Today I have the privilege of
interviewing author Margaret Peterson Haddix. She is the author of many
critically and popularly acclaimed YA and middle grade novels, including the Children of Exile series, The Missing series, the Under Their Skin series, and the Shadow Children series. A graduate
of Miami University (of Ohio), she worked for several years as a reporter for The Indianapolis News. She also taught
at the Danville (Illinois) Area Community College. She lives with her family in
Columbus, Ohio.
When did you decide to
become an author?
I
started thinking about it as far back as third grade. I remember making up and
writing down my own stories way back then. But I wasn't planning out my whole
career as an eight-year-old--it was just something I did for fun. And sometimes
after I finished reading a book I loved, I would make up new adventures for the
characters, because I missed them like I would miss a friend. Years and years
later I realized what I was doing was actually fanfiction, but nobody had
invented that term yet when I was a kid. For me, being a writer just seemed to
evolve from being a reader.
Tell us about your journey.
How did you get your first book published?
I
wrote a novel in college, and my creative writing professors encouraged me to
try to get that published. And I did try a little, but quickly realized that
I'd outgrown the book, and would have been embarrassed if it ever did appear in
print. Then for my first few years out of college, I worked in newspaper
journalism and wrote fiction on the side. The journalism jobs were actually
great practice for both writing and writing discipline, and some of the
newspaper stories I wrote gave me ideas for fiction I wanted to write,
too. By the time I wrote RUNNING OUT OF TIME, I felt a lot more hopeful
about its chances. But I still collected a lot of rejection letters and had to
do a lot of revision along the way. When I was ready to seek publication, I
mostly used the "try everything" approach, submitting to agents and
publishers both. (This was in the early 1990s, when that approach made more
sense.) Ultimately, it helped me to go to a writers conference, where I met
both agents and editors; a contact I made there led to me getting my first
agent, and she was the one who sent my book to David Gale at Simon &
Schuster. He and I ended up working together on more than forty books.
You have written a number of
series, as well as a bunch of standalone novels. Do you find the development
process different? Do you know you are writing a series when you start book one
or does that happen later?
Two
of my series began with books that I thought were only stand-alones. With the
first one, AMONG THE HIDDEN, it took a lot of other people (including my editor
and agent) to convince me that a series was possible; I truly had to shift
gears as a writer to see interlocking stories there. With the second, JUST
ELLA, I always felt there were possibilities for continuing the story somehow,
but about a decade passed before I saw how I wanted to do that. All my other
series were planned as series from the beginning. Writing a series vs. a
stand-alone is a different process.
With a standalone, I try to avoid tangents and detours that would be a
distraction from telling that book's main story. With a series, I'm constantly
looking around at possible detours and thinking, "Is this going to be
important in a future book in the series?"
Is there anything about
being a published author that has surprised you?
Oh,
yes. Pre-publication, this is how I pictured life as an author: I'd spend my
time alone at my computer, grappling with ideas and always searching for the
right word. It's true that I do plenty of that, and I love it. But I never
expected to also spend a lot of time traveling and meeting/talking with kids,
educators, librarians, booksellers, parents, etc. I've now been to all 50
states, and some of my trips to about 35 of them were for book travel. I've
also spoken about my books in China, Honduras, Germany, Spain, and Canada. If
you count Skype visits as well, I've gotten to interact with kids in countries
as far away and remote as Tajikistan. And all of this has been an unexpected
delight. I love to travel and love to meet new people. It's allowed me to keep
some of my favorite parts of being a newspaper reporter (getting to talk to
different people, whose lives are very different from mine in some cases)
without having the stress and challenges that I didn't like in that job.
The
other unexpected joy has been getting to meet and befriend other authors. We
are a strange tribe, and it's nice to feel that solidarity with people who also
think deeply and care passionately about both the fate of humanity and
grammatical minutia such as the Oxford comma.
Any advice you would give to
a writer just starting out?
Savor
the journey. Starting out (and who am I kidding? Lots of times even now) I would
stress myself out trying to plan or predict the direction of my career; I
wanted to be able to plot my life the same way I plotted my characters' lives.
But that's not possible. And many of the really wonderful things that have
happened have been more serendipitous. When I look back, it's a lot of little
moments that have truly mattered: the burst of intense joy that comes with
suddenly understanding what should happen next in a story, the glow of hearing
a reader quietly tell me what one of my books meant to her or him. This
profession comes with a heaping portion of self-doubt--most writers have to pass
through a lot of rejection on the way to their first acceptance, and even
success is no guarantee of future success. So celebrate every victory along the
way, constantly look for ways to grow as a writer, and surround yourself with
people who will help build you up, not tear you down. And make sure you are
that encouraging person for others in your life--whether they are fellow
writers or not.
Thank you so much for
joining me today! For more information about Margaret Peterson Haddix and her
books, visit her at HaddixBooks.com.
You can check out my review of Children of Refuge, the second book in the Children
of Exile trilogy. Comment for a chance to win a copy of the book.
