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Writing Across Age Bands – A Conversation with Author Julie Buxbaum

By Ines Lozano on July 14, 2023 / Articles

writing across age bands, author Julie Buxbaum's young adult novel Tell Me Three Things on a table outside

I will forever fangirl over Julie Buxbaum. My love for her work began in July of 2016. This picture was the start of my love affair with stories crafted by Julie. And on that day, her work sparked the inspiration that sent me on my writing journey. Her skillful abilities in writing across age bands helped unbox my dreams of writing books for children of all ages.

Julie Buxbaum is the New York Times best-selling author of Tell Me Three Things, her young adult debut, What to Say Next, Hope and Other Punchlines, and most recently, the very popular middle-grade series The Area 51 Files. She’s also the author of two critically acclaimed novels for adults: The Opposite of Love and After You. Her work has been translated into twenty-five languages. Julie’s writing has appeared in various publications, including The New York Times. She’s a former lawyer and a graduate of Harvard Law School. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, two children, and more books than is reasonable.

Your debut and sophomore books were both critically acclaimed adult novels. They were followed by your incredibly successful young adult books that include NYT bestselling novels Tell Me Three Things (my favorite YA of all time) and What To Say Next. In 2022, you again expanded your readership’s age band with the release of the first book in The Area 51 Files series for middle-grade readers. Did you start your writing career aware that you would be writing across age bands?

Nope. I never expected to write across age ranges or genres. When I first started out, I couldn’t think beyond the first book. I didn’t even let myself imagine that writing would become my long-term career. But over the past sixteen or seventeen years that I’ve been doing this, my life, and who I am as a person, have fundamentally changed, and so it feels natural and organic that my interests keep shifting. At the moment, my son is a middle-grade reader and I very much wanted to write a series for him. He’s the reason I ended up turning to The Area 51 Files.

Your popularity transcends generations, something that is not easy to achieve. Will we soon see your name on the shelves for early readers?

Thank you! I would love to write a picture book! No plans for one at the moment, but you never know when inspiration will strike. I do have an idea that has been percolating for years, but I’ve never been able to crack it.

You’ve proven that writers do not have to confine themselves to any genre or age group to find success. For the writer out there reading this, looking for advice on crossing readership age brackets, what is one thing that you’ve learned that surprised you the most about writing across age bands and categories?

Writing is writing. I find it is equally hard to write for young people as it is to write for sophisticated adults. On the other hand, it’s also equally fun! Each genre requires me to lean on a slightly different skill set, and I find my instinct sort of guides me toward what I’m best equipped to write at the time.

For example, during the height of the pandemic, I wasn’t in the right mind space to dig into serious material, so I wrote The Area 51 Files, which was pure joy. My YA and adult editors would have never let me get away with so many fart jokes! And it was just what I needed to help me get through what was otherwise a not-so-happy time. Which is to say, I think it’s helpful for writers to be adaptable and responsive to their own needs when deciding what they want to work on.

Regardless of the characters’ age, wit and humor are consistently present in your writing. My favorite thing in your stories is the clever banter within the dialogue. Do you have any tips for writers transitioning from writing teen or adult characters to exploring middle-grade novel ideas?

I approach my MG much like I imagine Pixar writers approach their movies. That is with the idea that I’m writing for two audiences at once. I’m writing directly to the middle-grade reader who may be reading on their own before bedtime—and I want my book to be a delicious, funny, adventurous delight for them. But I’m also writing to the parent whose lap they may possibly be sitting on.

So I try to have my humor work on multiple levels. My MG books are 95% jokes that kids will hopefully find hilarious, and then there are maybe 5% written as a wink for the grown-ups. Also, I think it helps to remember that kids are so freakin’ funny, and so they are always down for a good joke. No one makes me laugh as much as my ten and thirteen-year-old kids. They have perfect comic timing.

Also, this might sound like conflicting advice, but I think it’s super important never to write down to your audience. Kids these days are smart and sophisticated. At the same time, especially when writing middle grade, it’s important to always remember your readership and be mindful of their need for movement in the text to keep them engaged. You need to consistently be turning the dial up on every front because it’s hard to compete with the X-box!

To those that aren’t writers, it can seem like things come easy to successful authors such as yourself. After having written for teens and adults, did doubt ever enter your mind while drafting your middle-grade novels?

I doubt myself with every single book! After I wrote The Opposite of Love and After You (both adult novels), I spent two years working on a novel that will forever live in a drawer. You never know what’s going to work until it works (or in some cases doesn’t). Each time I sit down to write a new project, it feels like starting all over again, because each idea is fundamentally different and its own animal. That’s both my favorite and least favorite thing about being a writer. It’s always exciting and challenging, but it never gets easy. I’ve just gotten used to doubt being baked into the process.

Parents are never supposed to admit which child is their favorite. **I suppose the same may be said of authors and their book babies, but, (IL lowers her voice to a whisper), do you have a favorite between writing adult, young adult, or middle-grade novels?**

Honestly, I love them all! I find what I like writing the most has way more to do with where I am in my life, than the genres themselves. When the world shut down, writing middle grade felt like getting to go outside and play and laugh. At the moment, I’m working on middle grade and adult at the same time, because my brain and life have a little more room to breathe. Both feed different parts of my soul, so right now, it’s like asking me to pick between chocolate and coffee. I can’t live without either.

((If you enjoyed Writing Across Age Bands – A Conversation with Julie Buxbaum, you’ll love this piece.))

Want to Buy the Book?

You can find all of Julie’s books here

https://www.juliebuxbaum.com/books.

To buy The Area 51 Files for your middle grader, click here (

https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-area-51-files-julie-buxbaum/18234858?ean=9780593429464)

And pre-order the next in the series here

(https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-big-flush-julie-buxbaum/18993218?ean=9780593429501.)

What Does AI Mean for Middle Grade?

By Susan Koehler on July 13, 2023 / Oh MG News

Everywhere you turn in the news these days, you’re hearing about artificial intelligence, more commonly referred to as AI. What is it that prompts both excitement and apprehension, and just how does this tech news affect authors, illustrators, and readers of middle-grade works?

If you find yourself asking these questions, read on. There’s plenty of AI news on the middle grade front, and multiple organizations are speaking out.

SCBWI

Back in December of 2022, the official blog of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators published a two-part series titled “The Troubling Ethics of Artificial Intelligence and How It Impacts Children’s Book Creators.”

Part I covered issues for illustrators, like the potential for AI systems to study a wealth of existing artwork, learn patterns within them, and “create” something new from what the system has learned.

Natural questions arise. Can this be termed as “stealing” from existing creators? On one hand, it looks new. What’s the difference between a tech tool borrowing from existing patterns and an artist being inspired by them? But on the other hand, the product is not new and original. The “creation” is generated from the images that have been programmed into it.

The same issues exist for authors, as detailed in SCBWI’s Part II of the series. At issue is the fact that AI systems like the highly popular Chat GPT and a growing number of similar resources, are producing text at a wildly accelerated rate.

These systems can generate a story or a nonfiction piece about a particular topic for a target demographic at a specified word length. Just give it the specs, and watch it “create.” But can you really call it “creating”?

How Does AI Work?

Text generated by AI systems pulls from the language patterns, information, and ideas of existing works. Technically speaking, it’s not creating new work – it’s regenerating data points from established work in a whole new way.

This capability is sending up red flags for authors and illustrators. What qualifies copyright infringement in this strange new world? How likely is it that the publishing industry might succumb to the potential for big returns on small investments?

And what might all this mean for readers? When text and illustrations are being generated from patterns and data points gleaned from existing works, there is no creativity. No human perspective. No potential for something new and wonderful that speaks to the soul and enlightens the mind.

The SCBWI blog posts refer readers to the questions that are already on the minds of the folks at The Authors Guild, so let’s go there next.

The Authors Guild

Back in October of 2022, The Authors Guild posted a cautionary article by Mary Rasenberger entitled “How Will Authorship Be Defined in an AI Future?”

One major concern presented in this piece is fair compensation for creators. The Authors Guild is actively advocating for changes to copyright laws that will prevent AI from taking over the market for written works.

Rasenberger presents a list of ways AI has already been used in journalism, corporate texts, and literature. She cites two examples of AI achievements that are more than moderately concerning. An AI-generated novel was a finalist for a Japanese literary award, and there was an AI-generated article about the harmless nature of AI published in The Guardian.

Rasenberger goes on to explain that AI is not actually “creating”; it is auto-generating texts and images using existing works that have been programmed into it. She argues that copyright laws need to adjust for AI infringements, and she details a list of concerns that need to be addressed.

However, the author also concludes that she does not foresee AI being able to replace true art. Human art reflects the very real experiences and emotions of its time and place. And that cannot be generated from existing works. In Rasenberger’s words, “I think we can all agree that a world without the arts, which help move us forward as a society, is not one that we aspire to.”

MLA and NCTE

In July 2023, a joint task force of the Modern Language Association and the Conference on College Composition and Communication (a chartered conference of the National Council of Teachers of English) issued a statement about writing and AI in which they discuss both the risks and the benefits of AI. It’s a working paper, so comments are open and a final version is forthcoming.

This working statement “makes principle-driven recommendations for how educators, administrators, and policy makers can work together to develop ethical, mission-driven policies and support broad development of critical AI literacy.” In other words, there may be dangers, but AI isn’t going anywhere, so how can we make this work?

In the introduction, the statement is made that “writing describes a process as well as a product.” This is an important premise to consider. The labor involved in creating should be acknowledged and compensated appropriately, and students of writing need to learn their craft by going through the process of writing.

The paper goes on to define “broad risks and potential benefits of artificial intelligence to language, literary, and writing scholarship and instruction.” For example, while we need to guard against AI resources infringing on copyright and supplanting actual authors and illustrators, we can safely acknowledge the benefit of AI in brainstorming and gathering ideas.

Conclusions

It’s hard to derive real conclusions from all the AI information out there right now because this is just the dawn of the age. However, it’s safe to say that AI is here to stay, and creators as well as consumers of middle grade literature need to be aware of both its positive and its negative potential.

Does AI have the potential to eliminate human creators from the equation? No, it does not. Regenerating text and images from what already exists does not move the world forward. AI will never have the capacity to think, feel, empathize, and imagine.

AI can help us see with new eyes what is already in existence. But it cannot truly create. In the wise words of Albert Einstein, “Creativity is seeing what others see and thinking what no one else ever thought.”

Keep seeing. Keep thinking. Keep creating.

Interview & Giveaway With Author Toni Buzzeo

By Mindy Alyse Weiss on July 13, 2023 / Author Interviews, Giveaways

I’m thrilled to welcome middle-grade and picture book author Toni Buzzeo to the Mixed-Up Files. Congrats on your debut MG, Toni. I’m happy dancing that it’s been chosen as a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection. That’s fantastic! What inspired you to write Light Comes to Shadow Mountain?

I am thrilled to qualify at long last for MUF with my first MG novel!

As for inspiration, you’ll read in my Author’s Note that I had encountered two essential books. The first was Mary on Horseback by Rosemary Wells. I fell in love with that lyrical book with its musical language and stories based on the life of nurse-midwife Mary Breckinridge. I learned about the important work that Mary did in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky establishing the Frontier Nursing Service to bring medical services to those mountains and went on to do much more reading and research.

Then, three years later, Kathi Appelt and Jeanne Cannella Schmitzer published Down Cut Shin Creek, about the intrepid librarians of the Pack Horse Library Project who delivered books to the homes and one-room schoolhouses scattered across those same mountains. Both the FNS and the PHLP were in operation at the same time in the same place!

Add in the fact that in 2011, I learned that the mountains of Eastern Kentucky were dark, without electricity until 1937, and I knew I had the makings of a powerful story. However, what I didn’t know was that the story I wrote—a picture book—needed a lot more words and space to tell it properly.

I’m so glad you expanded it into this amazing novel. After having 31 picture books published, what was it like writing your debut MG? Are there picture book skills that helped, or ones you had to push aside while writing this?

Economy of words, a skill I’d employed over the course of 31 picture books, was a skill I had to push aside. Many of my editor’s early notes and line-edits challenged me to expand on description. I had learned, especially as picture book texts became ever-shorter over the last two decades, that one should scorn the paragraph and use a sentence instead, scorn the sentence and employ a carefully crafted phrase, scorn the phrase and find a single word if you could!

Perhaps the most important skill that I did bring along from picture books to the MG novel was the use of lyrical language. I started my writing life as a teenage poet and the drive to employ poetic language has never left me. Given the MUCH broader canvas of a novel, I was able to employ so much more of it in telling this story. My favorites were similes, metaphors, and personification. I had to assume that most of my readers weren’t familiar with my setting, but I enjoyed sharing the minute details of that setting in this way.

A couple of my favorite similes from the novel:

“Now, our beechnut isn’t a practical tree to climb—silver bark as smooth as river rocks and no low-slung branches like the others nearby.” (Chapter One: In the News)

He [Pap] holds my gaze. “I think you’re near old enough to understand this, Cora. Your mommy is in a mighty struggle with a demon as fierce as that giant catfish folks say pulls people underwater.” (Chapter Four: Mommy Has a Day)

A couple of my favorite metaphors from the novel:

“I chew on Glenna’s words for a silent moment, trying to separate out electricity from Glenna’s description of a crowded, busy city.” (Chapter Eleven: Ready for the Bee)

“Cora Mae Tipton, the heroine of the day,” Pap says as I fling myself into his arms. “I hear you and Stormy flew down the mountain with the wings of Pegasus to save your sister!” (Chapter Thirty-Eight: The Interview)

And here are two of my favorite uses of personification, both from Chapter Eight: Pies, Pies, Pies:

“On the way down the path after school, the reds of the sourwood and sumac shout their glory.”

“It was the very isolation and the quiet darkness of Shadow Mountain that called to our Scots-Irish ancestors, Cora Tipton.”

I love these so much, Toni! Your language absolutely sings.

What tips do you have for people writing MG for the first time?

For me, the most important practice was immersion in the world of the novel. I read only books set in my geographic landscape (Eastern Kentucky) during the period of time I was writing about (the late-1930s). I watched (and watched and watched) films and shorter documentaries about the area. I sought out photographs from the area, especially portraits of individuals and families. I listened to so many interviews of people who had lived a childhood like Cora’s young life themselves. I mined all of those sources, not just for the volumes of notes I took, but for the bonus it gave me—a sense that I, too, was inhabiting Cora’s world.

I also learned a lot from three of my mentors, Donald Maass, Lorin Oberweger, and Brenda Windberg at the Breakout Novel Intensive (BONI) and the Breakout Novel Graduate Learning Retreat.

The most helpful craft book I read and employed was James Scott Bell’s Write Your Novel from the Middle: A New Approach for Plotters, Pantsers, and Everyone in Between, recommended by my friend, novelist Dorian Cirrone, my chief plot brainstormer and multiple-draft reader.

And perhaps most importantly, I’d advise you to join a critique group of really smart, really dedicated, really talented writers. I’m lucky enough to have two groups. (If you peek into the acknowledgements in my novel, you will see the members of both groups named.) To employ an overused phrase, it really does take a village!

Yes! It definitely takes a village. And having trusted critique groups and mentors is a huge help. I’ve heard amazing things about the Breakout Novel events. And I absolutely love the Writing The Breakout Novel Workbook by Donald Maass. It’s helped me have so many amazing ‘aha’ moments.

How did you make Cora’s world so vivid? The neighborhood map is helpful and gave me a glimpse of the setting immediately. Did you use a map or other methods while drafting and revising?

Well, as I’ve said, I dug deeply into details of the place. What animals lived there? What was the weather like? What were the most beautiful aspects of the geography? What were the harsh geographic challenges? And for so many scenes, I worked to imbue them with these details (often expressed lyrically as you’ve seen).

As to that wonderful map, no, I didn’t work from a paper map of Shadow Mountain and Spruce Lick. It was 100% in my mind. I did, however, know every inch of that mountain. So when Kelly, my editor, asked if she could draw the first draft of the map (it was eventually rendered by the cover illustrator, David Dean), I said sure. But honestly, I think the story did such a good job of describing the place that Kelly’s hand-drawn map got it almost entirely right—just as I’d pictured it in my mind.

Can you share a writing exercise with everyone?

Picture the main character of your picture book or novel. What pose are you seeing them in? Get a clear picture of them–standing, seated, reclining–and imagine the position of each of their limbs, of their hands, of their feet. What does this pose, with its details, reveal to you about their core personality? Now ask yourself how this core trait will be/is revealed in your story. How will that trait play out in the outer story arc (external journey) and inner story arc (internal journey)?

I love this, Toni! I’ve never seen this exercise before, and will definitely use it on my novels and picture book main characters in the future. Thank you!

Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know?

I write in a fairytale writing cottage that my late husband Ken built for me when we lived in Maine. I moved to Massachusetts after his death, but I brought the cottage with me and did much of the work on Light Comes to Shadow Mountain right in that cottage. There’s even a video of it being built on my website.

I’m currently working on my second MG novel. It’s a Colonial time-travel novel set in contemporary Maine and 1770 Maine Territory, Massachusetts, on the cusp of the Revolutionary War. I wrote the first draft 37 years ago when I really didn’t know a thing about writing a novel. Now I hope to employ my mad skills and those of my brilliant editor to bring it to print!

Your fairytale writing cottage looks amazing! I’m so glad you were able to bring it with you to Massachusetts. Your second MG sounds fantastic. I hope it will be out in the world soon.

Thank you so much for stopping by the Mixed-Up Files—and for your generous book giveaway. One lucky reader will win a copy of Light Comes to Shadow Mountain. U.S. only. Enter the Rafflecopter below.

It’s 1937 and the government is pushing to bring electricity to the mountains of southeastern Kentucky. It’s all Cora can think of; radios with news from around the world, machines that keep food cold, lightbulbs by which to read at night! Cora figures she can help spread the word by starting a school newspaper and convincing her neighbors to support the Rural Electrification Act.

But resistance to change isn’t easy to overcome, especially when it starts at home. Cora’s mother is a fierce opponent of electrification. She argues that protecting the landscape of the holler—the trees, the streams, the land that provides for their way of life—is their responsibility. But Cora just can’t let go of wanting more.

Lyrical, literary, and deeply heartfelt, this debut novel from an award-winning author-librarian speaks to family, friendship, and loss through the spirited perspective of a girl eager for an electrified existence, but most of all, the light of her mother’s love and acceptance.

*A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection

a Rafflecopter giveaway

The winner will be shown here and contacted on Thursday, July 20. Good luck. 😊

Toni Buzzeo is a New York Times bestselling children’s author of thirty-one picture books and board books, and her first middle grade novel, Light Comes to Shadow Mountain, a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard selection. A former librarian and writing teacher, Toni and her books have won many awards, including a 2013 Caldecott Honor for One Cool Friend, illustrated by David Small. Her fictional characters sing with her deep understanding of human emotion. Endlessly enthusiastic, Toni draws on her career experiences as a school librarian in crafting her books and speaking with young audiences in schools and libraries. Toni lives in Arlington, Massachusetts just downstairs from her two lovable grandchildren (endless sources of inspiration!).

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Writing Across Age Bands – A Conversation with Author Julie Buxbaum

Your popularity transcends generations, something that is not easy to achieve. Will we soon see your name on the shelves for early readers?

Regardless of the characters’ age, wit and humor are consistently present in your writing. My favorite thing in your stories is the clever banter within the dialogue. Do you have any tips for writers transitioning from writing teen or adult characters to exploring middle-grade novel ideas?

To those that aren’t writers, it can seem like things come easy to successful authors such as yourself. After having written for teens and adults, did doubt ever enter your mind while drafting your middle-grade novels?