice, the not wanting to be precious. And I come back to that a lot on this show that I do always want to keep in mind, I think it's me reminding myself like, "It's possible and okay to write just for yourself sometimes." Like, "If you just need to do that for a little bit, you can do that and then put it aside." And if you're writing something for publication then it's for publication, and that's gonna come with edit letters.
Robyn Schneider: Yes. It's going to come with the edit letters, and then it's going to come with the copy edits, and it's gonna come with the sensitivity reads, and the reviews, and everything afterward. It's the line that like, "Books belong to their readers." And for a long time, I didn't quite understand what that meant. But yeah, stories, manuscripts, they can belong to you, but once you make the active choice to put a story out into the world, you are giving it away. And you're giving it to others. And that's magical and that's beautiful, but it can also be really painful.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Well this has been so fun, Robyn, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today. And I love this book. I hope everyone goes to check it out.
Robyn Schneider: I really hope so, too. Thanks so much for having me.
Sarah Enni: Thank you so much to Robyn. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @RobynSchneider. And follow me on both @SarahEnni (Twitter and Instagram), and the show @FirstDraftPod (Twitter and Instagram). This show was brought to you by HIGHLAND 2 the writing software by writers for writers. Happily, where I am actually actively doing my revisions now, I swear.
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Finally, if you have any writing or creativity questions that you'd like me and a guest to answer in an upcoming mailbag episode, please call and leave that question at First Draft's voicemail that's at (818) 533-1998. Or you can record yourself asking the question and email it to me at mailbag@FirstDraftPod.com.
Hayley Herschman produces First Draft and today's episode was produced and sound designed by Callie Wright. The theme music is by Dan Bailey and the logo was designed by Collin Keith. Thanks also to transcriptionist-at-large Julie Anderson.
And, as ever, thanks to you sneezes on your way to being fully formed thoughts, for listening.
I want to hear from you!
Have a question about writing or creativity for Sarah Enni or her guests to answer? To leave a voicemail, call (818) 533-1998 or send an email to mailbag @ firstdraftpod dot com!
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