Inspiration & Making the Leap From Fan-Fiction

Inspiration is a bear. It’s either falling from the sky, a lightning bolt to the head that brings about a divine delivery of characters, world-building, plot and voice in a single moment. That does happen, but it’s rare. Most of the time writers are stumbling along, unsure of what happens next – or, if we know – unable to execute in just the right way.

Today I thought I’d share the inspiration for all of my books in the hopes that it will illustrate how I utilize elements from all different aspects of my life to come together and form a novel, and later on I’ll talk about how to transition from fan fiction to your own creative worlds.

Sometimes we can’t pinpoint exactly when or how an idea came to us, but for my debut novel, Not A Drop to Drink, there was a definite lightning bolt moment. In early 2010 I saw a documentary called Blue Gold: World Water Wars, all about a looming freshwater shortage for our planet. I was terrified. Shaken to my core.

We all need water to live. If we don’t have it we’ll die in about three days. Because I am the way I am, I decided to do a little research about the process of dying from dehydration and walked away from that even more disturbed. I’m a worst case scenario kind of person. In today’s world, if you don’t answer my text or call me back in about an hour, I’m going to assume you’re dead.

That’s me.

So, after watching this documentary I consoled myself with the fact that I have a pond in my back yard. Small, and with bits of fish poop and algae, but the possible desperate times might call for desperate measures, and I assured myself that if I had to, I would drink my pond. But… I’m no fool. What happens in a world where there’s a shortage of something we all need to survive? How do people behave?

I know the answer to that. Badly.

That night I dreamt that I was in my basement teaching my niece – who was about seven at the time – how to operate a high powered rifle so she could help me snipe people from the roof of the house to protect our water source. I woke up going wow – okay, bad parenting – but I also was thinking of this little girl, and her authority figure telling her that water was more important than other people’s lives, and killing was how to survive.

Out of that documentary and dream, came my debut novel.

The sequel, In A Handful of Dust came about in a little more forceful way. When we sold Not A Drop to Drink my publisher was interested in making it a two-book deal, and asked for a sequel. I had written it as a standalone on purpose – I was writing it at a time when readers were suffering from over-exposure to trilogies – and had no intention or ideas for a sequel. But a two book deal from Harper Collins has a way of making one reconsider.

I had a very short window of time to come up with a basic concept for a sequel, so I pushed my brain pretty hard. I knew my setting was used up. Not A Drop to Drink takes place over about five square miles; what did the rest of the country look like? It was a good question, and the driving force that directed the sequel, In A Handful of Dust. I knew I needed to move my characters, and in a world where other people were the danger, they would want to head west rather than east – away from larger population centers.

If they’re heading west in a lawless world what does that look like? Sounds like a western to me. I gave them horses, drove them through mountains, and relied on a lifelong love of The Oregon Trail, Little House on the Prairie and other survival stories to move my characters into an exploration of the larger world of Not A Drop to Drink.

My third novel, A Madness So Discreet, was a huge departure. I knew I needed to go somewhere else entirely. Dystopian was dead – what was next? Not only did I not know the answer to that question, I had no ideas. There was nothing floating around inside my head. But I had some time. So, I did what a lot of writers do when looking for inspiration – I read.

Like any reader, I go for books that interest me, and my own interests tend to be… dark. I’d been curious about early methods of criminal profiling after reading Patricia Cornwell’s book about Jack the Ripper, so I started looking into that subject, which led me to re-read some Sherlock Holmes stories, as well as The Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson.

Those, in turn, led me to treatment of the mentally ill in the 1800’s, which led me to lobotomies and women’s rights, and all in all, a pretty odd assortment of books on my bedside table. I was slipping into sleep one night, staring at the spines, and the thought occurred to me, “Serial killers, insane asylums, lobotomies, early criminal profiling, women’s rights… someone should write a book combining all those things. Oh – I’m a writer. Maybe I should.”

 A Madness So Discreet fell out of me pretty quickly. It’s a dark world, with darker inhabitants. It wasn’t a place I wanted to stay in long, but it was also one that required total immersion. After writing the first 10,000 words or so and waiting to see if my publisher would want it (they did), I dove in, writing the rest of the book in about… three weeks.

Yeah, I wrote the bulk of it in three weeks. I don’t recommend that, as I don’t think it was healthy mentally, physically, or emotionally speaking, but I do think that deep dive adds to the permeating darkness of the book. Also, I have no idea what happens in A Madness So Discreet. Seriously. I was pretty much in a fugue state.

I re-emerged from that place with a few months to breathe in between edits and coming up with a new idea. Remember, I was still working full time as a high school librarian during this time period, and while that might sound difficult, I actually find it energizing to be around my target audience. Other people give me my energy, and the lonely life of a writer needs a counterpoint.

I shut the book on writing for a little bit and decided to chill. Originally A Madness So Discreet was supposed to have a sequel. It was a two book deal, with the assumption that the second would be a follow up tale. I had a synopsis ready to go and planned to rest on my laurels for a little bit… but A Madness So Discreet did not sell well. Yes, it won the Edgar Allan Poe Award, and while that is the highest honor a mystery can receive, that doesn’t translate into sales.

In short, an old joke was trotted out for me. A Madness So Discreet is a historical, and those don’t sell well in YA, historically.

Ha, ha.

So – what else did I have up my sleeve to finish up this two-book contract?

Oh boy, well… I’d been planning on that sequel, and marinating it for months in my mind. Now I needed to cough up something entirely new. Or… maybe not. I had an adult manuscript sitting in a drawer that I’d given up on nearly 15 years ago. Maybe there was something there?

The Female of the Species was the first novel I ever completed, all the way back when I was in college. When I moved into my dorm room I suddenly had two things that I’d lived without my whole life – air conditioning and cable. I watched a lot of TV my freshman year.

There was a particular channel that ran a lot of true crime shows, and I had it on one evening when I caught the story of a young woman’s death in a small town. Everyone pretty much knew who did it, but they couldn’t convict him because of lack of physical evidence. The documentary crew interviewed the victim’s parents, people in town – even the purported murderer himself.

I was getting incensed while I watched, as it did seem very obvious that he was, in fact, the killer. Yet, he was walking free. The internet was new in those days, and the documentary named the town, and the man who was the supposed killer. Huh… I thought to myself, if I really wanted to, I could probably go there, find him, and kill this guy.

Then I thought, I need to lay off cable.

But, a little voice in the back of my head asked… what if someone did?

Originally The Female of the Species was an adult thriller, but when I floated the concept and the proposal of turning it into a YA to my editor, he thought it sounded like a good bet. So, I dug out the old manuscript – absolutely thrilled because – it’s already done, right? I just need to age people down. Um… no. I was 15 years a better writer, which means that I looked at that old manuscript and… flinched. Also blushed a little. It’s not false modesty when I tell you that it was terrible. Nevertheless, I had the concept, and started from scratch.

After that came Given to the Sea and Given to the Earth, my fantasy series. What can I say about these? They are bizarre, high-fantasy, with deep world building and a complex plot involving magic, war, romance, politics and trees that can kill you and cats that will eat you. Given to the Sea has four POVs and Given to the Earth boasts SIX. Where did all of this come from? Easy answer…. My brain.

Hard answer – so many different sources.

Back when I was a child I was in love with a made-for-TV movie starring Anthony Andrews and Sam Neill, which was an adaptation of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. For whatever reason, my non-romantically inclined heart was drawn to the not-so-happy ending of the star-crossed lovers played by Sam Neil and Olivia Hussey. It stuck, and you might be able to see that reflected in all my writing, but most specifically in my fantasy series.

Given to the Sea and Given to the Earth draw from my interest in genetic diseases. Khosa’s urge to dance into the sea and drown herself was drawn from reading a book about Huntingdon’s disease called The Woman Who Walked Into the Sea. My interest in genetic memory greatly influenced the Indiri twins – But of course, I took it to the extreme, asking, what if we were born with fully functioning brains? What if not only that, but if we knew everything our parents knew, and their parents?

What else? My fantasy also touches upon global warming, the treatment of indigenous people, the insane, the disabled, and the generally unwanted. So many topics, so many elements of things I’m interested in became involved in this series to create a deeply layered world.

For this reason I can’t point to a single inspiration moment for my fantasy series, but rather a lifelong interest in a diversity of topics that came together to form this slightly bizarre – and I’ll admit, widely unread – series.

Lastly, my most recent release – This Darkness Mine – came about because of an internet search that wound up in weird places. I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of absorbed twins. We hear about them occasionally in books, movies, and real-life stories. But the truth is that fetal absorption happens more often than you think, and generally the surviving twin isn’t even aware of it.

This concept has always been a tenant in my mind, and one evening went down the rabbit hole of Wikipedia and somehow ended up learning about mirror therapy – the process through which phantom limb syndrome (the experience of pain or itching in a lost limb – is treated using an inverted image.

Hmm…. I rolled that around a bit. What if the “missing” piece of yourself was not a limb, but something more ephemeral. A soul… or an emotional heart? I checked to see if any of these ragged edges could possibly line up with that absorbed twin story I’d always been wanting to tell, then married it to another concept I’d been mulling awhile.

I worked in a public school for fourteen years, and the black and white of what is right and wrong that is ingrained in children from a very young age doesn’t leave much room for interpretation. In many ways, the healthy experimentation that marks a transition to adulthood could be looked upon as “bad.” What happens to the child who has always strived to be good, only to be pulled off course by totally naturally urges and curiosity?

What if “being good” is the only definition they have for themselves? What if this story piece fits into a larger picture that includes mirror therapy and absorbed twins?

It did fit, and the result was This Darkness Mine, my favorite review of which simply says – what the fuck did I just read?

You can see from my sharing here that most of my stories come from my natural curiosity drawing me to topics I find interesting, then stretching them out, pushing them a little by asking a very basic question … What if?

Up next – making the leap from fan fiction to your own creative worlds.

Fan fiction is a great way for writers to stretch their legs. Beginning writers don’t have to build a world, or even create their own characters. They can slide into a pre-written place, already populated with people whose personalities are established, and simply write their own plot and dialogue. It’s a great way for new writers to learn the ropes, and I know a lot of established writers who enjoy just jumping in and writing fan fiction for the fun of it.

When I was growing up fan fiction didn’t exist… but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t writing it. If a book I read had an ending I didn’t agree with, I made up my own. If there was a character I wanted to see more of, I gave them new places and plots to explore. Sidekicks have always been a great love of mine. The hero may not hold the attraction for me that they’re supposed to, but the one-liners from a supporting character usually had my heart. Very often I took characters I greatly enjoyed that I felt deserved more development, and I did just that.

This was fan-fiction before the term existed, and yes, most of mine revolved around My Little Ponies, She-Ra, and – I’ll admit this for my fellow children of the 90s – The Young Riders.

I was acquiring skills and learning how to plot, pace, write dialogue and dip into character development all without having to touch upon one of the scariest elements of writing – world building. To my mind, fan-fiction is a wonderful way to explore all of these skills before you dive off the deep end and make your own world.

A great way to transition is to ask yourself – what is this story missing?

Here’s an example. I used to watch The Walking Dead, but I stopped around season five because it was starting to bore me. It was dark, and it was dreary and it was a brutal, harsh world… right up alley, right? Yeah, totally. Except… that’s pretty much all it was doing. I tuned in every week knowing something really depressing, horrible, and graphic was going to happen and there would also probably be a monologue about how hard the world is now, and people have got to be hard to survive in it.

All true. All valid.

Also, kind of boring after five seasons.

If you remember the show LOST, this is something they circumvented by having lighter moments. You never knew if an individual episode was going to bring you romance, death, or laughter. Even the roughest episodes would have lighter moments, usually brought about by Hurley.

The Walking Dead, to me, needed a Hurley.

For those who write fan fiction and want to know how to transition over to your own worlds, I say, ask yourself what the show you love is missing, and then provide that. Build your character – let’s say, a Hurley for The Walking Dead – put them in a few Walking Dead situations and see what they do, how the react. Learn who they are.

Then, pull them out.

Give this character their own world, and their own story, entirely independent of the initial creation that you spawned them in. Build off this person you made to create the environment around them, and a plot will come.

I can’t say that any of my own fan-fiction-spawned characters are present in any of my published works because I never wrote anything down when I was a young writer. But I can say for sure that there’s a definite impact from The Young Riders and other westerns from the 90s in my work for both Not A Drop to Drink and In A Handful of Dust.

That leap into your own new worlds is a scary one. If you do it holding the hand of a character you made, it’ll at least be a little less lonely.

Do You #Nano?

Welcome to November. It’s National Novel Writing Month, known as NaNoWriMo, NaNo for short well… shorter. If you aren’t familiar with NaNo, it’s a writing challenge that takes place over the entire month, the idea being that if you write 1,667 words each day, you’ll have 50,000 by the end of November. Whether that’s an entire novel for you, the beginning of one, or the ending, it’s a heck of a challenge and a good lesson in powering through.

I wasn’t always a NaNo fan. I never liked the idea of being beholden to a word count that someone else set for me, or checking in with a website on a daily – or if I’m feeling particularly needy – hourly basis. I partially resented NaNo simply because it was something everyone else is doing, and I tend to be suspicious of things that other people like.

Then, in 2016, I needed to finish Given to the Earth. That’s my longest book, clocking in at nearly 100,000 words, and while I loved the story and was motivated to work on it, I knew my usual word count goal of 1000 a day wasn’t going to put me near my deadline. This book was a mammoth, and I felt like I was attacking it with a toothpick.

The Nano requirement of 1,667 words a day would push me to do more, and so, needing a boost, I signed up. The Nano site is free, easy to use, and offers more than just a word count accumulator. You can have writing buddies, check in with them for accountability, hop onto the forums if you need a break from your isolation, or even check out some pep talks from famous authors.

And while community is great, what I needed in 2016 wasn’t that. I’m a goal driven person, and suddenly I had something in front of me that appealed directly to that aspect of my personality. A progress bar. I’d get lost in what I was producing, take a quick assessment, then dump that number into Nano to watch my brown bar turn blue. It was rewarding, even on days that I struggled for a hour only to produce 200 words, that blue still crept forward, even if only minutely.

You “win” Nano by hitting the 50k word count goal by the end of the month. Winning means that you get a little rosette that says WINNER and weirdly, those pixels make you feel pretty awesome. I not only “won,” Nano, but finished Given to the Earth by writing a whopping 56,235 words that month. That’s an insane output, and I’m happy to say because of the nature of it being a sequel as well as already halfway finished when I began Nano, the first draft was fairly clean for being written at such a breakneck pace.

2017 found me in the same situation. I was promoting my newest release – This Darkness Mine – traveling, putting together this podcast, maintain the blog, and trying to hit a deadline for my upcoming book, Heroine. It was tight, it was tough. So I NaNo’d again. And while I did not “win” Nano – I only wrote 34,245 words that month – I did what I set out to do, using Nano to finish the manuscript and hit my due date.

This year is a little different. I’m not on deadline, or under contract. For the first time since 2010, I found myself working on a project that is just for me. It’s an adult historical novel with dual timelines, an audience jump for me. I don’t know if it will sell. I have no guarantees with this one – and I admit, that does take the motivation out of the project a little, as I write for a living now. But there is something freeing in writing only for myself, allowing time for experimentation and not beating myself up for every word I delete, and every minute I simply stare at the computer, not typing.

Okay, that’s a lie. I’m still definitely beating myself up about both those things.

But, returned to this new space of writing only for myself was weirdly intimidating, and I found motivation somewhat lacking. November 1st rolled around and I thought – why not?

I signed up on the first and promptly decided to defrost the deep freeze and make cinnamon rolls from scratch. These are not normal Mindy activities. This is called procrastination. I didn’t write a word on November 1st, which mean that my goal to catch up on the 2nd was over 3000 words. That’s a lot for one day.

I chipped away at it, got it knocked down a bit, went to a book festival on the 3rd where I peddled my wares all day, drove home, and sat in front of my computer to face a blinking cursor and a feeling of failure. I was back at needed to put in around 3 thousand words, actually more like 3 thousand three hundred. It was 8 pm. It felt insurmountable. So I wrote a little bit, and plugged it into my progress bar. It was about 200 words.

They were good words, but there were only 200 of them. I stared at the last sentence, unhappy with it. Here it is :

Her panic was tame; what was passing through the crowd gathered in front of the Archer’s Ferry schoolhouse was a wild cousin, its presence made known not through frantic movement or rippling screams, but rather a stillness of limbs and silenced voices, paired with questioning eyes that asked each other – what do we do?

Wait – does that sound like that’s my left eyes asking MY right eye what do we do? Or is it my eyes asking someone else’s eyes, what do we do? I flicked my pen up and down for a minute, then carried the laptop into the kitchen and read it to the boyfriend, followed by my question about pairs of eyes or individual eyes.

He looked at me over his coffee and said – maybe you’re over thinking this?

It was a valid question, but I still didn’t have an answer so I texted my extremely reliable critique partner RC Lewis with my query. She replied within a minute – I read it right the first time. You’re overthinking.

Yep. I was. Instead of plowing forward I was overanalyzing what little I’d done, picking away at what I’d produced – which wasn’t pushing that blue bar any further ahead. This is also called procrastination, by the way.

Fine.

FINE.

I took my laptop upstairs and laid down in bed – my preferred writing spot – and gave myself a pep talk you probably won’t find on the Nano site: Mindy, write some fucking words.

So I did. I wrote in the spirit of Nano, plowing forward in what I have always called a word vomit – just letting it all come out. Not editing, not staring, not over thinking. Just writing. It was 1 AM by the time I finished, but I did make up the deficit to hit my goal, a total accumulation of 5 thousand words in the first 3 days of November.

In fact, I’d like to brag a little and say my actual count at the moment is 5 thousand and twelve.

I had two somewhat related questions come from listeners last month. One asking, how do authors stay motivated throughout a book, not getting discouraged by rational thoughts? How do you power through? And the other stating: Sometimes reading too much on craft stunts my creative process and I worry too much that it’s all shit.

First of all – me too. Seriously. I absolutely read what I wrote the day or hour before and believe that it his horrible, unpublishable dreck. I’m usually typing away at something and shaking my head at the same time, because I think it sucks.

It’s true. I’ve got eight published novels and receive complimentary emails and tweets and have fans tell me to my face I’m their favorite author and guys – it just doesn’t matter. Whatever I’m creating right now is going to be the book that reveals me as a fraud and a hack. I have no confidence when I’m creating, so if you’re in the same place – congratulations. You’re a writer.

Every good writer I know thinks they are terrible.

Every writer I’ve ever met who thinks they are gifted is… not.

If you’re bored, Google the Dunning-Kruger effect.

But to answer the first question – how do you power through?

First of all, recall my moment this week when I was analyzing a handful of words, wondering if they indicated that one eye was questioning the other, or a pair of eyes questioning someone else’s eyes. That’s editing. In fact, that might even be copy-editing. It’s not actually writing. Now – don’t get me wrong, editing IS writing, but I’m talking about the actual act of getting something down, producing a first draft that you can go back and fix. I needed to move my characters forward, give them something to say or do, instead of – literally – stranding them just staring at each other.

One of my favorite quotes from this podcast has been in an interview with middle grade author Liesl Shurtliff who said – “I can’t edit nothing.” Truth. Stop those rational thoughts while you’re drafting. Get the words OUT before you question them. Move on. Move forward. That little blue bar on the Nano site will motivate you to charge ahead, instead of look back.

The first draft is not a time for rational, analytical thought. Earlier I called it a word vomit. I mean that. Think of the actual physical act of vomiting. You are incapable of thought at the moment, you have one goal and one purpose – GET IT OUT. You’ll clean it up later, right? You’re not cleaning it up while you’re still puking, are you? Nope.

Yes, I’m disgusting.

Yes, it also works.

People often ask me about my process and I’m often at a loss to describe it beyond that really horrible graphic notion of vomiting out words. I sit in front of my computer and try to move what’s inside of me – out. That’s my process. I know it’s a simplification, but I don’t know how else to describe it.

Will you find the term word vomit in a book about craft. No. Does it work? Yes.

To address the second listeners thought on craft stunting her creative process – yeah, I get that. I can’t even tell you for sure what craft actually means. To me, it sounds a bit stuffy, a term used to make some of us feel accomplished, while make others feel inadequate.

I feel inadequate when craft comes up.

I once had a friend who writes adult literary novels tell me I could teach a class on structure. I told her I couldn’t, because I don’t actually know what it is.

That’s the truth. I’ve never taken a writing class in my life. Seriously. Not a single one. Not in high school, not in college, not as an adult or at writer’s conferences. I majored in English literature studying what others have written – not creating my own.

However, that study – and a lifetime of consuming stories, novels, plays, movies and television – had taught me structure. I absorbed it subconsciously as a viewer, and it shows in my writing.

Craft is an intimidating word, and I urge you not to think about it too much. Write your story, see what comes out of you. Fearing that you aren’t good enough will follow you no matter what, so set that aside as well. Inadequacy will dog your heels whether you’re a high school drop out of have an MFA – trust me, I know writers in both those situations and they’re both really, really good. And neither of them believes it.

Trust your gut. Trust your instinct. Write what’s inside you.

Just get it out.

Writing In English When It's Not Your Native Language

On today's episode of the podcast I address a question from a listener about tackling the difficulties of writing in your non-native language. Listen in, or if you prefer, read below.

I received an email from a listener who is struggling to move forward with her work in progress. Part of the reason for this is that English is not her native language. “Just the idea of me writing a book feels laughable, like a huge cosmic joke.” However, she states, “I mainly only read in English, therefore it feels natural to daydream and put words on paper in that language.”

While this has never been an issue for me – I am, sadly, a monolingual Midwesterner – I can empathize with the struggle of writing – not to mention publishing – being compounded by the problem of not creating in your native language. It’s an interesting question, and one I took to Twitter for some answers.

But first, I want to add that the idea of you – or anyone else – writing a novel is not laughable. The drive is within you, therefore it is a real possibility. Also, the fact that you are naturally daydreaming in English and bringing words to paper in that language is a good sign. The current state of publishing in the United States does for the most part require that your manuscript be in English.

Now, for some more specific advice, I’ll take you to some of the responses that came from bi-lingual authors on Twitter, as well as a translator.

A native French speaker who prefers to read fantasy and SciFi in English and therefore – as noted by my listener as well – chooses to write in that same language. A German speaker on Twitter agreed, saying, “short stories are fine, but my attempt to write an English novel turned out to be quite hard. The language is missing a variety and a certain deepness. Also, progress is much slower than usual.” He adds that the specific struggles when writing in his non-native language are “word order, common expressions to native speakers, and odd rhythm from your own language.”

The French writer adds, “my grammatical writing is much better in French, but the English language is more malleable.” Adding, “also, the audience is larger in English. Odds are, if one can write a good book in English that the book will reach a wider audience than in French.”

And that’s the rub, isn’t it? Books in English are going to reach a wider audience, and – if you’re trying to publish in the United States – many agents only accept manuscripts in English.

Which brought me to the question of translation. Can a writer go the route of writing in their original language, and have it translated before attempting publication? Or, is too much of the original nuance, voice, and meaning lost in that move?

Janet Sumner Johnson, a MG author and translator addressed this saying, “I do my best to maintain voice when I translate, but inevitably, some of that is lost, and some of my voice seeps in.” She adds, “if you can reasonably hack the English, I would go that direction.”

The French writer adds, “Nuances and choice of words are lost during translation."

Through the course of this conversation on Twitter, YA author and native Russian speaker Katya de Becerra shared with me an article she wrote for YA Interrobang titled, “How Do Bilingual Authors Choose to Write Their Stories?” which I will be quoting from below and linking to in the episode credits.

Katya says, “Every aspect of my writing is influenced by my bilingualism; the way I structure sentences, how I describe things, metaphors I’m more likely to use, etc. Even thematically, in my novel What the Woods Keep the theme of a lost / forgotten language emerged as a sub-theme of its own, and totally unexpected.”

Katya continues in her article, noting a “deep seated worry that I’d somehow be “outed” as a fraud, once agents and publishers discovered that English wasn’t my first language. While this didn’t happen, my editors did comment on my at times unusual uses of language—things like sentence structuring or odd adjective choices—which made me wonder for the first time exactly how my bilingualism influenced my process.”

Katya brought this question to her fellow bilingual and multi-lingual 2018 debuts, among them Kristina Perez, author of Sweet Black Waves who grew up speaking three languages and as an adult added another six. Kristina says, “I also imbue my characters with own experience of switching between languages and how that affects their personalities and relationships. We articulate our identities through language and as languages change, so do we.”

Kelly Yang, author of Front Desk, is an English – Chinese speaker who states in Katya’s article that, “One of the things I struggled with as a bilingual writer is this fear that I may not be as good in either language. I wrote Front Desk to try to dispel this fear. I hope that when bilingual kids see more examples of writers making it in their adopted language that they’ll feel empowered to embrace their bilingualism and not be ashamed of it, because to know more languages is a beautiful thing!”

I hope these perspectives help lend some confidence to my bi-lingual listeners. Check out Katya de Becerra’s article How Do Bilingual Authors Choose to Write Their Stories? On YA Interrobang for more quotes and advice from authors writing in their non-native language.

As always, if you have a suggestion for something you’d like me to address dealing with writing, publishing, or questions for me in general – feel free to ask! Email me at Mindy@MindyMcGinnis.com or ask me on Twitter!