Mindy: Welcome to Writer Writer Pants on Fire, where authors talk about things that never happened to people who don't exist. We also cover craft, the agent hunt, query trenches, publishing, industry, marketing and more. I'm your host, Mindy McGinnis. You can check out my books and social media at mindymcginnis dot com and make sure to visit the Writer Writer Pants on Fire blog for additional interviews, query critiques and more as well as full transcriptions of each podcast episode. at WriterWriterPants on Fire.com. And don’t forget to check out the Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire Facebook page. Give me feedback, suggest topics you’d like to hear discussed, and let me know if there is someone you’d love to see a a guest.
Mindy: We're here with Katie Henry, who is the author of multiple books. Her most recent release is Gideon Green in Black and White, which is actually her first mystery. So you have jumped genres and even switched mediums, which is, I think really important to being a writer and surviving in the industry is the ability to be adaptable. So why don't you talk a little bit about where you've been and what you've done, and how you've changed over the course of your career.
Katie: I started out my writing life as a playwright back in high school because I was a theater kid, but I was a mediocre singer, dancer and actor. So you gotta do something. I decided what I would do was right plays, and I had a fantastic time doing that. I ended up going to college for playwriting, which if anyone is considering that, was a lot of fun, but not a whole lot of job opportunities after graduation for that. I had a fantastic time being a playwright, and I think the experience of going to art school and having that workshop experience was invaluable in learning how to take feedback and also give feedback that would be helpful to others. So I graduated with a degree in Playwriting. Job opportunities were limited there. I realized that I had been, throughout the course of college, I had only been writing about teenagers. Most of my classmates did not exclusively write about 16-year-olds in their plays. But I did. I've spent all this time writing about teenagers, maybe I should try writing for them. And I loved YA when I was a teenager, so I started reading it again, fell in love with it all over again, and decided that I wanted to try writing YA. And I wanted to try writing novels. That is basically how I got here.
Mindy: I had to laugh a little bit to myself when you were talking about following what you love and doing what you want and getting your degree in the thing that matters to you, and then finding out you can't get a job. That's a real thing. My listeners are probably hearing this. I double majored in English literature, philosophy and religion. I learned so much, I am over-educated and unemployable. I had no desire to teach, no desire to go into any type of teaching English or any type of ministry. Both of those degrees without going on for your master's are fairly useless. I say that like tongue in cheek. Communication and empathy and all of the things that are absolutely critical to being a good writer, were all buried in there, but on a resume, I am not qualified to do much at all.
Katie: It's funny you bring up religion and philosophy, my first two books were about religion, which again, is not a super marketable topic for YA. Though I think that's changing, there are a lot more books that talk about faith and have religious protagonists or people figuring out their faith. But just like you said, doing what you love, and even once you are in a writing career, leaning into the stuff that really matters to you makes all the difference.
Mindy: It can be hard and it can be discouraging. I actually had a long conversation last night, so I just read a book called Like, Comment, Subscribe by Mark Bergen. It is essentially the history of YouTube, and I read it out of curiosity. It was sent to me as an advanced copy and first of all, it's incredible. Everyone should read it, it's fascinating. Secondly, my initial reaction to it, my emotional reaction to it was that I got very angry. And it's not that there's no talent involved, there is talent involved, but when your job is to do un-boxing videos, this is my kid playing with a toy… I'm not saying that there's no talent involved in this, and it certainly is a time suck, but early adopters to YouTube, they were making 7 million a year. Why aren't I doing that?
And those people get burnt out and they're working very hard and their entire private life has to be public, so I understand that there is an exchange. Don't get me wrong, but I was talking to someone about mediocrity kind of being the king of content these days and producing new content over and over and over, something just slightly different. I was just having a particularly pessimistic day as well, so I will add that, but I was definitely hitting a point where I work every day and I work so hard, and I'm sure that you do too. And I feel burnt out, and I am always trying to say the right thing or find an important topic, or be meaningful, or create art for lack of a better word, and it's like… I should just have a foot channel on Only Fans because I have great feet. I could make so much more money. Very often when we talk about the things that we love, like, these are our degrees. We wanna create art, and we want to do something meaningful. But at the same time, man, being a sell-out sounds awesome.
Katie: Yeah, it would be so great if what we found personally meaningful was also extremely lucrative. That hasn't happened to me yet, but fingers crossed. Here's hoping.
Mindy: Is it something that you struggle with as a writer, where you sit down and you write one sentence and you're like… is that sentence right and you're just kind of staring at it?
Katie: It definitely is, and I think it is a lot more so now, when I know that a book is going to be out in the world. When it's part of a larger deal, and I know that not only does the sentence exist on my computer, but it may very well exist in a real book that actual people will read and write reviews of on Good Reads. That definitely makes me think in a way that is sometimes kind of paralyzing about - is this right? Is it doing enough? Is it saying enough?
Mindy: Me too, I'm very critical of myself, but I think that is of course what makes us get better all the time, continuously. When you're writing, do you write out of a place where you want to alleviate what I feel is a pretty low bar these days for entertainment, but also art? Do you want to write to that? Or are you writing for yourself? Are you writing for your readers? What are your goals personally, when you're creating?
Katie: I think I definitely write for myself first 'cause I have experience writing for someone else, it's just not as much fun and it's not as fulfilling. And if you were gonna sit down and write a 80,000-word book, you better be getting something out of it, or that is just gonna be a slog. I definitely am always writing the kinds of things that I enjoy, the kinds of things that I would want to read. Going back to what you said about writing now, this is a particularly hard time. I feel like I'm also writing with a sense of, How can I make the world just a little bit better? A little bit less bleak, in this time? All my books have varied in tone, they've all been funny or... I hope they’ve been funny. That's been the intention. And so particularly when you're writing humor, that's what you're setting out to do. I am always looking for, How could I make someone’s day a little bit more enjoyable in a time that seems particularly hard?
Mindy: I write super dark. I write issues, I write to topics, my goal is to reach the person that also thinks about these things or experiences these things to get that feeling of, Oh, okay, I am not a freak for thinking this way, or I am not alone for feeling this way. And that brings its own form of relief. But I wanna come back to talking about humor because I think right now... Yes, we need it. It's so important. People need to laugh. And so when I say disparaging things about social media, YouTube, TikTok, whatever... Believe me, I'm on it, don't get me wrong. I am a consumer, so I'll watch cats missing their jumps for three hours, this is me.
Katie: There's nothing better.
Mindy: My hang-up comes from the incredible amount of money that can be made that I can't. I think that's where my anger comes from.
Katie: It's not an even distribution.
Mindy: So anyway, coming back to humor and Writing humor, I think that's the hardest thing to do. I can make someone cry. I can make you cry pretty easily, making someone laugh–I feel like that's always a pot shot.
Katie: You know, it's so interesting that you say that 'cause I felt the complete opposite way. I discovered that I liked writing humor when I was a teenage playwright. And when you're a playwright and you're sitting in the back of a theater, it's really hard to tell how the audience is experiencing your work unless they are audibly crying or unless they're laughing. It was much harder, at least for me, to make people cry, and a lot easier to make people laugh. I love that instantaneous reaction that lets me know that I have communicated with other human beings through my words. I think that's why I have always gravitated towards humor.
Mindy: There is an amazing reward in making someone laugh. Yeah, you're speaking about your audience. I do public speaking, and even though I talk about my books and my books are not funny, my presentations always are, because I think, especially when you're speaking to teens, you have to be entertaining. And what amazes me is that I can take the same presentation and I've done them hundreds of times, I can deliver it the same way, I have the same slide saying the same lines and delivering the same jokes, nothing is changing. And there are days when I am murdering it and everyone is laughing and I'm getting DMs and tweets and emails, and people are like, Oh my God, that was amazing. You're fantastic. And then there are times when I'm up there… and there's nothing worse than pausing for the laugh that doesn't come.
Katie: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think I almost thrive in that kind of chaos. Humor is so subjective and chaotic in that way, where you just do not know, it is hard to figure out what is going to be objectively funny and whether it's going to hit with anyone, much less a larger readership. I kind of like that challenge to be like, How can I take something that I think is funny and punch it up so that the greatest number of people will possibly find it funny? And just knowing that you can't get everyone, you will never get everyone, and sometimes people will hate your humor so much. It's actually gratifying in a different way because you have made a connection, just not the one that you intended to.
Mindy: I agree completely. If I can make you feel something, and I get emails, 'cause my books are hard and people die, and I get emails all the time, and people will be like, I am pissed at you. And I'm like, That's cool. The tagline for this podcast is, our job is to make people care about things that never happen to people that don't exist. And if I can make you very, very upset over the death of a person that never was alive in the first place, and if you're pissed at me about it. That's awesome, I've done my job.
Katie: Yeah, that is such a victory.
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Mindy: Starting out with humor, that's where you were, and then you've moved forward into writing a mystery, which of course doesn't exclusively mean that you're not including humor anymore. But talk to me about that jump, talk to me about changing up there.
Katie: So it definitely is a comedic mystery. I actually think it's one of my funnier books. That was really important to me to include because something that I find is that the two genres that I feel are closest connected, and this is going to sound very weird, are horror and humor. And so thriller and mystery is included in that too, but they're both based on the element of surprise. Things make us laugh when they surprise us and things scare us when they surprise us too. And human beings love being surprised, even if we say that we don't. We love it. I went into that knowing that I wanted it to be funny and knowing that I wanted to carry some of the other things that I had done previously in more straight contemporary novels into this. But really working with the mystery element, it was really, really difficult to transition. I really love mysteries, I love reading them, and I very naively thought that that meant that I would be good at writing one. And I think eventually I did just get there, but it was a struggle. Mystery makes you level up, I feel like, and that is one of the reasons that I wanted to do it.
This is my fourth book, and I always wanna be growing as an author. If I'm lucky enough to have another book, I always wanna be doing something new and challenging myself, and I felt like every aspect of writing a mystery from the plotting to making sure there's still a character arc, and particularly in revision, when changing things, it means everything changes and clues have to be completely rearranged. It just asked me to be a better writer, a better collaborator with my editor, too. While it definitely was a challenge, I ultimately feel like I'm a much better writer for having tried it.
Mindy: So talk to me about your process. Are you a planner? Are you a pantser?
Katie: I am such a pantser, which is another reason that a mystery was a real challenge because you can't just go into a completely flying blind. I mean, you can... And I definitely did. But at some point, you have to know where you're going. I always pretend that I'm a plotter. I feel like I lie to people, particularly my editor about that. I turn in the five-page outline, and then by the time he gets the first draft it is completely different, which he's always very cool with, which is nice. Pantsing entirely, it does not quite work for Mystery. In the same way though, I'm glad I kind of did that as a first draft because it allowed me to discover aspects to the story and to the characters that I might not have gotten if I had plotted it out more carefully as I probably should have.
Mindy: So for the sake of the listening audience, Kaite and I actually share an editor. Our editor is Ben Rosenthal of Katherine Tegen Books. I think he's probably very accustomed to this kind of working relationship because I have turned in synopsis and outlines, and he just knows that that's just kind of what the concept might be, and I'm gonna turn in something similar in the same vein in about six months.
Katie: And you'll have to stop me or This will turn into the Ben Rosenthal appreciation hour, but it sounds like we have a pretty similar working relationship where he gives us authors just a lot of space to discover what the book is without locking in too early. And is generally just very adaptable in what a story can be and where it can go, which I really appreciate. I feel like I don't figure out what the book is about until, I don't know, the second draft, at least.
Mindy: I think that's fair. And I agree, Ben is wonderful. I've worked with Ben on, I think nine or 10 books now. Yeah, so we have a really good working relationship. I actually bristle when people ask me what my editor makes me change and I get almost angry about it. No, my editor is awesome, and that's not what an editor does, and you are misunderstanding the role of an editor. And for anybody that questions that, there are plenty of horror stories about editors out there, but I can say I've worked with three or four, and Ben the most often, and I've never had the experience of sending a book off and having it come back to me and the editor saying, Okay, this is what's wrong, and this is exactly how you fix it, or I fixed it for you. That's not what an editor does. And Ben is particularly good at saying, you gave me this, these are your strengths and this is the strength of this manuscript, these are the areas where it needs to work, and here are some ideas from me that I think could be utilized, and of course, I realize that you can just absolutely ignore everything I have to say and find your own way.
Katie: Yeah, yeah, I think a lot of aspiring authors or early stage career authors think of editors and even agents as sort of their bosses, and what you really quickly discover is they're not your boss. They are your collaborator, they are here to help you achieve your vision and that ultimately, this is your book, because when it's on a bookshelf, it's gonna have your name on the cover, and no one else’s.
Mindy: I agree, ultimately, it is a team effort, and you're the author. Every editor I've ever had has always said, It's your book. You make the final decisions. I will say, in addition to what we were talking about in terms of being absolute pantsers in many ways, I enjoy the flexibility that it gives me. Yes, there is some panic and yes, there are some days when I'm just like, I have no idea what I'm doing, I have come to trust my process because I've been doing it a long time, and I haven't had it fail me yet. One of the reasons why I do enjoy being a Pantser is because it allows for so much elasticity. So in my book, that will be coming out in 2023, a murder mystery in a small town, and it is a pairing - the unlikely duo of the valedictorian, and then the girl who is going to be the first person in her family to ever even graduate from high school. When I started writing the book and when I had written the synopsis, I turned it in with my main character, the good girl, being very much like a straight arrow and I follow the rules and I'm always doing the right thing, and there is value to being perfect. And I started writing it and man, she was angry, she was an angry person.
And I was like, Dude, this is not what I expected out of you. And she was just moving through the world with a very different internal monologue than what she was showing to people. She was a good girl, and she was behaving in that manner and checking all those boxes, but her internal monologue is like, No, fuck you, fuck you and fuck you. And I was just like, Wow, girl. So, you know, she changed and it ended up, I think, in so many ways, making the manuscript so much better, making that allowance and not having a lock in for even myself about what I'm gonna do or where I'm gonna take things. That's why I really enjoy being a panster.
Katie: Yeah, and I do think there is a benefit, particularly with mysteries, to being a little bit of a pantser, because so often your protagonist doesn't really know what's going on either. In Gideon Green, he is a former child detective who is coming out of retirement to solve a case with his former best friend. Part of his character arc is realizing that he does not know everything, and as the mystery takes them on twists and turns, I think it helps get me in the headspace of not really knowing what was going on, to legitimately not really know what was gonna happen.
Mindy: I really enjoy that. So tell us a little bit more about Gideon Green.
Katie: This is an idea that I had a long time ago when I was a teenager myself. I was thinking about how much I loved Encyclopedia Brown as a kid, those books with that wonderful child detective. But I was thinking about how long would that be cool? Because everyone in the Encyclopedia Brown universe thinks he's like the coolest kid ever. But that has an expiration date at some point. That becomes a lot less cool and a lot more off-putting and weird. I had this idea for a one-time child detective who is now 16, and because no one thinks the whole child detective thing isn’t particularly cool anymore. He has retired and instead spends most of his time in his room watching noir, which he is fully obsessed with, until his former best friend who ditched him in middle school appears at his door, wanting his help on an investigation that she's doing for the school newspaper. So reluctantly, he comes out of retirement and chaos ensues. Which is how I feel like all of my books eventually get to the place where, just chaos ensues.
Mindy: Chaos ensues is the best way to pitch anything. You wrote this during the pandemic, right?
Katie: I did, I did. I was going back in my email trying to find the actual date that I pitched it, but I couldn't. To the best of my recollection, I first pitched this book to Ben on maybe February 28, and then a couple of weeks later, the world completely ended. I live in Manhattan. And the world felt like it completely collapsed from underneath me as I was just starting to write this book. And my memory of writing the opening chapters of this book is sitting in my tiny New York apartment and outside the streets are completely empty, which is very weird for New York and just constant, constant sirens. That's my memory of it. And obviously, I would have preferred to be writing under pretty much any other condition, and it was horrible, a really difficult experience to be writing what almost felt like a fantasy book. I would write a sentence about how two friends hugged in the cafeteria and just burst into tears because that felt so far away from the life that I was living and I didn't know when that life would come back.
It was very difficult, but I feel like having written it during that particular time fundamentally shaped the book and what it is about. Gideon starts off as a kid stuck in his room with really nothing going on in his life except watching movies, and that's pretty much where I also was in March 2020, not through my own choice. Over the course of the book, he realizes just how much you need other people and just how valuable and magical and life-giving human connection is, and I'm not sure that it ultimately would have had that focus as a book if I had not been writing it during that time.
Mindy: And what were the difficulties for you in trying to write something, so it's a mystery with a very deep roots in humor, when you yourself are probably really not feeling all that chuckalicious?
Katie: It was tough, but in some ways it was really nice to just say, Okay, you're going into another headspace. You are inhabiting a world that does not resemble your own world at the moment. It was a form of escapism where it was like, Okay, everything sucks right now, life is not going well, put on your headphones and for the next hour, two hours, three hours, you can be somewhere else. That was really valuable for me, and something that I'm so glad that I had, and I'm so glad that I basically had to force myself to find the joy in this book and the humor.
Mindy: My books of course are very dark, but they also have moments of humor because you can't just hit your head against a wall all the time, you have to have a break. I always have those flashes of humor. When I hear back from people about my books, very often what I'm hearing is - they spoke to me or thank you for writing this, and I appreciate any outreach whatsoever that anybody gives me. But when I know that I made someone laugh, especially in this environment like you're talking about, I specifically tried very hard with the book that will be coming out in 2023, called A Long Stretch of Bad Days, I tried very hard to make that one funny and not just in surprising moments. There's a particular character, any time she's on the page, you know that she is going to make you laugh, and I'm like, This is what we need right now. I'm still gonna be Mindy McGinnis and I'm still going to give you a book with lots of horrible things happening, but I'm gonna try to help you laugh a little bit, too.
Katie: I feel like in some ways YA leans more heavily towards the dark and the issue books, and obviously those books are completely needed and so important. But teenagers are also some of the funniest people I interact with ever, and I think that they want humor, they deserve humor too. It just shouldn't be just for middle grade books or just for chapter books. Humor in YA is a much needed component.
Mindy: I agree, it's funny because I was talking to, at the beginning of the month, Marcy Kate Connolly. She was telling me that I should write middle grade and I said, That's a horrible idea. And then, but you know, I can really write a fart joke. I'm really good with farts. And she was like, then you've got it. Like, you're good. You know what I'm also really good at is dick jokes. I don't know how many dick jokes you are allowed to write, I mean none in middle grade, but I'm sure there's also a cap on YA. My mind goes weird places sometimes. So, I don't know, Teenagers can be difficult because they want dick jokes, they want sex jokes. That is the funniest thing when you're that age and raunchy humor, and believe me, I am here for it, but I also can't write a whole book of dick jokes. Much like I can't write a whole book of fart jokes for middle grade, you gotta have a little more substance there.
Katie: I have not yet found what the limit is for dick jokes. I've always wondered if I'm going to approach it, but haven't yet. My first book, Heretics Anonymous has an extended dicke joke that I cannot believe anybody let me keep. And it so divides the room like I have had people tell me, it is the funniest part of the book, and I have also seen people abandon the book at that exact moment, which is also a compliment.
Mindy: Well, you know what, that's okay. When that happens, I always say, You know what, I didn't write it for you then. A buddy of mine, his name is Kurt Dinan, he is from Ohio. He writes humor, his book with Sourcebooks is called Don't Get Caught, and it's about a prank war in high school. And it's fantastic, so fine, but he's got a running joke, it's kind of like the equivalent of... That's What She Said, but it's - like my balls. So if somebody is picking something up they’ll be like, Oh my God, this is heavier than I thought it would be. And they'd be like, Yeah, like my balls.
Katie: That is great. Just like inappropriate enough, I think that's the kind of stuff that teens are gonna laugh at, their parents might not, but you know. I will say that I've never had a teenager complain about language or dick jokes, I have had many parents complain and one time, a parent found my third book, which is about stand up comedy, in the public library. And she circled every single swear word or a reference to drugs. Posted it on Facebook, and it's just like, you know what, I am so sorry. Your child has heard all of these words before, I am not the one showing this to them for the first time. Your child watches Euphoria and Riverdale, like none of this is my fault, calm down. And also who writes in a library book? Like, Come on. I don't even mind her hating swearing. But she did it in pen too, if you do that to a library book, what's wrong with you?
Mindy: Once again, if you hate that, then I didn't write this book for you and you are not my audience. You can be angry over there by yourself and go find someone that fits what you wanna read a little bit better. I don't want to read happily ever after romances. They piss me right the hell off because I've been divorced like twice. This projects an unrealistic view of monogamy.
Katie: You're not highlighting every kiss in the book, and returning it to the library.
Mindy: This is misleading people about the size of most men's penises as well. We should do that, we should just start a Facebook page where it's like things that are just so inoffensive, no one would have a problem with. Me, I got a problem with the size of dicks in romance books, because you know what, not the case. Danielle Steele really set me up to be disappointed that's all. Her and Jude Devereaux.
Katie: No one is still listening. This has been like five minutes of talking about dick jokes.
Mindy: Alright, last thing, why don't you let listeners know where they can find you online and where they can find any of your books, but especially Gideon Green?
Katie: So you can find all four of my books, including Gideon Green in Black and White most places that books are sold. You can find me at my website, which is Katie Henry dot com. You can also find me on Twitter and Instagram. I have not yet gotten on TikTok, but you can find me on Twitter and Instagram.
Mindy: Writer Writer Pants on Fire is produced by Mindy McGinnis. Music by Jack Korbel. Don't forget to check out the blog for additional interviews, writing advice and publication tips at Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com. If the blog or podcast have been helpful to you or if you just enjoy listening, please consider donating. Visit Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com and click “support the blog and podcast” in the sidebar.
