It's a bonus edition of the Book Club for Kids.
Hi, I'm Kitty Felde.
Last week, we discussed Lisa Yee's novel, Maisie Chen's Last Chance.
This week, we continue the conversation.
Lisa, you have had a varied writing background, including advertising, script writing.
But tell us about this sort of writing, a speech for the President of the United States.
I was working at Disney, and I was a writer-producer for Mickey's Very Merry Christmas Parade.
And we had the world leaders from all around and they were giving speeches of inspiration and happy holidays.
So I wrote a speech for every world leader, and they had the option to use it or to write their own thing.
So I wrote something for the president.
This is a long time ago.
So this is Ronald Reagan.
And he used my words, hello, Joan and Ben, because it was Joan London and Ben Vereen as the host.
That's all he used.
But I can still say I did write a speech for the president of the United States.
You talked about how difficult it was to come up with the confidence to be able to write a novel.
Now, why do you think writers have such a hard time putting their fingers to the keyboard to write a book?
Ever since I was a kid, I always wanted to be an author.
I thought that all authors were dead people because...
I mean, growing up, we didn't have computers or anything, so I never knew about real live authors.
And so I thought if they were all dead, you're going to need somebody alive to write the books.
And I thought that should be me.
But I was too scared to even try, because to me being an author was like maybe being a rock star to somebody else.
And I was also afraid to say it out loud because I thought. you know, I might be made fun of.
People might laugh at me because that was my dream.
And so I just started writing everything but books.
And I remember when I had kids, I would tell them you know, if there's something that you really want to do, you have to try.
You might succeed, you might fail, but you have to try.
And then I realized I was being a big hypocrite because I had always wanted to be an author and I wasn't trying.
So That's when I started trying and I joined a group called SEBWI, where there were other people who were writing books.
And I realized that had I told people what my dream was, had I tried sooner, I might have gotten there sooner also.
But it was my own fear that was stopping me.
And when I meet young writers, I tell them, It doesn't have to be good.
Just just I mean, this is going to sound gross, but just vomit on the page.
You know, write something bad because the thing is, you can clean it up later.
Talk about your writing schedule.
How do you organize your writing time?
And how long does it take you to finish a book?
Right now I'm writing the Misfit series.
And in fact, the third book has just come out.
There's one a year for those.
So I will do an outline that that might take about um six, six weeks to do it and then go back and forth, and then i have about, you know, four months, five months to write a draft, and we go back and forth with revision and then it it comes out, you know, miraculously later.
My first book however, millicent moon girl genius, took me six years to write.
I mean, I was working full time.
And so, you know, it varies.
I will use as much time as I have and then spread it out.
Macy took two years.
So there was one year where I actually had six books come out at the same time.
And the year before that, it was just it was crazy.
But I was writing for D.C. superhero girls and American girl.
And you sign these things called non-disclosure agreements so you can't tell the other publishers what you're doing.
So I was not allowed to tell the other publisher that I was working for somebody else at the same time.
And so it just was like, it was writing day and night.
It really was.
Formasia took longer because I did a full first draft and I said it in the 1990s.
And then I threw it all away and started over.
You have to tell us about writing for American Girl.
Do they hand you a so-called Bible with all of the rules and regulations about writing for this franchise?
No, actually, they don't.
I was very surprised.
So they contacted me to do I think I've written six books for them.
But the first one was called Good Luck Ivy.
It was about a Chinese American girl growing up in the 70s.
And so my phone number is unlisted, but they called me and I was like, how did you get this number?
And they said, well, we have our ways.
And so they asked me if I would if I would write this book about this Chinese American girl.
I said, well, I'm Chinese American.
They said, we know.
And they said she's growing up in the 70s.
I said, I grew up in the 70s.
They said.
We know.
I said, this is kind of creepy.
But I had to say no, because I was working on another book with Arthur Levine, the editor.
But on the on that day, I got a call saying that J.K.
Rowling had sent in book number seven for Harry Potter and they were going to work on that.
So mine was on hold for a while.
So I was able to do the American Girl book.
And I asked them, I said, what would you like me to write?
And they said, well, that's why we're hiring you.
You tell us.
And it was it was a companion to another another series of books by Megan McDonald.
And so I said, OK, how many words do you want it to be?
They told me how many words.
And I came up with an outline.
They sent me to San Francisco because that was where it was sent to research.
And I wrote the book.
I hit exactly the word count.
And they said, you know, it can be longer.
And then they said to me well, this is kind of like our other books, but we're hiring you because we like your voice.
And we we want more Lisa Yee in this.
And I was like, oh OK, because I had researched and read so many of the other books and tried to make it just like that.
And so I rewrote it in my own voice.
And then after that, I did several more books for them.
It was great.
They sent me to the Amazon rainforest, to Hawaii to learn how to surf.
I mean, the research, I love researching.
So it was great.
We have interviews with dozens and dozens of other writers at our website, bookclubforkids.org.
You know, that's also where you can find QR codes for all of our episodes.
It was a suggestion from librarians who have been printing them out and pasting them to the back cover of books so a young reader can scan the code, listen to a couple of minutes of the episode that goes with that book and then decide whether they want to take the title home with them or try something else.
Those QR codes are at our website, bookclubforkids.org.
I'm Kitty Felde.
Thanks so much for listening.
Thank you.
