In a special spooky episode of the Good Story Podcast, NYT Bestselling young adult and middle-grade author Jonathan Auxier joins Mary Kole to discuss visual writing, worldbuilding, and how different media use dialogue to create action.
In a special spooky episode of the Good Story Podcast, NYT Bestselling young adult and middle-grade author Jonathan Auxier joins Mary Kole to discuss visual writing, worldbuilding, and how different media use dialogue to create action.
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Mary: Hello, this is Mary Kole and "The Good Story Podcast," helping writers craft a good story. With me, you will hear from thought leaders related to writing, and sometimes not, about topics important to writers of all categories and ability levels. Here is to telling a good story.
Thank you so much for joining us. This is a new audio and visual attempt at "The Good Story Podcast." My name is Mary Kole. And with me, I have the wonderful Jonathan Auxier. I will let him introduce himself and then, we are off to the races.
Jonathan: Hey, everybody. My name is Jonathan Auxier. I write strange stories for strange kids. Some of you might know my longer middle-grade books like the Peter Nimble series, or the spooky Night Gardener, or "Sweep." I also have a brand-new series that is out right now for younger readers, readers of all ages really. It's called "The Fabled Stables." The first book is called "Willa the Wisp." And the second book just, just came out and it's called "Trouble with Tattle-Tails." It's about a little boy named Auggie who works in magical stables filled with all kinds of strange, unusual, one-of-a-kind creatures.
Mary: And they are beautiful. I was looking through all of the covers. They are so fun.
Jonathan: I was very, very excited. Even though I do draw and illustrate some of my novels, these books, we have an artist named Olga Demidova. And I, as a parent, really wanted books that had tons and tons of color, full-color illustrations. So these books are basically, they're short. You read them about 15 minutes but there are 100 pages of full-color illustrations by Olga and they are just absolutely kind of candy-colored, and amazing, and silly, and brilliant. I love them. I love the way they turned out. I can't take credit for how they look but it's been really, really fun to actually get these physical copies, much more than my novels frankly because these are so much more nice and wonderful to kind of page through and hold them.
Mary: I love them. I'm so excited for you to branch out and maybe, even here, well, we'll see where the conversation takes us. But to hear how you sort of got around to middle grade, which I understand was maybe not your first writing love, and then got around to chapter books. So we can talk about kind of your own journey. I liked that we kind of started talking about your covers because one of the things that you are known for, as a writer, is your rich, detailed, very atmospheric worldbuilding. And that is sort of what I think of when I think of "Sweep," when I think of Peter Nimble, I think about this sort of gothic, Victorianesque, Dickensian world but with a lot of glow and heart. It seems like you dwell in a little bit of that world for quite a few of your stories or similar offshoots of that world. How did you arrive there?
Jonathan: Yeah. No, that's definitely a sound observation that I seem to have sort of a lane that I sort of landed in. And some of that were the dictates of the story. So, both Night Gardener and "Sweep" are fantasies set in a literal, historical backdrop of Victorian England. There's historical realities, especially in "Sweep" which is really historically grounded that I was working around. But, certainly, just a general aesthetic leaning toward that.
Worldbuilding is kind of a funny thing. So even early in my career, I started out wanting to be a playwright. I studied playwriting in graduate school. And even there, and certainly, later in my life and writing career when I tried branching out into screenwriting and then books, people have often identified kind of very strong worldbuilding in my writing. What's sort of funny about that is I don't think I, as a writer, am really prioritizing that. So, it's one of those compliments that I sort of am happy to hear because we like a compliment. It's also quite valued in certain arenas so like when I was breaking out as a screenwriter or trying to, that was something that people identified like, "Oh, we need someone who can really do strong worldbuilding." My sense though is that I've never been totally convinced that a lot of the people who talk about worldbuilding even have a clear sense of what they mean by it.
Mary: Fabulous.
Jonathan: But I don't have a good answer. I would love to, like, take down this dogma and give you this shining, new, clear thing but really what it comes down to is, I think, like anything, worldbuilding is something that can be done. It's not a question of whether it exists or doesn't exist. It exists. It's a question of whether it's done well or not done well. And I think you can have very worldbuilding stories that are a giant mess and don't actually take you into a world, and then you can have a very grounded, real story that makes the world real. And so, really, to me, worldbuilding is like a shorthand that people use to talk about almost like set design, and flavor, and tone. But, usually, when they're excited about it, it's not actually the set design, and the flavor, and tone they're excited about. They're excited about the fact that they could basically, fully visualize the space and actually, we're experiencing the story as though it was happening to them. Sometimes, I feel like people use worldbuilding as the way to say, "I felt like I was in a world." But set design is not actually the best way to make you feel like you're inside a world. It works a little bit. I mean, we've all been on, like, amazing Disney rides that like, "Oh, yeah, I really feel like I'm in a haunted house for a second." And so, it's a tool to help create that immersion. But I don't actually think it's the thing itself. This is the first time I'm articulating these thoughts so I might retract them in a minute.
Mary: No, I love it. And I was gonna say, you know, I think it's very interesting that this is what a lot of people call out in your work. You had started as a playwright. You did some screenwriting. And there, in film and on stage, the visual world is created by the visual elements, those crafts which are set design and, of course, in film, you have a whole visual component that works in chorus with the actual words the characters are speaking. You know, if there is any set description, it's like smash cut, interior, daytime. You know, that side of the writing that goes into creating the world in a basic screenplay and so, it's really interesting for me that that was your genesis as a writer. And yet, you have all of these accolades for creating the atmosphere of world on the page.
Jonathan: Well, some of that actually makes a lot of sense. I would say that I am, and I would own... Well, no one compliments me for this, but I wish they would because I think it's true. I am a highly visual writer. I was a late bloomer as a writer. I thought I was gonna be an artist pretty much my whole life until I, you know, got into my early 20s.
Mary: A visual artist.
Jonathan: Yeah, yeah. I didn't write very much. I was always coming up with stories, but I was thinking very visually. So, you know, as a young adolescent, I'm like, "Well, you know, a film director does those things." It turns out I hate cameras and so I was like, I don't want to spend my life, you know...
Mary: ...behind one of these things.
Jonathan: I spoke with a director once, who said... He was a screenwriter and a movie director. He preferred his screenwriter identity. And the way he described directing was, he said, "It takes a very special kind of creativity to film someone walking down a driveway for eight hours," which actually like sparked with me because I'm like, what am I willing to do for eight hours? I am willing to polish a sentence, maybe not eight hours. But, you know...
Mary: I was gonna say, have you ever worked on a sentence for eight hours?
Jonathan: Yeah. We can talk about my tortuous writing process later.
Mary: Oh, that sounds great. I would love to.
Jonathan: It's one step forward, nine steps back.
Mary: Perfect.
Jonathan: But not to sidestep this point. I started writing because I learned I actually wasn't that great of an artist. I had a lot of images and ideas, really, fundamentally, visuals that I wanted to put into the world. They were all narrative. They were stories. And I wasn't a good enough artist to turn them into stories. And so, I, like, looked around and I'm like, well, if you can write, you can create any visual. I started in theater, I think, mainly because of access. I had been acting in theater programs. I was familiar with theater and the barriers to entry are actually quite low. Theater classes are available in your high school and university. It doesn't take a lot to mount a little production. It takes a lot to publish a book. And it takes much more than a lot to make a movie, but you can just practice a scene with something and make something come alive, you know, in an afternoon. And so, theater was my way in because of that access. What I learned in graduate school was that with some very meaningful exceptions, theater, or I'll call it dramatic writing, fundamentally does not tell story through images. Stage plays can occasionally have very resting images but the way action unfolds in theater is through dialogue, right? You think of Shakespeare as the extreme example. The only stage directions we get are like, he dies, or, you know, exit, right, and because...
Mary: I saw your blog post about Hamlet. The prince of Denmark, it's just like, it's one word, dies.
Jonathan: Yeah. And that's actually, I mean, that's an extreme example but that's what all theater does is the action happens in dialogue, in words spoken by characters. And I actually learned that I kind of had a tin ear, not for having characters speak like humans but for having story action occur through dialogue.
Mary: Interesting. That's a really granular distinction.
Jonathan: Super granular. It took me a year of my MFA instructor yelling at me that I didn't understand the concept before I could even understand that I didn't understand the concept because he was like, "You are not doing actions." And I'm like, "There is action. She slaps him." He's like, "That's not a story action. That's not dramatic action. That's just a verb." And this was like really deep, complex stuff and I really developed those skills a lot but I also kind of developed a sense that like, this isn't the stuff that I love.
There are some people who can tell stories through their dialogue and that's the way the story moves. I think those people often transfer not only from theater but I actually think that's sort of a hidden ingredient of graphic novels. That's really hard, for me, to actually figure out. I think there's a temptation to write a graphic novel like you would a screenplay and be like, "Oh, the artist would do it all." Graphic novels are widely different because they can't show actions, right? You can't draw someone without silly cartoon lines. You can't draw someone doing a double-take, let alone slapping someone. You can show the moment before the slap, the moment after the slap. You can't actually show the action. And really great comics often have characters saying stuff that if you filmed it in a movie would look really, really bad. I recently reread Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, which was deeply affecting to me growing up, and I knew they were gonna finally make a movie out of it. And I kept on trying to just shoot the movie in my head as I'm reading these stories, and it would just be the worst scene you've ever seen. It works wonderfully on a comic page because a comic needs the action to move through dialogue. But if you just literally transcribe that brilliant comic to the screen, you would think it would be a one-to-one translation but I think they have to do a lot of work because it's a totally different medium. I can't even remember your initial question other than to say that...
Mary: We were talking about worldbuilding eons ago but I really, I love this, this kind of the difference between a screenplay, a graphic novel script, a play, like a piece of playwriting, a drama, a manuscript.
Jonathan: I don't know. A playscript, I don't know, I use script when I talk about plays.
Mary: I was a theater major. Oh, my gosh. No, I really like this. Give me an example of... Okay, I'm really gonna put you on the spot here. But can you give me an example of how dialogue moves action forward maybe in one or two of these mediums, just compare and contrast?
Jonathan: So, in a graphic novel, you often... I mean, I can't even remember. I picked up a comic my daughter was reading and I can't, for the life of me, remember what it was. I don't think it was "Bone" but it was something like that. And it's just the first panel was the character literally, they were clearly like marching out of the house. All we had was the image of the marching out of the house. And so, the character was saying, you know, something to the effect of, "What a great day to plant some seeds in the old garden." If you filmed that, it would look idiotic because we can see the garden. We can literally see what they're about to do. The pleasure of say a movie is watching the action unfold and tell us what's happening. That would be the epitome of hack writing, have a character say that. Instead, they might say, "What a beautiful day" but that we can even say... And so, the dialogue does different things. The dialogue, sort of, is used to reveal character, much more the personality of like, "Ah, way too sunny for me," right, or something like that. You use the dialogue in screenwriting to reveal character and theme and certainly sometimes, plot or necessary exposition. But it's not the fundamental language of cinema. The comic book needs that so that you can get to the next panel. Otherwise, the comic takes 500 pages. And certainly, some comics I've seen are like actually trying to storyboard the thing. You would think that's like this beautiful, artistic thing but it's actually, really, to me, a very uneven reading experience where I'm like, I'm flipping pages every three seconds and oop, now, I have to stop. And it's gonna take me four minutes to get through this conversation and then it speeds up again. I think that's an example of kind of asking one medium to use the language of another one. So, I don't know if that succeeds as an example for you.
Mary: And maybe in a graphic novel with the idea of kind of walking out of the house and, you know, having them say, "Oh, I'm gonna do some burning or whatever, trying to prime the garden." I'm not a gardener. So, I now feel the theater terms, gardening terms. But if the scope compared to film, you know, we'd be able to see the garden behind them. We'd be able to see all this. In terms of a panel, it is very restrictive so we are only able to see so much. And so, the dialogue has to do a little bit more work or the narrative, kind of the little narrative strips if those are included, kind of the prose of the graphic novels, have to do a little bit more work. And the reader also then has to do more work bridging from panel to panel. So, if there's a shift in the action or a shift in perspective, that happens more in the reader's mind, whereas in film, it's sort of laid out for us to sort of consume.
Jonathan: Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. I don't know what mastery of that looks like but I agree that I think there's a mistake made when we assume one medium translates really easily and neatly into the other. And so, again, for me, I had a lot of story ideas I got through theater. I went to a really good MFA program. I spent years honing that craft. But my ultimate takeaway was like this is gonna be, you know, like working with one hand tied behind my back for the rest of my career because I am a visual storyteller. And the visual is central. And I will, once in a while, get to tell stories through visual and theater. But there are other modes of storytelling like cinema that are 99% visual, right.
In my second year of graduate school, I took what I refer to as a vow of silence because I really wanted to understand what dialogue was, in part to understand what my MFA director was yelling at me about. And so, for a whole year, I only watched silent movies. And I watched tons and tons and tons of them. And I became kind of briefly obsessed with the form which really informed a lot of my writing moving forward. But the general experiment I was doing and a lot of these early sound movies are visually brilliant because before they needed to add sound recording technology, the cameras were quite small and nimble. So the cinematography in some of these early pictures, once they get past like the first, you know, a decade or two of moving pictures, the really, really vibrant and rich, again, because the cameras can be little and are much more nimble. And one of the things you notice is any one of these movies, it's gonna have a couple of cards slotted in with dialogue. And you suddenly realize, "Oh, here's where the story can't happen without these words out of this person's mouth." And when you start paying attention to really, the 10 sentences that whatever, a movie like 'The General" requires in order to function, you're like, "Okay. I guess for this mode, for writing for cinema, maybe I only need the 10 sentences."
And so, my writing got really kind of much more stripped down. The screenplay that sort of went into my screenwriting career as my calling card was an hour-long silent movie, which would never get made. It would have been gloriously expensive because it was very visual and very worldbuildy, and it was silent or it had no dialogue. It was a very noisy movie, but it was noisy in the language of cinema rather than the language of dialogue, which just wasn't necessary for that script. And that was me sort of leaning completely into what that medium does.
Mary: Did that hush your teacher up a little bit when you came out with that?
Jonathan: So, in that instance, I had like a radical, sort of ugly duckling transformation in graduate school. This was a very small program. I think they took five people a year. This guy would not have had a career in 2021. In a moment when we're looking at that boss, this was a really toxic man. I mean, screaming, throwing things at us, horrific insults, like as sort of debasing and awful as it can be. I don't know if you saw the movie "Whiplash." I think "Whiplash" is a masterpiece.
Mary: I'm glad it's on my list.
Jonathan: It really captures the perversity and complexity of the dynamic between a demanding instructor and a promising person who is making the mistake of needing their approval. I also think, ultimately, it's a very complicated set of reflections I have. I do not like the guy who ran the department, personally, for what I experienced. I am quite convinced that I would not have emerged as the writer that I was, similar to the sort of military boot camp experience. We are actually putting you through hell because we know that hell is coming. And we need you to know what it looks like. And we need you to have sort of the internal motivation to draw upon because the external motivation will never be there consistently, and in fact, it will usually be external, will usually be pushing against you.
Mary: Yeah, like self-preservation, get out of here, so you have to go dig deep as a person.
Jonathan: Yeah, you have to be the thing forcing yourself to do this unpleasant thing. So, I see the value of that philosophy, but I also think a lot of potentially wonderful writers are destroyed in that process and that is a great tragedy. I think it's a tool for a certain writer. It might have even been the tool I needed. It is not a tool for every writer. I think it's a mistake to romanticize that sort of instruction, which is complicated though because I needed it. I had come from a touchy-feely world prior to that, with a lot of adult and mentor support. And that got me into a good graduate program but it wasn't actually valuable past that. I needed to develop some other things.
Mary: You found that you really needed that kind of crucible experience to emerge.
Jonathan: Yes. Speaking with that, so I was on the chopping block. Every year, he was always threatening to cut at least one person from the program. And I had come straight through undergrad whereas most of the people in the program were several years older. Some of them were, you know, in their early 40s, and had run theater companies and really had a lot of experience. I was a child. I was a worse writer than everyone. I was desperate for approval, and it was my first time living away from family, all of this going on. And the first year, you could just smell my desperation and weakness, and I think I sort of had a stink on me. My writing was desperate. I was writing it for other people. And then, between my first and second year, I actually started to write a letter to friends and family explaining why I was going to drop out of the program. Instead, I wrote the first chapter of Peter Nimble. I've never written a word of fiction prose before in my life.
Mary: That makes a lot more sense because I read on your website that Peter Nimble was sort of a side project, right? You were involved in this program. You were studying something completely different, and I think you phrased it like, "Oh, to blow off steam or whatever." I had no idea that there was a lot of steam to blow off but that was sort of the outlet it seems like when you were doing the personal growth, this professional growth, this writerly growth, you know, thinking about quitting, all of this very intense stuff, watching silent movies, but a little pressure release turned into prose, which is now what you do, primarily. So, talk about how you sort of arrived at that little escape?
Jonathan: So, I wrote the whole first draft of Peter Nimble in a month and it was rough first draft. Again, I've never written a word of prose. Whatever I learned doing that, I came back to my second year of graduate school a completely transformed writer. And I came back very much one of the strongest students in the program, in part because I no longer cared about the people whose approval I needed, which is the sick cosmic joke about that fits into relationships. You know, when you let it go, when you don't need someone, suddenly, they appear. You know, all of these sorts of things. That was true in my writing. I took opportunity where I found it which was... I knew Peter wasn't gonna work for me, I was more a visual writer. I had opportunity in terms of kinds of grants and some access for screenwriting so I moved out to Los Angeles. All my friends went to New York. I was very sad because I prefer New York as a city. But again, I wanted to go where opportunity was and that was the point at which Peter Nimble became a sort of my enjoyable sidekick because it turned out, I didn't really love screenwriting. I didn't have the temperament for pitching. I hate having to pitch or sell an idea that I haven't actually written because it might be terrible. I know that. I throw out so much of my writing so the idea that I'm like telling you how great this thing is, it feels really sickening to me.
Mary: You did pretty poorly in L.A. where the hot air... That's what accounts for their perfect climate. It's just all the hot air coming out of everyone.
Jonathan: I did okay. There was a point I got like a big agent early on. I sold some things. I was like making some money, living off of writing, which was like, you know, a success. I wasn't getting anything produced. I was just also looking down the road and realizing I'm not proud of what I'm writing and the opportunities I was seeing. You know, I sold a TV show a week before the writers' strike in 2007, so I kind of came out of the gates and then got kneecapped.
Mary: Into a wall.
Jonathan: Yeah. There you go. But over a couple of years, basically, I noticed that the only writing I was excited about was that I would pick away at that manuscript or that novel I had written between graduate school years. And so that is where it became like I realized, you know, this is clearly what I love. Like the other stuff is exhausting. It stokes my insecurities instead of sort of assuaging them. Peter Nimble, really, that manuscript was kind of a happy place for me. So I spent like a happy, several years kind of just picking at it, and revising it, and tweaking it, which was terrific, until I kind of finally hit a point where I realized like... Actually, the real point was when my big movie agent read the book and was like, "We're setting this up as a movie tomorrow." He's like, "Great. This is great. We'll set this up as a movie." And this was the moment where everyone was so hot for IP. You know, everyone's adapting comics and graphic novels if you have an existing piece of property. And I remember, you know, this is an agent I was scared of. I laughed at jokes that weren't funny. I did anything to make him like me. And he's like, "We're setting this up as a movie." And I remember this, like, instant clarity and I was like, "No. This is a book. I don't want this to be a movie. I need this to be a book." And he didn't deal with book rights and so, he like threw a tantrum and called a guy who called a guy who got me a book agent so I could sell this dumb, little book so that he could then turn it around as a movie. And by the time the book actually happened and I actually met someone in publishing, you know, my book agent was a delight. He actually was a reader instead of being just, you know...
Mary: Nobody in the film world reads.
Jonathan: Yeah. You were a book agent, so you understand. You're a wonderful breed. The movie agent people, they're very smart. And some of them are nice, good people, but they're not my people. I wasn't comfortable with them.
Mary: Well, your cohort went to New York. And I think mentally and emotionally, you went to New York too. Your body just walked around L.A. for a while before you got... You know, you're not in New York City itself but your work is produced in New York rather than Los Angeles.
Jonathan: It could be just a temperament thing. But it's also just the types of people, you know, like I just felt like people would be more direct with me if something was wrong. They would tell me if they liked something. I was able to believe the compliment. I had so much more control over the work. I knew at any moment I can just say no and that was really freeing. And that often gave me the permission to say yes to a no, knowing that I didn't have to. Whereas if you're dealing with a studio or a development exec, they give you the note and they're like "You don't have to do this." But you're like, "Well, I kind of do."
Mary: Yeah. They're gonna find a hot new thing tomorrow. I mean, we're kind of villainizing the film industry but it's that it works completely differently and there's a kind of real lack of preciousness that... And preciousness can be really good, and it can also be kind of a hindrance for writers. And I think in New York, we do celebrate the good kind of preciousness where we're all together, trying to make beautiful books for children. You know, you say strange books for strange kids, which I love. Everybody kind of operates on the same mission. And in L.A., it's kind of like everyone's on the hot new sense and then the wind changes, and then everybody's on the other hot new sense. There's not so much attachment to sort of this book of your heart idea.
Jonathan: Yeah. And I don't need to necessarily villainize. I think I can be very explicit about the fact that it was not a good fit for me. I just didn't have the temperament for it. And some of the stuff that I am unusually bad at, bouncing between ideas. It takes me about two weeks to pull my brain out of one idea and start another. Screenwriting is all about having five or six ideas going. You meet with, you know, executive on a generally, like, "Oh, we've got this short story we want to adapt. What do you think?" And a writer who can thrive in that world, is able to read the short story go, "Okay, I have an idea. I've got three free days. Let me put something together." It would literally take me one to two weeks to just remove my head from whatever I was in, and those weeks felt like waste, like I was so glacial at bouncing from idea to idea. And that's a survival skill. It's not one person being better than another. But that was a legitimate, creative, and cognitive limitation that I had that pretty much precluded me from being able to capitalize on whatever opportunity I was being offered or given there. I'm just a very slow and deliberate thinker. I speak very quickly but I process and think very slowly. And again, I didn't have the temperament for that world. So, it's not that like I was too good for L.A. I think I could have stuck it out and maybe, you know, that lottery ticket I was kind of, you know, getting might have actually won out. I can't see the future but I did project into a future in L.A., and I was asking like, what if I got the thing I was desperate to get? And I could see very clearly that I still wouldn't be happy.
And so, leaving Los Angeles to live in an ordinary town, not ordinary, a magnificent town like Pittsburgh, writing kid's books where I can just kind of slowly tend my own garden, those were really crucial to my specific temperament because I have the time and patience for words and for my stories when they're mine. I get along better with the people involved, you know, publishers, editors, agents in the book world, librarians, teachers, other writers. So, it's just a fit question and it took me a while to find that fit. But I'm really glad I did. I don't spend a lot of time, you know, wishing I were still a playwright or something.
Mary: Yes. I think a lot of writers really struggle with this idea of what they should be, what they should be doing, how they should operate. But that's why we have a world where we talk in terms of plotters versus pantsers, you know, of people who can juggle multiple projects, people who really cannot. And I think a lot of people get far down the road and feel badly or they feel not like they're functioning at their full potential or whatever because they're trying to sort of fit themselves into these various molds that just might not be a fit, so I think the process that you went through, while it sounds like it took a while and you say, you know, I move at a pretty glacial pace to get to these kinds of realizations. I think at the end, it was absolutely worth it to end up where you needed to be, and you picked up a lot of insight along the way. So it's like, for me, a lot of writers come to me and they say, you know, "This didn't go anywhere. This didn't get picked up. I wasted all this time." I don't think any time that is spent writing or sort of exploring the options in the writing world because you've done playwriting, you've done screenwriting, you now do novel writing and chapter book writing, all of these are different disciplines but they all contribute to your overall sense as a writer and a creative. And so, I don't think any of that time was wasted, nor is a drawer manuscript, the time spent writing or revising a drawer manuscript wasted.
Jonathan: I agree with that. I just recently finished a book that came out called "Range." I can't remember the name of the author. But the subtitle is like how generalists succeed in a world of increasing specialization.
Mary: Interesting.
Jonathan: Something like that. And clearly, the book just wants to be, you know, run counter to a lot of sort of 10,000 hours type of critiques and...
Mary: David Epstein.
Jonathan: David Epstein, yeah. Those books are always a little uneven because someone is so excited about like their thesis is about like here's how my idea is different than all other ideas that have happened and, you know, take it with a grain of salt. But there was something really therapeutic about the book because it talked at length about basically, the value in sort of having a broader range of experience. And there's one way to tell my story where I came out of the gates really fast. Again, I was the youngest person in my graduate program, you know, first person to get like a major agent, you know, out of my cohort, managed to like break into an industry, abandon the industry, turn around, start a new career, and still have my first novel published when I was 29. So by most standards, that's like someone who never took a break and just was pursuing, you know, one thing relentlessly. But, internally, there were an enormous number of moments where I like walked away from what felt like the path that I fought very hard to forge in front of me. And that book talked quite a bit about how we don't celebrate enough walking away from things. Like there's a fetishization in say startup culture of like, "Your failures make you stronger." But that's still this sort of myopic focus on like, "Don't let anything get in the way of the path you've set." And this book talked really, I think, generously and wonderfully about like, "No, there's this other thing, which is just walking away, right when the thing is there," like tenaciously pursuing X because you have decided X is the thing, can occasionally be counterproductive and nonsensical or, at least, soul-crushing. [crosstalk 00:35:16.337]
Mary: A light crushing of the soul.
Jonathan: A little soul crush is a given in human existence, I think. So that was really liberating because I worked pretty hard to not dress up, sort of, my failures at certain attempts as like I was too good for this. It's a confluence of things. Part of the reason I also didn't pursue playwriting is because it became very clear to me that literally, no one makes a living at it. And I'm pragmatic that way as well. I was like, well, if this is my passion and my dream, then I want to do it full time. You know, like there's Lin-Manuel Miranda and no one else. And even he's doing a million side gigs. And so, I was like, well, that wouldn't work. And so, when I was pursuing, you know, screenwriting, part of me was pursuing like it felt like there's a job here. The thing I started to realize as screenwriting, which I think has only become much, much more true, especially if you're not interested in television, which I wasn't, is you can make a killing but you can't make a living. It's sort of the joke they say about screenwriting careers and I was like, I just want to make a living, I don't want to make a killing. And children's publishing, even different than adult literary fiction, certainly different than writing poetry or short fiction which is you really need to sort of support yourself usually through teaching in MFA programs and things like that. But with children's writing, it was having this new sort of market explosion post-Harry Potter. There was all of this interest. There was money. There was sort of new legitimacy in the industry. It happened to be the thing I also loved and really, you're looking for that confluence of like what's the thing I love enough to stick with it, which is really, to me, the definition of passion. It's just a kind of patience and the ability to take pleasure even when the thing isn't easy or fun...
Mary: I love that.
Jonathan: ...which is different than like, aptitude. Again, writing is not my first creative language at all. And so, it was that confluence. And it took some trial and error to find the thing that I both loved and felt like I was equipped to do and I can get paid for. And for my money [crosstalk 00:37:34.123] Oh, I've made so much more money on books than I ever did on screen. And I'm like, you know, I sold a movie to Disney. I wrote a screenplay for them. Like I've done some big things and the individual check that's written might be larger than some of my publishing checks but like in aggregate, I've been publishing books for, this summer will bring me to 10 years since my first novel was published. You and I are both quite old, Mary. It's happened so fast.
Mary: I see that in the mirror every day that I look.
Jonathan: Because I feel like, again, knowing your blog, right, when blogging was super important, my first book came out and so, I was familiar with you that way. But I think it's a testament that, like, we're both still here. That speaks to like the ability to make a living. It's not easy but the number of people who have said, "I want to become a screenwriter." That I'm like, "Don't. Don't do it. Write some books. You have so much more control and you will get paid more. And you don't have to live in L.A. which is a city that I find not fun to live in."
Mary: I'm from Northern California, the real California, to be clear, so I couldn't agree with you more. I do want to, I have been kind of swirling on this one point you made. I really want to shine a light on there real quick, which is in your study of the silent movies, you noticed that they only, you know, there's a whole story, right. But we only have like these 10 dialogue cards. And so, you basically identified that a story destined for film, a story with this visual storytelling component can actually be pretty simple, which is where I think we get the pitch, right. The pitch can be, you know, a girl gets into Harvard Law School to win her boyfriend back. Beautiful pitch, doesn't even matter what the movie is about on a scene-to-scene level, but the idea of the movie is so transmittable. It's so consumable. If you don't like that pitch, here's another pitch. But the real underpinnings of those types of stories that I think it seems you've discovered do so well in film, there really are like two or three bullet points that you get, and then it's a whole idea. And you don't like that, here's another one, you know. And you identified that you are not necessarily set up or equipped to operate that way, but I do think that it's a really interesting way of looking at an entire idea can come down to just 10 lines of dialogue.
Jonathan: Yeah. I think I would separate those two. I hear what you're saying about the one-sentence pitch and I actually think the one-sentence pitch... I test pitches really carefully with my writing. And it's easy to do because it's often after the fact. But, you know, I'm doing, pre-COVID, tons and tons of events at schools, and I am pitching my books. And I'll hold up, you know, all four books and I'll give them each a one-sentence pitch. It's not even like reading their faces. They're kids. They're excited to not be in class. But I can hear it coming out of my mouth that I'm like, that's not actually the fun thing that makes everyone lean in. And I believe figuring out a really clean pitch teaches you about what the appeal of your story is and sometimes, it runs contrary to what you think the story is like. Once I get into a book and get rolling, I pitch it a lot because I find that's like a divining rod that shows me the sort of real heart of the thing. I would say the lack of dialogue in say a silent movie, when I'm really just observing, for me, it was understanding that every medium has its own tools that are best suited for it. It doesn't mean you can't make a super talkie movie where the action happens in dialogue but it's not what the medium wants. And figuring out like where are you fighting against the medium and where are you working with the medium strengths, so it's on, again, movies. Movies are pretty unusual in a couple of ways but one of the ways is, obviously, a moving picture is one of the only things that can actually show action occur across time, right? Even in comics, as we said, like there's the gap, you extrapolate [crosstalk 00:42:06.520]
Mary: You don't get the smack of it.
Jonathan: Yeah. You might draw some speed lines or something. But like, it's still cheap, it's still lined, and the slack happens in the reader's mind, it still is effective. Cinema can actually do the movement, so can video games really. So it was just basically teaching myself to take really seriously like what medium am I working in and what does it want. What does it allow and what doesn't it allow? And I will be totally honest. With my first book, Peter Nimble, it was a very voicy book in kind of this tweety way. That has some appeal to it. But it wasn't until my second book, "The Night Gardener," that I started actually understanding some of the unique tools and you could even say expectations or requirements of prose writing, in terms of how POV works, which is super, super hard to teach. In the same way that my MFA director yelled at me about not knowing how to tell stories with dialogue, I find, I don't yell but when I'm working with writers, it's very hard for me to explain that, basically, every problem they have could be solved if they had a better command of point of view. And point of view is an incredibly nuanced and complex subject. It's not like first person, second person, third person, like that's what you learn, you know, in high school. But, actually, a strong command of POV is extremely complex. And I don't even have the vocabulary to teach it, I've learned. But I also think it's the whole thing if you have mastery of POV, the story. This goes all the way back to your initial question, that's when the world comes alive because that's what lets the reader fully inhabit the story, and inhabit the space of the story, and the world of the story.
Mary: So for you, the character is really the conduit.
Jonathan: There are two things. Point of view, I think, is very delicate control over levels of immersion. And one is going to bring you into the character and one is gonna bring you into the world. And also, even above the world, the author's mind, and I think that's something that fiction does better than almost any medium. It's really great hooks. You're living inside the character. You're analyzing and experiencing the world and sort of a bigger phenomenon. And then, you're also sliding into the mind of the creator and having a conversation with them because they're telling you what they think about the world, based on the world they've created and the characters they've created, and the outcomes of certain actions. And again, this is where POV is so complicated because it's so easy to start violating or accidentally pull the reader into one of those three states, and there's probably more than just three states. In a way, that's not helpful and you don't even realize you're doing it. Again, it took me years and years to even understand. I'd have much more experienced writers be like, "You're slipping on POV here," And I'm like, "No, I'm not. It's still in third person." And it was the same problem from graduate school all over again where I'm like I literally don't understand the problem that you say you're identifying. And it took me years and you had a second observation about worldbuilding that connected to that that I've lost about POV. Oh, the other thing is did you talk about centering on the character?
Mary: I'm orbiting into the three strata of POV right now so I literally like...
Jonathan: Welcome to a conversation with me. I move a lot...
Mary: I just want our listeners to know that, you know, we were doing our kind of banter and you were like, "Well, you know, like you could ask any questions as long as you're okay with me kind of jumping off the premise or disagreeing with the premise of the question." I have loved this conversation because I kind of go in with, like, my broad baseball bat of understanding and I'm like let's match these two ideas together. You know like no, no, my friend. There is some nuance here. I love that you are drilling into it so...
Jonathan: And sometimes, I say a thing and it doesn't feel true an hour later, so take everything with a grain of salt. I'm processing some of this as I speak. But I want to go back to the other thing you talked about so that was the POV thing. But you did mention sort of character as a conduit into worldbuilding and the way in which I have found that helpful to think about and in the graduate program, I do a workshop on this. I've no idea if it works for them but it's really helpful for me because it's been part as I've figured out my own process. In writing these fancy worlds, I've figured out that it's really central. And it has to do with basically that I'm not that interested in a super built world like being in a world were sort of mentality... And we get this not just in movie trailers but I think we see it a lot in YA. We see it in middle grade as well. We see it all over media, the elaborate hook and premise of the environment. And again, some of that set design, but there's usually a really hooky idea in a world where everyone is like X and like you're in this weird dystopia, whatever.
The thing that I find important for me as a writer to get me writing those sorts of stories in a way that the story starts coming alive and sort of showing me where it wants to go, is basically really, really aggressively reverse engineering. So let's say I have an idea for a world with a core metaphor or premise which 99% of fantasy does. It's fantasy that moves us and means something and resonates with our own lives. It all has some of it somewhere. It's a metaphorical resonance. I'm really aggressive once I have that flavor of that world to basically reverse engineer the protagonist. And one of the things that does, and I think we're actually seeing this, but basically, I'm telling a story the world is only important because of how that specific character is built and oriented. And that the problems that that character has and that they're gonna have to go through are exactly sort of almost a mirror image or deeply, deeply related to the fundamental problem or question of the world itself. And there is a different kind of worldbuilding storytelling that's much closer to video games or even if you want to go back earlier, what L. Frank Baum did with the Oz stories which after Wizard of Oz, I would argue, are all are quite unreadable. And it's basically you make a giant world where any story can happen. Gene Roddenberry, did this, of course. I mean, if you want to go super old, you could argue that Walter Scott did this with the "Waverley Novels." And the argument I've made often, that I'm about to refute is that George Lucas did this, the Star Wars universe. Ten million stories can be told in Star Wars. But also, I would argue that the reason we have to see the Death Star be blown up 10,000 times and 90% of the stories coming out of the Star Wars universe are about a boy named Luke and his daddy named Anakin and the same sets of problems echoed all the way into the, you know, episodes 7, 8, and 9, is because whether the creators understand it or not, George Lucas' world wasn't this broad platform that could easily tell a million stories. It was actually a really limited platform and it's not actually a very consistent role. Like the ability to poke holes in the Star Wars universe such as Luke Skywalker, 17 years old. His father was the Jedi who destroyed the galaxy and yet, no one remembers the Jedi. It's 17 years. That's much less time or several years shorter than like 9/11. The idea that no one remembers the Jedi and the Force.
Mary: Hush, hush, hush, hush, hush. This is blasphemy.
Jonathan: It's not blasphemy when that first story happens because the point was the journey that Luke goes on. There's other reasons that attempts to deepen the Harry Potter world have fumbled. Some of them are related to its author. But I also think there's a deeper reason which is Hogwarts makes no sense, except to the boy living under the stairs. And to him, to his journey, it makes perfect sense. But it turns out, you know, the magic trick of making us feel like the Star Wars universe or the wizarding world is endless. All they had to do is to make us feel that way so that we could follow that individual. So when I'm writing fantasy stories, as soon as I get that hook, okay there's a universe where there's a force, a good side and evil side. They're always at war. Then I go, I'm really disciplined where I'm like, who needs that story to happen to them?
The best example for this would be my third book, "Sophie Quire and the Last Storyguard." In many ways, this is actually my favorite book I wrote. I really, really love it. It didn't find as many readers as some of my other books, which breaks my heart. But every once in a while, a Sophie reader will show up in a signing line. I get really excited. But that was a world where I had already decided that basically, it was this small town in this sort of fantasy setting that had collectively decided to turn its back on... They have a city ordinance called No Nonsense. And everyone is literally burning and throwing away all of the fairytales and the folklore that had informed their entire culture and sense of place in the world because they want to kind of march into this bright, modern, more rational future. And there's ideas to tease out with that kind of big picture ideas about the meaning of the world. But the thing I had to do over and over again was take a breath and go, "I need a kid, a character, a hero, for whom this world is a direct challenge to their identity." And if they are not, again, mirror image is the wrong word but the best I have...
Mary: Foil?
Jonathan: Yeah, the foil. So the world is the foil to the child. The problems of the world are a reflection or connection to the problems within the child, the hopes, the aspirations of the child. And I find when you get that resonance, and it doesn't have to be super sophisticated, right. I think Bilbo Baggins in the Shire is a foil to the epic scope of what's gonna happen with hunting down Smaug in The Battle of the Five Armies. You're not always making Neo in "The Matrix," right. That's some obvious math of like, here's the computer-simulated, you know, prison we're all in, and here's the hacker who, you know, sees past all this and can swallow the right pill and bend a spoon. I can't remember. You don't always have to do that perfect math but I think on an emotional level, you need the journey that the story is gonna represent, the problems that this world represents are super, super intimate and localized. And that's how the world goes from just busy set design to like something we feel. You know, Katniss, to me, is like one of the best examples. I think you could have created "The Hunger Games" world and if you didn't have Katniss at the center of it, it would have just been nonsense. It wouldn't have resonated at all.
Mary: I was thinking about that when you were saying, you know, these high concept worlds where it's like kids are killing one another, you know. But I think you're right. Katniss anchored that kind of ridiculous high premise, you know, to use a pitchy type of term. You know, she really anchored that. And for her, that is the exact world that she needs to fight through to stand for what she believes in. And I think this goes back to your version of a pitch and your version of this kind of the heart of the story, the piece of statement of the story, and I love that you're sort of doing this dance between the character and the world where they really do fit perfectly to convey whatever the bigger idea is. And you can't do it without the right character in the right world.
Jonathan: One of the best things that might have led me to this sense of thinking, this was when I was young and in L.A. and starting out as a screenwriter, I had a friend. Now, he writes entertainment stuff. He's the Carpetbagger at New York Times so he's rocked it up. He's a wonderful guy, Kyle Buchanan. And he was like early days of like blogging his movie reviews and like doing, you know, as a side gig and kind of, you know, this was 15 years ago. And the movie "Crank," which I'm sure you all own on DVD, the premise is something like a guy has, like, a bomb put inside him, and like if his heart rate goes below a certain point, he blows up.
Mary: So it's like "Speed" but not with the body.
Jonathan: It's with your body. If these action-adventure movies are, like, about adrenaline, this is a guy who like literally, if the adrenaline stops, it's all over. But they cast Jason Statham, who like is, you know, this tough guy, sock her hooligan who like is already wired for action, you know, the moment he wakes up in the morning. And so, it's like, oh yeah, well this guy's gonna be able to like...he's gonna be able to handle this. No problem because he'll kill whoever, you know, whatever, break your arm. He'll do whatever it takes. And this friend of mine, he just made a really simple observation when he saw this movie coming out or maybe it was already out. He's like, "This was the perfect movie for Tobey Maguire." Like the whole point of it, with that crazy premise, is that you need someone who is in a completely alien state of being for who they are and how they operate. And that's interesting. I remember as soon as he said that, I was like, "Yup. You're right. You're right. You're right." It gave me like a lens through which I looked at all sorts of movies. And it's not that like the worst thing has to be... It's not always the opposites like Tobey Maguire and "Crank" but it's the idea of that the premise should be a direct challenge to the core sense of identity, hopes, dreams, and aspirations of this protagonist. Jason Statham, you're like, "Well, today, you're gonna have to kick him with your ass, and rip some arms, and kiss some beautiful women." He'd be like, "It's a Wednesday."
Mary: "I was born for this."
Jonathan: Right. There's no challenge. And as silly as that offhand comment he made at a party when we were hanging out, that clearly, you know, 15 years later in my mind, I'm like, that's kind of been my key for looking. Every time I'm creating a world, I'm going, you know, "How can I make sure that it's Tobey Maguire and not Jason Statham?"
Mary: Well, you know, I have to say, this conversation has gone in like 27 different directions that I could not have anticipated but I could not be any happier with it because I think that is the perfect takeaway for a lot of writers out there and how we think about worldbuilding because one of the challenges that I see are these just fast worlds that they've done so much development and all of this like the political trees of all the ruling families and all of this "Game of Thrones." You know, like all of this data, but what is the data doing?
Jonathan: Can I answer that? I don't know if you were wrapping up and we're done.
Mary: Yes. I want to make sure I'm respecting your time but if you want to drop any more mindblowing truth bombs...
Jonathan: I would talk about this for hours. This is my favorite stuff. So I think "Game of Thrones" is actually a perfect example and I use it in that lecture that I gave about having a clearly meaningful world and then centering it on the character. "Game of Thrones," when it first came out, a lot of the press was just about like look at how much blood and nudity there is. And it was like the HBO application of, you know, this is your grandpa's fantasy. And very quickly, the show understood that has limited appeal and maybe that will force some people, encourage them to check it out for the first time. But if you want to hang with the series, you actually have to like work a lot harder and, I mean, it's a huge cast. It's a complicated world.
But one of the things that George R. R. Martin, he's incredibly consistent with the world and there's this great quote he has that "If you have show notes, you can find it easily." Think of an interview on "Rolling Stone," someone's asking about like how "Game of Thrones" is a rebuke of Tolkien. And you can see that Martin doesn't really want to like tear down Tolkien but the critique that he gives is just so beautiful work. I'm gonna paraphrase here but he's like ruling is hard. Like at the end of Lord of the Rings, spoiler, it says Aragorn is a good and just king for 100 years or whatever it is. And he's like, "Really? Like what happened to the Orcs after they were vanquished? Did the army then sweep into the villages and murder all of the little Orc babies in their little Orc cribs? And then did Aragorn, like what was his tax policy? Did he have a standing army to make sure there wasn't retribution from the Orcs who had legitimately been slaughtered?" And why are we even, and this goes to like larger Marxist critiques that you get with people like Michael Moorcock with fantasy worlds, like why are we assuming a king is a good thing? We assume that in a fantasy, a happy ending is a good king. But in most of history, good governance comes from no king or a king abridged in their powers, like in a, you know, constitutional monarchy or something.
And his point was like, he wanted Westeros to be an example of like it's always compromised. It's always a game. You're always going to violate your principles. And so, he actually, I think, for that first book in the first season of the show, did create the perfect protagonist because you have Ned Stark who is a man of principle, a man who does his duty, does the thing he agreed to, even if it's incredibly inconvenient and painful to him, to the point that he married a woman that he knew didn't love him because of this sense of duty. Over and over again, he does the right thing. And the world of Westeros is a perfect rebuke to that and the gutsy thing, the compelling thing that George R. R. Martin did was say, "I am so committed to my view of this world that I am going to show you how it chews up and destroys a Ned Stark." But those two were made for each other. I would argue that minus Ned Stark in the equation, it would have just been an incoherent mess of CD jerks. It would have been like "House of Cards," right? You know, everyone's double-dealing and a jerk. And then you watch all season. You're like, "What? Yup. everyone's double-dealing and a jerk." And really, it's because they didn't create that character who was sort of the thing that we were gonna process the world through and critique the world through. So, to me, actually, like that was the appeal of "Game of Thrones."
Mary: And when he dies, our whole understanding of the world and how the world works is really set into motion. I think it's very interesting to kill off a focal character, protagonist character, in like the opening act, really.
Jonathan: Yeah. Again, that became like, it just raised the stakes of like, "All right. In most stories, the one nobleman could beat the corrupt system." Didn't work. So let's see what different kinds of men and women can beat this system. I think half the reason the series failed is because it violated its core premise, which is that there could be a peaceful resolution. I was expecting the series and I think, weirdly, it would have made us all feel icky and sad, but I thought the series was gonna end with this terrifying power vacuum, where literally, I could see it in my mind. I always assumed that Little Finger or whichever conniver is still alive would be like, "And the Game of Thrones begins anew," and they would [inaudible 01:02:45.631] out. And you'd see armies mobilizing across whatever the 17 different, you know, domains and kingdoms. And I'm like that would have been awful, and cheap, and completely consistent with the reality of the world they created.
Mary: With the premise.
Jonathan: And the idea that they somehow found a good and just magical ruler who was going to succeed at ruling, felt like a violation. The series had gone very clearly out of its way to show us that a good, just man loses his head. And so, for me, that's the beginning of that series and then what HBO does at the end of the series is a perfect example of when you do have your world anchored to a character who's a perfect fit for it, right. It's like a hand in a glove. And when you lose that, right, you know, episodes 7, 8, 9 of "Star Wars," you're right, stuff that is good but doesn't get where we needed it to go because...
Mary: Doesn't pluck those heartstrings.
Jonathan: So yeah, I think if we talk character first, I think the whole point of the world is as a crucible and a mirror for what a character is going through.
Mary: Oh, my god. This has been the most fascinating conversation. Again, you could talk about this for hours, I could chat with you for hours. We have to depart but I want to thank you so much. You say nobody calls you a visual writer. I will lead us with, this has been an interview with Jonathan Auxier, the visual writer of books like "Sweep," and Peter Nimble, and the new series, "The Fabled Stables," for even younger readers. Thank you so much for just such a juicy, far-ranging, and incredibly insightful conversation. I couldn't be happier.
Jonathan: Oh, absolutely. This was such a joy. Thank you so much, Mary, and thank you for doing this. I think this is a big value and help to writers at every level who are wanting to think about craft.
Mary: I know it will be, for me, in my own thinking about worldbuilding. I'm Mary Kole. This has been "The Good Story Podcast," and here's to a good story.
Thank you so much for tuning into "The Good Story Podcast." My name is Mary Kole, and I want to extend my deepest gratitude to the Good Story Company team: Kristen Overman, Amy Wilson, Rhiannon Richardson, Joiya Morrison-Efemini, Kate London, Michal Leah, Jenna Van Rooy, Kathy Martinolich, Len Cattan-Prugl, Rebecca Landesman, Steve Reiss, and Gigi Collins. Please check us out at goodstorycompany.com, and I would love it if you joined "Good Story Learning," a monthly membership with new content added where you can learn everything you ever wanted to know and more about writing and publishing for writers of all categories and ability levels. Thanks again for listening. And here's to a good story.