Guest Post Written By Shannon Hale
This book took a fifteen year journey, longer than any other that I’ve written. In 2005, I was on a walk with my toddler son, and he suddenly took my hand and started to pull me off the sidewalk toward a weedy, open lot between two buildings where we’d never been, as if he knew what he was doing, like he knew this place and needed me to see it.
He was so urgent and specific, my storyteller brain immediately started to make up a reason for this. Maybe it was some mystical place, and a child could sense what an adult couldn’t. And when I entered it, I would magically enter the story of whatever novel I was carrying in my purse. And he’d brought me here, because he knew motherhood was challenging and he wanted to give me a break.
Book ideas come daily, and I jotted down some notes about this idea like I always do and set it aside. The book that became KIND OF A BIG DEAL is almost nothing like the original idea. But some stories take the long way home.
Jump forward nine years. In spring 2014, I’d just turned in a final draft for a book, the sixth book that I’d written or co-written in just over a year. I’d never written so much in such a short time, and it was very stressful year, so I decided, for the first time ever, to take a break from writing.
“I’ll take a month off,” I told myself, “and I’ll just read, do yoga, and recharge.” I lasted three days. I’m so hardwired to write that not writing was making me more anxious than writing. I couldn’t just turn off the fired up part of my brain that was always wanting to craft with words and story-tell. So I decided, “I will write something that I’ll never be able to sell, that way it’ll be low pressure and I can just write for fun.”
When it comes to things least likely to sell I figured I had two options: a book of poetry or a spec screenplay. I’d really enjoyed co-writing the AUSTENLAND screenplay so I decided to go that route. In going through my idea files, I came upon the one I’d titled THE FANTASY SPOT and I spent a week breaking it down and writing a detailed outline for a three act screenplay. And then over the rest of the month I wrote the first draft.
It had changed quite a bit from initial concept. It was about Lydia, a young mom with a toddler daughter. She was a band geek in high school and is a discouraged musician, and starts having a hard time being content as a stay-at-home mom. Her husband works to support them, travels a lot, and becomes more distant. Is he having an affair? There’s a magical bench at the park, and if Lydia reads a book while sitting there, she goes into the story. Lydia enters just three books: a historical romance, a zombie horror, and a story set in a cabaret-type show where she can play music again.
It wasn’t great, so I revised it a bunch, made her a frustrated singer wishing to be a Broadway star, and came up with the fantasy infrastructure to explain the random magic. By then I needed to end my hiatus and start working something I might actually publish, so I set aside the screenplay as a thought experiment.
Sometime later I saw my film agent and told him I’d been working on a screenplay. He said, are you going to write it into a novel, too? And I thought, well, maybe I should write a novel. I’ve already done so much work on characters and relationships, and in a novel I could dig in so much deeper. So I worked on it as a side project between drafts of other books, finishing a first draft late 2014. It was now called THE MASQUE OF JOSIE PIE. I began to revise it whenever my editors or beta readers were looking over my main projects, a few weeks here and there at a time.
Three years and at least twenty revisions later, I had something. I thought it was pretty funny and pretty sweet, and I started wanting to share it with people.
My literary agent at the time specialized in children’s literature so I set out to find a second agent who would represent me just for my adult books. I got some agent recommendations from writer friends, queried, and sent the manuscript to four agents. As I told them, “I don’t think it’s perfect, but I think it’s in good enough shape to send out and find an editor with whom I can work to revise it.”
All four agents rejected me.
At this point in my career, I’d published 25+ books, many New York Times bestsellers. I’d won awards. I was known as a good person to work with, a professional who makes her deadlines. Although I mostly wrote for young readers, I’d published three books for adults, one of which (AUSTENLAND) had been made into a film. I thought I was a pretty good risk for an agent to take on. And yet the rejection was complete and thorough. So I had to step back and taken some inventory—I like the book, but these agents are not connecting to it. What am I missing?
As I analyzed the notes I received from the agents and talked to people, I realized something I’d been overlooking—the book I’d written didn’t have a clear genre, and adult fiction largely resists that. I’d been steeped in the children’s literature world, where we can play with genre, combine genres, go bonkers in any way we please, and our readers will go along with that. But adult readers aren’t as flexible as young readers. Many get uncomfortable with stories that aren’t clearly in a genre. And the marketplace supports that: e.g. in bookstores, kids’ books are shelved by age with all genres side-by-side, while adult books are micromanaged down to the sub-genre.
And I’d written a contemporary romantic musical comedy fantasy. Where would they shelve that?
I could either abandon it as lost or do the incredible amount of revision it would take to turn it into a young adult novel. Honestly, now that I was thinking about the genre problem, I was paranoid that young adult wouldn’t work either. It’s far easier to play with genre for young readers. Would teen readers already be too old to come along for this slipstream ride? Also there is an (in my opinion, sad and incorrect) opinion that you can’t write humor in young adult, especially with female protagonists. That teens only want heavy, serious books.
But I didn’t want to waste the work I’d done, and I still really liked the core of the story. Plus I remembered other books I’d spent years on (like AUSTENLAND) that early readers just didn’t seem to like, and I’d managed to keep revising till it worked.
So I decided to roll the dice and keep working. Now the book was called SCARLET! and Josie was an older teen, a nanny, and a failed Broadway star. This character change ultimately changed everything. When revisions are major, it can be harder and more time consuming to revise an existing manuscript than to write one fresh, in the way that it’s more expensive to renovate an old building than to build a new one. I’m not sure how many sentences remained unchanged. I cut tens of thousands of words, added tens of thousands more, and altered just about everything in between. It was so much work. I can’t even describe how much work. Oh my gosh, how did I ever survive all that work?
In 2018 I showed the manuscript to Connie Hsu at Macmillan, with whom I’d done REAL FRIENDS and BEST FRIENDS (and also EVER AFTER HIGH back when she was at Little, Brown). She liked it enough to make an offer for publication. The book was now called PAUSE FOR A DREAM SEQUENCE and despite all the revisions I’d done, Connie pushed me to do more and more, to keep trimming and adding, and keep making it funnier and smoothing out the relationship arcs. Josie went into a dozen different books instead of just three, and it was Connie’s idea, “What if Josie goes into a graphic novel too?” and I was like, “Oh my gosh, could we do that?” and she said “Of course!” making her my favorite person and leading to my new favorite part of the entire book.
At least a dozen revisions later…(one of which was so massive that I eventually, for the first and only time in my career so far, checked myself into a little hotel near home and for five days locked myself into a room with my laptop and went all-work-and-no-play-makes-Shannon-a-dull-girl all over that manuscript)…it was finally done!
In 2020, with a gorgeous book designed by Aurora Parlagreco, with cover art by Ana Hard, comic book segment illustrated by Samantha Richardson, and interior covers created by my husband Dean, the book, now titled KIND OF A BIG DEAL, will be published to the world.
That toddler boy who walked with me in 2005 is now sixteen years old. And I still don’t know why he so urgently pulled my hand to the weedy spot. Maybe if I had just stayed there and waited long enough, I might have magically entered my copy of ANNE OF GREEN GABLES. I didn’t get to go into a book, but at least I got a book out of it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Shannon Hale is the New York Times–bestselling author of over thirty books, including fantasy novels The Goose Girl and Book of a Thousand Days, science fiction novel Dangerous, Newbery Honor winner Princess Academy, graphic novel memoirs Real Friends and Best Friends (with LeUyen Pham), and romantic comedy Austenland (now a major motion picture starring Keri Russell). She lives in Utah with her husband and frequent collaborator Dean Hale, their four remarkable children, and two ridiculous cats named Misty Knight and Mike Hat.
