Occasionally asked Questions
To ask Melissa a question about her books or writing in general, or to submit a book review for this website, send an email to questions@glenhaber.org.
How long have you wanted to be a writer?
Pretty much as long as I can remember. If you want to see examples of my early writing, click here.
Why do you want to be a writer?
I have never asked myself this question. The question I ask, almost every single day, is how did I get so lucky that I get to be a writer? I love writing; I’m happy when I’m writing; I’m all weird and agitated when I’m not writing.
It always interests me that no child has ever asked me the more complicated question Why do you write for children? I think that’s because children understand what’s so wonderful about children’s literature, even though neither they nor I have ever explained exactly what it is. If you want to see a list of my favorite kids’ books, click here.
Where do you get your ideas?
Sometimes, even I’m not sure. But some ideas, of course, come from my own life. For example, Beyond the Dragon Portal started with my daughter. Every morning when she came downstairs she would tell us all about the trip she’d made to Dragonland the night before and how she’d sat in the meadows of starflowers and moongrass and how the grandfather unicorn had told her stories. She told this story so often and in so much detail that her father and I started tuning it out. And then one day I started wondering what would happen on that day when I went up into her room to wake her up and saw that the room was empty, curtains flapping… So I started writing. But writing never goes where you think it’s going to go, and my daughter’s carefree story about dragonland transformed itself into a novel about war. Similarly, The Pluto Project started with a game I used to play with my best friend Daniel. As I wrote it Alan stopped being Daniel at all, and the book is really about whether or not there’s any meaning to our lives. That’s not at all where I thought it was going to go.
Sometimes it happens in the opposite way. Like most of the books I’ve worked on, The Heroic Adventure of Hercules Amsterdam started with a single sentence. I was walking down my street, and suddenly a sentence just popped into my head: “Hercules Amsterdam was only three inches tall, but nobody knew the reason why.” I had no idea why, either; I needed to write to find out. When I started the book, I thought Hercules would have no problem with his height (like Stuart Little, who takes his short stature in stride), but because writers really don’t have any control over their characters, it turned out completely differently. Suddenly my Hercules was not at all like Stuart Little. He became terrified of everything: bees, cats, balls, acorns, and most of all, people. And when I realized that Hercules was not just scared of getting hurt physically, I sat back and said, “Whoa. I guess I’m writing my autobiography.”
Wait a second. How can a book about a three-inch-tall boy be your autobiography?
Because when I was a fat and miserable nine-year-old, I felt like I was three inches tall. I was lonely, shy, and odd, and I felt completely friendless and vulnerable. In short, so to speak, I felt just like Hercules.
And that’s the great thing about fantasy novels—they’re like metaphors. You can really explore how awful it feels to feel like you’re always about to get hurt emotionally when you write about someone who can get stepped on physically. So even though The Pluto Project comes closest to telling the story of my childhood, Hercules is the closest to what my childhood felt like. That’s the funny thing about books. What’s “true” historically speaking is not necessarily what feels truest. It’s like what the artist Pablo Picasso said: “Art is the lie that tells the truth.” A book can get to the meaning of your life by telling a completely different story from what actually happened to you, and really, I think that’s the most amazing part of writing. If you’re interested in this topic, click here.
Are you going to write a sequel to "Hercules" or any of your other books?
I don’t think so—but I won’t rule anything out. I think there are books that lend themselves to sequels and then books that don’t. The Harry Potter books, for example, always leave something hanging. Harry might solve his immediate problem—find the Prisoner of Azkaban, make it through the Triwizard tournament, for example—but Voldemort’s still out there, and the story has to go on. Other books don’t need sequels. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a good example. Charlie solves his problem by the end of the book—he’s not hungry anymore, his family will be looked after, and he stays just as good and kind and pure as he was in the beginning. There’s no reason to have the sequel (Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator). And you can tell Roald Dahl didn’t feel any need to write it—it doesn’t feel inspired. I think inspiration is important. The best books are the books that are fighting to get out of you. If I ever feel inspired to write a sequel—if an idea pops in my head and I feel I need to write it, I will. But I don’t want to churn out an uninspired book just because sequels sell well.
On the other hand, I am currently working on a trilogy. So someday I will be able to answer “Yes!” to this question.
How long does it take you to write a book?
This is a complicated question, because it depends on what you mean. These days it takes me about a month or six weeks to have a complete first draft of a novel—but a first draft is really far from being a book. After I have a first draft I usually rewrite it about ten times before I show it to my writing partner. (Her name is Susan and I met her through my agent—check out her website here www.susanvaught.com). After reading Susan’s helpful comments, I do another draft or three or five before I send it to my agent. Of course, she’ll have suggestions, too, and after I make those (another one or two drafts), I’ll send the manuscript to my editor. My editor usually wants me to make changes before she shows it to the publisher so that’s another draft or three before I get a contract that says the publisher wants to turn the manuscript into a real book. (Or not—I have a bunch of rejections to go with my three published novels.)
After I have a contract, the work isn’t over—they don’t just slap a cover on it and chuck it into stores. My editor will write me a detailed letter (the first one I got was eleven pages long,) telling me what to fix. And these are big things, too—not typos, but big questions about the plot and how the character is growing and changing over the course of the book. After I give her a new version (that’s usually three to five drafts for me), I’ll get another letter, and probably a third, after lak lak more drafts. Finally, the book goes to copy-editing to catch all the mistakes, and about nine months after that, it hits stores—about 20 months or so after the publisher accepted the book. Considering the fact that I once made two full-formed babies in nine months, this always strikes me as a very long time.
What’s an agent? What’s a publisher? What’s an editor?
An agent is someone who helps writers sell their work to publishers. My agent’s name is Erin Murphy, and she’s fantastic. The publisher refers both to the company that publishes books (I publish with a great company called Dutton) but also the person in the publishing house who actually decides which stories to turn into real, physical books. The editor is the person who takes the author’s manuscript and makes it better. If you’re interested in seeing how Hercules changed from an early draft to a final draft, click here.
How does an editor make the book better?
If you read the question about how long it takes me to write a book, you’ll see I usually go through twenty or thirty drafts. When I ask kids what the difference is between a first and second draft, they almost always say that you have to make the second draft neater and correct your spelling and so on. That’s true, but it’s really not the most important. What’s more important is making your writing better—adding more detail to things that turned out to be important, taking out things that don’t really belong. Sometimes cutting is much more important than adding. The first thing my editor made me do with Hercules, for example, was cut out about 20 pages—not whole pages, but 20 pages worth of extra words here and there that slowed the book down.
How can I become a writer?
Read! Read! Read! And write! Write! Write all the time! And when you’re ready, send your stuff out. There are lots of places that will publish kids’ writing. Go to the library and check out The Writer’s Guide to Children’s Books and look at the many many entries of places to send your stories, poems, essays. Be warned that you won’t get paid for your work, except for the rare place like the magazine Stone Soup: http://www.stonesoup.com. But look for cash prizes, too. When I was in college, I won $1500 in a writing prize, and lived in California for a summer on it—the best summer of my life.
When you’re an adult, and really serious about writing, the advice is still the same. Write, write, write, send it out, send it out, and network like crazy. It is a sad fact of life that it is very hard to break into publishing. Many people do it by entering contests and going to writing conferences and meeting agents and publishers face to face. I did it by sheer luck—I gave The Heroic Adventure of Hercules Amsterdam to a friend from high school who gave it to another friend I knew from high school who had a friend I also knew from high school (www.commschool.org) who had a girlfriend who was an editor at Dutton…. So the lesson is: be nice to people in high school.