All Behind the Book essays

Isabel Bandeira's Bookishly Ever After is an "ode to book nerds," starring a 16-year-old girl who takes all her romantic advice from heroines in her favorite books. (Sound like anyone you know?) Bandeira shares a look behind the writing process for her new YA novel, revealing that it was just as much fun to write as it is to read.

Bookishly Ever After was a pure joy to write and very different from any of my other writing projects before it. I hadn’t planned on writing a contemporary, so I decided to write the story just for fun while querying other projects. Because I thought this manuscript was never going to see the light of day, I allowed myself to fearlessly play with my characters and the story.

While plotting out the book, I dove back into memories of my own high school and early college days—not for the actual events, but to get back in touch with the feelings that had surrounded being a teen. I pulled up memories of trying—and failing—to impress my crushes and lunches with my friends. I remembered freezing on the bleachers in band during football games and crushing on popular boys who didn’t know my name while missing signals from sweet boys in my class. Heartbreaks came rushing back to me, and I relived bad (and good) first kisses.*

I also let myself have fun. I may have danced around my family room while blasting the Partridge Family from my record player and plotting out scenes. Or giggled at my own antics while trying to figure out hand and arm positions for kissing scenes to avoid the dreaded “octopus arm syndrome.”**

The “books” Phoebe reads throughout Bookishly Ever After turned into writing exercises as well as something I could work on when I needed a break from the main story. Because I had to make the book excerpts look and sound like they were written by different authors, I changed writing tenses, points of view, and had specific “voices” for each of the “authors.” Plus, I enjoyed writing in many different genres—early revisions of Bookishly had fantasy and more contemporary excerpts that ended up getting cut or replaced, but still taught me a lot in the process of writing them.

I didn’t intend for Bookishly Ever After to become more than a fun writing exercise, but while I was having fun, the story had other plans. By the time I was done, this little project had turned into a book-shaped thing. And I’m so glad it did.

* OK, I have to admit that I didn’t need to go back too far for those. I’m still something of an introverted, socially awkward adult, after all.

** I cannot confirm or deny if this happened in my work cubicle while writing during lunch breaks.

Growing up, Isabel Bandeira split her time between summers surrounded by cathedrals, castles and ancient tombs in Portugal and the rest of the year hanging around the lakes and trees of Southern New Jersey, which only fed her fairy-tale and nature obsessions. Even though she’s a Mechanical Engineer and tones down her love of all things glittery while designing medical devices during the day, it all comes out in her writing. In her spare time, you’ll find her at the dance studio or at the rink, working on her jumps and sit spin. Bandeira lives in South Jersey with her little black cat, too many books, too much yarn and a closetful of vintage hats. She is represented by Carrie Howland of Donadio and Olson, Inc. Visit her at isabelbandeira.com.

And be sure to check out Bookishly Ever After: BAM | B&N | Indiebound | Amazon

Emily Henry makes her YA debut with the cosmically charged romance The Love That Split the World, about two teens who live in separate realities, two different versions of their small Kentucky hometown. Through a tiny opening between their worlds, Natalie and Beau fall in love. But what future can exist for such a delicate love?

Henry shares her own magical worldview, hallucinations, nostalgia and "love for the gray" that inspired her novel.

I always joke that I’m a Believer™ to rival Fox Mulder. That is to say, I’m a person who believes. I’ll read articles about how octopi might be aliens or our universe could be some other being’s hologram, or all humans might be linked in a collective unconscious, and I’ll think, “I can see how that could be true.”

I believe in a vast and mysterious world, where the seemingly impossible sometimes becomes true, and science and magic are often differentiated by the amount of information we have access to. I’ve always found myself drawn to stories that pull back the curtain, that pick at the fabric of reality. I’m fascinated by the way that thinking in—writing in—those gray spaces can change the way we see our world.

So many different things collided to push The Love That Split the World out of me, but I think the first and foremost was this, my worldview: a belief in a strange, sprawling world full of surprising connections and events so strange that, to our ignorant eyes, they look like magic. My love for the gray.

"I wanted to look at one of the most confusing times in life and to pull out the meaning, to make sense of the nonsensical and to unravel the established."

It was summer when the idea for Love first struck me, though it was less like lightning and more like a rapid blooming in my chest. I’m always incredibly nostalgic in summer, and that particular summer my boyfriend at the time (now husband) and I were caught in weird in-between phases of life, the kind where you really miss stuff from the past but also feel so eager to move forward. We went out for a walk one night, and it was humid and buggy and golden, and I felt an overwhelming swell of both nostalgia and deja vu for the summer I graduated high school. I realized that in that moment, I felt the same way I had then: desperate to hold onto what I was leaving yet eager to move forward; I felt like I needed to get back to the magic of childhood or to move forward toward self actualization, like I wanted to be anywhere but the present. I was facing down Time with a capital T and its strange and (still weirdly) unpredictable nature.

With those feelings came a strong desire to write. I’d never felt so excited or nervous to start something as I felt with The Love That Split the World. I wanted to capture all of the feelings of that summer in particular, but also of all the summers I spent in Kentucky as a kid, a sensitive kid caught in a world of constant tension.

Like Natalie, I suffer from hypnopompic hallucinations—a kind of waking dream your body wakes up before your brain and dream is briefly transposed over reality. For me, these hallucinations often surface during times of intense stress, and looking back, I had more of them in my senior year of high school than throughout the rest of my life combined. I wanted to explore a reasoning behind why, to play with the idea of the hallucinations as windows to other people, places and times that crop up when we’re pulled in a lot of different directions. Basically I wanted to create a magical exaggeration of what those in-between times in life feel like.

And in the same way that the hallucinations are a physical manifestation of looking forward, Nat’s hometown embodies the feeling of looking back, of the moments when time slows. It’s a place thick with humidity, fireflies, memories and ache. There are so many magical, wonderful things about being a kid in that small town, but small towns can also be uniquely frustrating. I wanted to write a book that captured the nostalgia, claustrophobia and magic of a place that seems to exist outside of time, where not all that much changes, and a person like Nat might start to feel at once stuck and terrified to leave.

It’s hard to explain but to me, these concepts always felt linked. Nostalgia and time, tension and stress. These things go hand in hand, and I wanted to write a book that explored their psychological, metaphysical and spiritual connections. I wanted to look at one of the most confusing times in life and to pull out the meaning, to make sense of the nonsensical and to unravel the established. I wanted to make that gray a little warmer, a little more inviting, softer and sweeter and gentler. I wanted to write the gray into a comfort, a hug, a deeply abiding love.   

Sharon Biggs Waller's second YA novel is a romantic historical adventure with an unforgettable British heroine at its heart. In 1861, Elodie Buchanan is the daughter of a plant hunter. Her father often travels to China to collect precious plant specimens, but his failure to find an extremely valuable orchid could mean financial ruin for their whole family. He has one chance to find the orchid, with Elodie by his side. Waller shares a look behind her atmospheric and enjoyable new novel.

I never know where inspiration for my next story will hit. It can be something as simple as a painting or a statue or a place. Both of my novels, A Mad, Wicked Folly and The Forbidden Orchid, are set in England because it has always been a wellspring of ideas for me. As a historical fiction writer, I find history is everywhere in England, even underfoot—a few years ago archeologists found a Roman mosaic floor underneath a cricket pitch.

England is also a land of gardeners; in fact, after soccer it’s pretty much their national pastime. My husband and mother-in-law are keen gardeners, and so their passion rubbed off on me. I had no idea that plants were so linked with English history. Roman conquerors brought in the sweet chestnut and walnut trees and figs, and English conquerors brought back tea, which later caused a war against China. The Victorians were largely responsible for importing the vast number of garden plants we have today, via their intrepid plant hunters who risked their lives to travel to far-flung and often dangerous lands searching for new and unusual plants. The humble rhododendron was collected high in the mountains of China, and the North American tulip tree was the first to cross the ocean to England.

The idea for The Forbidden Orchid came about when I saw an exhibit at the Museum of Gardening in Lambeth. The exhibit included the glass Wardian cases that made it possible to transport plants safely over long distances and arrive in their new land in good nick. The exhibit also talked about the dangerous occupation of the plant hunter. Men pitted themselves against one another, employers lived vicariously through their dashing hunters, and many ended up dying of gruesome accidents and illnesses or being captured by natives. But the risk was worth it; fortunes could be made from an unusual plant that no one else had.

One largely favored plant was the orchid. The Victorians adored them, but they had no idea how to care for them and often cooked them in their overheated greenhouses called “stoves.” So these temporary plants were in high demand: The more unusual, the better. What was more, orchids were a man’s collection; women were not allowed to have them as it was deemed unseemly (although Queen Victoria loved them and had quite a collection).

That exhibit also made me think of the duality of plants, and how for humans, what can cure us or bring us pleasure or relief from pain can also kill us and ruin our lives. When working through the themes of the book, I found a parallel between all of the characters and the plants I chose to include—tea, which prompted England to force opium on China; orchids, which caused unbridled passion among collectors; opium poppies, which soothed pain and caused extreme wide-spread addiction that exists today; and Artemisia annua, an ancient plant that cures malaria and is now coming back into favor. In fact, soon after I turned in Orchid to my edits, Tu Youyou, a Chinese pharmaceutical chemist, won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for extracting the substance from Artemisia annua, helping millions of people worldwide with malaria.  

And so, inspired, the idea for a book about a teen plant hunter started to take shape in my mind. I loved the idea of a girl who longed to see the wider world, but knew society and family expected her to remain at home. When a scrap of a plant her father gave her began to bloom into an orchid, she begins to bloom, too, and dares to venture out into the wider world. 

Author photo credit Edda Taylor.

In many ways, my life has come full circle. After living more than 25 years in Manhattan, I have moved to the small East Texas town of Commerce, which reminds me very much of my hometown of Hiawatha, Kansas. And now, 58 years after I wrote my first book, The Little Squeegy Bug, a new version of that book is being published by Winslow Press.

I was 27 years old and an Air Force sergeant stationed at Barksdale Field in Louisiana. I had been a high school drama/journalism teacher until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Like thousands of other young men, I immediately enlisted in the armed services. Now World War II was winding down, and I was thinking about my future. I planned to resume my teaching career, until one day my older brother Bernard called. He had been injured in the military and had a long recovery time ahead. To pass the time, he wanted to paint pictures for a children's book, and he wanted me to write it. As a nonreader in school, it seemed ironic that I was being asked to write a book for young children to read. But Bernard needed me, so I had no choice.

It only took a few hours for me to write the tale of a little bug that lived by the brook a little bug without a name or a mission in life and how that little bug became Squeegy the Firefly, the Lamplighter of the Sky. It took Bernard much longer to do the pictures, but soon we had our first book and our own publishing company, Tell-Well Press. I wrote two stories each year. Bernard did the art, and Bernard's wife Maxine kept the books. Things were tight until something amazing occurred. The first lady Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in her column, My Day, "The grandkids were at the cottage this weekend, and I read them a marvelous book about a little firefly, written by two young GIs. Our grandkids loved the story, and so will yours." The book took off and so did my career as an author. Since then, I have written more than 300 books, but none have been as memorable as the first.

The last 10 years have been a prolific time for me as a writer. With my co-author Michael Sampson, I have written 10 books, with topics ranging from girl's basketball (SWISH!) to Bible heroes (Adam, Adam, What Do You See?) to football (Little Granny Quarterback) to math/counting (Rock It, Sock It, Number Line).

But one morning over coffee, as we struggled for a new manuscript idea, Michael suggested that The Little Squeegy Bug was appropriate for a new generation of readers. At first I protested, thinking the language and art were outdated. But as we played with the language, we were able to shrink the story by 50 percent, revising it into a picture book format with more room for art.

It was wonderful to revisit this old story and even more magnificent to have an opportunity to correct the mistakes I had made as a young writer. The original story was over-told and contained scientific inaccuracies. Plus, the original story portrayed a bumblebee who carried a "gun" in his tail. We quickly changed that language to "stinger." The art was the next challenge. My brother Bernard, who illustrated my first 20 books, had passed away, and the original squeegy bug art was lost. But Winslow Press found a talented new artist to do new pictures for our new story. When our editor sent sketches of Pat Corrigan's work, we knew he was the perfect choice for the new squeegy bug. Pat's delightful illustrations have made the little firefly soar again, and the spectacular printing job makes the little bug shine as he never did before.

All is well I have returned to my roots of small town America, and The Little Squeegy Bug, the Lamplighter of the Sky, is once again lighting up bedtime story times.

We just hope that history continues to repeat itself, and that the new first lady notices our book!

Bill Martin, Jr. is the acclaimed author of Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? and Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. Michael Sampson is the author of The Football That Won and Star of the Circus. The Little Squeegy Bug is published by Winslow Press.

The second novel from Jesse Andrews, author of the bestselling Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, is a downright hilarious story about starting bands and starting a life on the road, about bromance and romance, about learning to love what you really, truly love—without apology.

In The Haters, music nerds and jazz camp misfits Wes and his best friend, Corey, meet Ash, and after a night of genius jamming and excellent sushi, they decide to hit the road as a band. The novel is wildly funny, as well as an inventive homage to Andrews' years playing in bands, surviving on gas station food and forging friendships out of all the joy and misery of music-making. Here, Andrews shares a glimpse into this world and his latest novel.

I have a confession to make. You know that band that moved into the house down the street from you? The band that plays deafening music at antisocial hours of the day? Sometimes you see its badly dressed, visibly unhygienic members roaming around your neighborhood in a dissolute vacant-eyed pack? Perhaps they are trying to capture a raccoon and turn it into their band mascot? Or accidentally yet repeatedly dribbling a basketball into your car?

That was me.

(I mean that probably wasn’t literally me, unless you lived in Arlington, Massachusetts, 10 years ago. But still. My bad.)

My first band was called Meow Meow Kitty, we were 13, and we had one song. The song had four chords, no title and lyrics that will always be completely theoretical to me because I could not hear them. We were very loud. Also for a brief period, we were known as Area Toaster: The Secret Government Eggo Project, because our lead guitarist was a conspiracy theorist.

Our limited output notwithstanding, I thought of the band at the time as a primarily creative endeavor: me and my fellow musicians, making art. But in hindsight, it’s clear that its value to me was more social than artistic. And even as I got more serious about my instrument (bass), bands for me remained as much about friendship and camaraderie as they were about the music itself.

I had to write about being in a band sooner or later. And recently, I did. My new novel is called The Haters, and it’s about two boys who listen to music together all the time but are afraid to play anything, for fear that it will suck. It’s also about a girl who is dealing with her own doubts and insecurities, but who nevertheless convinces the boys to hit the road with her and take risks and do dumb things and try to become a band. And they do. Sort of.

Band friendships are specific and intense. They’re about trying to fuse your identities together into art. They’re about being vulnerable in front of each other, which is hard, which is why band mates fight so much. They’re also about being enormous dumbasses a lot of the time, because everyone in the band (presumably) is a musician, and musicians just tend to have a pretty strong Dumbass Gene. (I’m sorry. I know this is a generalization. But it is definitely true and there is nothing anyone can do about it.)

After college, once I was out in real world, the bands I was in (Hurra Kam Rada; Teen Plant; The Young Dads; please do not look any of them up) became about Making It. We wanted our fan base to get to the point where they weren’t all people we knew personally. We wanted sold-out shows and multistate tours and six-figure record sales and glossy music videos. In Teen Plant, specifically, we wanted to enter every show via helicopter, and additionally be the first band to play in space. Failing that, we had a plan to give our drummer Dave “dog hormones” so that he could slowly, excruciatingly turn at least halfway into a dog, and then we’d at least be the first band with a half-dog half-human drummer.

We didn’t make it. We worked our asses off, but for consistently meager, underwhelmed audiences. Our tours were laughably short and our online presence was ignored. Teen Plant cut a record, and no one listened to it. None of the bands made it.

But some of the members did. One is a working composer in Los Angeles, and if you own a TV, you’ve heard his work. One gigs and teaches in the Bay Area. One is becoming a rabbi and writes beautiful liturgical music. And Dave never became halfway a dog, but one of his other bands, Rubblebucket, played Jimmy Kimmel and tours regularly. (They kick ass and you should stop reading this and go listen to them.)

And writing The Haters made me realize that whether our bands made it wasn’t really the point. If I had told 24-year-old me that, he would have been disgusted and maybe physically assaulted me. But it’s true. The friendships are the point.

Those friendships are probably the best and most intense and most complex that I will ever have in my life, and honestly, I wouldn’t trade any of them for being the first band to play in space. (Maybe a couple. There are a couple where I’d have to think about it.)

Does the band in The Haters make it? They might. If you read the book, you’ll find out. But honestly, the book is really about whether the kids make it in a completely different way.

And by that I mean, whether once the tour is over, they will all move into a house down the street from you and wage open war on your property values. Again, I’m sorry. I was young and stupid. God, it was great.

The teens at the heart of Peter Brown Hoffmeister's first YA novel, This Is the Part Where You Laugh, have more trials than would seem fair. Travis lives in a trailer park with his grandparents, his grandmother has cancer, and he's always on the lookout for his homeless, heroin-addicted mother. His best friend, Malik (aka Creature), can't help but get himself in trouble. And the new girl, Natalie, is clearly uncomfortable in her own home. But for all that life throws at them, their hearts stay gold—something that always is clear, despite a little shoplifting and trash-talk on the basketball court. There's plenty of humor through all the pain, especially Creature's hilarious "dirty love letters" to Russian princesses.

Hoffmeister is the author of six books and a high-school English teacher in Oregon. Here he shares a look behind his sharp new novel.

This Is The Part Where You Laugh started as a short story. I was writing about two teenage friends. Each day, the one who owned a car would come pick up his other friend before school. The driver was obsessed with Russian princesses and was writing a series of dirty love letters to these long-dead royals. Meanwhile, his friend's mother was dying of cancer, and that wasn't being talked about at all. The second boy was dealing quietly with his own personal tragedy while the driver talked on and on about dead Russian girls that he was in love with. The story was really about power, how we make choices in our lives but still some things happen that are beyond our control.

When I moved the story to Ayres Lake—a real location in Eugene, Oregon—the story opened up. Expanded. My wife's Auntie Ruth died on the trailer-park side of that lake opposite the wealthy landowners with their sprawling lawns and half-million-dollar homes. I wanted to write a romance between a boy from the trailer park and a girl from the wealthy side, but I didn't want to write something cliché or make caricatures of teens. I wanted to show that we all have problems. We're all dealing with our own issues. We all have an idealized future out there in front of us, and we're hoping to make that future happen somehow.

In the novel, Travis' grandmother—whom he lives with—is dying of cancer. His mother is homeless, and Travis used to sleep in weekly motels with her, in dumpsters or down by the river. I was a homeless teen for a short while, and I've slept behind dumpsters, on sidewalk grates, under bridges, in hedges, etc. I know how that feels, how vulnerable a person is when he sleeps outside in a city. I've been kicked awake by heroin addicts and I've been kicked awake by police officers. Also, Travis got in trouble at school in the past and was arrested. I was expelled from three high schools and arrested as a teen, so there are some similarities between my real life struggles and the narrator's.

But the novel expanded far beyond me. Travis releases crocodiles on the lake to make his grandmother's final days more interesting. His friend—nicknamed Creature—is writing The Pervert's Guide To Russian Princesses. All of that challenged my imagination. And Natalie is a sarcastic and sometimes foul-mouthed soccer-player girl. Her voice was really fun to write, but I had to go outside of myself. I had to listen to my high-school daughter and her friends to understand how that voice would sound. I was also a high-school English teacher while I revised this novel, so I listened for the ways that my characters would talk, listened for specific, realistic phrases and cadences in the speech of my many different students. I had to put these fictional characters together, and I wanted the book to be as real as possible. I was writing romance and tragedy mixed with dark, dark humor, so what I was actually writing was real life. Hopefully readers will enjoy the experience.