Instant #1 NYT bestseller! Jennifer Lynn Barnes, THE GRANDEST GAME
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[0:38]Thanks for listening. Jennifer Lynn Barnes is the author of The Grandest Game, which, by the way, hit number one in the young adult, New York Times bestseller list, instant bestseller, congratulations.
[0:53]Jen is the author of more than a dozen critically acclaimed young adult novels.
[0:57]She has advanced degrees in psychology, psychiatry, and cognitive science, including graduate degrees from Cambridge University,
[1:03]where she was a Fulbright scholar, and Yale University, where she received her PhD in 2012.
[1:08]Jen wrote her first published novel when she was 19 years old and sold her first five books while still in college.
[1:15]In addition to writing YA novels, Jen has also written original pilot scripts for television networks like USA and MTV,
[1:21]and she is one of the world's leading experts on the psychology of fandom and the cognitive science of fiction,
[1:28]and the imagination, more broadly. Jen is an associate professor at the University of Oklahoma, where she holds a dual appointment in psychology and professional writing.
[1:37]Welcome, Jennifer. Thanks so much for coming on Momstone. Have time to read books to discuss The Grandest Game and your whole career and everything else. We decided to talk about it.
[1:46]Why? I'm so excited to be here.
[1:49]Oh, yay. Well, congratulations on The Grandest Game. I had so much fun diving in and getting to know your characters and all of that.
[1:58]Just super interesting. It's not the type of book I normally read.
[2:02]And now I'm like, why do I not read these types of books? Like, what is wrong with me?
[2:05]I don't know why. I'm like reading memoirs about people dying all the time. But anyway, so I'm so excited to read it.
[2:12]These books like almost no one, but my editor and my mom really publication day.
[2:17]So like, you're pretty much other than my mother. And my dad is like halfway through.
[2:23]So you're the first person I've gotten to talk to who's actually.
[2:27]Oh, my gosh. Wow. Oh, my gosh. Well, that's, I'm hugely honored. So thank you for that.
[2:36]Okay. Well, tell listeners about The Grandest Game, but also back up and talk about everything off of her and all of it.
[2:42]Like, just go into the whole thing for people who do.
[2:45]So we started with a series called The Inheritance Games, which was about an eccentric puzzle obsessed billionaire who dies and leaves his entire like $40 billion fortune to a teenage girl he's never met.
[2:58]And that girl who's the protagonist of the book has no idea why to the best of her election.
[3:04]Never even met this guy. But to inherit the money she has to move into his sprawling secret passage filled mansion and live alongside the family he just isn't here did for a year.
[3:16]And that includes his four very magnetic, very charming, very attractive brand sons, at least one of whom thinks she's the enemy.
[3:26]And a con woman and another one thinks she's the grandfather's last puzzle to be solved and the original trilogy there was a love triangle with those two brothers.
[3:36]And so there was an original trilogy there's a sequel to that trilogy called The Brothers Hawthorne and the brothers Hawthorne is also a prequel to The Grandest Game, which is kind of the next phase of storytelling in this world.
[3:50]The original trilogy the core mystery was why did billionaire Tobias Hawthorne leave Avery all her money so their individual mysteries in each books there is danger and twists and turns and reveals going back generations and both families.
[4:06]And this game is coming in with three characters who are somewhat new to the world. They were all introduced in brothers Hawthorne but just as very secondary kind of characters and they're taking center stage because now it's a book about an eccentric billionaire again.
[4:21]The eccentric billionaire is Avery Graham's my protagonist from the first book she is 17 when she inherits she's 20 at the start of the grandest game.
[4:30]And she has had this like tremendous experience over the course of the inheritance games one coming into all this money before she was living in her car and trying to plan for college and then all of a sudden she's the richest.
[4:44]And one of the richest women in the world and it's as she comes into this new life but it's also this world sort of steeped in puzzles and riddles and games because that is how the old man raised his four crayonsons.
[4:57]And after he's death his death he's left all these games for them to play that sort of lead them to answers about why he might have chosen Avery.
[5:06]And at one point in the original trilogy one of the brothers kind of is having this discussion with Avery about the games because the grandfather used to play these games where you go puzzle to puzzle to clue to clue like them with them every Saturday morning just like is another way of pushing them and making them extraordinary.
[5:23]Avery and is talking one of the brothers and he tells her like the point of the game was never to make us extraordinary the point of the game was to show us that we already were.
[5:33]And to stoke this competition and Avery over the course of playing all of these games and coming into this fortune and she's gone through kind of like her origin story to become this powerful and very very wealthy woman.
[5:45]And she wants to give that experience to other people so in the grandest game there's an eccentric billionaire who's 20 year old Avery grams.
[5:53]And she has set up a game called the grandest game which is a chance to win life changing amounts of money so something more like 20 million dollars.
[6:04]And it's the same kind of game that the old billionaire Tobias Hawthorne like to play that he raised his son's playing and that Avery and in particular one of the other brothers named Jameson loves these kinds of games and loves designing them.
[6:18]So they build these grand sprawling competitions that look different every year so we're coming in for the grandest game for the second annual grandest game.
[6:28]Last is the clue anyone in the world can play takes you across the globe their private jets flying everyone from puzzle to puzzle if they are one of the first ones to solve it.
[6:39]Second annual grandest game is a more intimate affair so it starts up and there are four wild card tickets hidden somewhere in the United States there's one clue released to them so whichever four players find those tickets first get into the game and then there are three players of Avery's choosing.
[6:56]And so over the course of the book we follow three protagonists who are all playing the game.
[7:01]There is Gigi who is the younger half sister of one of the Hawthorne brothers who we have met just in brothers Hawthorne and she's kind of your sunshine happy random it was blirting things out character who really kind of wants to prove herself in this game.
[7:17]She's just graduated high school she's kind of lost and looking for direction and this is something to do.
[7:24]You have Lira who has a twisted past with the Hawthorne family that revolves around her father's death when she was very young and it's very mysterious but she knows that it is related to the Hawthorne family in some way.
[7:40]And then you have Rohan who doesn't even he's so mysterious he doesn't even have a last name playing for these big grand stakes in this sort of organization of power he's in he needs money.
[7:53]In order to ascend to the top of that organization so he is playing the game coming to the game with the background of having created similar games of his own so you put these three together.
[8:04]On a private island full of luxuries like helicopters and masquerade balls and the most incredible ball gowns and they're getting ready to play just the most incredible mine been the puzzle filled game of their life.
[8:20]Wow, so where are where how and when and where is all of this coming from with you where is the fascination with the games where how did you.
[8:32]You've been writing since you were in college and you were published books at 19 and gosh that just made me feel so old but anyway, which is amazing but tell me like you have to have a certain and I know you have PhD and all that but like how it is your brain work that you're coming up with all of the other puzzles and all of the.
[8:49]And all of that like take me through how you're piecing it all together.
[8:53]So I have always wanted to write some puzzle centric books in fact it's something I spent like 10 years trying to find a premise that would actually get one of my editors to let me write my puzzle book.
[9:04]So that's actually part of the origin of the original inheritance games series was that.
[9:09]So for years I've been wanting to write what I call my puzzle house book I'm like there's going to be this incredible mansion and it's full of puzzles and riddles and codes and that element of it was actually inspired because when my dad.
[9:22]Right after I graduated college my dad retired and then he and my mom spent like five years designing and building their dream house.
[9:29]And like he sat down and Google sketch up and he would draw a room and take it to the architect and like he helped design what is Google what is Google sketch up or something like that it's a program that lets him like draw rooms and he can draw furniture to put in the room.
[9:46]I might be getting the name of that wrong but it became his hobby right after he retired was like he would actually draw like what the cabinetry should look like and then sit down with the person who actually does that and they bring it to life.
[9:58]So they spent years doing.
[10:00]as he used to walk the site every day while it was being built.
[10:03]And he'd asked my brother and I,
[10:04]do you have any requests for the house?
[10:06]And of course, I'm immediately like,
[10:07]it's a great passage.
[10:08]I would like a secret passage.
[10:10]And indeed like in the library of their house,
[10:12]there's this bookshelf.
[10:14]But if you press a hidden button,
[10:15]it just disappears into the wall.
[10:17]It's a floor to see early in bookshelf.
[10:18]So I got my secret passage.
[10:20]And I have this feeling,
[10:22]the first time I ever walked into the house,
[10:24]where I was like,
[10:25]oh my gosh, this house is my dad.
[10:27]Like he has spent so much time on it.
[10:29]He has literally picked out every minute detail
[10:33]of this house himself.
[10:34]And I had the very morbid thought
[10:36]where I was like, oh my gosh, one day he's gonna be gone.
[10:39]We're gonna have to sell this house.
[10:41]And I don't know how I'll ever do that.
[10:42]But then my writer brain said, you know,
[10:45]but what if it wasn't just someone
[10:47]who put themselves emotionally and mentally into a house?
[10:50]But what if it was someone who had actually
[10:51]like coded things into the house
[10:53]and built elements of different puzzles into the house?
[10:56]What if instead of one secret passage,
[10:58]there were 50.
[10:59]And what if instead of being a house,
[11:00]what if it was like a 40,000 square foot castle mansion?
[11:04]And so for years,
[11:05]I wanted to write about my puzzle house in part
[11:07]because I wanted to write puzzles.
[11:08]And I never had quite the right premise.
[11:11]And then with the inheritance games one day,
[11:12]I was generating premises for books
[11:15]using a theory from the psychology of fiction,
[11:17]which is this theory is one called Gossip Theory,
[11:20]which is basically the theory proposed by Paul Bloom
[11:24]and others that we like fiction
[11:26]because it basically co-ops
[11:28]and evolutionarily hardwired liking for Gossip
[11:31]and fiction just happens to be gossip
[11:32]about people who aren't real.
[11:35]And the brain is not excellent at distinguishing
[11:37]between real and not real when it's super immersive
[11:40]and when you're reading it through a pages of a book.
[11:42]And so I was like, okay,
[11:44]what would get the whole world gossiping about you at once?
[11:47]And so I wanted worldwide gossip
[11:49]and I wanted it not to be a bad thing.
[11:51]And then I eventually come up with a billionaire dies
[11:54]and leaves you all his money.
[11:56]And then I was like, that's great.
[11:57]That passes gossip test and I was like,
[11:58]oh, and then you have to move into his puzzle house.
[12:01]So that's where the puzzles came from originally.
[12:05]And since then I've fallen in love with it.
[12:08]So the writing process for all of the books
[12:10]as in many ways looked very similar.
[12:12]I do the puzzles very early on
[12:14]because the puzzles are the absolute funnest
[12:17]and easiest part for me.
[12:19]So I can do an eight to 12 step puzzle sequence in a day
[12:24]where I just like sit down and make all the puzzles.
[12:28]And I will have a document that just says like,
[12:31]here's the first, here's the,
[12:33]like here's the clue, here's the answer,
[12:35]here's the clue, here's the answer.
[12:38]And each puzzle can lead into the next puzzle
[12:40]and I'll have that all written out.
[12:42]And I can literally just sit there and do that in a day.
[12:45]I keep a running list on my phone.
[12:47]Whenever I see something in the real world,
[12:49]I was like, oh, that would make a great puzzle.
[12:51]So I'll make the puzzles first.
[12:53]These books are also mystery books
[12:55]and specifically mystery series
[12:57]where you have some mysteries
[12:58]that are arching across multiple books.
[13:00]For that, I tend to use what I call the three mysteries method
[13:04]or the three questions method,
[13:05]which is usually in each book,
[13:07]there are like three core mysteries
[13:10]that are gonna play out over the course of the book
[13:13]or the series.
[13:13]And so when I'm sitting down to start,
[13:16]I'll write out lists of possible questions
[13:19]that might form the mystery on all of these books.
[13:22]So for inheritance games,
[13:23]I always knew the big mysteries
[13:24]can be why did he leave for the money?
[13:26]But I wrote out all these candidates
[13:28]for the supporting mysteries
[13:30]and ended up with there's something that happened
[13:33]one year before the book started
[13:34]that split two of the brothers apart, Jameson Grayson.
[13:38]And then there was basically who's trying
[13:41]to kill her, she's inherited was the third mystery.
[13:44]And they're not always all apparent at the beginning.
[13:47]So the who's trying to kill her comes in like halfway
[13:50]at the midpoint of inheritance games.
[13:52]So for grandest game,
[13:54]I always knew that the biggest mystery
[13:57]for the Lyra character was going to be basically
[14:01]what happened to her father.
[14:03]So we come in and very early on,
[14:05]we find out she has this backstory
[14:07]of she never even met her biological father.
[14:10]She was living with her mother
[14:11]and the guy she calls dad, who later adopted her.
[14:14]And then one day her biological father
[14:17]basically kidnaps her from preschool
[14:20]and it's a memory she had been suppressed.
[14:23]So she went through what most of her life
[14:25]having no idea this happened,
[14:26]but he takes her to this house
[14:28]and he says a few cryptic things to her.
[14:30]One of them is a Hawthorne did this
[14:33]and then he goes up the stairs
[14:34]and he kills himself, leaving her alone in the house.
[14:37]So she has this huge trauma
[14:39]and immediately repressed it
[14:41]and had no idea it ever happened to her
[14:43]until the events of the inheritance game started
[14:46]and then the whole world is gossiping about Tobias Hawthorne
[14:50]and Avery Grahams and as soon as she starts hearing
[14:53]the name Hawthorne in the news,
[14:56]she starts remembering what happened to her.
[14:59]So her story actually starts at the same time
[15:01]inheritance games did.
[15:02]That's three years before the start of the grandest game.
[15:05]Soon as Avery inherits,
[15:07]all of this is stretched up from Lyra.
[15:09]So she goes through this like crisis
[15:11]where she's like, I don't even know who I am anymore.
[15:14]I was like this, happy like 16 year old,
[15:17]live in my best life with my wonderful family
[15:21]and like she knew she had a biological father,
[15:23]she knew he was dead.
[15:24]She didn't really think that much about that
[15:27]and then all of a sudden she starts having these dreams
[15:30]and flashbacks and she remembers this thing
[15:32]and it just completely throws her for a loop
[15:35]to where she doesn't even know who she is anymore
[15:38]and she doesn't want her family to know she remembers.
[15:41]And so at some point before the grandest game starts,
[15:44]she somehow gets a hold of the phone number
[15:46]of one of the Hawthorne brothers, which is Grayson Hawthorne
[15:49]and she calls him for answers.
[15:51]And so this happens in the brothers,
[15:53]Hawthorne they have some very charged phone conversations.
[15:56]Last under a minute each, they're not saying that much
[15:59]but he eventually in a time of crisis for him
[16:02]tells her to stop calling.
[16:04]She feels betrayed because she thought he was gonna help him.
[16:06]So then she gets a ticket to the grandest game
[16:09]that shows up in her post office box
[16:11]like in her early chapters in the book.
[16:13]And she's like the Hawthorne family had something to do
[16:16]with the biggest drama of my life.
[16:18]Grayson Hawthorne made me think he was gonna help me
[16:20]and then he abandoned me and but this would get me
[16:25]like $20 million and I'm not gonna turn down a chance
[16:28]of having a one in seven chance of walking away
[16:30]with $20 million.
[16:31]So she goes to this private island
[16:33]with all of these feelings kind of in there.
[16:35]So her mystery was obvious.
[16:38]And then I have to think a little bit about, okay,
[16:39]well, what's Gigi's core mystery gonna be in this book?
[16:43]And what's Rohan's core mystery going to be in this book?
[16:46]So I'll actually write out what those questions are.
[16:50]And then I write out every possible answer to the questions.
[16:55]So just stream of consciousness.
[16:57]I'll spend a full day writing out possible answers.
[17:00]And then eventually once I have all the answers
[17:03]written out to all the different questions,
[17:05]I start looking for ways they might dovetail
[17:07]or fit together or ways that I will like,
[17:10]oh, I like this and one and this one and this one.
[17:12]And so I pick the three answers I'm gonna do.
[17:15]But then the great thing about having brainstormed
[17:17]all the answers that aren't true is that now those all
[17:20]are living as red herrings and my subconscious.
[17:23]So as I'm writing the book,
[17:25]they can come up very organically without me planning
[17:28]to put in that red herring.
[17:30]It's just my brains already generated
[17:32]every possible answer there could be to these questions.
[17:35]So they're just sort of living there.
[17:36]So when I start, I know the puzzle sequence.
[17:39]I know the questions and the answers.
[17:41]I have an idea of the romantic arcs in the book
[17:44]because there's a very strong elements of romance
[17:46]in all of these books and subplots.
[17:49]So I have an idea of what those arcs might look like
[17:51]and what some of the character arcs might look like.
[17:54]What is everyone?
[17:55]How are the characters arcing
[17:57]and what does that mean for different romances?
[17:59]And then after that, I don't like plan out an outline
[18:03]or anything like that.
[18:05]But I do tend to then plan in short bursts.
[18:08]So I'll have the puzzle sequence.
[18:10]I have the mysteries and any day when I sit down to write,
[18:13]I'll have an idea of what I want to write that day.
[18:16]And so I will often start with saying,
[18:17]here's what I want this scene to accomplish.
[18:20]And usually it's like five things it wants.
[18:22]Like it needs to establish this.
[18:23]It needs to show this clue.
[18:25]It needs to have this moment.
[18:27]I want this kind of big romantic thing.
[18:29]And then I write about what those should look like.
[18:31]And so I do a lot of writing about what I want to write.
[18:33]And then when I'm ready to actually block out the scene,
[18:36]I usually write just the dialogue of the scene,
[18:39]back and forth between the characters.
[18:41]And then I'll go and write the actual scene.
[18:43]And all of the prewriting on the day of
[18:46]is totally new for me as of about seven years ago.
[18:50]So I have three kids and the oldest is eight.
[18:53]And so, and the youngest is the middle is almost seven
[18:56]and the youngest is three.
[18:58]So when my now almost seven year old was born,
[19:01]I had a 15 mile ride, a 17 month old,
[19:04]and I had a newborn and I was writing books.
[19:06]And at that point, I was still a psychology professor.
[19:09]And my mental child did not sleep through the night
[19:12]until he was like two years old.
[19:13]He was up three times a night for two years.
[19:16]And so I've been writing books since I was a teenager myself.
[19:19]I've been writing them my entire adult life.
[19:21]But suddenly I couldn't write the same way anymore
[19:24]because I was sleep deprived.
[19:26]And I was writing in different hours.
[19:28]And there was not as many hours of the day anymore.
[19:31]So I had a brain that couldn't write an entire scene
[19:34]at once anymore.
[19:35]So I have to decide what's going to happen.
[19:38]And then I have to kind of decide the order
[19:40]in which things are going to happen.
[19:42]And then I have to write out the dialogue.
[19:43]And then I can write the scene.
[19:46]And ever since my second was born,
[19:48]that's just how I've written almost every scene
[19:51]where I can break the different things
[19:53]you have to do to write a scene down
[19:55]just to make it something that my brain can handle
[19:58]in a smaller chunk.
[20:00]Wow, you're so impressive. I like just listening to you talk and hearing your brain work.
[20:06]First of all, that's fascinating and I feel like that's such a good trick to just do the dialogue of a scene
[20:12]because you have to get so much into it, right? You have to just still it down to like it's most important things, right?
[20:19]And how to communicate that. That's genius. I'm actually trying to adapt this draft of a middle grade novel that is not published
[20:26]my daughter and I are turning it into a graphic novel. And I'm like, oh, you just need the words really,
[20:32]right? You just need an interesting experiment versus like what I normally write, which is like
[20:37]on and on and on. So anyway, I find that fascinating that you do that. Tell me a little bit more about
[20:41]your background and how you started getting into all this, how you started writing in college,
[20:46]the fact that you're a Yale psychology professor or you were, I guess, and all of that just give
[20:51]your other life and your brain development, so to speak. Right. So I started trying to
[20:58]write professionally when I was in high school. So I wrote my first attempt. I wrote my first like
[21:03]five or four attempts at a book my senior year in high school. And then I went off to college.
[21:08]But I always knew I wanted to major in something that wasn't English because I was always kind of like
[21:12]an English writing person and then also like a math science person. So I had a lot of different
[21:18]ideas took a random array of classes my freshman year and landed on cognitive science as a major,
[21:24]which at Yale is interdisciplinary between psychology, philosophy, linguistics, neurobiology,
[21:30]anthropology. It's basically just like any class and any department that has to do with the human
[21:35]mind. And so you take an array of those classes. I got into research and started working in a
[21:42]primate cognition lab and child cognition labs, really looking at like how our minds develop and
[21:49]how they might have evolutionarily developed. And so I fell in love with the science of things too.
[21:55]People are always like, oh, those seem like two very different things. But in a sense like
[22:00]writing in psychology are both about the mind. They're both about understanding people. They're
[22:04]about beliefs and emotions and how people become who they are. And I was a Yale psychology major.
[22:12]I'll have you know. So I get it. I feel like it was the best training. But go on.
[22:19]And so I did research all through undergrad. I went on and did masters at Cambridge where I
[22:25]did autism research and specifically looking at people with and without autism and how they
[22:30]respond to different elements of stories and how they create stories. And then I came back to Yale
[22:35]for my PhD in psychology. I was doing kid research. And at one point on my professor said to me,
[22:42]you know, if you're going to keep doing the book thing because at this point, mine, I sold my
[22:46]first five books while I was in college. And so by the time I was in grad school, these books were
[22:51]starting to come out. And my for everyone was always so supportive of it. They thought it was so
[22:56]cool. No one had a problem with me doing two things. But one of my mentors said, you know,
[23:00]if you're going to do the book thing, you should probably segue into studying more of the
[23:05]psychology of fiction like you did kind of in grad school. So then I worked with a professor at Yale
[23:10]named Paul Bloom who was really interested in the psychology of fiction. We kind of matched up.
[23:14]And I started doing research. And then at that point, I was doing developmental research on kids
[23:19]and story preferences and those kinds of things. And then I eventually went on to become a professor
[23:24]at the University of Oklahoma, where I was a professor for almost a decade. And I had this
[23:30]really neat split appointment where I was half in their professional writing program,
[23:34]which is a genre fiction writing program. So it's like, you can go and you can major in writing,
[23:38]but you can write romance and YA and sci-fi and fantasy. And like it doesn't do any literary
[23:45]fiction. It's all just popular fiction. And they have classes and all the different specialties.
[23:52]And so I taught half in their program. And then my other half of my appointment was in the
[23:56]psychology department where I had my own lab where we studied the psychology of fiction and
[24:02]the imagination as well as the psychology of fandom. And I loved it. I loved that when you're a
[24:08]scientist, it looks so different than people think science looks. And especially with something
[24:13]like psychology, you know, I get students in my classes. And one of the first things I want them
[24:18]to know is that they too could do science that no one had ever done. Because when you're talking
[24:22]about psychology, all you need are questions and thoughts about what the answers might be. You
[24:27]need something you're interested in. So for me, it was fiction. It was stories because as an author,
[24:32]I'd always be like, huh, I wonder what makes a good book title. And I noticed that life
[24:37]Game of Thrones and Hunger Games will have the word game in it. I wonder if that's a good word
[24:42]for titles. And if so, why? And then you dig into the theories of things and like what theories
[24:48]might predict you fight certain titles. And the wonderful thing when you have a lab is you can
[24:52]actually like one of my graduate students and I actually generate it. We were like, here's five
[24:56]theories and here's the kinds of words they predict would be good in titles. And my graduate student
[25:01]went off and she designed the survey and we got like reaction time data and memory data and
[25:07]likely missed three data from hundreds of participants. And we were able to see that like
[25:12]actually all of the theories we were working with generated buzzwords for titles that outperformed
[25:16]controls on the discovery. And so we were there. And the ones we tested were theory of mine
[25:25]words, which are words having to do with the minds. So example titles would be things like
[25:29]a beautiful mind or cruel intentions because intention is a mental state word. Also words like
[25:36]secrets and lies, volunteer mentalistic category. And then there were gossip words. So words like
[25:45]scandal and rumor and reputation were all very good words for titles. There were morality words.
[25:52]And particularly it seemed like in more alley words like cruel or wicked might do some work there.
[25:58]And then there were pleasure words, which were words related to things that we are hardwired to
[26:04]find pleasurable. So those can be things like competition or wealth or beauty. So I had all these
[26:10]theories of what we found pleasurable that I'd worked on when I was on maternity leave with
[26:15]my youngest. My life state kind of saying, well, I think you're a baby full-time project. And so
[26:22]even before we rein the tests, that's where the title inheritance games comes from because two
[26:26]of the buttons I was theorizing would be good to push for wealth and competition. So it's like,
[26:31]how can I name a book wealth competition? And so inheritance is a wealth word and game is a competition
[26:39]and that's where inheritance games came from. And actually one of the neat things we do
[26:45]on the covers of the book is I have like the different buttons you can push. And so their
[26:50]wealth competition, beauty, danger, touch, which we usually do visually through something like
[26:57]warmth and power. And so when we're designing the covers of various inheritance games or grand
[27:05]scheme books, we always try and make sure that every single button is being pushed at least once
[27:12]on the cover. So like for the grandest game, we have a glass rose for beauty. We have a knife
[27:19]for danger. We have a spark of fire for warmth. We have dice and a chest piece for competition.
[27:26]The tagline is only one can win because that's a competition tagline to things are golden
[27:32]and full of jewels, which is wealth. And we did that on the inheritance games cover too. So
[27:37]you can actually go through every cover in the series and you can be like, what's your danger
[27:41]object? What are your competition objects? And so it's just even in the way we package the books
[27:46]and the way I write the back cover copy and the way I write the books themselves are I have this
[27:52]giant workbook now like 27 pages of questions I asked myself about all the things that
[27:59]theories predict we would like in fiction. And then at one point I actually just said here's
[28:03]all the theories. I made all my predictions. And then I actually it was like what would happen if I
[28:08]wrote a book and did every single one of these things as much as I could and what happened was the
[28:13]inheritance games, which was my 21st book, but it was the first book I ever wrote that really took
[28:19]off. Wow, that's so interesting. Oh my gosh, so you can really break it down into something totally
[28:26]quantifiable that's fascinating. And it's the writer and he loves it because I can still be like
[28:32]just as creative and just as invested in the characters. But I also love puzzles and it's a puzzle
[28:38]aspect too to be like, okay, how am I going to get my competition note in this scene? Because
[28:45]competition can come through something like a love triangle is a competition. It can come through
[28:50]okay, we're randomly going to play a game right now. It can come through characters who are rivals
[28:55]or sibling rivalry or you know, so when I'm revising I'll actually often look at each individual
[29:01]scene and be like I'll just make a list in the margins of what pleasures are in this scene? What
[29:06]buttons am I pushing? How am I doing like in every chapter of the book? I'm making sure that I'm
[29:13]pushing some of these buttons. And then the like puzzle-solar in me who likes to quantify things
[29:18]and who was a scientist and love looking at data and having graphs and stuff. That part of me
[29:25]can take sort of a rod draft that's more written by the writer half of me and then say, okay,
[29:30]well, we're going to punch up this, this, this, this, and this. So often I wait until I have my
[29:34]revision letter back from my editor so I can figure out what's kind of missing from the reader's
[29:39]perspective and the train die, which is usually like we need more romance, we need more this
[29:44]pacing here, you know, a little more reveal. And then I can do that and also look for answers
[29:50]to those problems using the psychology of fiction to find the answers.
[29:55]Wow, are there books written about the psychology of fiction like all this research that you use?
[30:00]There are some good ones that will give you different overviews of different elements.
[30:05]So there isn't yet a book that kind of synthesizes all of it, but there's like the storytelling
[30:12]animal by Jonathan Gottshell is one I pull from and such stuff is dreams by Keith
[30:19]Oatley has a lot on fiction and theory of mind.
[30:22]Paul Bloom's book, How Pleasure Works, Has a Chapter Devode to Fiction.
[30:27]That's where I first learned about Gossip Theory and he was one of my advisors at Yale,
[30:31]so I'd also heard about it from him.
[30:33]The Pleasure Theory of Fiction comes from Stephen Pinker's How the Mind Works.
[30:39]So it's kind of pulling from all over to get all of the theories, but there are all of
[30:44]those books out there that you can read to see any kind of one theory.
[30:49]And then like as a writer, you just kind of like think about that theory for a while
[30:53]and be like, okay, what parts do I think apply?
[30:57]What parts don't?
[30:58]What more can you theorize like in your gut or based on the books you love?
[31:03]And then you just kind of integrate like the existing scientific theory with those intuitions
[31:09]and like every writer I've ever met has those intuitions.
[31:12]You might not know you have them, but if you've read a bunch of books or watched a bunch
[31:17]of movies or written books, you kind of have those intuitions.
[31:21]So for me, it's just a matter of like using the intuitions I already have to inspire
[31:26]scientific questions, which I used to then research, but also then using the scientific
[31:31]theories to kind of elucidate where my intuition might be leaving gaps that I could feel.
[31:38]Amazing.
[31:39]Oh my gosh.
[31:41]Well, I could clearly listen to you talk about this stuff all day.
[31:44]Oh my gosh.
[31:45]Well, congratulations on the grandest game, congratulations on all of your success.
[31:51]I love hearing what you have to say and I feel like you need to teach a class on how to
[31:58]write using all these things or something because I feel like cracking the code on what
[32:02]makes fiction work is something that everyone really struggles with.
[32:06]So anyway, congratulations.
[32:09]Thank you.
[32:11]It's so nice to meet you.
[32:12]I feel like we've barely scratched the surface.
[32:13]There's so much more to discuss, but I'm totally inspired by you.
[32:17]So thank you.
[32:18]Oh, well, thank you for having me.
[32:20]This is so much fun.
[32:21]Wow, for me, too.
[32:22]Thank you.
[32:23]What a pleasure.
[32:24]All right.
[32:25]Bye bye.
[32:26]Thank you, Jennifer.
[32:29]Thanks for listening.
[32:30]Two moms don't have time to read books.
[32:31]If you love it, please leave a review and follow us on social at Civi Owens and at Civi
[32:37]readers.