Remembering John Watkiss – A Creative Force in Wonderland and Beyond
January 21, 7 years ago the world lost an artistic genius, John Watkiss. John was not only a remarkable artist but also a cherished collaborator who helped bring the world of “The Looking Glass Wars” to life. As I reflect on the journey, we embarked upon together over two decades ago, I am reminded of his immense talent, his boundless creativity, and the lasting impact he had on the entertainment industry.
John’s prowess extended into the realm of comics, where he left an indelible mark on iconic characters and series. His collaboration with me on “The Looking Glass Wars” was just one facet of his creative output. His work graced the covers and interiors of comics published by both DC and Marvel. His visual storytelling brought to life the adventures of Batman, Conan, Deadman, and Sandman, among others. His panels were a masterclass in composition, perspective, and emotion, immersing readers in rich and dynamic visual narratives.
One of my personal favorite paintings of John’s can be seen in Volume 11 of the book “Sparrow,” a testament to his ability to evoke emotion and depth through his art. His mastery of anatomy and his ability to capture the essence of characters in their most defining moments made his comic work truly stand out. He understood the nuances of facial expressions and body language, making each character’s journey even more engaging and relatable.
Our collaboration on “The Looking Glass Wars” was a testament to John’s unique talents. His visualizations of Wonderland, its inhabitants, and its machinery were nothing short of magical. With every stroke of his pen, he transported readers to a realm where imagination knew no bounds. His attention to detail and his knack for infusing each image with emotion and depth were unparalleled. Together, we crafted a world that was both captivating and visually stunning, including some concept art for the musical.
John’s influence extended far beyond our collaboration and the world of comics. He left an indelible mark on the world of cinema, working with luminaries such as Steven Spielberg and Ridley Scott. His contributions to projects like “Treasure Planet,” “Atlantis: The Lost Empire,” and “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” showcased his versatility and his ability to seamlessly blend realism with the fantastical. His work enhanced the storytelling of these films, making them all the more immersive and memorable.
DreamWorks, Disney, and countless other studios were fortunate to have John’s artistic prowess grace their projects. His involvement in films like “Tarzan”, Guy Ritchie’s “Sherlock Homes”, “The Prince of Egypt”, and “Mulan” demonstrated his knack for infusing animated worlds with depth and authenticity. John’s mastery of anatomy, lighting, and composition made every frame he touched a work of art, leaving an everlasting impact on the animation industry.
John’s artistic contributions were not limited to the silver screen or the pages of comics. He was a renowned educator, sharing his knowledge and passion for anatomy with countless aspiring artists. His influence continues to ripple through the generations of creators he inspired and guided.
As we remember John Watkiss, let us cherish the legacy he leaves behind. His imagination knew no bounds, and his dedication to his craft was unwavering. He brought wonder and awe to everything he touched, leaving an undeniable mark on the worlds of literature, film, comics, and art.
Rest in peace, dear John. Your spirit will forever live on in the beauty you created and the lives you touched.
With profound sadness and gratitude,
Frank Beddor
Before There Was Gregory Maguire’s “Wicked,” There Was Julia Stiles’ Sundance Breakout “Wicked”
For the next 10 days, Hollywood will shift to the slopes of Park City, Utah as scores of independent filmmakers will exhibit their work at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, hoping the festival serves as their coveted “breakout”. Twenty-six years ago, breakouts included Darren Aronofsky (for his debut feature Pi) and Todd Philips (for his infamous documentary Frat House). Lesser known is that Sundance 1998 was the breakout for Julia Stiles, whose turn as the sinister Ellie Christianson in Wicked made her “the darling” of the festival.
Wicked, directed by Michael Steinberg and produced by Frank Beddor, is a genre-bending thriller which Ain’t it Cool News called a “gem of the macabre,” blends noir and camp in telling the story of the twisted Christianson family. Living in the seemingly idyllic upper middle class gated community of Casa Del Norte, it might seem like the Christianson’s live a charmed life, but that facade is in constant danger of crumbling. Karen and Ben are in a loveless marriage, each involved in their own affairs. Karen with the next-door neighbor Lawson and Ben with the family’s nanny, Lena. Stiles dazzles as fourteen-year-old Ellie, an intense teen who despises her mother but is obsessed her father. The story turns sinister when Karen is brutally murdered. Ellie relishes stepping into the void left by her mother as she prepares the family’s meals, wears Karen’s clothes, and deepens her relationship with Ben in a shocking twist. All while the grizzled veteran Detective Boland begins to suspect the teenage Electra may not be so innocent in the death of her mother.
Wicked took the festival circuit by storm, earning rave reviews for its bold take on suburban dysfunction and the blended tone. John Cooper in the Sundance 1998 program called the film “an exhilarating hybrid that continuously surprises and amuses,” while Sandy Gow wrote in their description for the Vancouver International Film Festival that “Wicked is one of those films that sucks you into its twisted realm so subtly you don’t realize how far your mind has been bent until you leave the theater.” But the most ardent praise was reserved for Stiles, who took home the Best Actress award at the 1998 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in the Czech Republic. Brendan Peterson writing for Film/Tape World said she was “destined for greatness” while Michael Hogan in Vanity Fair wrote, “Stiles gives a smoldering performance of Wicked.” The stage was set for a career-defining reception at the country’s biggest film festival.
Although only sixteen-years-old, Julia Stiles was not a rookie when she stepped into the warped mind of Ellie Christianson. Growing up in the artistic enclave of SoHo, Stiles began acting in avant-garde theater at 11 after sending a letter to the director of the La MaMa Theatre Company asking to audition. Film and television roles quickly followed, including the David E. Kelley medical drama Chicago Hope and a turn as Harrison Ford’s daughter in the 1997 action thriller The Devil’s Own also starring Brad Pitt.
That tenacity Stiles displayed early in her career would serve her well during the casting process for Wicked. Director Michael Steinberg (The Waterdance, Bodies, Rest & Motion) said, “The only condition Frank (producer Frank Beddor) and I set in advance of making the picture was that we had to find the right Ellie.” Beddor credited a little luck in finding their star: “I was helping to produce a short film for acting coach Larry Moses and his Director of Photography recommended a young actress. This was the first I heard of Julia Stiles.”
Beddor and Steinberg sent the script to Stiles’ manager and quickly received a hand-written letter from the teenager expressing her interest in the role. In an interview with MovieMaker, Stiles recounted what drew her to the role: “It’s a fantastic character…I constantly want to shock people. I’d much rather do a risky, groundbreaking movie than one that’s ambivalent. The key is to first shock people, then make them like it.” Beddor flew Stiles out to Los Angeles for an audition with Steinberg. “Julia and I started improvising scenes for Michael,” remembered Beddor, “and we knew…she was Ellie. She had IT. I sensed I had an opportunity to help launch…a real movie star.”
The key to Stiles’ breakthrough performance was her nuanced understanding of Ellie and her ability to inhabit her character’s mind. In an interview with Mark Ebner for Black Book, Stiles said, “I understood Ellie. Everything she feels in the story, I have felt in some form in my life…it’s obvious on the surface that I wouldn’t carry on in my life the way Ellie feels about her father. I love my dad, but not the way she did. I couldn’t see it from the outside and look in and say, ‘Well, she’s a psycho who’s in love with her father and wants to kill her mother.’ I had to be her. I was just thinking, I’m just in love. And being angry with my mother was just anger. It just took the bare, raw emotions of love, anger, jealousy, deceit, and betrayal.”
That rare combination of acting chops and understanding of human psychology at only sixteen resulted in a powerhouse performance, one in which Stiles imbues Ellie with rage, danger, and vulnerability. It was the type of brave, daring turn that Sundance embraces. Jose Martinez of SOMA Magazine wrote that it was a “hell bent breakthrough performance…destined to grab an audience’s attention.” That line turned out to be prophetic after a line of teens crowded outside the theater clamoring for Stiles’ autograph after the film’s Sundance screening.
Stiles’ Sundance success wasn’t just limited to her on-camera work, however. She also earned the distinction of being the youngest writer invited to the prestigious Sundance Writers Lab for her co-written screenplay, The Anarchist’s Daughter, which follows a Lower East side “punk” who tries to figure out what insanity is by tripping on acid. Oscar winning scribe Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects, Mission: Impossible, and Top Gun: Maverick) served as a mentor for the program and said that Julia “has the one essential thing that you need to succeed with any hope of keeping your soul: she knows exactly what she wants.”
Stiles’ breakthrough at Sundance proved to be a launch pad for the rest of her career. Off the strength of her performance as Ellie, Stiles was cast as the headstrong Kat Stratford in Gil Junger’s teen classic 10 Things I Hate About You opposite Heath Ledger and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Kat’s tough exterior and vulnerable core parallel Ellie’s character in a lot of ways and it’s easy to see why the filmmakers tapped Stiles for the role after seeing her work in Wicked. The Shakespeare update became a pop culture hit and Stiles was feted as one of the new faces in Hollywood and was featured in a Seventeen Magazine profile and graced the cover of Vanity Fair alongside other rising stars Adrien Brody, Reese Witherspoon, and Kate Hudson.
But the outpouring of positive press didn’t affect Stiles’ seriousness about her profession. “What I wanna do is be like a chameleon,” she said, “a Laurence Olivier playing different roles.” It’s safe to say she’s done just that. Stiles’ credit list includes O, The Bourne films opposite Matt Damon, Mona Lisa Smile alongside Julia Roberts, and Silver Linings Playbook as Jennifer Lawrence’s sister. Stiles has also taken her talents to TV with a 10 episode run on Dexter and a starring role in the Amazon comedy The Lake. Stiles has also undertaken important charity work including working for Habitat for Humanity and Amnesty International. She has produced a body of excellent work in a long and diverse career, one that was jump started on the Sundance slopes due to a daring indie titled Wicked.
An itinerant storyteller, John Drain attended the University of Edinburgh before studying film at DePaul University in Chicago and later earned an MFA in Screenwriting from the American Film Institute Conservatory. John focuses on writing mysteries and thrillers featuring characters who are thrown into the deep end of the pool and struggle to just keep their heads above water. His work has been recognized by the Academy Nicholls Fellowship, the Austin Film Festival, ScreenCraft, Cinestory, and the Montreal Independent Film Festival. In a previous life, John created and produced theme park attractions across the globe for a wide variety of audiences. John keeps busy in his spare time with three Dungeons and Dragons campaigns and a seemingly never-ending stack of medieval history books.
ALL THINGS ALICE: INTERVIEW WITH SARA ELLA
As an amateur scholar and die-hard enthusiast of everything to do with Alice in Wonderland, I have launched a podcast that takes on Alice’s everlasting influence on pop culture. As an author who draws on Lewis Carroll’s iconic masterpiece for my Looking Glass Wars universe, I’m well acquainted with the process of dipping into Wonderland for inspiration.
The journey has brought me into contact with a fantastic community of artists and creators from all walks of life—and this podcast will be the platform where we come together to answer the fascinating question: “What is it about Alice?”
For this episode, it was my great pleasure to have Sara Ella join me as my guest on this episode! Read on to explore our conversation and check out the whole series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview.
Frank Beddor You’re the first author that I’ve spoken with that has also worked in Wonderland. Reading your book and seeing all these parallels to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as well as some of the things that I ripped off of was delightful. I’m very excited to chat with you today.
Sara Ella I’m so honored. I’ve been a fan of yours for years. Ages ago, my library introduced me to The Looking Glass Wars and I was so excited because I was so drawn to anything Alice so I’m just really excited to be here. Thank you for having me.
FB I’m talking with Sara Ella, the writer of the Curious Realities series. Why do you think Alice has lasted for so long? You’ve been a longtime fan so I’m curious if you’ve identified some of the specifics of what attracts us to Alice decade after decade.
SE I think in general, children’s stories seem to last the test of time. My librarian once told me that children’s stories are the ones that last because they resonate with us as children, but they also resonate with us as adults. For Alice, her story is one that we all relate to. We all want to escape. We all want to avoid growing up and adulthood. But her story is so interesting because she doesn’t want adulthood, she wants nonsense, she wants to stay a little girl and be silly. Then when she’s put in the world that she’s imagined for herself, she doesn’t want to be there. She can’t really be satisfied. Especially with portal stories, where someone portals into another world, that’s something that we all want. We all want to escape. That’s why we read. That’s why we love film. That little bit of time of escape is something that we can all relate to and just the reminder of imagination and what a huge role that that plays as well.
FB I’m glad you brought that up because I was very jealous of the Wonder gene idea. I thought it was very clever. I also thought it was similar thematically to what I was playing with with imagination. I often had people asking me, “Where did this idea come from?” I would say, “Well, it popped into my imagination.” Then I thought imagination can be a real power for people to think about what their life can be. Then when I was reading your book I came across the Wonder gene, which gives you magical abilities. Imagination, curiosity, and wonder are all very much childhood expressions that we lose or it starts to fade for some of us as adults. I often want to get back to that and being a writer, you have to live in that space of curiosity and wonder and imagination. I think what you did with the Wonder gene is very specific, but yet it’s in a grander thematic way. Can you talk about how you use wonder, curiosity, and imagination in your work?
SE I’m a huge Disney person. I love to go to the parks and what Walt Disney did in making Disneyland and Disney World so different from other theme parks. This idea of when you’re in a certain land, you can’t see the other land, and there are certain ways that Disneyland was built so you can’t see the outside world. I really love that idea of being fully immersed. So I thought how can I do this with Alice? I wanted to do something different with how she gets into Wonderland. How can I make this my own? How can I make this fit into this dystopian world I’ve created? And imagination plays a part in it. And I think there’s always that question of whether is Alice dreaming. Does she really experience this? We kind of see that in The Looking Glass Wars where Lewis Carroll has written this story and Alice is just so mad. “This is my history and you are pretending it’s some silly children’s story.” There’s always that question for the reader, is this real?
That’s what I wanted to explore. What does it mean for something to be real? Does it mean that it has to physically be there? Is it something that we see in our mind? Is it something we imagine? Is it something we believe in? All of those things culminated in the idea of the Wonder gene and this idea of virtual visual reality that Wonders have created for themselves. I love stories like Ready Player One or Warcross by Marie Lu and the idea of virtual reality. Even in Harry Potter, we see Dumbledore tell Harry just because it’s inside your head, why does that mean it should be any less real? I think that’s what’s so fun about Alice. As much as we, as authors, try to convince our readers the story is real, there’s always that question about if Alice really experienced this. Or was she imagining it the whole time? But also, if she was, why should that make it any less real?
FB You did a great job of creating those two realities within one overall reality that we all relate to. I also thought it was clever to have the Queen of England be the unimaginative, normal person, and then the Queen of Hearts be the real powerhouse in the underground or parallel.
Let’s start with the two worlds and the logic that you came up with so we could all suspend our disbelief. How much did you think about that? The world creation you’ve done is time-consuming and it has to be right otherwise it’s problematic for the reader.
SE I’m a discovery writer. The most frustrating part of the writing process for me is figuring out the logic behind my magic system and trying to make it all fit and work. I always see the characters very clearly in my mind and can kind of follow their storyline. But making sure the magic system makes sense is something I struggle with. With creating Wonderland on top of England or London, I played off the idea of what can Wonders see that those without the Wonder gene can’t see. I was inspired a lot by different stories. Brandon Mull’s Fablehaven, for example, where he has two children who go to this magical preserve and they can’t see any of these magical creatures until they drink this special fairy milk. So it’s playing around the idea about what is unseen to us until we have some kind of special ability or special understanding or special knowledge. We see it in Harry Potter where the muggles don’t see a lot of the things going on in the wizarding world and until Harry’s eyes are opened to it, he doesn’t see it either. I guess it would be like the Chosen One trope. There are certain tropes that are repeated but I think we’re so drawn to repeat those tropes because we all want to be the Chosen One, we all want to be Alice. We want to be the ones who can see into the special world of Wonderland. Then I ended up adding what I call a pinch of science fiction because, in a sense, all science fiction is somewhat grounded in fantasy, just at different levels. We see that with Star Wars. So I thought, how can I make up my own science about how the superheroes come to be? Why are superheroes able to do what they do? In my mind, Alice is a kind of superhero. Those with the Wonder gene are able to see something that others cannot see. So I played off that and it just takes a lot of rewriting and good editors to make sure it all comes together.
FB When you’re working on a movie, you’re always looking for some sort of IP that’s recognizable. Some of the most successful movies are stories familiar to people but told in unfamiliar ways. That is certainly what you’ve accomplished with the Curious Realities series. You did a reimagining of The Little Mermaid as well. Why do you think familiar stories told in unfamiliar ways constantly attract people?
SE I think we’re drawn to things that are familiar, we’re drawn to things that are nostalgic to us. It’s why I never tire of hearing Cinderella. I never, ever tire of hearing about the girl who overcame cruelty and stayed kind through it all. That’s something that resonates very deeply with me. It’s something I’m really drawn to. We’re all inspired by something. Whether we’re retelling a familiar tale or we’re reimagining it or we’re coming up with something totally new, we’re still going to draw from different inspirations. I think there’s that nostalgia aspect. Then it resonates with people who are drawn to anything and everything Alice in Wonderland, but then we’re also introducing readers who maybe would never bother to pick up the original Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I love that aspect, too, of inviting a new reader in and they might now be introduced to other versions of Wonderland or to the original, and be drawn to that. So I think on both sides, you have those who are looking for something new and they really want to like these classic stories, or these fairy tales, but they’ve just never resonated with them. Then finding that version of the story that finally connects with them is a really fun challenge.
FB Because you’re writing for a contemporary audience, you’re talking about contemporary themes, and you want to bring people in. You’ve done that with The Wonderland Trials, the first book in the Curious Realities series. But yet in terms of one of the games in the book, the first game Solitary, you have one of Lewis Carroll’s quotes. “Who in the world am I?” That magically is going to relate to my 15-year-old daughter and what she’s going through, what your kids are going to go through as they get older and so you want to cocoon that idea around a story that lets them explore and have adventure. So with the public domain and familiar stories told in an unfamiliar way you’re really trying to connect with a contemporary audience. And if they discover Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland because of it, you’re gonna make a lot of librarians happy.
SE I 100% agree with that. I also have a 15-year-old daughter, and as teenagers, they’re trying to figure out who they are. That’s why I love writing about teens and for teens. But at the same time, so much of my audience is adults. So I think that teenage period of figuring out who you are and what you want and what you want to do just continues to resonate with us, no matter how old we get.
FB I always ask my guests to choose a character from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to describe their personality and their aspirations. Who would you dress up as for Halloween or as cosplay? I have a feeling I know who you would choose.
SE I feel like my answer is very cliche and boring. But as I was friends with Alice, when I worked for the Disney parks, I would choose Alice. I love how she’s walking around in this world that she created for herself. Yet she’s going around, trying to tell people they’re not taking her seriously enough, everybody needs to be more serious. Stop with the nonsense. That just really resonates. It’s kind of the dynamic of my husband and I’s relationship, which is very similar to Alice and Chess in The Wonderland Trials. He’s always trying to lighten the mood. She’s always trying to get him to be more serious. It’s a fun kind of dynamic. So it might be a boring, typical answer, but I would definitely be Alice.
FB Interestingly enough, most of the time people pick some other character so I always find it interesting when someone picks Alice. What I also find curious is that in your book, Alice is really edgy. She’s street-smart. She’s a card shark. She’s got great retorts. I identify with Alice or when people ask me about my books and which character I enjoyed writing most I always say Alice. Her journey is so interesting and writing a book is like going on an adventure in Wonderland. It’s nonsensical at times. It was certainly nonsensical for me to even take on writing my first book. But of course, there has to be a little Mad Hatter, just to be in this business. But I love your character of Alice and her nickname is Ace, which is really appropriate. By the way, all of the references to cards in the design of the book, everything about the book from a production standpoint is spectacular. It’s so well done. Kudos to your team.
SE Thank you. I have a really great team. I was really grateful to work with a cover designer who took my sad little concept that I created and turned it into the cover because the cover is probably my favorite cover that I’ve ever had.
FB The covers for both the first book and the second one, The Looking Glass Illusion, are great.
You said earlier that your process is discovering the story as you write. Can you talk a little bit about that? Have you ever written yourself into a corner and gone, “Man, I gotta start all over again.”
SE Yes, but after six books, I’m working on my seventh now, I have learned to stop fighting that process. When I first started I thought I was doing it wrong and I needed to outline. The one book I outlined was Coral, which is my reimagining of The Little Mermaid, and I had to rewrite that book three times. This is why I tell all writers just because something works for somebody else doesn’t mean it’s going to work for you. We’re all creative in different ways and our brains work in different ways. So if you feel like you’re inside a box with outlining, try not outlining. I really love Save the Cat! Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody, which is based on Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat! As somebody who’s a very visual movie person, the beats that she puts together work for me. I follow those beats as a guideline, “I’m at this percentage of the book, where do I need to go next?” I use it as my map, my GPS. Jessica Brody has a really great course on her Writing Mastery Academy about fast drafting and how her process works for that. I realized this is what I’ve been doing. But she explains it and organizes it in a way that even though there’s a kind of madness to it, there’s still a method. It’s a lot of note-taking, just keeping track of and moving the story forward, getting that first draft down. I have comments in the margins, “Change this character to a female, make sure that you change this character’s personality.” It’s like I’m editing as I’m writing it, and I’m seeing the problems come out. But then I just write forward from that point, however, I’m going to end up changing the beginning.
FB We’re very similar in that way. Your writing is very visual. Certainly, that happened for me, because that’s the medium I was working in when I started writing The Looking Glass Wars. Also, I had to rewrite it three or four times as well. Then once my editor came on it was like, “Oh, my God, I have a lot of problems to fix.” But once you get the first book under your belt, you find your own rhythm. What you just described makes perfect sense and everybody does things differently. Also, your talent for prose is clear. It’s really beautiful writing. No wonder you have so many books under your belt.
SE Thank you so much.
FB Let’s talk about promoting your book. You live in Arizona, right?
SE Yes, I’m about 20 minutes north of Phoenix.
FB Did you ever go to the Comic-Con there?
SE Not yet, but I’m hoping to be able to go this year. It’s called Phoenix Fan Fusion now, but I am hoping to be able to go. I have connected with a local bookstore and I have several author friends who go.
FB I went to Comic-Con in San Diego and I had only published in the UK. When I was in the UK, I went to a school and one of the kids was upset because I didn’t write the whole story of Hatter Madigan’s 13 years and he wanted me to go home and finish the book. And on the plane ride home, I thought maybe I could do a comic book about those 13 years. So I did a comic and then I went to San Diego Comic-Con and it turns out that people were interested in the comic because of the artist. But when they read the comic and realized there was a novel attached to it, they started buying the British edition of the novel on Amazon. And what I’ve realized is I sold more novels at Comic-Con than I did comic books. The people who go are huge readers, they’re early adaptors, and they want to get the word out. It’s a great place to press the flesh and sell books, whether you get a dealer’s table which is for folks like us or you go in with a publisher and you’re at their table.
SE I definitely want to and now you’ve motivated me to try even harder to be able to get there.
SE Yes, they have been so fantastic to work with. They have collaborated with me to do pre-orders, so readers who pre-order my books are able to get signed and personalized copies along with a little envelope of pre-order goodies. They have just been fantastic. They’ve done my launch parties for the past three books and I will continue to go back there because they have a huge YA audience.
FB They’ve cultivated the best audience. I’ve done a number of events with Changing Hands and they’re also great at setting up school events. Have you done many school visits?
SE I’ve only done a couple of school visits. But I’d like to eventually do more so I’ve been really grateful to be connected with several authors in the area and keep my ear to the ground for different invites and opportunities that come up.
FB The thing about Arizona is the schools are very large. You can go into some of those schools, and Changing Hands set this up for me, where there’d be 30 6th graders, 30 7th graders, 30 8th graders and you do three presentations. Then Changing Hands or any other bookstore will sell the books on-site and you get pre-orders or post-orders. That was one of the great ways to build out that YA audience. You have such a unique and interesting story because of your time at Disney and your interest in fairy tales that I think you could really connect with those kids.
SE I always say it’s easier to speak in front of adults than children because you really have to win children over. But I do love public speaking. I taught a creative writing class last year to teenagers at our homeschool group. The year started with them saying nothing and acting like they didn’t want to be there but as the year progressed, I couldn’t get them to stop talking. I feel like you have to earn that from kids. That’s what I really love about speaking in front of teens and children, if you have them engaged and laughing and asking questions, you’ve earned it. So I definitely would love more opportunities to speak at schools. I had the opportunity to speak at the Arizona State University writing summer camp a couple of years in a row and that was a smaller group but also a lot of fun.
FB Do you do much with advanced reader copies when finalizing your books?
SE With my debut novel, Unblemished, I did work with several beta readers who were giving me feedback before I even submitted it to publishers. Now that I’m writing on contract and writing on deadline, I usually form a kind of street team. They’re the ones who get the advance copies and they get to submit reviews early so we can build that hype. Though, I always ask them please, before the release, only have spoiler-free reviews.
As far as feedback goes at this point in my career, it mostly comes from Nadine Brandes, my best friend, and a fellow author, and then just working with my editors. I’ll ask my 15-year-old daughter things because I sometimes date myself with certain references. I’m also an editor and I was editing a story for a client the other day and there was a reference to Smokey the Bear. So I asked my teenage daughter, “Do you know who Smokey the Bear is?” She said she did. So that’s how I gauge if I’m dating myself. But as far as feedback goes with beta readers, most of those advanced copies are really just going to those early readers who are getting the word out. But at that point, nothing in the novel can be changed.
FB In terms of reviews as it relates to Alice in Wonderland and the British sensibility versus an American taking it on, I got a lot of blowback. “What’s this Yank doing?” I noticed a lot of the reviews were not always that kind. It felt sort of personal because I was an American. I was curious if you had any feedback about taking on this classic.
SE You’re always going to have both sides of the coin with a retelling. Whenever I’m asked by a new writer, “What are your tips for writing a retelling?” I always say, “You can’t please everyone.” You’re gonna have your readers who expect it to be exactly like the original and they’re very protective of that story so if you get something wrong, or if you change something in a way they don’t like, they’re going to come after you. Particularly, when you’re researching another culture or another place you’re not from, you want to get it right. But there are inevitably things that you’re going to get wrong. On the one hand, I’ve had people say, “Wow, I lived in England for three years and this is so authentic and accurate. I loved it.” Then I’ve had other people who have reviewed it and said that everything was very forced and you can tell I know nothing about England or British culture.
FB I think I have that exact same review.
SE I think you have to expect that your story is not going to be for everyone. You’re going to research to the best of your ability but we’re also writing fiction. Sometimes our work is based on a part of our reality. But in the end, you’re going to take certain liberties and your book is not going to be for every reader. I don’t read reviews unless they’re sent to me. Sometimes I stumble across one or two I wish I hadn’t stumbled across. But for the most part, I find that either way, if I’m reading reviews that are building the book up, I’m gonna get a big head about it. If I’m reading reviews that are tearing the book down, I’m going to doubt the book. There’s nothing I can do about it because I can’t change it. So I just try to stay down the middle of the road. If someone tags me in a review, I’ll read it and I’ll thank them for it but for the most part, I always tell writers, that if reviews are affecting you one way or another to the point where it’s affecting your writing, and it’s changing the way you think about your own story, then it’s probably best to try and stay away from reviews altogether.
FB Why don’t you tell us a little bit about the sequel? My last two books, Seeing Red and ArchEnemy, were really a continuation. It really upset people. They were pissed off because it didn’t have that definitive ending like The Looking Glass Wars and it was a long time before ArchEnemy came out. If I had to do it over again, I would have had a more satisfying ending to the second book. But of course, I was inexperienced so I didn’t really realize that. So tell me about the ending of The Wonderland Trials and how you constructed The Looking-Glass Illusion. What’s the transition?
SE The Looking-Glass Illusion is a continuation. So for those who have not read The Wonderland Trials, now would be the time to fast-forward through this part of the podcast. But The Wonderland Trials ends with Alison and her team, Team Heart, leaving the third trial behind and entering the fourth trial, which is the Queen’s Trial, the Heart Trial, and they don’t quite know what to expect. The entire premise of The Looking-Glass Illusion is where you have The Wonderland Trials which has three different trials, the entire second book is set in the Heart Trial. For those familiar with Lewis Carroll’s second story of Alice, Through the Looking-Glass, the Heart Trial is all on a chessboard and it’s all about Alice trying to get to the eighth square. I went into this not knowing how to play chess. So how am I supposed to write a book that’s based on the game of chess? That’s where my friend Janelle came in. She sat down with me and taught me the basics of how to play. So the entire story of The Looking-Glass Illusion is trying to defeat the Heart Trial, but they’re also trying to find what’s real and what has happened to the real Wonderland. As Alice and her team learned in The Wonderland Trials, what they’re seeing is not necessarily what the real Wonderland is meant to be and is an illusion that they believe the Queen of Hearts has created. So if they defeat the Heart Trial, they believe they can find the real Wonderland. So that’s the second book and I had a lot of fun figuring out how chess played into it. I had a lot of fun with some of the nonsense words. Okay, this is a nonsense word, Lewis Carroll, but how does it fit into my world? I had a lot of fun with that and the Jabberwocky and really the whole theme is believing in the impossible, but also facing your fears.
FB I really like that, believing in the impossible. Do you have a favorite iteration of Alice? I’m assuming the Disney movie is one of your favorites because you worked there. But is there a song or another movie that you love?
SE I listened to “Welcome to Wonderland” by Anson Seabra a lot when I was writing The Wonderland Trials. It’s kind of a melancholy song but obviously, if you’re writing Alice, you’re thinking of Alice, but it’s really just a song for people. I really love the lyrics. One of my favorite reimaginings of Alice on screen has got to be what the TV show Once Upon a Time did with Mad Hatter’s character, who’s named Jefferson Hatter in the show. He’s a portal jumper and the evil Queen Regina wants to use him for this and he spirals into madness. Because there’s always the question, how did the Mad Hatter become mad? There’s obviously the history behind how hats were made but in the show, he’s so desperate to get back to his daughter that he continues trying to make a portal-jumping hat and he spirals. So I love what Once Upon a Time did with that and I love what they did overall meshing and melding the different fairy tales. That was a lot of fun. It remains one of my favorite on-screen retellings of Alice, particularly Hatter’s story.
FB Can you tease us with a retelling that you’re thinking about? Mine is Treasure Island. There’s got to be a way to do Treasure Island.
SE I would read that book. Treasure Planet is one of my all-time favorite underrated Disney movies. I am contracted for a four-book series with my publisher and each book is going to be a retelling paired with a literary classic. I cannot divulge specifically the one I’m working on now which releases in 2025 or my marketing director might have off with your head. But I will say that for anybody who’s followed me, you can find me on Instagram at @saraellawrites. I’ve been dropping lots of clues to the fairytale that I’ve wanted to work on for many, many years to come. It’s a fairy tale that has resonated with me and the book that I’ve chosen to mash it up with is one of my favorite stories from literature. But it’s also one of my favorite films and the film is very different from the book. But I feel that this particular fairy tale in this particular story from classic literature fits very well together. So if you want to go clue hunting, if you’ve read The Wonderland Trials you know I love clues and games, you can scour my Instagram to see the clues that I’ve dropped for what I’m working on next.
FB Okay, listeners, I need you to do that and message me what you think it is. I definitely want to follow up and have you on the show again and hear all about it because that is an excellent, tease for your upcoming book. It’s really been a pleasure to have you on the show and talk about all things Alice and in particular, your really successful, beautifully written books.
SE Thank you so much for having me, Frank. When I received your email to be on the show, I thought, “Is this real or am I being scammed?” So thank you for having me on. I’ve been a follower of yours for years. Love your books. It was really an honor to get to chat with you today.
5 Pieces of Science Inspired by Alice in Wonderland
We all know Alice in Wonderland is everywhere. Since Lewis Carroll’s tale about a young girl wandering through Wonderland was published over 150 years ago, Alice has been ever-present in pop culture. There have been numerous adaptations in film, television, literature, video games, and board games. Alice’s story has directly and indirectly inspired musicians and storytellers, most recently with Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things. Words and phrases such as a “Cheshire Cat grin” and “down the rabbit hole” are constant parts of everyday speech. But Alice isn’t just ubiquitous in culture, you can also find her in every facet of science. From the cosmos to psychology, Alice has influenced how we understand and define our world.
Here are five places where you can find Wonderland in science:
The Alice Ring
Wonderland is a wild, mind-bending world entirely different from our own. However, a recent creation by Finnish and American scientists shows that our world might have more in common with Wonderland than we previously thought. The Alice Ring is a decayed monopole “that flips the magnetic charge of any other monopole passing through its center, creating an anti-monopole.”
Yes, as someone who never took physics, that was confusing for me too. A monopole is essentially a magnet with just one magnetic pole. The Alice Ring looks like a regular monopole but when you look inside, things get curiouser and curiouser. “Everything seems to be mirrored, as if the ring were a gateway into a world of antimatter instead of matter,” said co-creator Mikko Mottonen of Aalto University in Finland. A realm where everything appears to be the opposite of the norm? It makes sense why they named it after Alice. The prospect that science can quite literally create mirrored realities is both exciting and frightening, similar to Wonderland.
Medicinal Magic Mushrooms
Mushrooms are synonymous with Alice in Wonderland, especially the psychedelic ones. In the novel, Alice eats a mushroom that changes her size, evoking the hallucinogenic effects of psilocybin mushrooms. While there is no evidence psychedelics or any other type of drug, influenced Lewis Carroll, the story’s connection to mind-altering substances is undeniable, especially since the 1960s when the counterculture embraced the connections to drugs found in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Mushrooms, however, are becoming more and more mainstream. Specifically, their medicinal qualities are being fully explored for the first time. In a recent presentation to the Memphis Rotary Club, Dr. Ronald L. Cowan of the University of Tennessee Health Science Center outlined the exciting possibilities that magic mushrooms have for treating depression. Magic mushrooms showed effects in a few days to two weeks and helped to resolve depression in about two-thirds of patients, both at better rates than traditional antidepressants. Though it is a small sample size, the results are encouraging.
How does Alice play into this? The music, film, literature, and values of the 1960s counterculture that embraced and espoused the psychedelic qualities of Alice in Wonderland have become part of the mainstream, bringing with it more progressive attitudes toward drugs. It is not improbable that Alice’s role in that counterculture, along with its continuing prevalence in our culture, played a role in society being comfortable with exploring the possibly life-changing benefits of psychedelic mushrooms.
Alice in Wonderland Syndrome
Perhaps the most famous, or infamous, example of Alice in science is the mysterious Alice in Wonderland Syndrome. The rare syndrome involves distorted perception and instances of it began cropping up in medical texts around 1900. In a 1952 paper, neurologist Caro Lippman recounted several examples from patients including “a sensation of the neck extending out on one side for a foot or more,” a woman’s “left ear ‘ballooning out 6 inches or more,’” and another patient reporting that if felt like her head grew to “tremendous proportions” and floated up to the ceiling. The litany of other testimonies is very similar to Alice’s experiences in Lewis Carroll’s novel. A common thread amongst Lippman’s patients was that most also suffered from migraine headaches. This gave rise to speculation that Carroll, who also suffered from migraines, may have been directly influenced by his affliction, though no such complaints have been found in his diaries.
The cause of Alice in Wonderland Syndrome is not well understood. Brain inflammation due to the Epstein-Barr virus seems to be the most common cause of symptoms in children while symptomatic adults most often present with migraines. Tumors and schizophrenia are also potential causes. While the syndrome is just as mysterious as the inner workings of Wonderland, scientists are better able to explore the disorder due to neuroimaging technology which can help track the relationship between symptoms and brain activity.
Cheshire Cat Galaxies
The mischievous grin of the Cheshire Cat is an iconic image that has cropped up in a variety of media. The cat’s teasing, enigmatic smile can also be seen in the cosmos. The Cheshire Cat galaxies are a group of distant galaxies that resemble the grin of Lewis Carroll’s feline. The galaxies are an example of gravitational lensing, where the galaxies’ light “has been stretched and bent by the large amounts of mass,” which is usually dark matter. In this case, the mass surrounds the “eyes” and “nose”. The circular “face” is formed by the gravitational lensing of four galaxies far behind the “eye” galaxies.
But these galaxies are not just stagnating in space. Much like Wonderland, they are constantly changing. The two “eye” galaxies, for example, are on a collision course, hurtling towards each other at over 300,000 miles per hour. Astronomers believe that the Cheshire Cat galaxies will eventually become more like a Cyclops group once the two “eye” galaxies collide and merge. But don’t worry, that won’t happen for another billion years.
Borogovia Dinosaur
Lewis Carroll created many fantastical creatures for Wonderland and one of his creations lent its name to a wondrous creature of Earth – a dinosaur. The Borogovia was a small theropod (hollow bones and three toes and claws on each limb) that lived 66-84 million years ago and was first discovered in the 1970s in southern Mongolia. The Borogovia, which belongs to the group of dinosaurs that evolved into birds, reminded paleontologist Halszka Osmolska of another avian creature – Lewis Carroll’s borogoves. Borogoves are mentioned in the poem “Jabberwocky” and Humpty Dumpty describes a borogove as “a thin shabby-looking bird with its feathers sticking out all round—something like a live mop.” The spindly legs of the dinosaur certainly evoke the characteristics of its Wonderland namesake and it’s fitting that fiction became fact and this feathered Wonderlander lives on in an ancestor of birds that once roamed Earth.
Meet The Author
An itinerant storyteller, John Drain attended the University of Edinburgh before studying film at DePaul University in Chicago and later earned an MFA in Screenwriting from the American Film Institute Conservatory. John focuses on writing mysteries and thrillers featuring characters who are thrown into the deep end of the pool and struggle to just keep their heads above water. His work has been recognized by the Academy Nicholls Fellowship, the Austin Film Festival, ScreenCraft, Cinestory, and the Montreal Independent Film Festival. In a previous life, John created and produced theme park attractions across the globe for a wide variety of audiences. John keeps busy in his spare time with three Dungeons and Dragons campaigns and a seemingly never-ending stack of medieval history books.
All Things Alice: Interview with Adrienne Kress, Part 2
As an amateur scholar and die-hard enthusiast of everything to do with Alice in Wonderland, I have launched a podcast that takes on Alice’s everlasting influence on pop culture. As an author who draws on Lewis Carroll’s iconic masterpiece for my Looking Glass Wars universe, I’m well acquainted with the process of dipping into Wonderland for inspiration.
The journey has brought me into contact with a fantastic community of artists and creators from all walks of life—and this podcast will be the platform where we come together to answer the fascinating question: “What is it about Alice?”
For this episode, it was my great pleasure to have Adrienne Kress join me as my guest on this episode! Read on to explore our conversation and check out the whole series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview.
Frank Beddor As a kid, the whole idea of identity and trying on these different identities while growing up is really universal. But what’s remarkable, since I’ve been working in the Alice universe, is how deeply seated it is in culture and how Alice has become such a muse for creatives. We never had this conversation. Can you tell us a little bit about Alex and the Ironic Gentleman? I didn’t know that it was inspired by Alice. How did you use elements of Alice in your book?
Adrienne Kress The very basic plot is a girl, Alex, has to rescue her grade six teacher from pirates. She was raised by her uncle but he was killed and the only adult in her life who’s a parental figure is this teacher. At the same time, she’s found a treasure map, which is what these pirates were looking for. So it’s also a treasure hunt kind of thing. Act One establishes everybody and begins the adventure and has pirates kidnap the teacher. Act Three, we go to sea. We’ve got the H.M.S. Valiant, we’ve got our good guys and then we’ve got the Ironic Gentlemen, who are the pirates. We have a proper Treasure Island-style, Peter Pan-style adventure.
But Act Two is very much Alice in Wonderland. Alex has to get to Port Cullis, which is a port town where she’s trying to get a boat. So the journey from her town to Port Cullis, that’s the Alice bit and it’s very much Alice in Wonderland. She’s thrown into a very absurdist world. Even though it’s her world, her world is absurd. Everything is very episodic. It starts with a very strange train sequence that’s my Beckett, existential absurdism. My very first play was that Waiting for Godot style, the circle that never ends. I find it horrifying and deeply amusing at the same time. So it starts with that and then Alex ends up being plopped in a forest. Then in this forest, she comes across different people who are absurd caricatures or, in one case, an extremely ginormous octopus who’s an older English-style lush actor like Peter O’Toole.
Alex has to help solve its problems to move on to the next step, which is yet another person who needs another thing. She’s basically trying to get to Point B but she keeps getting waylaid. I remember my editor being like, “Okay, if we’re going to do this, it’s not very forward moving so let’s make sure that we have no extraneous words.” We did cut one scene where she meets a French horn player, which I was sad about because I used to play French horn which is why that was in there. But she has these scenes and for some readers that’s their favorite bit. I think the Alice fans at heart get it. Then some people are like, “Oh my god, I just wanted to get to Port Cullis.” They wanted that more straight journey.
FB They wanted Treasure Island.
AK Exactly. We get there. I just wanted to do a little bit before that.
FB So if you like Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Treasure Island, or 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, this is a book for you.
AK I did call it an homage to children’s lit. It’s the first book I ever finished writing. The first children’s book I ever wrote. So everything was very much an homage. Everything was something else. I put friends in it. Previous employers were in it. I tried to represent everyone nicely.
It was just everything I love in a book not thinking it would be published, not even thinking about publishing. Then, of course, there’s the challenge of realizing you have to write a second more challenging thing. I think writing a first book is hard but you’re so focused on this crazy huge accomplishment, “I have this goal and it took me 10 years, but I’m going to do it and put everything I’ve got into this thing.” Then you get published and you start to have a career and somebody asks you for a second book and you’re like, “But I can’t do what I did. I can’t do that all over again.”
FB I thought it was exactly the opposite. There was something about the first one in terms of not having any pressure because you don’t think it’s gonna get published and you can take 5-10 years, however long it takes. However, once it’s there, and you figured out the rules and the logic, then yes, there’s a pressure. But so much of it’s already a roadmap, and much easier, and the second book certainly took me a lot less time. I did feel pressure from the editors a little bit more, but I was happy that I had already established that, if they liked this world, I’d been working on it. I have all this stuff in a filing cabinet. I’ll just pull more stuff.
AK There is a difference. I don’t know why I did this to myself. I’ve now written some series but generally, I always enjoyed standalones. I decided for the second book, I was going to write a completely different story. It was set in the same world but with completely different characters and, a completely different story, and then halfway through, we would bring Alex back into it and stuff. So I think writing a direct sequel has its unique challenges, especially if people really liked the first one. It’s like, “Oh, no, how do I make this as well-liked, if not more well-liked too? How do I write the second book, but not rest on my laurels? There are a lot of challenges with that. But I think for me because I decided I’m going to write a second book that’s completely not the first, I felt again like I was starting a bit from scratch.
FB That’s for sure
You have a whole new series out. You have three books in the Bendy series.
AK The Bendy books are a series, but they’re also standalones. So we’ve done it again. But The Explorers, which is just mine is a proper three-book series.
FB Can you walk us through that? Did you know you were going to have a trilogy when you started it?
AK Yes. It was a three-book deal from the beginning. Just from the beginning, it was a very classic, hoping that each book is their own adventure but it had that very classic overarching arc. They had to collect things and they had to rescue somebody by the end.
FB Were they saying they wanted the book to come out every year or every 18 months? Did you have that added pressure?
AK It was every year or 18 months, I can’t remember which, but it was definitely that. So that window where you had to write the whole of the next book and then go through the whole process again and write it in time with their deadlines
FB I found that very stressful, by the way, hitting a deadline for the book. Because they said you’re going to lose your audience. The audience is going to find some other series.
AK There’s one book in the Bendy book series, which is in the YA section because it’s a memoir. In the very first game, there’s a book called The Illusion of Living, which is the memoir of Joey Drew, who’s the Walt Disney of this animation studio. So they wanted me to write the memoir, which was a really cool experience writing a memoir about an adult male for a young adult section. But with these three books, the other two are technically Y.A., there’s less of the pressure that you’re talking about, which just blows my mind. “You’re going to lose your audience.” Who says that? But that kind of pressure, when the developers of Bendy decided they wanted the next book, I guess they would talk to Scholastic about it, then Scholastic would come to me and say, “You have to get this to us in two months.” That level of fast. It isn’t the same way as writing a series where they’re like, “We need the next book ASAP for the series.” It was more like, “When we’re ready for the next one, we gotta go, go, go.”
FB Just to make it clear for the listeners, Bendy is based on a video game. So they needed these books for the day and date of releasing a new game?
AK I don’t fully know what the decision-making process is there. I’m just happy to be a part of it. So the second game was released this time last year. I think it’s possible that when they finished working on the game, they were like, “Okay, now we would like another book.” They were so focused on the game, as they should be. But I believe it was a year from being told they’d like another book. So that’s even before I’ve written an outline to send to them. It was a year, from that point to the release of the most recent one. This time last year, I would have been knee-deep in writing it.
The most recent one, Fade to Black, came out at the beginning of October and I don’t think I had started writing it last year at the beginning of October.
FB Let me just get all these titles right. So Bendy and the Ink Machine: Dreams Come to Life was book one, which came out in 2019. Did you have to audition for this? Send in an outline and based on the outline, they chose you or did you have a pre-existing relationship?
AK I think they reached out to maybe four other authors and there was very little that they required. They wanted it to be Y.A., set in the studio, the games take place decades after the studio is over, so essentially, they wanted it set in the 1940s. That’s about it. Then I came back saying I’d like to do an apprentice who’s 17, and works in the art department because obviously, the whole point of his game is art. So let’s put them in the art department. They liked that and they were thinking the exact same thing. At that point, all of us who they had asked wrote pages. I think they wanted about five pages but I asked if I could submit 15. So I did the opening which is almost entirely the same opening of Dreams Come to Life. I guess they liked it, which was very nice.
FB And the second is Bendy: The Illusion of Living. The third one is Bendy and the Ink Machine: The Lost Ones and the most recent book is Bendy: Fade to Black.
Also, it was published through Scholastic, which is great because they have such a far reach and they were your original publishers as well.
AK They were the ones who published Alex and the Ironic Gentleman. They were the very first.
FB You’re keeping it in the family. That must have been nice. Do they have an editor that they assigned to these books?
AK So it’s fascinating and goes back to what I was saying about reluctant readers. They have an imprint called AFK, which means Away From Keyboard. For those who don’t know your acronyms, which I did not, that’s a very cool online acronym. They did the Five Nights at Freddy’s books, which are massive.
I don’t know when they actually started the imprint or whether it was on the back of how successful the Five Nights at Freddy’s stuff was but they do all these video game tie-ins. My editors have all been incredible. What I really liked about it beyond it being fun is that they have this imprint that’s all focused on video game tie-ins and you’re getting all these readers like me, reluctant readers, who might not be into a book going “Well, that is my favorite video game.” I get it all the time from kids and teenagers, “I hate books,” or “I don’t like reading. I’ve never really read a book. But I read this one because I love Bendy and it was really good.” I hope that the Bendy books spark that realization of “There are books for me. I just have to find them. They might not be what even the school is showing me but somewhere there are books for me.” So as the reluctant reader I really, really love that.
It’s so fun to read certain reviews, like on Goodreads, where they said the author didn’t have to go this hard. No, I did. I have to get themes. I have to get morals. I have to get complicated ethics questions. I love that I’m able to do that and sneak that stuff into these books. Then next year, they’re adapting the first book into a graphic novel, which I’m also super into. I’ve got a graphic novel of my own that’s coming out in 2025 because it takes forever. It’s 250 pages and this incredible artist, Jade Zhang, has to illustrate it. I don’t know how she’s doing it. To me, it seems fast. But they’re releasing Dreams Come to Life as a graphic novel next year. Again, I love that because I think graphic novels also open the world of reading even more.
FB Are you adapting your own book, the prose, into the graphic novel or are they hiring somebody else to do that?
AK They’ve hired a writer named Christopher Hastings, who’s done this a fair bit. When I was first told there was going to be a graphic novel I was like, “They probably already have somebody but I could do it.” And then I thought, “No, even though I know how to write a script, how on Earth do you make that book that’s almost 300 pages into a graphic novel?” Even if it’s got the same number of pages, it’s not going to be that same length.
FB Let’s go to your graphic novel because that’s fascinating. I wrote my prose and then I had no idea what I was doing and then I did a graphic novel and I look back on it and go, “Wow, I made so many mistakes and set up this so terribly.” But it was really, really fun to do and now I understand how different it is. Can you speak to writing your first graphic novel?
AK The way that one writes a graphic novel is you have page numbers, specific pages that you have to dictate, and then what happens in specific panels on those pages. That is what is so challenging. I love it. I think very visually to begin with and I’ve read a lot of graphic novels. So I felt very comfortable playing around with how to use the space and what to do. I have a friend Stephanie Cook, who has a lot of kidlit graphic novels out now, and also is an editor, and she does tons with graphic novels in the comics community in general. So we met up, and I’m like, “Help me.” She told me generally, for middle grade, you don’t want more than five panels on a page. Very pragmatic things like that which were very, very helpful. But generally, I had a good vibe, I had a good sense of aesthetics.
But what I didn’t know until I was going back over it myself, and then working with an editor on it, was how hard editing a graphic novel is. Because in a book, screenplay, or play, if you need an extra bit of dialogue or an extra section to fully understand what’s happening, “Sure, I’ll put it here.” But if you add a single thing to a graphic novel script, it’s Tetris. You add another panel, and then that fifth panel has fallen off the page. Can I fit it into the next page? Or can I make this page six panels? Or do I need that panel? Maybe I can get rid of that panel? Or do we move everything down? But of course, there are two-page spreads and you have to make sure that you have pages two and three side by side. It can’t be three and four because they’re on opposite sides of the page. It’s math.
FB Every page you add is hundreds and hundreds of dollars for the artists because they get paid by the page unless you make a deal with them where they’re part of the authorship. I found the editing process really, really challenging, as well. But the heavy lifting is the artists. Also, the artists can say, “Hey, I can’t fit all those panels,” or “There’s so much dialogue in this particular panel, we’re going to have to move it around a little bit.” I was really leaning on Ben Templesmith.
AK I’ve given so many challenges to Jane. So the story is called Ghost Circus and it’s about these two kids and we meet these ghosts at the circus.
FB Not in the H.A.T.B.O.X.?
AK No ghosts in the H.A.T.B.O.X.
FB It’s in the circus, not the H.A.T.B.O.X. Okay.
AK There are flashbacks to how the ghosts became ghosts and they’re set in all different time periods. So Jade’s drawing 1930s New York and then the savanna with elephants, plus the main timeline we’re in with the ghost circus itself and all the characters there. It’s so impressive. I feel like I’ll know whether or not she had issues or whether she solved them. I think there’s one or two times she’ll do something with a couple of panels and I’m like, “Oh, yeah, that makes more sense.” But maybe just because I was so aware of the middle gradeness of it all, that was very much at the forefront of my mind. So being aware of the number of panels I needed per page. Then before even Jade came on board, editing it and working on it with the editor, he’d be like, “This is too much though. We’re not going to fit that dialogue on our panel.” That’s where the math came in. But it was an incredible learning curve.
FB But being a playwright, you really had a handle, because that is the closest form to writing for graphic novels.
AK One hundred percent. Thank goodness I had that experience. Because I did look at other people’s scripts, I wanted to learn, something even just as simple as page one, panel one. I wanted to know how that works. It’s great to have that reason for us to look at what other people have done but it didn’t feel awkward because graphic novel writing comes from playwriting and the scripts look like a play.
FB My wife and I are working on a graphic novel and this is her first graphic novel but she had been a staff writer on the show Bones. So she sort of understands but we were having the simplest conversations, “So, on the one page, is it panel 1 through 5, and then on page two, it’s panel six, do you continue?” “No, it’s just one through five and then the next page is one through five.”
AK That question makes perfect sense. Like, “You’re not repeating the same pattern?”
FB But this time we hired an editor from the very beginning and said, “Okay, here’s the basis of the story.” Then he was saying you have to have a sensitivity reader read it because some of the names and some elements don’t quite line up based on the story. So we’ve done that. It’s really a science, as you say, it’s a math question. There is a lot more going on in the world in terms of when you create something to make sure it’s accessible to all.
AK I do think it’s quite wonderful because I think we’ve been using sensitivity readers for a while, as authors. Reaching out to people we know or asking our friends, “Hey, do you know somebody who might be able to look over this section because I want to make sure this is as correct and sensitive as possible?” It’s all kind of already existed but I like that it’s been codified as a proper job. It’s something that I think is more front and center of awareness, which I think is important. We had one, specifically for Bendy: Fade to Black, which is set after World War II and the dad has PTSD from the war. It’s thematically important to the story. The whole story is actually about PTSD and mental health, and living with that sort of trauma. I did my level best, researching and trying to make things as sensitive and as authentic as possible, but Scholastic did give it to somebody to read over just to make sure that we were doing it right.
FB I agree with you. The level of subtlety is really different and we must be mindful. For the graphic novel my wife and I are working on in particular, the characters all come from different places and we wanted to make sure that we were honoring everybody’s heritage and getting it right. Are you interested in World War II much after doing that research?
AK It’s one of those things that I think is by virtue of being a cinephile there are so many movies about World War II. But then, for my generation, it impacted our grandparents. So it’s a very present thing. You’ve got a real direct connection versus perhaps other history that feels like it’s almost a story. You don’t have that visceral connection, which is why I think I might have struggled with other history classes and other history. It wasn’t until I started doing art history where you could actually go and see the actual works and connect to the reality of it that I realized I did like history. I just need to consume it differently.
There are a lot of phenomenal YouTube shows that are about the domestic side of history. So a day in the life in Victorian England. What did you eat? Where do you sleep? With the first Bendy book, they wanted it just after World War II. I had been to New York and somebody recommended the Tenement Museum in the Lower East Side. They found a boarded-up tenement that hadn’t been renovated, and hadn’t been touched, and from there they started reaching out to families generationally for stories and objects, they looked at census information. What it’s become is you go on these tours and it’s like just walking through history. You’re there. You’re seeing and touching everything and it was incredible. Shortly thereafter, I got the gig for the book and they wanted it set in the 1940s and I was like “Okay, I’ll make it New York.” I know their lives. I know where he lives.
FB That’s great. You were destined to write these. Are there going to be more books in this series?
AK It’s been such a pleasure and I really enjoy working on them. I know the developers are very focused on the next games as well. They’re very sweet about it, which I’m grateful for because I was very nervous with a pre-existing fan base. I felt the same way about Hatter Madigan.
FB That was really fun, working on Hatter Madigan: Ghost in the H.A.T.B.O.X. together. I knew I was in good hands when you came up with the idea that he was an insider and not an outsider. Your rationale was that Harry Potter had done that to such great success and there are a lot of other stories that do the same thing, that Hatter being an insider would make the story in this book unique. Once you pitched that, I said, “Okay, that’s a very smart idea.”
AK Thank you. It was so much fun. The world is, God…creating that world the way that you have, with literally an encyclopedia, is so phenomenal and so intimidating as a writer. I admire so much just the depth of the world-building you had. As we were talking about with Alice in Wonderland, that’s what’s so great about all these adaptations of Alice is everybody’s unique perspective.
FB I was really trying to create a jumping-off place. Take some of the motifs and then use that creativity and share the sandbox and see what other people can bring to it. In every conversation I had with you and with other creatives, it doesn’t work unless you bring yourself to it. You bring something unique that you can do. That’s what I’m looking for. I don’t want to be precious. I want to actually break away from it a lot more because I’ve gotten so focused. I think about it in a loop and I can’t break out of it unless I have another voice.
AK That’s so fair. You were asking me about the adaptation of Dreams Come to Life. There is no way, with the narrowness of focus that I have, that I could possibly bring a unique look to that book. But a new person adapting it would. That’s the crazy part, isn’t it? Getting to write and make stuff up as a job.
FB How do you balance writing your own work, adapting something, producing, and auditioning? What’s the day-to-day balance that you try to accomplish?
AK What’s balance? I wish it felt more like I had a plan and I really stuck to it. The truth is, it’s a little bit flying by the seat of your pants. I can’t speak to what they are but I’ve got two write-for-hires that just happened this month. So right now balancing those…and I feel very good about the plan because the jobs are so vastly different. There are a lot of reasons why I can do that. I wouldn’t always say yes to doing two projects right at the same time but these worked very nicely together, they complement each other. But this summer, I had no writing, anything. I didn’t have edits. Nothing was sorted that way. So I decided I really wanted to write. I have a middle-grade story that’s much more in the style of Judy Blume. So not fantastical in any way, more coming of age. I’ve been really wanting to write it for a few years so I’m like, “That’s what I’m doing this summer.”
It takes place over a summer so it felt like the right temperature because I’m in Canada and we only get this so much. That’s with my agent and we’ll probably go on submission to publishers in the new year. But I’m glad I did that, over that gap in the summer, because then these projects came along and it would be sad because I don’t think I would have been able to balance them with my original work. The key is taking advantage of moments. If you can’t plan everything out ahead of time you can still have a sense of how long a project will take and maybe when that’s done I’ll do this thing that’s more in my control. The pet projects that might not have a home yet. You have to still honor and give space to that project.
FB You had a good summer. You finished a new book and you had a movie come out.
AK Post on the movie was a long post. There was no way you could focus on anything else. I was also injured at the time so that didn’t help. I think you’re well aware that moviemaking can be entirely consuming.
FB When you’re on set, forget it. You only have so many hours in the day and then you’re gonna lose crew and locations.
AK Exactly. If I was just acting, that would be different because you have a lot of downtime as an actor on a set. That’s a great time to maybe just get a few words in the computer. It’s much easier to multitask. But as a producer and as a writer on it, you do not have the same level of free time.
FB You said fly by the seat of your pants and one of the reasons for that is so much of the work is speculative. There’s the focus you need to finish your book that you’re not getting paid for or the movie that has enough financing just to get it made, but you’re not making any money unless the movie sells. Then depending on how many bills you have to pay it’s like “Okay, where am I putting my attention?” If I need to pay bills, I need that work-for-hire stuff, or for this movie, let’s gamble and see if we have a little payday at the end of it. It does feel like when you’re doing so many different mediums, you’ll fly by the seat of your pants because there is no structure to it. It’s really a self-generated structure. That’s not so easy.
AK A lot of people I talk to, even writers who are also doing a day job, I’m like, “Oh, if only I had all that free time.” I am very lucky. I get to write professionally as my job. That is an amazing, amazing gift. It’s incredible. But there are other challenges. There was a long period where I was writing, especially with Alex and the Ironic Gentleman, but I also had a day job. Even once it got published, I still had a job. That job schedule does actually help schedule out your writing too because you only have certain windows in which you can do it. If you have the whole day, it’s very hard to schedule things.
FB I had this equivalent when I had kids and it’s like, “Wait a second, I only have from 10 to midnight.”
AK Exactly. It’s hard. I do really admire people. There are just unique challenges for all of it. In the end, you have to be your own boss. You have to give yourself your own deadlines. With my deadline for this coming-of-age middle grade that I finished, I was telling friends, “I’m a week behind. I know I finished it the next week, but I really wanted to get it done earlier. I’m really annoyed with myself.” And my friends will say, “But it’s your own deadline.” I treat my own deadlines like somebody else has imposed them.
FB I agree with that. I think the more discipline, the better off you are. So yeah.
Before we go, if you were a character from Alice in Wonderland, who would you be and why?
AK That’s a good question. As a drama major in my art school, every year you had a different focus and in grade 10 a lot of that was performance, putting together a little production. We were very fortunate in our year that we got to do Alice in Wonderland. I was cast as the White Queen, which is what I wanted and I loved playing her. I don’t think I had ever played a flighty character. I tend to get cast as intelligent, grounded human characters. I think the White Queen might have been the first sort of flighty, weird character I got to play. That meant a lot to me. I realized I like playing these characters. I just love the character and her wordplay. Her particular scene that she has with Alice, with all the wordplay, “tomorrow, yesterday, today.”
Growing up, I’d obviously seen the Disney movie. But there’s a TV version from 1985 and Carol Channing is the White Queen, and she has a song. I grew up with that version. The Jabberwock was so scary that I couldn’t watch half of it because it gave me nightmares, but I still loved it.
FB That is a very, very good answer. It might be the best answer of anybody that I’ve interviewed because not all have played the character. So it’s generational from the 80s.
AK I’ve always loved her. Of course, I did get to dress as your Alyss and that was amazing. I need to wear that jacket again.
FB If people wanted to start reading your work, where would you suggest they start? Would you say something like Alex and the Ironic Gentleman or The Explorers?
AK I’m approaching 20 years since Alex came out, which blows my mind. It’s just a very weird feeling. There’s one boy who wrote this really great review. He sent me an email for Alex, probably one of the first kids who emailed me about a book. I reached out and we had this whole chat. He was 13 at the time, and now he’s an author.
But I do think Alex is still out there. It hasn’t gone out of print, actually, which is very exciting. A few years ago, pre-COVID, I was in LA and went into The Last Bookstore, and the one thing they had Alex. I was thrilled that Alex was the one that was there. So if you can find Alex and the Ironic Gentleman that was quite seminal as it’s my first book. But if you can’t, yes, go with The Explorers because that’s out there. That’s Random House.
FB Thank you so much. This has been a real pleasure. You have such a diverse creative life. I think it’s really inspiring.
AK Thanks for having me. It’s so nice to see you again.
Battle of the IPs: Alice in Wonderland vs. The Hunger Games
Alright, everybody, we are back with another head-to-head battle. This time I will be pitting our undefeated champion, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland against another popular book and film series, The Hunger Games. A recurring theme in The Hunger Games is going against unbeatable odds, which I find quite fitting in this instance. I mean, this is a blog about Alice in Wonderland after all. But, perhaps, the bow-slinging Katniss Everdeen and cake boy Peter will be able to steal the throne that has been consistently held by Alice. So, The Hunger Games, ready your bows, somehow camouflage yourself because you are good at icing cakes, and may the odds be ever in your favor, because you’re going to need it against the juggernaut that is Alice.
Worldwide Cultural Impact:
In this first round of our showdown, we’ll examine the global impact of these two massive franchises. Both have earned their places in the hearts of audiences worldwide, but in the end, one will come out on top.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: Lewis Carroll could not even comprehend the impact that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has had on the world. Its influence spans literature, film, art, and fashion. Wonderland’s timeless allure transcends cultural boundaries, making it an enduring component of global literary and artistic culture.
The Hunger Games: Suzanne Collins’ dystopian saga, The Hunger Games, has left an indelible mark on popular culture. Its exploration of political themes, survival, and rebellion resonates with audiences globally, making it a powerful cultural force.
Verdict: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – There is barely any comparison here, Alice is the winner. Don’t believe me? Go outside to a place where there are people, and just watch them. Take a mental tally of how many Alice-related shirts you see compared to Hunger Games shirts. Exactly. If that does not sway you, I don’t know a single song that is about the Hunger Games, whereas with Alice-related songs, there are too many to count.
Critical Appeal:
In this category, let’s compare the critical acclaim of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Hunger Games. I’ve decided we will be focusing on the critical appeal of the books due to the unfair advantage that Alice would have if we were comparing the critical reception of the films. An Academy Award trumps a Teen Choice Award.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: Lewis Carroll’s inventive satire of Victorian high society was critically celebrated for its unique blend of whimsy and philosophical depth, which has earned it a timeless status in the Western literary canon.
The Hunger Games: Suzanne Collins’ trilogy, starting with The Hunger Games, has received critical acclaim for its gripping narrative, social commentary, and complex characters navigating a dystopian world. While praised for its relevance and impact, some critics have raised concerns about its depiction of violence.
Verdict: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – The Hunger Games was close, but of course, Alice is going to win here. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has endured for over a hundred years. The critics loved it then and they love it now.
Influences on Language:
Now, let’s talk about language. Both franchises have left linguistic marks with unique phrases and terminology.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: “Down the rabbit hole”, “mad as a hatter”, “off with their heads.” These are a few examples of common phrases said today that I can come up with off the top of my head. Of course, I can’t not mention that Carroll’s linguistic creativity has created one of my favorite words, “chortle.” Ignoring my stupid infatuation with the word, Carroll’s inventive use of the English language has become so ingrained in our everyday life that we don’t even think about it.
The Hunger Games: Phrases like “May the odds be ever in your favor” and terms like “tribute” have become part of everyday language, reflecting The Hunger Games’ impact on the contemporary lexicon.
Verdict: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – I’ve done this section in every single comparison and after this one, I will be removing it from the competition. It’s always a “gimmie” for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the true way to measure a book’s impact on language is to see how many words and phrases that were created in the book are used today without even thinking of the reference material. For example, if I were to say, “May the odds be ever in your favor,” people would go, “Haha yeah, Hunger Games.” But if I say, “I didn’t get any sleep last night. I went down a rabbit hole online and ended up learning how to blow glass,” people won’t be thinking, “Rabbit hole, like Alice.” They will be thinking, “Yeah man, you look super tired.” I also decided to ignore the fact that Carroll had invented the word “chortle” to make this comparison more unbiased.
Controversy:
Let’s stir the pot here, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Hunger Games have faced controversies related to their content and themes. Do I agree with the points raised here? No, but I think it’s important to see which IP has “offended” the least amount of people.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: Over time, some critics and readers have engaged in discussions about the surreal and whimsical nature of Wonderland, questioning its appropriateness for certain audiences. The abstract and sometimes nonsensical elements have sparked debates regarding the interpretation and potential impact on readers.
The Hunger Games: Suzanne Collins’ trilogy, particularly The Hunger Games, has stirred controversy due to its portrayal of violence and its themes of survival in a dystopian society. Some critics have raised concerns about the appropriateness of such themes for the intended young adult audience.
Verdict: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Alice is the clear winner here. I mean the criticism that was raised is a Super Weeny Hut Jr. level of complaint. It’s too whimsical? What does that even mean? Whereas concerns about violence in The Hunger Games are to some extent more legitimate.
Books Published:
Numbers never lie, except when they are made up to prove a point, which I did not do here. In fact, I did math here, which is something I thought I would never have to do when I became a writer. But here we are…let’s take a look at book sales.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: Lewis Carroll’s Alices Adventures in Wonderland has sold over 100 million copies around the world with more than 100 different translations. Since its original release, there have been over 300 different editions released.
The Hunger Games: Suzanne Collins’ trilogy has sold over 100 million copies worldwide and has been translated into numerous languages, captivating readers with its dystopian narrative.
Verdict: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – While both books have had immense success, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is the victor here. While they both have sold over 100 million copies, The Hunger Games needed three books to get there. If we divide 100 million by three, we get 33.3 million copies, whereas Alice’s 100 million divided by 1 still is 100 million. Hooray, math!
Box Office Success:
Next, we compare the box office success of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Hunger Games.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: Disney’s adaptations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland have seen considerable success at the box office, particularly with Tim Burton’s film, which grossed over $1 billion.
The Hunger Games: The Hunger Games film series has grossed over $2.9 billion worldwide, making it one of the most successful film franchises based on a book series.
Verdict: The Hunger Games – While both have achieved success, The Hunger Games’ substantial box office earnings give it the edge in this category. I wanted to find exact box office information for Alice, but inflation and the sheer amount of Alice films that have come out makes it difficult to get proper numbers. So, I decided to compare the most successful of the adaptations. It is no question here.
Theme Park Rides:
Who doesn’t like theme park rides? Okay, probably a few people, but I love them. As a kid when I read a book or watched a movie, I would always imagine parts I liked as rides and wanted to see how they could come to fruition. Fasten your seatbelts and keep your legs and arms inside the blog at all times.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: Various Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland-inspired theme park rides, notably those in Disney parks, allow visitors to explore the whimsical world of Wonderland, encountering familiar characters and scenes.
The Hunger Games: While The Hunger Games doesn’t have dedicated theme park rides, its influence has extended to immersive experiences in various entertainment contexts.
Verdict: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Alice has rides around the world, The Hunger Games has none. The closest thing to a Hunger Games ride is Fortnite, which isn’t a ride. I’ve read The Hunger Games books and can’t even come up with an idea for a ride.
Conclusion:
Alright, I’ve tallied up the score and, oof, okay, Alice in Wonderland got six points and The Hunger Games got only one. I can hear the cannon firing in the distance signaling the defeat of yet another IP. You put up one hell of a fight Hunger Games but when you go against the champ, you have to be prepared to take a few licks. But it was a valiant effort on The Hunger Games’ part and for that, we raise our three fingers in its honor, and let out a whistle, doo dee dee doo… Look, I actually really like The Hunger Games books, so when you decide to write your hate mail for your favorite IP losing against Alice, just remember, you can do that, or you could get a hobby. Perhaps archery or baking.
In the spirit of trying to broker good faith between the fanbases, I will now present some AI image mashups of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Hunger Games.
First off, we have Katniss Everdeen as Alice. And yes, she’s brought her bow to Wonderland.
Next, we have the Mad Hatter as a District 1 socialite, ready for the opening ceremonies.
I hope you all enjoyed this blog, let me know what you think. What IP do you want to see face-off against Alice for the next blog? Do you agree with what I said here? If you didn’t and can remain calm about it, I’d love to hear your thoughts. If you didn’t and can’t remain calm, Frank would love to hear your thoughts.
Meet the Author:
Jared Hoffman graduated from the American Film Institute with a degree in screenwriting. A Los Angeles native, his brand of comedy is satire stemming from the many different personalities and egos he has encountered throughout his life. As a lover of all things comedy, Jared is always working out new material and trying to make those around him laugh. His therapist claims this is a coping mechanism, but what does she know?
All Things Alice: Interview With Adrienne Kress, Part 1
As an amateur scholar and die-hard enthusiast of everything to do with Alice in Wonderland, I have launched a podcast that takes on Alice’s everlasting influence on pop culture. As an author who draws on Lewis Carroll’s iconic masterpiece for my Looking Glass Wars universe, I’m well acquainted with the process of dipping into Wonderland for inspiration.
The journey has brought me into contact with a fantastic community of artists and creators from all walks of life—and this podcast will be the platform where we come together to answer the fascinating question: “What is it about Alice?”
For this episode, it was my great pleasure to have Adrienne Kress join me as my guest on this episode! Read on to explore our conversation and check out the whole series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview.
Frank Beddor I want to talk about your books and writing. But I didn’t realize that you started as a playwright. You started as an actress, as well, so I want to talk about that.
Adrienne Kress I’m also a producer now. So we have that in common. My husband and I produced this very small indie horror movie over COVID.
FB Congratulations on that.
AK Thanks. We wrote it. He directed. I starred in it. We were supposed to go on a honeymoon in 2020 and that didn’t happen so we used that money to make a little movie.
FB What does that say about the launch of your marriage?
AK That was how I knew I had met my soulmate.
FB I’m interested in the acting part of it because I started as an actor. I had been doing commercials for ski companies so I caught the bug. You started really young though, as a kid.
AK I did theater school first so I wasn’t doing professional gigs until high school. I was studying at art school and doing plays. So it’s interesting because with theater acting, even if you’re 10-11 years old, there’s still all this technique just by virtue of being on stage.
There are definitely habits you learn and then when you get older, and you’re suddenly in theater school in England as an adult, they’re like, “You need to just relax. You overthinking it. It became less about technique and more about just being in the moment.
FB I found it hard not to try and do what I thought they wanted. The performance versus tapping into my own truth at the moment. Auditioning was very, very scary and daunting. But in terms of the couple of movies I did, I thought, “Oh, if you’re just really relaxed, and you start by being yourself and then think about what to bring to it, you find a voice at the moment.” Did you find the same thing? What was your approach?
AK Absolutely. I came to film acting after theater acting. One of the things almost all theater actors will tell you is there’s a steep learning curve of doing less, do nothing at all. I found that very challenging, but at the same time, I agree, it’s very freeing, with film, to have multiple chances to do some things and multiple takes. You’re also having an intimate moment, just between you and the other person, but there happens to be a camera there. It’s very freeing.
But I’m with you on auditions. I think I’ve gotten to a place now with auditions where I’m just like, “If they want me, they want me.” If they want what I can do and they want what I look like, they will want me. If they wanted someone else then they didn’t want me. I know I’m good enough that it’s not going to be, “Oh, no, this person is terrible. Why would we work with her?” It’s very much centered on what they’re looking for on there. I’m a lot more relaxed than I used to be. I used to be so wound up and tried to read their minds. What do they want? Now my attitude is I’m just gonna take advantage of this moment to act because it’s not like you get a ton of gigs.
FB I was shocked at how little you have to do in film. It’s you. It’s just the thoughts that come into your mind, through your eyes, and in your expressions. If you try, you’re dead. You’re overacting. That was startling to me.
AK It’s completely different and it’s very hard. It’s tough when people will fall down. Sometimes, actors aren’t to blame if there’s a bad performance in a movie or TV show but nine times out of 10 what that actor is doing is still very, very difficult. It’s all the stuff around it, whether it’s the lines or whether they were given time with the work before shooting because I don’t think people realize how hard it is to do nothing. It’s really, really hard.
FB It’s really the thought process. You have to prepare and you have to get in that frame of mind so you’re thinking the thoughts that get communicated. Much like writing. You have this idea that you’re trying to communicate with a sentence or a paragraph or a Chapter, and you think, “I think I know what I’m feeling and it’s just gonna come off the page. Is there any chance this is gonna happen? Probably not.” At least that’s how I felt, there’s no way they’re gonna get this.
AK It’s the best feeling when they do.
FB Both in acting and in writing. When they come back and ask you, “Subtexturally, what was going on for you when you were creating or writing that scene?” And the same thing with acting. It’s so effortless, right?
AK Probably in all areas of life, the more effortless the thing looks the more effortful we’re not to assume it is. The more impressed we shouldn’t be.
FB That’s so true. When I was acting, one of my acting coaches said that if you really want to understand the playwright, you have to understand who they are as a person. Read their biographies or learn why they’re telling the stories and that will give you hints into the text. Then she had me write the scenes before the scene you’re acting as if you were the playwright. That’s what queued me into wanting to write books because I love playwrights and I think the work is remarkable, how so much of it comes through this dialogue. But that experience of writing out the scene before the scene I was acting was what motivated me to start writing.
So I’m curious about you. First, you had English teachers as parents, that seems like a high bar to deal with. It’s in your DNA. Obviously, you started writing. Tell me about writing plays and ultimately how the process of writing a play might inform the actress you are.
AK I love that question. I was always writing things. My dad taught creative writing, so, when I was five, he’d have me do exercises he was doing with his high school students. I was always creating stories and playing make-believe. But when I came to playwriting properly, I had been a drama major for long enough that I’d seen enough scripts that writing plays came from understanding character as an actor. That has also translated into the book writing subsequently, but with writing plays, as you said, they’re generally very dialogue-heavy. That’s really what you have to go off of as an actor and as a director. I think that led to my very, very dialogue-heavy books. Writing dialogue is probably my favorite thing to do in general and specifically in books and then in one of the Bendy books, The Illusion of Living, I literally just put in a short play. So I guess the acting informed the playwriting, which in turn informed the book writing so it does come back to acting for me, being inside the head of the characters and going inside out. I think there are some authors, like your George R.R. Martins or Tolkiens, who might create mythos and world-building and then think about how to tell the story and which characters they need to tell the story. Whereas I generally come from the germ of the character.
FB That makes sense to me as well. Do you say the dialogue? Do you read the dialogue out loud? Do you play the different parts when you’re writing a play or prose? Or do you read it to somebody and see how it works or do you just trust it?
AK I can be just going for a walk or something and then start to create a little dialogue in my head. I do a weird sort of humming, which I only realized I did recently. I’m reading not even just dialogue but any words on the page, but I’m not saying the words out loud. So I’m constantly reading out loud, but it’s very small. With plays you often workshop and take them out to actor friends. With books, obviously, I have beta readers as you know. My parents, the English teachers.
FB Really? I have two kids and my son is writing essays for college and I’m like, “Hey, do you want me to read your essay?” He goes, “Oh, no, I’m good dad.” Really? You don’t want me to take a look at it? I’m a writer.
AK He can take advantage of it.
FB He came around. But I have to be very careful in terms of walking him through any ideas or changes. If I’m too forceful he shuts down. My daughter doesn’t show me anything unless she’s under a deadline and she’s stuck. How were your parents?
AK They’re very good high school English teachers and I’m an only child so I was it. They would go, “Oh, this is an interesting idea. Hey, Adrienne, have you heard of it?” Not just when it comes to writing, there was always a lesson to something or an educational component growing up. Having them look over my schoolwork growing up, it’s just the next step.
FB You felt they fostered your work and your homework and your creativity, and you didn’t really bump up against them because they were good teachers.
AK They’re good at being harsh, which is the point. The good thing about my parents when it comes to this is they’re very honest. They’ve always been very good at being that teacherly, “Okay, so I’m not sure this bit works and I’ll tell you why.” But they were also so supportive of all my creative endeavors and very proud and impressed by me, which is nice. It also meant that I had confidence in what I was doing. Even though it always hurts, whether it’s editors or your parents, to hear this isn’t quite working or they didn’t like this bit. That will always be like a dagger. I also had the confidence that generally, my work was good so I kept moving forward. Also since my first book, Alex, I’ll say, “No, I disagree. I want to keep going with this.” I’ve also always had that relationship. It’s not, “We’re the parents, therefore we’re right and you’re wrong.” It’s always been a conversation.
FB So you’re equals when it comes to the creative process.
AK Maybe when I was a little younger, I probably couldn’t have fought but now yes and it’s great. So I have my parents and I also have my agent. She’s wonderful. Not all agents necessarily edit and they don’t necessarily want to, but she’s very good. We’ve been together for close to 15 years. She knows my work inside and out and I really respect her thoughts. Again, it’s the same vibe as with my parents.
FB That’s what a good editor does. My editor made a point of saying, “This is your book. I love everything that you’re doing. Now, I’m going to send you a couple of suggestions.” So after softening me up, then the suggestions come and it’s page after page.
AK I think it’s called the sandwich method. Praise at the beginning, then you give your critique and then you end with praise. I’ve definitely had editors use that on me, as well.
FB What was the first thing that you wrote that was really satisfying and gave you that start of confidence? Was there a moment when you said, “I think I want to do this and I can do this?”
AK I have no clue when but my mom and my dad, specifically with his creative writing, started teaching me creative writing. But, from birth, it feels like I’ve had competence in my storytelling ability. Writing stories in English class in elementary school was always my thing and I always got really good grades. I had all the validation in the world. I did a book with a friend. She and I were both known for our creative writing and it was so popular that the principal got a copy of it. So I’ve always had that validation. Then throughout high school, I was doing creative writing classes. But in my last year of high school, I wrote a play for a playwriting class. It was probably one of the first one-act plays, a properly structured play that I wrote was chosen for a student-run one-act play festival. All the producers, directors, writers, actors, crew, everybody were students. One of my friends was chosen to be a director and he chose my play and I was cast in the first play of three. So I was there every night and I would sit at the back of the audience for the third play, which was mine, and listen to it being performed.
It’s what we were talking about earlier when you write something and you hope to get an effect. When people laughed at the jokes right on cue as if they were being directed to, I thought, “Is this a better feeling than acting?” I still don’t have the answer, but it was really up there. So I became really interested in playwriting at that one, not so much novel writing. Then I went through drama school for university and in my last year of theater school at the University of Toronto I did another playwriting class and it was taught by this incredible Canadian playwright, Janet Sears, whom I’d studied already. It was this great intimate, seven-person class that you submitted writing samples for to get in. The way she structured it was amazing. The class all bonded and we got on great. The assignment was a one-act play and we had these tutorials halfway through the term, as we were in the middle of writing, and we were just chatting and I was saying, “I’m not sure this might be two acts. I don’t know.” And she said, “With you, Adrienne if you want to just make this one act for a two-act play, I’ll let you do this. Because I think you’re really good at this and I know how much you like acting but I hope you keep writing as well.”
I’m paraphrasing but I just remember the moment. Up until that tutorial session my attitude was, “Yeah, I love to write creatively and I guess I’m good at it. But don’t we all like to write creatively?” I guess it was the first time a true professional had called me out as having some sort of skill that was at a certain level that I wasn’t aware of myself.
FB Those are really clear moments because of the way that you were describing coming out of the womb almost with a notebook and your dad saying, “Let’s get to it,” it was just part of who you are. But we all need that validation or that really clear moment where you see the audience responding as if somebody said, “Hey, by the way, the writer is in the audience. So make sure you laugh at these five places.” Then of course you have a professional validate your work.
AK It was everything. I turned my focus to playwriting after that. I went to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and did a yearlong classical acting-specific program. After that, I tried to write some plays to direct and produce but I kept having trouble. So I decided to write a kidlet novel because I really love reading kidlit novels and it was a way to refresh my brain and completely cleanse the palate. It took a year. I’d never actually written more of a novel than 18 pages. So I kept writing and writing and writing and that ended up being my first published novel, Alex and the Ironic Gentleman. So what was supposed to be an interlude sent my career and everything about my life in a completely unexpected direction, which was being a writer of novels.
It sounds so much like actors who accidentally become actors and get the lead in something because they looked right. I never want to give that impression as an author that I just sort of tripped into it. I think telling the history of coming out of the womb and learning how to write, it’s been in there the whole time. But it really was a sudden change of trajectory because everything in my head at that point was theater – write a play, direct a play, act in a play. Then Alex came along.
FB Were you writing plays about young adults at the time?
AK No, my plays were entirely about adults. They were sort of absurdist with some shocking moments of violence in them. But I was really into absurd things and I actually did the absurdity thing in Alex and the Ironic Gentleman. It was a very classic children’s adventure, episodic adventure, very inspired by Alice in Wonderland. She has her main throughline of trying to go home but then she meets all these weird individuals and has these mini-adventures with them. I really structured the second act of Alex on Alice in Wonderland. Act One was more Roald Dahl-y and then Act Three was very Pirate-y, Peter Pan or Treasure Island. But I had gone from writing total adult stuff to even completely skipping young adult and going straight to middle grade.
FB You said you read a lot of kids’ stories growing up or as an adult to relax. Can you share some of those stories with us and what is it about those stories for you?
AK I can talk about kidlit forever. I’m what’s called a reluctant reader, which is a term that wasn’t around when I was a kid, which is unfortunate because it’s tricky to be the daughter of two English teachers and not really want to read. My parents had to do everything to convince me to pick up books but when I did pick one up, I was a voracious reader. I’d read it in a day and then I’d have to read everything by that author because I trusted that I would like that author. But even as an adult, I’m sort of that same way. If I read an adult book, I’m still like, “I don’t know, man, I don’t think I’m gonna like it.”
But growing up some of the first books that my parents really pushed on me were the Beverly Cleary Ramona books. They’re very entertaining and they’re a really easy and fun read. My dad also really loved the adventure books by Enid Blyton. Some elements don’t fully stand the test of time but I really glommed onto the adventure part of it. Then as I got a little older I got into Judy Blume. At the same time, my dad would also read to me every night, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, The Hobbit, and all The Lord of the Rings, and he did all the voices.
My dad also introduced me to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy when I was probably 12-13, which changed everything in my brain and really introduced the notion of absurdity and that kind of humor. That’s probably been one of my greater influences. But as I got older, young adult didn’t exist as an actual named category but some books featured older protagonists that weren’t adults. But you ended up jumping to adult and there were some adult books I enjoyed. I enjoyed Michael Crichton and Agatha Christie. I enjoyed books that had really forward-moving stories. But a lot of adult books I found were depressing and the arcs that the characters go on, by the end, you’re like, “Oh, that’s sad.”
In my last year of high school, we had an English assignment where we could compare any two books, so I chose Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan. I really dug into those and as I was writing it, I realized what I liked. The idea with these kids’ books is you’re still dealing with big issues and strong emotions. Anyone who thinks there aren’t big issues in kidlit hasn’t read any kidlit. They’re just being snobs. The emotions are the saturated colors. They’re not quite as messy. I like the saturated feelings and regardless of how dark it gets, and some of them get very dark, they always end on a hopeful note. As cynical as I can get with the world, I am, at the core, very optimistic. I believe in hope. So that’s why I love reading those books. I kept reading them after high school, like A Series of Unfortunate Events, which sounds like it shouldn’t have hope, but I was reading all of them.
FB I was reading the first book, The Bad Beginning, at a fancy resort, and I was by the pool and this woman was sitting next to me and she goes, “What are you reading? Isn’t that for, like, elementary kids?” And I said, “No, it’s not actually. It’s amazing. You should check it out.” But she gave me so much judgment that I was self-conscious after that. I didn’t know people across the pool were going to be judging my book. But A Series of Unfortunate Events is a dark story and just brilliantly told. The whole thing that he uses with vocabulary and spelling and spelling out this is what that means, it’s so perfect for kids, but adults can also read it and go, “That’s so clever.”
AK I think the best kids’ books and kids’ media are written and created on two levels. There’s the level of the audience it’s intended for, let’s say the eight to 12 audience. But also, especially with books versus a Pixar film, kids’ books are one of the last places where we still read out loud, where we still have an oral tradition. We don’t do it so much with adult books. I think the way audiobooks have taken off shows how much we love them. But that communal experience of somebody telling a story is rarer and rarer the older you get. When I write kidlit, I keep in mind that there’s going to be a teacher or a parent or somebody reading this to kids. I have some parent easter eggs in there, some jokes that probably the kids won’t get yet. But also when the kids come back to it when they’re 10-11 or even in their 20s, they’re like, “Oh, I didn’t get that joke at the time.” I think there’s always that nuance and depth.
But even if there weren’t any adult jokes, there’s just some great stuff in it. If you like the book, the book is meant for you. That’s how I feel about this idea of gatekeeping ages. I actually have a more controversial opinion, which is with adult books and kids. There can be some stuff in an adult book that is intense and maybe certain kids shouldn’t read it, but there are other kids who are ready for it. As long as you’re having a conversation with them, and as long as you’re having a parent or teachers talking with the kids and working through possibly more complicated issues, I actually think that’s okay.
FB What Pixar does so brilliantly is that it works for kids and adults. They have that four quadrant thing they talk about in marketing, which is why Harry Potter, became the book that was in the young adult section but all adults started reading it. Then it’s okay to read this stuff. But nevertheless, you brought up Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan, both of which, on the surface, are kids’ books, but adults started reading them before any kids probably did, certainly with Alice in Wonderland.
AK That’s the other thing. We, in retrospect, recategorize things. For people categorizing The Outsiders as Y.A., I guess it is. I don’t know. But the young adult genre didn’t exist (when it was published). I understand the need to find places to shelve things and I think that’s important. At the same time, new adult is becoming a marketing category and there’s been a lot of conversation about how we’ve lost the category between middle grade and young adult. By putting labels on things, we can exclude things. I think that’s just something we know, in general. There’s a benefit to knowing and understanding what a category means and using that in a positive way but at the same time there are people I know who are trying to be published who have books where the characters are 13-14, or even up to 15, and we have the eight to 12 category. Even though 12 and up is the category for young adults, they want characters that are 16 plus. Because of the need to categorize, there is a wealth of books and writers that are being ignored because we don’t know where to put them on the shelf.
FB When The Looking Glass Wars was turned down by everybody in the States, my problem was that the lead character started as seven, the next time we see her she’s 12, and then she’s 18. It was after Harry Potter and everybody said, “Well, I don’t know where this fits, and who did you write it for?” I didn’t know that there were categories. The categories were just coming into shape.
I think the middle-grade genre or categorizing middle grade is smart because after doing a lot of school visits, those six-, seven-, and eight-year-olds are looking for somebody to aspire to who’s not a teenager. So if you have a 13-year-old character, that’s pretty spot on. And they do the lion’s share of the reading. They have more time.
AK Yes. So you have teachers and librarians who are reading to them and introducing them to these books. We don’t have that as much in high school and we certainly don’t get opportunities as adults. I’m not a parent myself, but when people become parents, they get that opportunity again, and they get excited. “We get to go to the library and have somebody read to us.” We should have adult reading time because it’s something that’s in our DNA. We want to sit around the fire and tell stories.
FB So share with us your theory on Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan, because both of these stories have been around a long time. I’m curious when you wrote your paper if you have a theory on why these stories in particular have lasted so long.
AK I had this theory that we were dealing with two main characters, and I’m making Wendy the main character in Peter Pan, who have two completely opposite goals. Wendy’s scared of growing up, but in the end realizes she has to grow up. Whereas I think Alice is feeling frustrated by the grownups and she wants to find a place to belong as a kid. So one character is trying to figure out how to grow up in a way that pleases her and the other one is like, “No, no, I don’t want to grow up so fast. I want to stall growing up.” Even though weirdly, Wendy does want to start growing up at the beginning.
But that question of growing up is one of the big reasons they both appeal. Because we’ve all had our own relationship with growing up. Some people are desperate to get older. I just wanted to be a kid. Teenagers scared me. They scared me when I was a teenager. They still scare me. I respect the heck out of them but they scare me. I liked being a kid and this goes back to the books I like to read. I didn’t want to read angsty teen stuff. I didn’t want to really read romances. I just wanted to read plot-driven adventures. That’s all I wanted. I definitely had desperate friends. “When can I wear makeup? When can I have a boyfriend? When can I be independent?” I think that’s very relatable in both Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan.
Then on top of that, they’re so specific. I’ve been talking to a lot of kids lately about writing and I feel like the more specific you make a character, the more universal it becomes. You have these incredible specific characters like Captain Hook and the Queen of Hearts. These very meticulously wrought characters have very specific aesthetic features and personality traits that just spark so much imagination. On top of that, for Alice, people have always played make-believe with their cards and their chess boards, tapping into a very basic form of make-believe. Which you also get with pirates and mermaids. You get a lot of classic make-believe stuff that was also particularly popular, I assume, at the time of the original Peter Pan play. It was stuff that kids of that time enjoyed playing so that made it also relatable.
I think there are so many universal themes in both of them and then the specificity of the characters and how enjoyable they are contributes to both stories’ staying power. It’s so fun.
Take Your Writing to Wonderland: 7 Tips From Bestselling Authors
Writing is often a daunting proposition. Whether it’s a novel, screenplay, blog article, or even just an email, staring at that blank page can be paralyzing. Self-doubt can be demoralizing. Sometimes, it’s surprising that people can finish anything at all. How do published authors work through the pitfalls of writers to finish (and rewrite) their books?
That’s where we’re here to help. Through Frank’s years of doing comic cons, and introducing the world to The Looking Glass Wars, he’s been on numerous panels where writing is a main topic of discussion. The following article was constructed from his appearance on a panel at the 2015 Salt Lake Comic-Con (Link to Video when published), where he was part of an all-star lineup featuring some of the biggest names in Y.A. and Middle-Grade sci-fi/fantasy. These writers dished out indispensable writing advice that will help you fill up your blank page and take your writing to the next level.
“I want you to go out and I want you to find your favorite book, the book that made you want to become a writer. Get a fresh copy of that book because you’re going to destroy it. Go through the book the way a writer would read it. You’re going to highlight every single scene that you love. Then get your pen and start breaking that scene apart. Ask yourself, why does this work? What did my very favorite author do right? As soon as you can break that book apart and understand why it’s your favorite and understand what that author did right, you are going to know exactly what you want to put into your own writing to make yourself better.”
Jennifer Nielson is the prolific scribe of 17 novels, so it’s safe to say she knows what she’s talking about. Her debut, The New York Times Bestselling YA fantasy novel The False Prince, is the first book of the Ascendance Series, which follows an orphan who is trained to impersonate a missing prince. She has also written six YA historical fiction books, including A Night Divided, about a family that is separated by the Berlin Wall.
“I wrote my book, I picked up an agent very quickly, and we sold it very quickly. I think it was all because I was convinced this was a book that would never sell. I wrote it thinking, I’m just gonna write what I think would be funny for me to read to my kids, and my kids would like it and I would think it’s entertaining. I didn’t think about the industry. I didn’t think about what was popular. I wasn’t trying to emulate anything. I was actually just going to write a book and then get that out of my head. Then I knew I could write a book and then I was going to write a book that could actually get published. I think in the end, that served me the best because I wasn’t true to anything other than my own voice and what I wanted to do, and it seemed to work out well.”
Platte F Clark is the author of the middle-grade comedic fantasy Bad Unicorn trilogy. Called “deviously enjoyable” by Publisher’s Weekly, the series follows Max Spencer and his band of misfit friends as they’re hunted by a homicidal unicorn.
“My first novel, I had no experience with middle grade. I didn’t know anything about it, I was just writing. The protagonist starts off at seven, and then she’s 11, and then she’s 19. That was a big problem in selling the book but the book got published and people still read it and love it. Sometimes going in, ignorance is bliss. In my case, that happens a lot. But my advice is a little trick that I have when I’m writing and I’m into it and I have a really good scene. I don’t ever finish it. I put it down at the end of the day. So that the next morning when I start writing again, I know exactly what I’m going to start writing because I’m already in it. I know what I’m finishing and it just seems to set the whole day.”
It’s probably pretty safe to assume that, if you’re reading this, you know who Frank Beddor is. But let’s recap just to be safe. Frank is a former world champion skier who also produced the hit comedy There’s Something About Mary. His New York Times Bestselling trilogy, The Looking Glass Wars, exposes the true story of Wonderland and chronicles Alyss Heart, heir to the throne of Wonderland, as she fights to regain her crown from her evil aunt, Queen Redd. Beddor has added to the Wonderverse over the years with the Hatter M graphic novel series and the middle-grade novel, Hatter Madigan: Ghost in the H.A.T.B.O.X.
“I spent a lot of time stressing and worrying about getting my best ideas on paper. It wasn’t until I finally said, “You know what? I’m spending too much time on finding my best ideas. What effect can make my worst ideas work?” So, I started going to my worst ideas, the ones that just seemed the dumbest and stupid, and I went with them and I grew and I pushed it and I thought, “How creative can I be?” Those best ideas that I had were not as good as those worst ideas because of all the care and all the energy that I put into them. It sometimes takes stepping away from waiting for that perfect idea to show up in that moment of brilliance, and kind of just forcing yourself to be brilliant with some of the bad ideas that you already have.”
Michael Jensen is the author of Woven, a fantasy novel about a young ghost who teams with a spoiled princess to unravel the mystery of his murder and find an ancient needle with the magical power to mend that which has been torn. Publisher’s Weekly called Woven a “charming quest tale” while Kirkus Reviews deemed it a “sure bet for high-fantasy fans”.
“I always say whatever ideas scare you the most, whichever idea feels like it’s gonna be the hardest to write, that’s usually the one. In fact, both of my series were ones where I thought, ‘I don’t know if I’m good enough to write that book.’
The note that I seem to give most often when I’m critiquing new middle-grade work is that the writer tends to forget that the kids need to be the hero of the story. I don’t just mean having a kid as the main character. I mean that you’re reading the book and things are going along, and then you get to the climax and the kid’s solution is they go to an adult, and the adult fixes things for them, and that’s the end of the story. But it’s middle grade, the kid is supposed to be the hero. How different would it have been if Dumbledore was the one who always stepped in and saved things, instead of letting Harry be the hero? I’ve even seen that in Y.A. drafts but it’s especially common when I’m reading middle-grade drafts. I see that a lot with newer writers. It’s like that adult sense steps in, and it’s not that they’ve dumbed down the writing or anything like that, but when they’re trying to figure out how to solve the plot, they rely on adults more than their kid characters. Really, really remember that you’re writing for kids. Let the kids be the hero of the story.”
Shannon Messenger is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of the Keeper of the Lost Cities series, which follows a twelve-year-old Telepath who is forced to leave her earthly home and move to the Lost Cities, where fantasy creatures of all races live. Messenger has also written the Sky Fall series, in which a seventeen-year-old wind spirit falls in love with his bodyguard and battles an evil rival.
“The best advice I could give to any writer, whether it’s middle grade, Y.A., whatever you’re writing, is to finish what you start. No one ever really writes a great book. You write a book that you then fix to make as good as you possibly can. I see so many people who are stuck in the middle of a draft, or redrafting or rewriting something and not actually finishing it. You need to finish so that you and your readers, or an editor or an agent have a sense of the entire story that you’re trying to tell. Then you have something that you can actually shape. Sometimes that shaping is small, sometimes it’s going to be huge.
I was six books into the Imaginarium Geographica series and one of my best editors at Simon & Schuster said, “There’s something that isn’t working for this, and here’s how I think we should fix it. What do you think?” And I said, “You are absolutely right.” The solution was, what was originally the prologue in that book became the epilogue and I removed a major character who was in every single chapter. I had to rewrite the entire book. It was excruciating, very excruciating. All along the way you’re giving up lines because now there are conversations that are gone and you can’t repurpose those, you can’t just replace it with another character, because he’s built into the story you’re telling. My editor was right. We could have pushed it out. I could have been a prima donna and said, “Well, this is the sixth book and you got what you’re getting and I’m going to Disneyland.” But she was right and the book was better because we made those changes. Because of those changes, the seventh book in the series, The First Dragon, was the one that was most technically flawless. I had seven lines in my editor’s letter for that book and a note that said, “Apparently, after seven books, you’ve got this down.” That’s all I got.”
James A. Owen is best known as the author of The Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica series, which features fictionalized versions of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams who find themselves in possession of a book that holds maps to the worlds of our literary heritage. Owen is also the creator of the comic book series Starchild.
“When I get an editorial letter, I read it and then I take 48 hours off because I’m so depressed. I just watch movies and sit around and mope. Then usually after that 48 hours, I start to realize it’s not as bad as I first felt. Every time you just start thinking, “This is going to be the one where you get, ‘Wow, this book’s actually perfect. I don’t have any changes for you.’
I am terrible at writing advice. It’s hard for me to articulate how I write books. But one thing that always stands out to me is, and it might be obvious but, it is all about the characters. Face up and make your characters the most important thing that you throw all your devotion into. Every book I’ve ever loved is because I fell in love with and made a connection with the characters. I felt anxious to just even hear them have regular conversations. I just felt like it was there. I grew to care for them and love them. If you just have these really shallow characters and they’re all exactly the same, when they have an action scene and they die, you’d be like, “I don’t care. I hope this guy dies. He’s boring as heck.” Just setting cannot overcome weak characters. Action and suspense cannot overcome weak characters. The most beautiful prose ever written by a human cannot overcome weak characters. So really, really focus on your characters as you write your books and make people care about them.”
With over 21 million books sold, James Dashner is the author of The Maze Runner novels, a Y.A. dystopian science fiction series set in a world devastated by a succession of solar flares and coronal mass ejections. The books spawned a popular film trilogy that grossed nearly $1 billion at the box office. Dashner’s other work includes Y.A. sci-fi series The 13th Reality and The Mortality Doctrine. The Godhead Complex, the seventh book in The Maze Runner series, was released in November 2023.
Meet The Author:
An itinerant storyteller, John Drain attended the University of Edinburgh before studying film at DePaul University in Chicago and later earned an MFA in Screenwriting from the American Film Institute Conservatory. John focuses on writing mysteries and thrillers featuring characters who are thrown into the deep end of the pool and struggle to just keep their heads above water. His work has been recognized by the Academy Nicholls Fellowship, the Austin Film Festival, ScreenCraft, Cinestory, and the Montreal Independent Film Festival. In a previous life, John created and produced theme park attractions across the globe for a wide variety of audiences. John keeps busy in his spare time with three Dungeons and Dragons campaigns and a seemingly never-ending stack of medieval history books.
All Things Alice: Interview With Teresa Lin, Part 1
As an amateur scholar and die-hard enthusiast of everything to do with Alice in Wonderland, I have launched a podcast that takes on Alice’s everlasting influence on pop culture. As an author who draws on Lewis Carroll’s iconic masterpiece for my Looking Glass Wars universe, I’m well acquainted with the process of dipping into Wonderland for inspiration.
The journey has brought me into contact with a fantastic community of artists and creators from all walks of life—and this podcast will be the platform where we come together to answer the fascinating question: “What is it about Alice?”
For this episode, it was my great pleasure to have Teresa Lin join me as my guest on this episode! Read on to explore our conversation and check out the whole series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview.
Frank Beddor Hey, everybody, welcome to the show. This week, I am sitting right across from my new guest and I’m a little bit nervous, I have to do a really good job today. I have to be very cautious about the questions I ask and I have to leave a lot of space for her to answer. Not only is she a brilliant writer and a creative force to be reckoned with, she’s somebody I married five months ago. I’d like to welcome my wife and my collaborator, Teresa Lin, to the show.
We’re gonna be talking about The Looking Glass Wars and some of the work that we’ve collaborated on such as the TV show and the movie. We’ll also talk about the musical because that’s how we started our creative collaboration, with her helping solve a problem that I could not solve. So it’s always nice to have somebody much smarter and better looking. And probably a lot more articulate. So welcome to the show, Teresa Lin.
Teresa Lin Thank you. It’s nice to be here. It’s kind of interesting to be sitting across from you and having this spatial and auditory distance. It feels like our collaboration has always come from this inside space where we’re really deeply connected.
FB I’ll reach out and hold your hand if you get nervous. I can be intimidating to guests at times with very probing questions.
But it’s important that we start with your creative background. I mean, you can go back as far as you’d like. But I’m interested in the evolution from your time in Taiwan to the States to Duke to USC film school, to starting in the film and TV business to getting one of your first jobs as a professional writer on the TV show Bones.
TL One of the ways that I like to contextualize how I came to storytelling has always been this imaginative space, this expanse, that I filled because I had no access to television growing up in Taiwan and I was kind of a solo kid with both parents working. I was brought up really by the school teachers the school principal and myself. I was given a set of art supplies and some books and I was left to myself. So that expansive creativity, imagination, and filling in started there. I remember the very first film I saw, my grandmother took me to Snow White. What I remembered was the magic of cinema and also the model of what girls should grow up to be. Being in Taiwan it was the Chinese culture where girls were taught to be quiet and subservient. The quiet and small spaces that I had to fill I did with my imagination and stories.
So when I came to Florida, my family bought into a motel where we worked and lived. That was my bird’s eye view into American culture. I was quite enamored with what America stood for and then quite startled by the reality of what it looked and felt like living in a motel next door to Baxter’s Lounge, which was a transvestite bar in a not-so-great part of Tampa. Again the discrepancy between what was imagined and what was sold to me, and what the reality gave me more fodder for creating stories.
Then all the life experiences I had growing up with my parents giving me this cultural background of what it means to be Chinese and Taiwanese and keeping those ethics and then the idea of higher education being the number one driving force in my life and understanding that if I were educated, then that would be my ticket up in society. That gave me a tremendous work ethic and it landed me at Duke, and then at USC film school, but people are always surprised when I tell them that I didn’t really find cinema or was able to watch movies until I was in college.
I remember the book that did it for me was The Godfather by Mario Puzo, and how much it drew me in and how this Italian culture of family was so similar it was to my culture. Then watching the movie, I had this totally internal and external experience of someone else’s interpretation of that book. I thought, “Oh, my God, this is a thing.” Ever since then, I was just driven by the idea of film and story. People say that films are immediate empathy machines. So when someone is watching it they’re breadcrumbed into the feeling and experience of these characters. For me, someone who’s come from the outside and really wants to be on the inside, language and storytelling were a way to draw people in.
FB I’m curious about the differences you remember between the book and the experience with the movie and if you had any critique at the time. Or did they each stand on their own two feet and you just marveled that the story worked as a novel and worked as a film?
TL It was the sensation at times of deja vu because it was so similar to what I had imagined. Then, at times, it was really different because of casting, or I didn’t see or experience the character in such a tone. Nevertheless, it was a depiction of family and the tension between the characters, the family, and the conflict that was so prescriptive of what family hierarchy looked like. Because as a child, you felt the reverberation of the adults making the very important decisions. My family had gone through a lot of drama because of the motel and because of us being immigrants. There was a lot of misunderstanding between what we were feeling and the conflict that’s out there, and the fear of the unknown, and not knowing how to control it.
Also, I was the first person in my family to really study English. My mom took some English classes where she worked, but I was the oldest of three daughters and I was the first one in my family to really get a grasp of English so I became sort of the translator. I was translating a lot of legal documents or I was running the front desk of this motel and talking to adults and negotiating prices. So it was me engaging with this adult world and trying to translate that to my parents.
FB Were you a teenager or younger when you were doing this?
TL I started around nine or 10. The importance of understanding and having a grasp of the language was paramount to the role that I played for my family. What I took away from that was if I could be understood, then people could be on my side, because understanding is a precursor to love and acceptance. So, for me, language was the key. Knowing how to tell a story well and contextualize it for the other person is the key to being understood.
FB So story has been a big part of your life, but you were also thinking about becoming a lawyer. In law, there’s performance, there’s story, but there’s also interpretation and the ability to absorb a lot of information and then retell the story the way you want to present it.
TL As with a lot of immigrant families, you understand that the sacrifices they made mean that you are either going to become a doctor or a lawyer, or something of the like. Translating legal documents was already part of my repertoire, I was on the debate team, and I was a member of the Association for Young Lawyers Club.
But to your point, playing with words and digesting words, understanding how they will fit and how to contextualize someone’s subjective narrative, and understanding what the greater purpose is for writing something or for telling a story has always been a muscle that’s been well-honed in my life.
FB So we’ve been married for five months, but a couple for a decade, which has a nice ring to it. Why don’t you tell the audience about your first encounter with Alice in Wonderland?
TL I would say that Alice in Wonderlandcame to me through Disney. I watched the Disney film when I was probably 11 or 12. It’s a little blonde girl who falls down a rabbit hole and has a lot of nonsensical events happen to her. It tickles everybody to think of, “What if I’m in this dream place where nothing seems to make sense?”
It frees you from logic and it allows you to be playful. Though I remember it getting pretty dark with the Queen of Hearts. Then it just was resolved by it all being a dream. I don’t think I connected to Alice as much as I did to some other Disney characters because I think this idea of staying a child and not wanting to grow up was exactly the opposite of what I was conditioned to do.
FB You finished high school early. You finished Duke early. You wanted to get into your adulthood, into your career, and what ultimately became writing for television.
TL The path of writing for television showed itself down the road. But I was always fascinated by storytelling. I used to live in the library as a kid and I used to go into the research section and look up all the ways that fairy tales evolved from Europe and all the different origin stories coming from all different cultures and how they evolved and how they came into our consciousness.
I was just fascinated with it. I’m not quite sure why but I was very interested because, as a child, a lot of the Chinese lore and mythology tales were told to us as cautionary tales. They were ways that our lessons came to us. If we, as kids, didn’t do the right thing, then these are the consequences. I needed to understand that. I was raised partly Buddhist, but also, these stories conveyed to us, “If you tell lies, something bad is going to happen to you. I think as a kid, or as a person, you want to examine what is the worst thing that can happen to you.
FB For me, it’s the devil and hell.
TL That’s right, being burned forever. But now looking at the larger lens of stories and Alice, I wanted to revisit that because I remember when I first met you, I was learning and reading about The Looking Glass Wars, and how you reimagined Alice. It was really inspiring because you were empowering a girl to become a warrior queen and, more importantly for me, it was somebody who had to look back and reconcile the history of her past, and not just her own past but her family’s past as well. That’s something I really recognized within my own history.
FB This is a motif that you’re deeply invested in, your past, and using it in storytelling.
TL A lot of the impetus for my writing has to do with how we tell our stories and how it forms our identity. In order to move on we need to reconcile and contextualize our past, not just for ourselves, but for our ancestors. There are generational traumas that need to be reconciled for us to understand how to move on and pass that on to our daughters and sons. We as a species need stories to help us understand and give value and meaning to everything we’ve gone through outside of just our immediate emotional responses.
FB We had been a couple for two or three years, and you had your focus on the things that you were doing and I had the things that I was working on, and, of course, we talked about The Looking Glass Wars, but we weren’t collaborating yet.
TL I remember you diving back into developing the musical.
FB We went for a walk in Minnesota around Christmas Lake, where I grew up, and I was lamenting this problem with adapting The Looking Glass Wars into a musical and I was stuck. I was trying to shoehorn this novel that I’ve lived with for all these years into a musical. I had been inspired by Wicked and I really thought it could work.
TL You were having a hard time reconciling Alyss with two love interests.
FB They were separated and half of the show was with Prince Leopold and then half of it was back with Dodge and I said, “That’s never going to work and I don’t know how to fix it.” So we kept walking and you didn’t say anything for a little bit but then you just turned and went “I think if they’re the same character that would work.” If Prince Leopold is, in fact, also Dodge and Dodge is Prince Leopold so they’ll go back and forth between our world and Wonderland. I was in love with you before that, but that moment was, “Wow!” I think I grabbed your hand, “I’m not ever letting go.”
TL I thought that moment happened when I hit that ball…
FB That’s true. We went on a little vacation and I was teaching you how to putt on a golf course. It was about a 60-foot downhill-breaking putt and you sank it.
TL I think that was the first moment.
FB That was the athletic moment because I live in two spaces. I live in the athletic space and I live in the creative space. So that was more of my past coming through.
TL That was really fun. I do remember the moment you’re talking about around Christmas Lake, when you looked at me with new eyes, “You and I can collaborate.”
FB We talked about a lot of different musicals and you started writing the outline for what they call the book, which is the outline for the composer and the lyricist. Those are really tricky.
TL It was really fun because there’s another aspect of my childhood that Frank didn’t know about and working on this project with him allowed me to plumb into this past where I had music in my life. Growing up, we didn’t have a television but we had a piano and we always played and sang. So musicality was always a part of our family life so when I was invited in to work on this musical, I really had fun.
FB You love to dance as well. You’re quite the dancer. But the tricky thing was sorting out the tone. We were looking at Les Miserables as an example, for a bit, and we were obviously also looking at Wicked. Moulin Rouge as well.
TL We were looking at these great, sweeping love stories because ultimately, it’s a big love story that drives it. But we also wanted to make it fresh. We wanted to look at examples of taking something that we all know, in popular culture, and taking a left turn with that project. It’s reimagining and reinventing something that feels familiar and giving it a twist.
FB Musically, you had a lot of various songs. You usually put a reference song or two for each scene. That was the roadmap of what we were thinking for future composers and lyricists.
TL Given the time and the space to do a deep dive, it flows. There’s so much material there to draw from.
FB I think the aspect of being able to establish the reimagining of what happened with Lewis Carroll, but ultimately, having it be driven by this love story, and her coming back home and to her destined love.
TL And her finding her sense of identity.
FB That’s been really enjoyable. One of the challenges that we both have in terms of finding the entry point for The Looking Glass Wars, beyond the books and graphic novels, is what’s the right medium. What’s the timing and what’s the best story? Just in the same way that a movie has really limited parameters and time, for a musical you have 20 songs and you have to compress and condense. I’ve found that to be very difficult because maybe I’m too close to this source material but when we started talking about it as a TV show it started to show itself as a really exciting avenue.
TL I really enjoy watching stories now where the characters are tied together not through chronology or space and time but thematically. So the characters don’t necessarily have to be in the same space to share something really meaningful. I love the way that sometimes storylines cut across each other. Maybe there’s a pivotal scene or an emotional scene where the emotions connect the characters. So we’re really able to explore that in the TV show model because of the magic system and the emotionality that ties Hatter and Alice together, and also explores Queen Redd, and some of the reasons why she became Redd in her timeline as a teenager with her sister. I really want to ground it in the family story.
I know the scope of the show is huge. There’s a whole Wonderverse out there that you’ve created over 20 years with so many nations, characters, and really cool concepts. But underneath it all, it’s a family story. For me, it’s the Hart family and what happened back in the day with Genevieve and Redd when things got out of balance and how their ability to wield imagination ripples out to the rest of the world. For Alice, it’s a redemption story for her family and it’s a redemption story for herself and in the decision of who she wants to be going forward.
FB I’m really glad I married you. Bringing it full circle to your family, The Godfather, and The Looking Glass Wars, finding that strong theme of family and anchoring it in that is something that I would like to continue to explore with you in these podcasts.
TL I would love to come back and share our process.
FB It’s really nice to chat with you across the table and to expand our collaboration in this way.
Walt Disney and Alice in Wonderland: The Long and Winding Road of Disney’s Passion Project
With CEO mudslinging, sagging box office returns for Marvel, and looming board battles, it can be easy to forget the Walt Disney Company is, at its core, a dream factory. The House of Mouse has produced movies, TV shows, theme park rides, and games that have inspired and entertained, forming core memories for its legions of fans. This assembly line of amusement originally stemmed from the dreams of one man – Walt Disney. And what inspired Disney? Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
“No story in English literature has intrigued me more. It fascinated me the first time I read it as a schoolboy.” Disney was fascinated by Lewis Carroll’s fantasy tale as a child growing up in Missouri and it’s easy to see how the novel influenced his later work. Disney’s films told fantastical stories in magical lands, infused with comedy and whimsy. Micky, Snow White, Pinnochio, and Cinderella captured the world’s imagination, just like Alice, the White Rabbit, the Mad Hatter, and the rest of Wonderland’s denizens did in 1865. But Disney wasn’t just content being inspired by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, from his first forays into making movies, Disney was intent on bringing Alice to the big screen.
In 1923, Walt Disney was working at the wonderfully named Laugh-O-Gram Studios in Kansas City, Missouri. Laugh-O-Gram was not a runaway success, folding after two years and nine cartoons. But it was with Laugh-O-Gram that Disney made his first Alice film, a 12-minute silent short titled Alice’s Wonderland. The charming live-action/animation hybrid is loosely based on Lewis Carroll’s novel and follows Alice, a young girl who, after being inspired during a visit to an animation studio, dreams of traveling to an animated world filled with anthropomorphic animals. Alice is greeted at the train station and is the guest of honor in a parade around the animal realm. After escaping a pack of hungry lions, Alice leaps off a cliff and wakes up back in her bed, exhilarated by her fantastic dream.
Alice’s Wonderland didn’t save Laugh-O-Gram from bankruptcy but it did serve as the proof of concept for the Alice Comedies, a short series that chronicled the adventures of a live-action girl, Alice, and her animated cat Julius. Running from 1924 to 1927, the Alice Comedies were an important foundational piece for the nascent Walt Disney Corporation. It wasn’t until 1933 that the prospect of an Alice feature at Disney surfaced again, with the “Queen of the Movies” Mary Pickford in talks to face down the Red Queen as Alice. But the emergence of a competing live-action adaptation at Paramount scuppered the project and Disney contented himself with making Thru the Mirror, a short featuring the Mickey Mouse in a Through the Looking-glass parody.
The project that became the 1951 film Alice in Wonderland first started in the late 1930s after the tremendous success of a little film called Snow White. An initial story treatment was completed and Disney hired David Hall to create concept art for the feature. The results were…interesting. The art itself is beautiful, presaging the darker routes that future adaptations of Alice would take. But dark isn’t what Disney wanted for Alice. He was convinced that the film’s success would hinge on highlighting Carroll’s humor in the novel and ultimately rejected Hall’s work.
It was around this time that Disney’s enthusiasm for the project seemed to wane. “I don’t think there would be any harm in letting this thing sit for a while. Everyone is stale now,” he said. The prospect of Alice in Wonderlandgetting the Disneyland treatment became even more unlikely, with the underperformance of Pinnochio and Fantasia and the collapse of the foreign market due to World War II. Bank of America even prohibited the company from producing new feature films until they had fixed their finances.
Yet Disney didn’t give up. Come 1945, he was back in Wonderland, tapping famed Brave New World novelist Aldous Huxley to pen the screenplay for a live-action/animated hybrid production. While Disney found Huxley’s script too literal, he hadn’t lost his enthusiasm for the source material, telling American Weeklyin 1946, “Carroll was revolutionary in the field of literature. He violated the serious Victorian tradition by writing Alice in a vein of fantasy and nonsense. In fact, he was a pace-setter for the motion picture cartoon and the comic strip of today by the style he introduced in his fantasy.”
Disney decided to make the film fully animated and directed that the script focus more on the humor, joy, and whimsy of the novel. Mary Blair’s concept art introduced a modernist bent and her use of vivid colors and warped perspective captured the tone Disney desired. He also commissioned talented songwriters such as Sammy Fain and Bob Hilliard to compose music and songs for the film. The train was now truly on the tracks and Disney’s clarity of vision and eye for artistic talent came to the fore as Alice in Wonderland coalesced into a bright adventure with catchy songs and contagious comedy.
The production was massive by the standards of the time. The production of Alice in Wonderlandtook five years and the budget ran to $3 million (over $47 million in 2023), requiring Disney to ultimately utilize some of the profits from Cinderella to ensure the film reached his lofty standards. A full live-action feature was shot for reference during animation, a process that produced over 350,000 drawings and paintings by 750 artists. A 50-piece orchestra directed by Oliver Wallace (later nominated for an Oscar in recognition of his work) completed the score. And above it all, was the Missouri schoolboy who was finally about to turn his childhood dream into reality.
Alice’s road to becoming a revered classic, however, was to prove to be just as winding as her adventure in Wonderland. Reviews were not favorable upon the film’s release in 1951, with critics citing the divergence from the source material and a lack of heart and warmth. Audiences were similarly underwhelmed, resulting in a $600,000 shortfall at the box office. But, like Carroll’s book, Disney’s film proved to have considerable legs. Several re-releases encountered more receptive audiences, especially in the early 1970s when the studio connected the film to the recent prominence of psychedelia. Subsequent generations reevaluated Disney’s passion project and the film is now considered one of his company’s best. In the film, Alice remarks that “Curiosity often leads to trouble.” And while Walt Disney’s childhood curiosity regarding Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland did result in some stressful times, it also led to an indisputable animated classic.
Meet the Author
An itinerant storyteller, John Drain attended the University of Edinburgh before studying film at DePaul University in Chicago and later earned an MFA in Screenwriting from the American Film Institute Conservatory. John focuses on writing mysteries and thrillers featuring characters who are thrown into the deep end of the pool and struggle to just keep their heads above water. His work has been recognized by the Academy Nicholls Fellowship, the Austin Film Festival, ScreenCraft, Cinestory, and the Montreal Independent Film Festival. In a previous life, John created and produced theme park attractions across the globe for a wide variety of audiences. John keeps busy in his spare time with three Dungeons and Dragons campaigns and a seemingly never-ending stack of medieval history books.
