CR 020: Chris and J.J. Grabenstein on Collaboration and Creating Books for Young Readers
The husband-and-wife duo discuss his Mr. Lemoncello Library books, her work as an audiobook narrator, and their new book series, Stinky’s Stories.
If you have a middle-grade reader in your life, there’s a good chance you’re familiar with the work of Chris Grabenstein. The former ad executive (whose advertising boss was the now uber-prolific author James Patterson) began writing mystery novels for adults before switching to the children’s literature genre in 2008. Over the past 16 years, he’s penned numerous award-winning middle-grade series, including The Smartest Kid in the Universe, Dog Squad, The Haunted Mysteries, and the Mr. Lemoncello books, in addition to dozens of standalone titles.
Now, he and his wife, J.J., are launching a series, Stinky’s Stories, aimed at younger readers. The goal of the books, Chris says, is to “bring the fun of Mr. Lemoncello’s Library to the kindergarten to second [grade kids].” As with other titles in the Grabenstein canon, the series contains themes of libraries, reading, and the power of storytelling, and are written in a way to engage even the most reluctant of readers. (The first two books in the series, The Boy Who Cried Underpants! and Jack and the Beanstink, are available now.)
I recently spoke with Chris and J.J. about their collaborative writing process, their frustration with book bans, and how they use improv to generate story ideas.
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SANDRA EBEJER: Congratulations on the new books! How did Stinky’s Stories come about?
CHRIS GRABENSTEIN: I go to a lot of schools, and sometimes they say, “Could you do something for the kindergarten to second grade kids?” I usually improvise a story with the kids, and sometimes we’re in a library, and I say, “We can make up a story about anything. Like for instance...” I noticed a lot of libraries had stuffed animals on their shelves, so I would spin a story about stuffed animals. [Turns to J.J.] One day I told you about that, and you told me a story.
J.J. GRABENSTEIN: I loved stuffed animals as a kid. I always made funny voices for each of them. At the end of the day, they each had to tell me in their own voice how their day was and what happened. Was anybody a bully? Was somebody extra nice? I would pick the stuffed animal of honor who got to sleep on my pillow that night. Each day, I chose one.
CHRIS: My wife here’s the voice over actress, and there’s one great character she had created. I said, “That would be a great voice.”
J.J.: [The books] almost started from an audio perspective, really, because we were joking around, doing funny voices of characters, and we said, “We should write this down.”
CHRIS: I love that kind of improvisational spirit with whatever comes up. You can take that to the end, say yes to it, and move it to the next point. And we like the concept. We look for stories where kids may object to the ending, like in “The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” that classic Aesop Fable. Well, yes, the wolf came that time, but what happened to the poor sheep? Were the sheep made to pay the price for this boy’s bad behavior? If we use our imagination, we can come up with another ending. So that’s what the whole concept gelled around.
J.J.: Stinky helps the kids use their imaginations to come up with an ending they like better.
What is the creative process like when you’re writing a book together?
CHRIS: I liken it to when I worked in advertising. I was a copywriter. They always teamed me with an art director, someone who thought more visually. So I was verbal; they were visual. We’d get together, we’d sit down, we’d get the brief, and we’d brainstorm ideas. Then the point would come where one of us would have to go write a script—that was me—so we would have something on paper that we could then react to.
[J.J. and I] work the same way, where we block out the whole story, the characters, and then we hash out what might happen. “What did happen to the sheep?” “Well, they rolled around in grass, and they disguised themselves.” “What happened to the boy?” “He got fired because he got bored easily—that’s why he cried wolf—so they gave him the most boring job in the town watching paint dry at a sign.” It’s that kind of storytelling, a boulder rolling downhill, gathering its moss along the way. We do that together and then I would go write a chapter, J.J. would look at it and make some notes, and then we’d read it out loud.
J.J.: That was when we knew whether it worked or not, because we’d have the voices in our heads of the characters, and we’d go, “Wait a minute. Stinky wouldn’t say it that way. We’ve got to rewrite this sentence.”
You both have such interesting backgrounds. Chris, you mentioned that you worked for many years in advertising. How did that work prepare you for the career you have now?
CHRIS: Well, before I did any of that, when I first moved to New York with my seven suitcases and one typewriter—because you could take eight pieces of baggage for free on airplanes back in 1979, which is when I moved to New York City—I did improvisational comedy. Bruce Willis was in my troupe, and the late Robin Williams would jump up on stage with us whenever he was in New York. So that taught me a lot of that “yes, and” stuff, which led me to get into advertising. A lot of advertising is you’ve got to keep coming up with ideas, because your bosses and the clients are going to kill things on a regular basis. James Patterson was my first boss in advertising, and he taught me a lot.
When you’re writing advertising, especially when I was doing it [in] the ‘80s through the ‘90s, the remote control was our enemy, because everybody had a remote control. Back then, if you were watching your favorite TV show and a commercial came on and it was boring, you had five seconds to reach over, grab the remote, and zap. We had to grab the viewers’ attention in those first five seconds. I noticed that when Patterson left advertising, he started writing books that were called “page turners.” And I said, “There might be a connection between what we’re doing in advertising, where we have to grab people’s attention, and writing books that will be fast-paced page turners.” That helped me out an awful lot.
J.J., you were a stage actress for many years. Are you still acting professionally?
J.J.: No. I did a lot of musical theater. I toured all over the place. Then when I met Chris, I wanted to stop touring because I finally found the right guy. I segued into the voice over world. At the same time, he started writing, and I started helping him. He would ask me to help him shape the stories. The first thing he said to me when he gave me a manuscript was, “Tell me if anything takes you out of the story.” I have a really short attention span, as it turns out, so I would get bored, and I would say, “We don’t need to describe this whole thing. Let’s just get back to the dialogue here. What’s happening in the story?” So we ended up shaping a lot of stories together. I learned about story structure from him. Then he started writing for children, and I got to do a lot of his audio books.
I know from personal experience that it can be difficult to have a work-life balance as a writer because you can’t really shut off your work. It’s always there. But I imagine that’s even more true when your spouse is also working on the same book. Do you have set hours when you work? Or are you constantly collaborating and sharing ideas?
CHRIS: When we write, we do that outlining together. Then I’ll spend some time doing a rough first pass of a chapter.
J.J.: And then we’ll do the voices and figure out if it sounds right. And while he’s in [his office], because he’s working on a million books at once, I’m doing other things. Something will come to me, and I’ll think, “I’ll write it down so that the next time we get together, I can say, ‘I thought of this. I think you should do this.’” And then we collaborate.
CHRIS: We have stacks of yellow note cards and Sharpie pens in every room of this house. There’s one right by the front door when you come in. They’re in the bathrooms. You need to have them in the bathrooms. Ideas are going to come to you when you least expect it. I found that in advertising, when you had to write a commercial, if you sat in your office going, “I need an idea,” it’s when you went home and walked your dog that all of a sudden, an idea would pop into your head.
J.J.: And because this was so audio driven, if a voice came to me, I could just grab my phone and do voice memos and then play it for Chris later.
Do you ever have writer’s block?
CHRIS: The improv stuff helps me out a lot. When I go to schools, I do this game where the kids give me a first sentence and a last sentence, and I have some story cards. We pick a protagonist and an antagonist. And I know what the protagonist really wants, and why the antagonist wants to stop them. When the kids first came in, I had six of them write down one word on a card. “I’m all ready to go. All right, we’re making up a story, first sentence, last sentence about this. Oh. Uh-oh.” The kids always get really quiet. “I haven’t written anything all day today. There’s a chance I might have writer’s block.” And it’s amazing how many second and third graders already know what writer’s block is. “Well, I’ve got some emergency words standing by. If I have writer’s block, I’ll pull one of those words you guys gave me outta my back pocket, and whatever that word is, it’ll be the next word in my sentence.” So I do this whole exercise where I’m telling a story, and then I’ll pull out a card that says something like “nachos,” and that is the next word. And now we’re off. And then the next word is “poop,” and then we’re going on.
What I’m showing the kids is, I told the story. There’s some pretty good stuff in it, there was some stuff that maybe I would change, but I got something out and down on paper. So when we’re writing, we just write, and we go full steam ahead, and if you have something to react to, then you can turn it into something good. If you have something terrible on paper, it’s at least a start. If you have nothing on paper, then you’re never going to get anywhere. So I try to tell kids, and [J.J. and I] tell each other, give yourself permission to write a really bad, terrible, stinky, no-good first draft, because no one’s ever going to read the first draft of anything you’ve written. I worked on Escape from Mr. Lemoncello’s Library for two and a half years. I wrote nine drafts, and five or six of those, I changed fifty percent of the entire story. So yeah, that book’s great now, but it wasn’t perfect when I first wrote it down.
When you’re not writing, what do you read?
CHRIS: I mostly read nonfiction. I like to read funny stuff, so I read Shouts & Murmurs in the New Yorker every week to keep my funny bone going. And I read my friends’ books. I just finished James Ponti. He’s got a new book called The Sherlock Society, so that’s been fun to read. And whenever Stephen King’s new book comes out, I always get that right away, just because I think he’s the voice of my generation. He was the first one to put brand-name products in [a book] in a cool way, or rock and roll lyrics. He just has a way of creating characters that you fall in love with, and then you start worrying about.
J.J.: I finally get to read James Ponti’s book now, because he got it first. [Chris] has so many middle-grade author friends, so we get some wonderful books, and it really does get your mind going. You see how other authors handle things. I also read a lot about animals. I’m a big animal nut, so I like reading about animals and animal behavior, specifically cats. I’ve been involved in rescuing cats, so that’s one of my favorites.
What is your advice to aspiring authors?
CHRIS: I say, read, read, read, write, write, write, because you can’t be a writer until you’ve been a reader. Actually, James Ponti told a great story, and it’s what I tell kids: If you really want to be a writer, read something you like once, just for fun. Then go back and read it again and start paying attention to when things start happening. Then go back and read it a third time, and start making notes like, “What happened here? Well, this was a surprise.” You’ll start discovering the structure underneath it.
The two of you established a scholarship at the University of Tennessee to support students who are interested in working as a children’s librarian. It’s a very scary time, as I’m sure you know, for those who work in the field and speak out against book bans. What would you say to those librarians who are fighting oppression, fighting book bans, and just trying not to lose their job for doing their job?
CHRIS: We say thank you, because they are intellectual freedom fighters. It’s very interesting. Mr. Lemoncello’s Library Olympics came out almost 10 years ago, and in there, there is a mother who doesn’t like one book in the library and wants to close the whole library down. There’s somebody else who doesn’t like any book about squirrels and wants to remove every book about squirrels from the library. And it’s sadly prescient. It was my way to do a parable for kids about book banning. Just because one person doesn’t like a book, great, then your kids don’t have to read that book. But don’t stop every other kid in the area from reading it. Hopefully we will be able to stand up for these librarians, and we’ll keep trying to fight the good fight with them, but I know it’s not easy. And it’s completely unexpected, too. Who would have thought that a library would become such a hotbed?
That’s why we started the Luigi L. Lemoncello Library Scholarship at the University of Tennessee. It’s fun because two or three [students] get the benefit. They are usually graduate students who have already decided that they’re going to pursue a career as a children’s librarian.
Many of your books have themes of learning, libraries, schools, and book bans. Why are these themes important for you to include? What are you hoping that young readers will get from the books?
CHRIS: I think Mr. Lemoncello’s motto is the best one of all: “Knowledge not shared remains unknown.” That’s why libraries exist, it’s why public schools exist—so that everybody has a chance to learn. I think it’s probably because my mom was a first-generation immigrant. Her parents were a Greek steel worker and a Greek seamstress who worked out of the house, and they really imbued in their kids, “Your job is to get an education.” We were always told that knowledge is important. My mother also said that [if] learning becomes easy to you, it’s your job to help other people who are struggling with learning.
I like the fact that anybody can learn anything, so we have a diverse crowd of people who might come up with ideas that’ll save me down the line. They’ll come up with some surgery or something that will save you. I’ve always had a trouble with people the opposite of that, as represented by the Chiltington family in those [Mr. Lemoncello] books, [who think] knowledge is power, and the more we hold onto it, and the more that we stop anyone else from getting it, the more powerful we’ll be, and everybody else can suffer.
J.J.: Yes, and in Stinky’s Stories, specifically, one of the things that we’re trying to highlight is using your imagination to change things that you’re not happy about. Hopefully that’ll translate into their lives, and it might inspire some young writers, who are like, “Look at Stinky making up a story with those kids on the story rug. They just come up with it and it’s absurd and funny and silly. Maybe I could do that!”
To learn more about Chris and J.J., visit Chris’s website.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
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