By Faran Fagen
I recently showed a MasterClass to my students from Michael Lewis, the author of Moneyball and The Blind Side (both made into popular movies).
As the video rolled, I was reminded of how profound his writing advice is and realized a lot of his advice could apply to middle grade novels.
Here are some of the highlights of his master class and how they apply to our craft:
Lewis focuses on finding your voice, developing an idea, creating characters, structuring a narrative, hooking the audience, simplifying complexity, and crafting strong beginnings and endings. Sounds familiar?
Lewis’s central question is essentially: What is the story here?
He’s especially good at taking subjects that sound complicated or dull—finance, statistics, economics—and finding the surprising human story inside them. His MasterClass specifically teaches how to “make anything interesting.”
One of my favorite Middle Grade writers is Donna Gephart, and she’s an expert on making ordinary things interesting, such as toilet paper or a trivia contest. The same can be said of Nicole Melleby or Jason Reynolds, who bases one book on a thrilling elevator ride in Long Way Down.
Lewis emphasizes character and uses real people in his own books as the engines of his narratives. MasterClass’s description of the course specifically includes developing characters and building a story around them.
Some of the questions Lewis poses: Who wants something badly? Why can’t they have it? What are they afraid will happen? What terrible choice might they make? What will they learn about themselves?
Lewis teaches the importance of hooking an audience and controlling the story from beginning to end. A middle-grade reader doesn’t need constant explosions. They need questions people care about.
One of Lewis’s strengths is relating to the reader. That’s particularly useful for MG writers. You can have sophisticated ideas in a middle-grade novel—grief, inequality, family divorce, identity, friendship, injustice—but the storytelling needs to remain accessible.
Extending Lewis’s message, you want your middle grade reader to understand what the character wants, what stands in the way, and why it matters.
He also said don’t be afraid of the messy first draft. Draft first. Diagnose later. Don’t stop Chapter 7 because Chapter 3 isn’t perfect.
For MG (or any genre really), every chapter should create some version of: pacing, character motivation, missing scenes, exposition, chapter endings, voice during revision.
The Michael Lewis formula I’d give an MG writer:
My Child:
Who is the protagonist?
They want:
What does the protagonist desperately want?
But:
What’s stopping them?
Because:
Why does this matter so much?
Then:
What unexpected thing happens?
So:
What does the protagonist do about it?
Which makes:
How does that decision make things worse?
Until:
What’s the biggest crisis?
Finally:
What choice does the protagonist make?
And afterward:
How has the protagonist changed?
That gets very close to the practical heart of Lewis’s approach: find the compelling human story, build it around memorable characters, create momentum, simplify the complicated parts, and make the reader care what happens next. Happy writing!
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