Episode #142: How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have? with Holly Goldberg Sloan

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Welcome back to another episode of Kids Ask Authors! We are excited to have Grace Lin and Holly Goldberg Sloan answer the kid question, “How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have?”

TRANSCRIPT:

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'm here with Holly Goldberg Sloan, the author of middle grade novels, such as Counting by 7s, Short, and her newest book, The Elephant in the Room. Hi Holly.

Holly Goldberg Sloan: Hi. Thank you so much Grace for having me.

Grace Lin: Oh, thank you so much for being here today. Are you ready for today's kid question?

Holly Goldberg Sloan: I am. I'm ready. As ready as I'll be.

Grace Lin: Awesome. Today's kid question is from a person named Molly and Molly asks, how many unpublished and half-finished books do you have?

Holly Goldberg Sloan: Wow. Molly, Molly, and Holly. Molly's asking Holly a question, this is a crazy thing. I have no unfinished books. The secret to my success, if you can say I have a secret, is that I don't give up. I don't let go. I keep going and I'm just not somebody who quits. So, there are... Everything I do is finished. Now I will say, because I'm a screenwriter, I make movies on television besides writing books. And I do have a few screenplays that I never could figure out, but for the most part I wrote Angels in the Outfield and Made in America and The Big Green and the Crocodile Hunter Movie and many of those movies I was paid to write by the film studio. And so, Disney doesn't let you quit. Fox doesn't let you quit. So maybe that I started doing that right out of college and maybe my training is I need to turn in and I think it's good training in life that you should finish something you, it's not up to you to judge it if it's good or bad, but it's up to you to finish it.

Grace Lin: And you've never written something that you finished and then nobody wanted to publish it.

Holly Goldberg Sloan: No, I haven't. But I-

Grace Lin: That's such a wonderful thing. Good for you.

Holly Goldberg Sloan: But here's the thing, I'm 63-years-old and I didn't publish my first book until I was 50 and I had one book. Okay. So now that I'm thinking this through, wait, that's not true. I did write this one book about a dog. I did finish it, I didn't publish it, but I sold it to Hallmark, and they made a Hallmark TV movie out of it. So, I consider that something still came of that, but I'm not one of those people that if you open up all my drawers, you find one sock. You know what I'm saying? There's a pair in there. So, I believe in completion.

Grace Lin: Oh, that's so interesting. Because I'm very much the opposite because I have so many different ideas. And so, I don't really have, I agree with the idea of finishing. I don't really have too many unfinished stories. Once I start the story, I usually tend to finish it. But I do have a lot of stories that I wrote that, that never got published. Especially the early ones. I've got lots and lots of those. And if you-

Holly Goldberg Sloan: Maybe because of my... I wasn't doing books until I was already pretty established as a writer. So, it's probably just a difference of where it hit in my career, not maybe my personality. I don't know

Grace Lin: Well, it's interesting. So, do you have, because you were saying you open the drawer and there's only one sock. Well, because I thought you were going to talk about ideas, because when you open my drawer there's notebooks and notebooks with hundreds and thousands of ideas in them. Do you have at least lots of ideas that you don't write into stories? Or does every idea you get make into a story?

Holly Goldberg Sloan: Okay, here's another one of the crazy secrets I can say about myself, and my kids make fun of me for this. I don't outline anything. I start writing. I always start with a character. The character is the basis of all my work. So, I start with the person, and I start writing about that character and I don't know where the story is going to go. So, because of that, I don't have drawers filled with things. I don't.

Holly Goldberg Sloan: Characters bouncing around in my head. But here's the thing, I write contemporary, realistic fiction. I write, I don't write about dinosaurs or mermaids, or I don't write about vampires because I've never met any of those. And so, I write about real people. And so, every day in my life I will listen to someone or see someone and wonder what's happening inside their world. And that's how I get my characters. And then once I start really thinking about a character, an example would be Counting by 7s. It's about a girl who's very gifted, highly gifted. And I met a little girl who was like that. My kids went to a gifted school and my kids are, they're smart, but there was the girl there. Oh my gosh, she was amazing. And I kept thinking about her life and what the challenges would be to have her life. And so, that's where I start. I don't really know where the story's going to go. I'm sure the teachers are not liking my answer, but anyway, you don't outline. I'm not a big planner. I don't even have to do lists when I go to the market.

Grace Lin: That's so interesting. Well, I think it just goes to show that all authors work differently because I have so many things that are an exact opposite of you. I have hundreds and thousands of ideas. I do have unfinished things because I feel like I have so many ideas. And then, I'll start one and I'll be like, "Actually this idea is not as good as I thought it was going to be." And I'll be like, "I don't want to spend all of my time on this idea when I know I have a better one." So, there are unfinished things in my computer or in my notebooks. And I also have lots of stories that never got published. So, it just shows how different everyone works.

Holly Goldberg Sloan: Well, I mean, here's the part I will say, you are so enormously successful and talented, Newbury Caldecott, you have been rewarded for your process. So, I think everyone should do how their creation, their process of creation a different way. And the point is to do it in a way that works for you.

Grace Lin: Yes, definitely. Yeah. And I think this is such an interesting interview with you because I think it just shows everyone works differently and no way is wrong.

Holly Goldberg Sloan: Exactly. I mean it's not like we're dentists. If I went to work and I asked someone to open their mouth and I hadn't looked at their x-rays and I didn't really understand how to do a filling and then I went outside and took a walk, I take walks all the time and then came back in and I'd figured out how to do this person's mouth, it probably wouldn't work. But when you're a writer, you have a lot of flexibility in your process and in what you do. And maybe that's why I chose it. Maybe I'm that person that wants that. I don't know if you feel that way. Do you feel that in a way your profession shows you or you chose the profession?

Grace Lin: That is a very good question. I think that it's a little bit of both, honestly.

Holly Goldberg Sloan: Probably. That's true. It's probably true. That's a little bit of both. But sometimes an example of this would be, I thought I was going to be a lawyer. I would've been the world's worst lawyer. I know that because all of the... You can't be somebody like me that's not, doesn't even want to outline and then go into a trial. What would I do? Just wing it. But I entered a contest in college and I did it because there was a big cash prize and I won. And it was for a short story I wrote. And that pivoted me from thinking about law school to thinking maybe I should try writing these things down and seeing if I can make a living out of it. So, sometimes circumstance changes your life.

Grace Lin: Yeah. Well, that's a little similar to me. When I was in grade school, I entered a book contest and I won fourth place. And after I won fourth place, I decided I wanted to be an author and illustrator forever. So, it is similar where there's a contest that changed us.

Holly Goldberg Sloan: And I think that that's why it's really great for kids to enter contests, to put themselves out in the world, to allow other people to look at what they've done it. You can draw pictures and write stories, but they're meant to be shared. Most of them are meant to be shared. And I like that you got fourth plays and then you thought, okay, I need to dethrone three, two, and one.

Grace Lin: Well, the reason-

Holly Goldberg Sloan: You did.

Grace Lin: ... that you have. I only won fourth place, but it came with a cash prize and the cash prize was $1,000. And that's really what did it, I was like, "$1,000 for fourth place".

Holly Goldberg Sloan: Okay. Wait, how old were you with the $1,000 cash prize?

Grace Lin: I think that was like sixth grade.

Holly Goldberg Sloan: Wow. You were really entering great contests because I won $500, and it changed the course of everything I did. But of course, we're not the same age. So, maybe adjusted for inflation. My 500 is closer to a thousand. I complete at one point, and I tell kids this when I'm meeting at schools, I was... I'm in the Writers Guild of America and we were on strike and I ended up entering a contest that I saw online, which was from Taco Bell to come up with a new slogan for the hot sauce. And the hot sauce was called Fire. So, I wrote a slogan, I submitted it and a year later the doorbell rang, it was a FedEx and there was a man standing there with a big packet and I opened it up and it said, you won the Taco Bell name the Fire slogan, hot [inaudible 00:10:27] slogan for the hot sauce. And I got a year's worth of Taco Bell delivered to me in Taco Bell dollars, $5 denominations for a year.

Grace Lin: That's a lot of Taco Bell.

Holly Goldberg Sloan: A lot of Taco Bell. But we did realize, my children realized you could go to Taco Bell, you could give them a $5 Taco Bell bill and just get a drink and then they would give you back. The drink was 89 cents, then you would get $4.11 cents back. And they realized they were, it was a bank, the Taco Bell dollars were a bank, they could go win. So again, inner contest, you never know where it will lead you.

Grace Lin: And I would also like to emphasize just because even I only won fourth place, so even if you don't win it's still great to enter.

Holly Goldberg Sloan: Yes. And also, just the process of entering.

Grace Lin: Yeah.

Holly Goldberg Sloan: The process of entering, forget the winning.

Grace Lin: Yeah.

Holly Goldberg Sloan: The process of deciding you have something of value and putting that thing that you have a value out to be shared in the world.

Grace Lin: Exactly. All right. Well, thank you so much, Holly, for answering Molly's question. And thank you Molly, for such a great question.

Holly Goldberg Sloan: Yes.

Grace Lin: Thanks. Bye.

Holly Goldberg Sloan: Bye-bye. Take care.

Today’s KID BOOK REVIEW comes from Sophia! Sophia is reviewing, “Counting by 7’s” by Holly Goldberg Sloan.

The book I would like to talk about is Counting by 7s by Holly Goldberg Sloan. This book is about a genius 12 year old girl named Willow Chance, who is comforted by counting by sevens, but everything changes when her adoptive parents die and leave Willow alone in a confusing world. I like this book because I felt that the characters in the book had a great amount of struggles and victories, so I enjoyed reading it. I'm an African Mexican American. My pronouns are she, her, hers.

Thank you Sophia!

More about today’s authors:

Holly Goldberg Sloan was born in Michigan and spent her childhood living in Holland, Turkey, Washington DC, Berkeley, California and Eugene, Oregon. She was the screenwriter on the Disney baseball film ANGELS IN THE OUTFIELD, and she was the screenwriter and the Director on Disney's THE BIG GREEN. The mother of two sons, Holly lives with her husband, television writer and illustrator Gary Rosen, in Santa Monica, California. She has published six novels, including Counting By 7s, Short, I'll Be There , The Elephant in the Room, and Appleblossom the Possum. Her books have appeared on over 44 state reading lists, and have won awards around the world.

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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