SPEAKER_00 0:00

Finding your own rhythm is really important. When I first started writing, I kept seeing these writers who I admired so much talking about how they sat down and wrote every day, no matter what else was going on. And that works so well for some people, and they need to have that continuity. And for others, it's never going to be the case. So finding our own rhythm and what's going to work for us. And knowing that that's going to be different for different projects sometimes and different at different stages of your life.

SPEAKER_01 0:31

Welcome to the Write It Scared podcast. I'm your host, Stacy Fraser, a formally repressed creative soul, turned fiction writer, story editor, and author accelerator-certified fiction book coach. At Write It Scared, we tell the truth about why writing a novel is so hard by acknowledging that most writers grapple with two stories: the one they want to put on the page to the best of their ability, and the often subconscious internal story that prevents them from doing it. This show is designed to help you identify and rewrite the internal narrative holding you back while you discover and write the story you want to tell and learn all the tools to help you do that successfully. Join me each week for a new episode where we'll talk about writing to deepen our understanding of the craft and of ourselves as writers. Writing a novel is an inside job that we do not do alone. Welcome to Red It Scared. I'm glad you're here. Let's dive in. Hey writer, welcome back to another episode of the Write It Scared podcast. I'm your host, Stacey, and I'm so excited to bring you this interview. Today I'm with author Cynthia Platt, who is just a delight. She is so warm and so lovely. And we chat all about her young adult novel, Postcards from Summer, and dig into writing dual timelines and writing contemporary young adult love and embracing the messy magic and beauty of our individual creative processes. I can't wait for you to listen. So here is her bio. Cynthia Platt is the author of the young adult novel Postcards from Summer and a middle grade novel, Parker Bell and the Science of Friendship, as well as multiple picture books including Grow, Easter Starring Egg, Pandemonium, and A Little Bit of Love. She's written numerous Curious George books and stories for early readers for the Cannes Academy of Kids Learning app. Her latest book, Happy Halloween Teal Pumpkin, was published in July of 2024. When not writing, she also teaches at Leslie University's MFA Creative Writing Program. And she is a former children's book editor at Houghton, Mufflin, Harcourt, and Candlewick Press. Okay, so let's jump into the interview. Hello, Cynthia. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. I'm excited to talk to you about your most recent novel, postcards from summer, get to know you a little bit better, and share your journey with our listeners. So thank you. Thank you so much for having me. It's a real pleasure being here. So I always like to start out by asking you to share a little bit more about your journey to becoming a writer.

SPEAKER_00 3:15

Right after college, my first job was in publishing as an assistant and at Little Braun Company. And I knew at the time I started temping there to get my foot in the door. I knew at the time I wanted to go into kids' books. There was never a doubt in my mind about that. So I waited and bided my time with position open. I was so lucky to get it because it's so rare that anything did open up. And I started working in publishing. And I had worked in publishing, I think for about 25 years by the time I finally left. I went to Candlewood Press and was an editor there and then worked at Hot Miplin Harcourt's trade division before while it still existed. It's now um part of, it doesn't exist anymore, part of HarperCollins. And all of that time I helped other people with their books, with their writing. And I love helping people with their writing. But I had a real block about the idea that I could write myself. That wasn't a thing that I did. And I really got in my own way about it for a long time. Until finally I sat down and said to myself, like, this is a practice thing. I'm not gonna learn how to ice skate just by putting on skates and jumping onto the rink and doing a triple axle or whatever. And it's the same with writing. I'm not going to be a good writer unless I start practicing, and I'm never gonna know unless I try. So I did finally get out of my own way, and I did finally start practicing and practicing more and writing and rewriting. And I wrote a lot of low-quality things at first, but I think that was all part of the process for me. Like I had to start somewhere, and I know where I started, and I know how long it took me to get someplace where I felt comfortable in my skin as a writer. And I just feel really lucky at this point that I have had books published and that I am part of a wonderful community of writers, and that I let myself try something different and try something new and stop hindering my own progress forward, which I think we all do, and I did in spades at the time.

SPEAKER_01 5:25

I think so many of us can relate to that. I know personally I can. I held myself back for a really long time, believing that I wasn't a creative person. Like that was wonderful and I loved it, and I admired other people who were. I envied other people who were, but I didn't think I could be, but I I didn't know because I wasn't trying. And then so I had to kind of get over that hump and start trying. And you're right. So tell me what you love about it. You were an editor first, and you worked in the publishing world, and then you transitioned over to being an author. So tell me what you love about the writing. What is it?

SPEAKER_00 6:00

So I guess for me, I've always been a reader and a pretty avid reader. As a kid, I was that kid who always had her nose in the book, the kid who snuck a book into class and was reading when I wasn't even supposed to. I was that kid, and it always seemed like magic to me. You would discover these stories and this whole world would open up, and it seemed like magic. And I think that it hasn't lost that for me at all. It's just that I'm trying to do that for myself now instead of just not that I don't read all the time, because Stacy, I really do. But I think there are still moments that feel magical about it to me. And I really feel again very lucky that I write for so many different ages of kids. I have, you know, this my first YA novel, Postcards from Summer, was published, but I've written a young middle grade novel. I've written a lot of picture books, board books, curious George books, you name it. I've written it at this point across age groups. And it's so wonderful to be able to experiment with writing for different age groups. Uh it's wonderful to sit down and try to puzzle through a picture book in a very different way than it is to sit down and puzzle through a novel told in two verses across time periods set in the same place. So it's all really challenging and sometimes very frustrating. But I I still feel like uh it has got that element of magic about it to me that and I think this is just how our brains work, right? That it's amazing that anyone can come up with a story idea. It's amazing that anybody can sit down and illustrate a book. Our brains are kind of medically magical, I think. So Yeah, it hasn't the the the shine has never rubbed off for me.

SPEAKER_01 7:48

I mean, you can feel it. I can feel it in your voice, and I can just see it. And if you could, you would see that Cynthia's face is just lit up. Like truly, truly, truly you love this. So, what what is it about writing for the YA audience and kind of the middle grade audience? Like, why are you drawn into that world?

SPEAKER_00 8:07

Yeah, it's interesting because I started writing picture books, and that seemed like it was something I could do. And like I said, I practiced a lot. I took classes, I I did workshops all across the board. I really did put a lot of work into it. And then this is gonna seem like a strange story, but literally one day, as I'm practicing writing other things, I had a nightmare. It was a really bad nightmare. And I woke up and wrote it down in the form of a letter in the middle of the night and thought, hey, I just wrote my first short story. And I hadn't written my first short story because I shared it with one of my writing groups, and they both kept saying, I think you need to keep working on this. I don't think this is a short story. And so I did. And the novel never ended up getting published, which was frustrating to me because I loved it so much. But I really sat down with that and spent a couple of years working on it and revising it and revising it and revising it. And, you know, it's historical fantasy set in industrial England and told in three voices. One of them is feral. It was an ambitious novel to kind of dig into for a first try. I feel like I missed YA. I'm just old enough that they didn't really cover my age group when I was in high school and you know, kind of reading in that age level in that bracket. And I went from like Judy Bloom's middle grade novels to reading Jane Austen. So I feel like I missed that phase of my reading and have done a lot of reading in that realm since then, and editing too. And I love, love, love the space to spread out and explore character and plot. I love fantasy and sci-fi. The story I'm working working on two stories right now, two novels, but one of them is very firmly science fiction, silly science fiction, but still. And the other is set in the climate catastrophe. So again, it just runs such a gamut of what you can accomplish when you give yourself a little more space to tell the story. So I love writing YA because I can sit down and really give myself time to do an exploratory mission and learn who everybody is and learn what's happening in their world. It's really exciting writing a first draft of a novel. There's just so much scope that you can fit in. And that's not to say I don't love picture books, too, because I do, but writing a picture book is writing of like a very concise poem in a lot of ways. You have to choose your words super minutely and carefully because you have such little space. And it's a completely different exercise to expand in the way that a middle grade or young adult novel allows you to.

SPEAKER_01 11:02

Yeah. And that's such a great word for the category, especially of YA, is the expansiveness that there is there. And wow, postcards from summer is which we're gonna talk about in a minute, is a contemporary YA. And you're also writing, you know, something that is the silly science fiction and something that is sounds like I'm not sure it's fantasy or dystopian, not sure where somewhere blocks the line somewhere in the speculative fiction world. And then, and then you also have a novel in the trunk that was historical fantasy.

SPEAKER_00 11:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:36

That is so cool. I I loved it. I think a lot of us when we start out, we feel like we do feel this expansiveness. And then we stick around here for a while in the publishing and the writing world, and we're like, oh, we need to choose a lane. Yeah, you know, and and I don't like that. I don't either. I like to play in all kinds of fields, and I love all the genres, really. And so that just you sharing your story makes me feel better.

unknown 12:05

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 12:06

The fact that I also have a fantasy in the trunk and am writing a thriller and have an idea for a romance, a straight category romance.

SPEAKER_00 12:16

We're all multifaceted, we're all interested in so many different things. Yeah, we're all capable of doing so many different things. So why not give yourself space to explore and permission? Glad you are space and permission, right?

SPEAKER_01 12:28

I love that. So I'll thank you so much for kind of sharing your origin story and how you came to be in the place where you're you're writing the books that you are. So would you please share just a little bit of what postcards for summer your most recent young adult novel is about?

SPEAKER_00 12:44

Of course. I mean, ultimately, it's a romance um and it's a mystery. It's told in two different voices. Lexi is 17 in contemporary the contemporary world, and she's lost her mom. She lost her mom when she was really young, and her dad absolutely refuses to talk about her. Like he shuts down, it's too painful. He can't talk about it ever. And so she feels really adrift because she doesn't know anything about her mother, and then decides hey, let's do something irresponsible and on a little like physical and emotional journey to try to figure out if I can find out more about my mom. In the meantime, you know, we're you're back and forth with Emma, her mother, and her timeline, where there is a love triangle and some interesting summer friendships that happen, and you know, a single really tragic event and a question of who's responsible for causing it and how that affects Emma's life in the long term, and where that leaves Lexi, who's trying to find out about her mother, and then finds out things that she didn't necessarily want to learn.

SPEAKER_01 13:54

I loved it. And I just love to know like where the idea came from and what it was like writing it. And also it's dual timeline. So this was not a straightforward book, I'm sure, to write.

SPEAKER_00 14:05

No, I want to preface what I'm about to say by saying that I have a ADHD. So any novel writing process for me is an exercise in hyper-organization. And this is the second novel that I've worked on that is more than one narrative voice. And it takes a level, I'm an outliner to begin with. I know that a lot of people can't do that and just feel like it curves the creative flow. If I don't have some idea of where I'm going, it's like my brain has exploded and all over my computer, and that's it. Like I can't.

SPEAKER_01 14:40

It feels like chaos, doesn't it? And it really can be too sometimes.

SPEAKER_00 14:45

So outlining played a really big role, and and re-outlighting and re-outlining played a really big role in it. I have a possibly unhealthy relationship with the Scrivener app, and that's okay. I can admit that that's the case. I don't function well without it when writing something longer. And so when dealing with Emma and Lexi's voices and postcards from Summer, you know, it really helped to have something like Scrivener where I could separate out their voices very distinctly, chapter by chapter, and keep track of who was telling a story when. Where do the transitions happen here? I think if I had been doing this in a Google Doc or pages or Word, I I don't think I could have done it, to be really honest with you. I really needed that separation and organization. And it was a lot of rewriting. It was a lot of rewriting. There's always like the thrill of the first draft, and then most of it doesn't stay. And I just keep working. And like I said, for me, the work involves like the burst of like joyous creativity and and revising, but it also includes, you know, a notebook where I keep chapter by chapter information about what I need to do for each revision. And I start a new notebook for each revision because I had to keep doing that. In fact, the only reason I found out that I have ADHD was that I got diagnosed as an adult. I was at a writer's workshop and was describing this process to someone. And she said, Oh, you have ADHD too. And I said, No, no, that's not true. I absolutely do not. And other people were chiming in saying, you should maybe look into it because it sounds like you do. And I do. But I think even knowing that has made this. I used to feel bad that it took this many steps for me to write, and especially with something as intricate as postcards from summer. It has to be an intricately organized process for me. And I think realizing now that that's just how my mind works, and it's okay to need I'm not going to be a pantser ever, ever, even with a very straightforward storyline. And when it's not a straightforward storyline, no way. So I think it was good for me in a lot of ways to come up with some more organizational tools for myself while I was writing postcards from summer, so that I could keep track of where does Lexi's story end at a certain point? Like where does Emma pick up? And, you know, for part of it, it's not a mystery novel. Let's let's just say that right now. It's not a traditional mystery novel, but there is a mystery involved, a family mystery that's involved.

SPEAKER_01 17:33

Never all, actually.

SPEAKER_00 17:34

Yeah. So, you know, part of it was also figuring out how much information you let out when. Lexi's searching for information about her mother who died when she was really little. Where does that journey take her? And how much information does she find out where? And where does that lead her to next? It was a constant balancing act.

SPEAKER_01 17:54

So did you outline each timeline separately and then merge them together? How did that work for you?

SPEAKER_00 18:01

I ultimately did have to do that. Yeah. I started off like the first draft, I didn't do it. And like I said, it was chaos. And then, you know, the realization that I think writing Emma in particular, I had to write Emma's at least the outline for Emma first, so that I knew exactly what was going to happen with Emma, so that I could then figure out where Lexi fit into all of this and where in her travels and in her journey to find more, where am I placing Lexi into the story and into this timeline with each switch back and forth? So I did ultimately outline Emma's section, her whole storyline first, and then went back and did the same thing for Lexi, and then started to kind of cut and paste in Scrivener. Like, no, no, this isn't where Lexi belongs. I'm gonna switch her to here. And no, this Emma chapter needs to go much later, and I need to so it was a lot of a lot of trial and error, but I did have to divide and conquer.

SPEAKER_01 19:05

Yeah. Yeah, it's it's it's ambitious. You need to look at the narrative arc of each each timeline, and the turning points for each have to be there. Yeah, and you merge them together, and then you have to be able to step back and pull up to like this 30,000-foot view and see if everything is timed right, and then and figure out an even higher level idea of turning points for the overarching story.

SPEAKER_00 19:37

That's a lot. It was, and again, like it's a lot of hoops that I have to jump through to do. But I have to say, keeping a notebook after I got those outlines together and did a revision and then started on another revision. Starting a notebook, and it was the first time I ever did it, and I think I'm never gonna turn back. And I went chapter by chapter talking about specifically what information you learn about Emma in each chapter and how Lexi discovers it, yeah, or how the story unfolds in the past in Emma's timeline. And it helped so much. Yeah, just to handwrite it all out and to say, okay, I'm giving away way too much information in chapter seven. I need to dial this back, or like I'm being really, really, really obscure and no one is going to understand what I'm even talking about because I'm trying so hard to hide information. So it did really help to break it down into pieces and then put it all back together again.

SPEAKER_01 20:40

Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. I'm sure somebody's out there right now. Writing a dual timeline, pulling their hair out is going to go, this is really helpful.

SPEAKER_00 20:49

Thank you. We don't talk a lot about, you know, writing while neurodivergent in some way, because it it can have its own, like I said, there are a lot of hoops that I have to jump through. And that's okay. It was good realizing it about myself. But I, you know, for a while felt really bad about the fact that I kept talking to people who were like, get your butt in your chair every day, and you write every day. And I can't do that. Like there are days where it flows and I could write for 11 hours straight, and there are days where there's nothing in the tank.

SPEAKER_01 21:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:23

And that organizationally, like a lot has to be done before the tank gets filled again. So I think it's just good to acknowledge that our processes can be wildly different. Right.

SPEAKER_01 21:35

And I think it makes the beautiful point of in order to accept yourself, you have to know yourself. And so, right. So comparing to every to whoever's in whoever we're comparing to, that's helpful. No, it's not. We all do it. We all do it. It's human nature, but it's not helpful. And so when we can dial it in and I guess when we can just Step back and observe ourselves. Like, are we doing that? Are we not doing that? Yep. But I I love what you share is that the more you grew to understand you as a person, the more accepting you were of the process that you now embraced instead of being like, oh, I have to do it this way.

SPEAKER_00 22:18

Like, there's no scriptner and reorganize everything. No, I love it now. Right.

SPEAKER_01 22:25

Right. So it's a hell, maybe it may not be an unhealthy relationship with Scrivener. It may be a healthy relationship for you. Right. So a big part of this podcast is dedicated to telling the truth about why writing a novel is really difficult. And by, you know, put bringing that into the light, it will help people create more empathy for themselves as writers. And then we'll have more stories in the world because more people will stay with it. So I'd love to ask you if you could share a time when the writing's gotten really hard, when you struggled, what it was like, and what helped you move through.

SPEAKER_00 23:06

So I feel like I'm in it right now. That time period had a lot of family health issues over the past 12 months and much more recently. So it's been one of those times where life has like an all-cap bold with exclamation points, interrupted everything. And that's that happens, right? It happens to all of us in big and small ways. Work becomes overwhelming and we have too much to do. Parenting becomes overwhelming, taking care of parents and older relatives. Like we all have our stuff, right? Our own health issues, our family health issues. So I feel like I got to a point a few months ago where I was like, well, nothing's getting done. And I don't know what to do about it. And it's been really good to I have two different writing groups that I'm part of. One meets just in the morning before work. Um, so we get together on Friday morning and we hop on Zoom together and we try to keep each other accountable and write. That has been surprisingly good for me, not just because I love the two of them and I love to see them every Friday morning, but it's been really good for me to say, it doesn't matter what's going on, I'm setting aside this time. And that's it. And my other writing group meets at night, also on Zoom, and is a much bigger group of really fascinating women who have such different perspectives on the writing world. We're all different ages, we're at different places in our lives, and they're just such an immense support that you feel like, all right, I'm gonna ski through this hard part and it's gonna be okay. But for a while, I was like, I, you know, you throw up your hands. What are you gonna do? So I think I was at a writing conference once, and it was a romance, I think it was a romance writing conference, if I'm remembering correctly. And you know, you strike up conversations with all kinds of people at these conferences, it's amazing for that reason. But she had been going through a hard time and she hadn't written in like two years or something. And she was talking about giving yourself grace. And I was like, oh, light ball moment, like we do have to. And I, you know, I teach in an MFA program at Leslie University, and I tell my students that a lot too, because they're always under deadline. They're always like, there's always a push to create work because that's how school works. Even if it's an MFA program and you're working on creative writing, you're working up against deadlines. And sometimes stuff happens, and you have to take a step backward and say, stuff happens. It's okay that this happened because it's just life, and that's what happens to all of us. So I think the idea of grace has really stuck with me.

SPEAKER_01 25:53

I love that. Yeah, life life. I I love life life. That's a good way to look at it. It'll never stop. There's this quote that a friend of mine shared with me years ago that says, Acceptance is the answer to all my problems today. Yeah. And I hate that. I know. Right. Um so I love your response. You just surrounding yourself with supportive community and giving yourself grace because we're only human. We can only do what we can do.

SPEAKER_00 26:22

And I have to say, this past year has also given me my new favorite mantra. That's not a today problem. Like there are like when there are really immediate things that are going on, sometimes things are not a today problem. And I was never good at doing that. Everything would just crash in at once, and I would be like, and I have to do this, and I have to do this, and I have to this. If there is a positive thing that has come out of this, it's the perspective of not all of this has to happen at one time. Wow.

SPEAKER_01 26:51

I'm writing that down on a post-it. I'm stitching it on a pillow, I'm gonna put it on my hat. That is not a today problem.

SPEAKER_00 26:59

It's not a today problem. And it was it, it I only started saying it because at the time, you know, I've told you this before, like my husband was having a lot of health issues. And I'm like, okay, well, we're just dealing with right now. There's nothing else that we can deal with. And once I got to a point where I was comfortable with that, simply because I couldn't do anything else, it got easier to say, I'm gonna let go of this for right now. Like I know it's gonna still be there, but it's not something that I'm gonna deal with right this second. And sometimes that writing a chapter, like a revision of a chapter, that I'm like, today can't be that day. And tomorrow can be, but it's not gonna be a today problem because today's problems are very immediate. And that's okay. When that happens, it's okay.

SPEAKER_01 27:47

Okay, thank you so much for sharing all about your book and about your process and about coming to terms with how you have stepped into your process as a writer. What would you say your wish for your fellow writers is? What would you like to impart to them?

SPEAKER_00 28:07

Yeah, absolutely. I feel like that's always a tricky question because advice is never one size fits all, right? But I think finding your own rhythm is really important. Again, like when I first started writing, I kept seeing these writers who I admired so much talking about how they sat down and wrote every day, no matter what else was going on. And that works so well for some people and they need to have that continuity. And for others, it's never going to be the case. So I think just finding for all of us, finding our own rhythm and what's going to work for us. And knowing that that's going to be different for different projects sometimes and different at different stages of your life. But just I think being open to the fact that that rhythm can change and it's good to embrace wherever it is and whatever it is, and maybe be a little less hard on ourselves.

SPEAKER_01 29:00

Oh, that's beautiful. Thank you so much. So, would you like to share anything that you're currently working on?

SPEAKER_00 29:06

Yeah, absolutely. I have a new board book out which just came out this week called Happy Halloween Teal Pumpkins. It is a lovely little ode to kids with food allergies going trick-or-treating on Helen. And it's in conjunction with the Teal Pumpkin project, which has an app and a map that you can use to try to find places where it's safe to trick-or-treat if you're a kid who has food allergies. And like I said, I'm working on two different novels right now. One is an alien invasion story, but it's not really about the alien invasion so much. It's about this group of kids. It's a it's a it's a found family story, but it's the inciting incident is definitely holy crap. Invaded in the middle of my gym class. And the other is is about a climate catastrophe. And it's one of long-standing duration. It's not like the world is crashing down all of a sudden. It's someone who has come of age. A young woman who's come of age, knowing only this. And so, and and then wondering if there was something that could be done to change it for everybody, or if it's just the way things have to be. So, again, it's a lot of soul searching for her and a lot of learning to trust yourself with a good dose of like consent thrown in and the importance of it. So, yeah, they're really different. One's a lot. Um, but it's been good to, I think, have the leavening when you're writing something that's a little darker in a lot of ways, to also have the silliness of aliens invading during gym class and what that means.

SPEAKER_01 30:48

I very much agree. I am working on a um young adult thriller right now, and it's heavy and so on the side, I'm over here writing a you know, a little fun romance story. And and then my daughter and I are working on a fairy story together. Yeah, it's good to have that variation so that you don't feel mired, I guess, or doesn't get heavy.

SPEAKER_00 31:13

Deeply goofy picture book in the mix as well that I've been revealing. So, yeah, you're amazing. You are amazing that are not related to each other at all.

SPEAKER_01 31:23

I love it. That's amazing. Really, truly it is, and it actually makes me feel so much better just for my own self because I am such a dabbler as well in many different things, and so like oh, I'm not alone. Thanks. Okay, yeah, y'all. Intense dabbling.

SPEAKER_00 31:42

All right, so where can listeners find you? My website is cynthiaplatbooks.com. I'm on Instagram, also Cynthia Platbooks, and I am just starting out on blue sky and leaving the world of Twitter behind and finding a really lovely little kidlet enclave there.

SPEAKER_01 32:00

So thank you so much for your time and just you know, your honesty, your vulnerability, and sharing your joy of writing and storytelling. It definitely translates. And I hope everybody who loves contemporary YA coming of age picks up your book, Postcards of Summer, and look forward to more stories from you. Thank you so much. It's really a pleasure talking to you. Thank you for listening to the Write It Scared podcast. If you enjoyed today's show, please make sure to hit the follow button so you never miss an episode. And please leave a review. Reviews help other writers like you find the voices and messages they need to hear to continue to write their stories. Let's lift each other up. Remember, you can be scared and still be unstoppable. I'll see you next week.