Episode #127: “Your books are mostly about girls. Have you ever considered having more books about boys?” - with Shannon Hale
Welcome back to Kids Ask Authors! We are joined this week by Shannon Hale. Shannon and Grace answer this kid question, “Your books are mostly about girls, have you ever considered writing more books about boys?”
Grace Lin: Hello. I'm Grace Lin, children's book author and illustrator of many books, including the middle grade novel, When The Sea Turned To Silver, and the picture book, A Big Moon Cake For Little Star. Today, I am here with Shannon Hale, the author of many books, including the Princess In Black Series and Real Friends And Best Friends, all illustrated by LeUyen Pham, Diana, Princess Of The Amazons, illustrated by Victoria Ying, and the middle grade novel, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl. Hi Shannon.
Shannon Hale: Hello, Grace.
Grace Lin: All right. Are you ready for today's question?
Shannon Hale: Bring it on.
Grace Lin: Okay. Today's question is from a person named Tilda. Tilda asks...
Tilda: Your books are mostly about girls. Have you ever considered having more books about boys?
Grace Lin: "Your books are mostly about girls. Have you ever considered having more books about boys?"
Shannon Hale: That's a great question, Tilda. I have published over 30 books, and I think only two of them have male protagonists, River Secrets and Calamity Jack. It's funny because I have never really sat down and thought, "I'm going to only write books about girls," but I am a girl, so writing about girls has felt more natural to me. The truth is when I was growing up reading and especially in high school and college, I read a lot of books by men that were about women, and I thought they did it really poorly. I thought they wrote women as they imagined them to be rather than how they really are. I became very hesitant to write too far out of my personal experience because I didn't want to mess it up.
Shannon Hale: I didn't want to write from the point of view of somebody I didn't really understand and hadn't lived in their shoes or close enough to be able to guess how they're feeling and thinking. That includes not only gender, but race and other experiences as well. I have rarely gone outside of my close personal experience that way. When I have I've done so very cautiously. For example, in the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, which my husband and I co-wrote, we have a character, who's a girl, she's also deaf. My husband and I are both hearing. She's not the main character, but she is a point of view character in the book. We did not want to mess this up and although we know deaf people and we've done a lot of research, that's just not enough. So in addition to that, we were able to have two people who are deaf read the book for us and give us careful notes.
Shannon Hale: After all the work we had done to try to get it right, we got careful notes from them, letting us know things that we'd gotten wrong, that we never could have known from reading books and thinking creatively. That was such a huge blessing for us. They were amazing. When it comes to writing boys, both times that I've written boys, they have been sequels where these boys had been characters in previous books. I got to know them really well without them being point of view and then I felt confident with them.
Shannon Hale: I think that I absolutely... I have another book I'm working on right now that's about a boy and I absolutely would in the future. I don't know that I would write a book from the point of view of someone who's non-binary because again, it's so far outside my experience, I just think I would mess it up. That's just something about being cautious and careful and respectful when writing outside your experience.
Grace Lin: Well, what I think is so interesting is that you say you write so much in your own experience yet there's so many stories just in your own experience, and you've got so many more coming. I think that in some ways you don't need to go out of your experience too much because obviously there's so much to write just in your own experience.
Shannon Hale: And there are people who write outside their experience and do it really, really well and more power to them. For me, I've always wanted to be cautious, but I also find that... There's a poem, Tilda, by TS Elliot, where there's a line that says, "I am large, I contain multitudes." I often feel like that. There's so much inside all of us to explore that we don't have to be like, "Ooh, to be really novel and amazing, I'm going to write someone totally different from me and try to guess what their life is like." I don't know that's always the best tactic to take.
Shannon Hale: That's not to say I haven't written outside my experience in a lot of ways. I mean, I've read a lot of fantasy novels long ago and far away. I have written from the point of view of people of different races and different abilities and many things, but each time I make that choice, I do it very cautiously. It takes much more time because I don't want any kid especially to read one of my books and have me get their experience wrong. That would just break my heart.
Grace Lin: Yeah. I completely understand. I mean, most of my books are about girls as well, mainly because I grew up with sisters, and I'm a girl. Honestly, when I was growing up, there was just not that many books with Asian-American girls in them, so I just feel like I wanted that so badly that I just want to keep writing that. I keep writing the book that I wanted over and over and over again, which is why I keep writing books about girls, but I have written a book about with a boy protagonist and I probably will write more, but the thing that comes naturally the most is the girl character.
Shannon Hale: Yes, and I just love... Growing up, I think, Grace... I think maybe kids today don't know that we didn't have as much. Certainly not characters that weren't white, but we also didn't just have as many books about girls, adventures about girls, fantasies about girls, science fiction about girls. There were very limited the books that we could find. They existed, but just not as much, especially... Movies too. Part of me is always wanting to write those books that I wish that I'd had as a kid that I could have seen lots of different kinds of girl characters.
Shannon Hale: That's actually been my primary focus, not necessarily only writing about girls, but making sure that every book I write that main character is different from the last one because I... Personality wise, experience wise, their thoughts, the way they move through the world because I wanted to give so many voices to so many different possibilities because I grew tired of how so many... As I was growing up, the girl characters, there was like three archetypes of girl characters it seemed like. It was really hard to break out of them. There are exceptions of course, and all hail Ramona Quimby.
Grace Lin: Yeah, that's true. She was one of the exceptions by far from of the books that I read when I was younger. When you were saying all that, I was also thinking like, for me, writing is not easy to begin with. I feel like it's a lot easier for me just to start with a character that I'm comfortable with, which is usually a female character instead of giving me even more challenges right from the get go. It's like setting yourself up for success.
Shannon Hale: Exactly. It's hard enough. Why do we have to make it so much harder?
Grace Lin: All right. Well, thank you so much, Shannon, for answering that question. I thought that was a really great question, Tilda. Thank you so much for asking it.
Shannon Hale: Yes. Thank you, Tilda, and thank you, Grace.
Grace Lin: Bye.
Today’s Kids BOOK REVIEW is from Zaynab. Zaynab is reviewing “Best Friends” by Shannon Hale and illustrated by Leuyan Pham.
More about today’s authors:
Shannon Hale is the New York Times best-selling author of over thirty children's and young adult books, including graphic novel memoirs Real Friends, Best Friends, and Friends Forever, and multiple award winners The Goose Girl, Book of a Thousand Days, and Newbery Honor recipient Princess Academy. She also writes books for adults, such as Austenland, which is now a major motion picture starring Keri Russell. She co-writes books with her husband Dean Hale, like the Eisner-nominated graphic novel Rapunzel's Revenge and best-selling illustrated chapter book series The Princess in Black. They live with their four children near Salt Lake City, Utah.
Grace Lin, a NY Times bestselling author/ illustrator, won the Newbery Honor for Where the Mountain Meets the Moon and her picture book, A Big Mooncake for Little Star, was awarded the Caldecott Honor. Grace is an occasional commentator for New England Public Radio , a video essayist for PBS NewsHour (here & here), and the speaker of the popular TEDx talk, The Windows and Mirrors of Your Child’s Bookshelf. She is the co-host of the podcast Book Friends Forever, a kidlit podcast about friendship and publishing (geared for adults). Find her facebook, instagram , twitter ( @pacylin) or sign up for her author newsletter HERE.
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