VR, Moon Trees, and Building Confidence Through Reading: An Interview with Wendy Mass

Children’s and YA Librarians will be very familiar with our interviewee today, the prolific Wendy Mass, author of “A Mango-Shaped Space, “Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life,” “Every Soul a Star,” “11 Birthdays,” “The Candymakers” and many others. With the debut of her and artist Gabi Mendez’ first graphic novel, “Lo & Behold,” we got to chatting about the strength of each medium, the potential power of VR, and what silly (and serious) questions kids will ask at school talks. Thanks Wendy for talking with us!

How’s your book tour been going?

Wendy Mass: It’s good. I’m home. It was about two weeks doing some local events and then a road trip to Chicago and back.

Oh, wow.

WM: Yeah. So I got to see a lot of kids at a lot of schools, talk about the graphic novel, and had some really nice bookstore events. I got to meet the illustrator of the book, Gaby Mendez, which was awesome.

That’s rad. How different is this kind of tour to a prose book tour? Or is it very similar?

WM: What was different about it was I got to make a new presentation and talk about art and how art can tell a story on its own without the text. I’m so used to only being able to tell the story through words. It was fun to kind of be able to explain how different that process is with a graphic novel and how I had to do all the art direction, which was something I didn’t realize when I started this process was part of what the author did. So I kept saying to my editor, “I’ll do this. I’ll write in this art direction. But please, please, please let the artist know, whoever you wind up hiring, to totally ignore it if it’s terrible and do whatever they think is best.” It really turned out to be a lovely collaboration. So that was really what was different.

Gabi showed me her images, like her sketches and how she sort of went from thumbnails to looser sketches to the tighter stitches to the ink and then how the color came in after. It was fun to be able to show that whole process to the kids who didn’t know how comics were made before. So that was fun.

So this was that a lot of schools?

WM: Yeah. Sometimes Gabi was with me, sometimes it was on my own. Usually on a book tour, they’ll send you to a variety of different schools. Schools who, you know, are sort of big on reading and kind of excited to hear an author. Sometimes it’ll be a place that’s never had an author come before, which is always really nice, and then they get to ask their questions. It was really interesting seeing the ones where Gabi was with me – at the end, we’re signing books – to see the kids that would run up to me to talk about writing stories and then the kids who would run up to Gabi to talk about making art.

It was cool that they had that chance because usually when I’m at a school, I’m just talking about writing. I do talk about artwork when I have a book that has some art in i but my books don’t generally have a ton of art because they are for older kids, so I do talk about it there. And I have this little video that an artist for one of the books showed me how one illustration was made, like how they’ll make a sketch and then spend days shading it and lighting it and adding all these details. I always talk about that and say, you know, for those of you who might not be interested in a career as a writer but want to be involved with books, here’s another part of it is being the illustrator. So this way, I got to really fully explore that.

They get to see all parts of the process.

WM: Exactly. How the sausage is made, as they say.

Did you have any fun, out-there questions from the kids? Because I know sometimes it’s no holds barred.

WM: It’s the kind of thing where each time is a learning process. Like, there was a time when Gabi wasn’t with me, and I explained the whole thing, the slides that would normally be hers, and how I can’t draw a straight line, even with a ruler. I’ll say the same thing. And then at the end someone will raise their hand and they’ll say, “Well. How long did it take you to draw the pictures?” And I’ll be like, oh, man. What did I do wrong that I didn’t get that across to this boy? So then the next time I’ll be super, super clear, even more so than I thought. So a lot of it is kind of trial and error and and realizing what didn’t I do? I mean, he certainly could have just kind of been tuning out. But I always try to think of it as my fault that he didn’t get something, not his fault.

I’ve certainly gotten some strange questions. A lot of “What’s your favorite color?” with the younger kids. “How much money do you make?” I get that a lot and then I always just say, “not enough to buy a yacht.” Because think of whatever that would cost and then it’s nowhere near buying a yacht. I will sometimes, especially if it’s older kids, like middle school, I’ll go through how a writer gets paid. What percentage of the cover price of a book the author gets and I’ll have them guess, like, “Do you think it’s this much? Or this much? Or this much?” and it’s always the lowest number. I try to kind of leave them with something so they have an idea, especially if they’re thinking of it as a career. They should know that it’s not the easiest in that way.

But you still love it.

WM: But I still love it and that’s what I’ll say at the end of the day too. I’ll tell them I get to wear my pajamas to work every day. And I mean, I know in the last few years, many of us have done that, but normally, there aren’t many professions that that you could do that in. Getting to make up imaginary worlds inside your head all day and send them out to hopefully wind up living inside someone else’s head is a lot of fun and something I take very seriously.

Kids will often ask me and so often, they’ll always ask, “What’s your most favorite book that you’ve written?” but more and more often they’re asking “What’s your least favorite book that you’ve written?” It’s like, if I had a least favorite, I wouldn’t publish it. I really take a big responsibility to plant something in someone’s head. If a story is going to be living in there, I want to make sure that it’s something that I feel is okay to be living there and that will help them and be a good thing.

I don’t know. I think we all have stories that we’ve read that we’re not happy to live in ourselves.

Yeah. I try not to read the works that I don’t like but that doesn’t always work.

WM: And as grownups, we have a better sense of that even though we still get tricked. I definitely will get tricked sometimes. But when you’re a kid, I definitely know there was books that I picked up and read that I wish I hadn’t.

Because it didn’t hit you at the right time? Because of what the book was saying?

WM: The content either scared me or I just wasn’t ready for it so it kind of freaked me out. Stuff like that.

How do you find that balance in your works, like tailoring it to the audience that that you have in mind? Because you’re primarily writing for a middle grade audience, right?

WM: I guess I keep circling around the same kinds of themes. I want them to build a sense of confidence in their own individuality, to love what they love, to not feel bad about that, to not make anyone else feel bad about what they love and what lights them up and what they’re passionate about. So I wind up of telling those stories a little bit often, I think.

I want to stretch their minds in terms of people they might not meet in their daily life. Characters that are going through things that if the reader goes through them one day, then maybe they’ll feel stronger because they’ve already kind of walked in the shoes of these characters. Empathy is a big part of what I tried to cultivate, and especially in “Lo and Behold” that was definitely something on my mind.

One of the early reviews that I read, said “Addie,” the main character, “went from apathy to empathy.” And I’m like, “I’m gonna steal that!” I wanted her to go from apathy to empathy, to go from really being closed off and not being able to kind of identify with or even, like, accept or understand what someone else was going through really, to really being able to help them, to show them empathy and to really feel what it was like to go through what they’re going through.

So those are the kinds of things I guess that I circle around a lot.

As you said, it’s one of the big themes in your new graphic novel, “Lo and Behold.” What was the impetus behind the story? Were you approached by Random House originally? Did you go to them and said you think this story would really work in this format?

WM: What happened was, it was my 30th book, and at this point I really wanted to do something new.

Wow.

WM: It makes me feel old but I wrote a lot of books. My first book came out 20 years ago, so in the last 20 years of life, somehow I wrote 30 books, and I really just wanted to do something different. I’d written for lots of different ages, which was really fun, but I wanted a different format and I always kind of looked around my life to see what to write about and I was playing a lot of virtual reality. I am a huge VR evangelist. So not like VR enthusiast, a VR evangelist, where I want to put everyone in a headset. It was such a big part of my life and so I thought, that’s what I want to tell a story about but I just didn’t feel like I could paint enough of a picture of what VR was like, so the idea of a graphic novel came to me.

I had to write like a summary of what it would be, I had to write maybe 20 pages of the script to kind of prove that I could write in this format. I had to learn all of that, read a lot of books on how to write comics, and how to leave places for the silent panels for the story to tell it, which was the hardest, I think. Then I took it around to different publishers and the editor at Random House called me on the phone and was like, “I want to do the story. I want to do the story with you.” And I was like, “I want to do this story with you.” And then it was born.

Then I had to write the whole thing before it was matched up with the artist. That was a scary process. Because it’s like, who’s it going to be? And what’s it going to look like? You know, you have this whole vision that you’ve worked for so many years, I just had no idea what it would look like, but I’m over the moon with how beautiful I think she did illustrating it.

Very appropriate too.

WM: Over the moon!

And that’s the thing. Like the moon tree aspect of it, about the seeds that went to the moon, was from something I got to see. I got to see a second generation Moon Tree being planted when I went down to North Carolina to see the eclipse in 2017. It was cloudy, and I was missing the Eclipse, but I got to watch this moon tree being planted, so I thought “I’m going to write this in a story one day.” So this was finally that day.

I think a lot of that happens as a writer. It’s like, maybe this wasn’t so great but someday it’ll make a great story. Somehow it, you know, validates the experience or makes it better if you can use it someday. That’s something to think about.

It’s certainly difficult when for the more difficult aspects of life. Like, should I use this in my art? Should I not?

WM: When you fictionalize it, I guess it’s different. I mean, that’s interesting, because if you’re drawing it, then you’re so much closer to it than, I think, if you’re writing fiction and it’s somebody else’s character’s experience. That seems to take a little bit more distance. Maybe it’s easier.

I wonder if that’s one of the reasons why graphic novels are connecting so much with the younger generation right now. Because it makes it feel more immediate.

WM: I think so and also it I think, when they’re so used to, whether it’s like watching videos or watching television, it’s a way of still getting that stimulus without watching something. It’s familiar way of them getting a story but also reading at the same time, which I think is why it’s such a nice gateway for kids who maybe struggle with reading or are a little more reluctant to read a story and then see where it takes them into, you know, longer books of fiction.

Prose is a little more abstract than graphic novels, you’d say?

WM: I mean, it requires much more thinking. You really have to think about, what is the character saying without saying it? Or what am I reading between the lines here and the graphic novel, it doesn’t make you work that hard. It’s certainly not internal in the way that a novel is. It has to show so much more on the page. So I could have a few, and I do have some, thought boxes of Addie’s where she’s just thinking but a lot of graphic novels don’t even have that. It’s all dialogue that has to tell the story, the dialogue and the art. It’s really such a different process.

Did you miss that internality when making the “Lo & Behold?”

WM: I did. I mean, I think I wound up using a lot more of those thought boxes, or narration boxes I think I called them, where she’s kind of telling the reader what she wants them to know that isn’t shown, I think I’m using more of those than a lot of people do in their graphic novels. I don’t know if it’s because it was my first one and I was still stuck a little bit on “But I have to let you know what she’s thinking.” So that and also just the story itself being kind of her internal journey, like I had to do that.

I did write a second graphic novel now, which is a prequel to another book of mine. I have this book called “The Candymakers” and a prequel to it, which takes place in the 1950s. So that’s a graphic novel and I didn’t have any narration. It just was all dialogue and art. Like by that point, I guess I figured it out.

I think it’s a stylistic choice at this point. Just having read so many comics, it’s the thought balloons and thought bubbles, they fall in and out of fashion, depending on how immediate you want the story to feel.

WM: Do you have a preference? Or is it just it depends on if it works in this story.

I like a good thought balloon. Like I like the balloon balloons. I like the captions. But yeah, I think it really depends on the story. It depends on how much you want it to be internal.

WM: You know, when you say the different things like captions, my editor kept sort of striking out the captions, and I’d be like, but then how do they know that the next day is there or that…meanwhile at the same time as this? And she’s like, they’ll know. They’ll know. I had to kind of remind myself that there’s more clues than I’m used to.

And when you’re in the scripting phase, you don’t get to see the the art part. And when you see the art it’s like “Oh, yeah! There’s the sun. There it goes.”

WM: Exactly. That’s exactly right. And then at the very end, when all the art was in and the color and everything, and we’d see something that wasn’t working well, like there was a few points where it was too late to change the art but really easy to change the text. So we wound up like changing the text to match the art, whereas the whole rest of the time had been the other way arounnd. That was a little interesting twist for me at the end.

Shifting over to what’s within the book, one of the major themes and one of the major touchstones for the main character is grief and learning to work through some of these complicated feelings around loss. Did you want that to be that that emotional core of the book? Or were you looking for the empathy side, the VR side, to kind of take more of the focus?

WM: I think is tied together in that you don’t really know what she’s going through or exactly what she’s going through until the end, so that kind of gave me some leeway. It made it easier because if like, say hypothetically, we knew her mom died in the beginning, then the whole book, that would be a big part of it, and weighing on it and being in conversations and dealing with all of it. I kind of gave myself an out by being like, “Well, the mom’s not there right now but we don’t really know what happened so let’s put a pin in that and move on with the story.”

I think that the idea of accepting her current life was important to me without really knowing what it was, the idea of making the best of where you are because we don’t have a choice. I think that that could be extrapolated in lots of different people’s lives. If the kids are reading in and don’t have that situation of their mom not being there right now but they certainly have something else where maybe they’ve just moved or they’re in a different school and don’t know people; there’s some situation that makes them close themselves down like Addie and I wanted to show what could bring you out of it. In her case, it was the virtual reality but it was also accepting a new friend in her life with Mateo and allowing herself to recognize that other people are going through things as well and that they can help each other. That was really the journey that I wanted her to go on.

This is going to be a weird question but do you think that children are inherently selfish?

WM: I think that children have to be self-centered because that’s their journey. That’s their part in life. They need to grow and learn who they are and they’re their, sort of, best guide. They’re making their own judgments. We can’t…if we tell them on one side, don’t be pressured by your peers, but then on the other side, look around you and act accordingly, it’s like, we can’t tell them both things – and we can tell them both things – but we want them to learn to be their own selves, just not to the point where they’ve closed themselves off from caring about and understanding what other people are going through.

It’s a tough ride, you know, through adolescence. I think it takes some kids longer than others to cultivate that empathy and to really understand where they fit in in the world of what other people are going through. It’s tricky. And I think that’s one of the reasons that I love writing for this age. Hearing from someone who’s like, “I never thought of X, Y, or Z this way before” or “I read your book when I was nine. And then again when I was 12. And then 14 and now I can see so many different things” because they are different. So that’s always really gratifying.

Do you always hope that your books grow with the people who are reading them.

WM: I feel like I try to put enough in there that, like, some things might go over their head at 10 that they’ll get at 14. And I think “Lo and Behold” is like that because the themes in it are more advanced than maybe a graphic novel they might pick up in third or fourth grade. So I think that there are some things that the younger kids will miss that hopefully, if they read it again as a middle schooler, they’ll pick up or they’ll be able to identify with more. Time will tell.

They’ll really focus on the the moon trees.

WM: Right, or they might come away with it as a book about virtual reality and not get the deeper things in there and that’s fine. And then maybe then they’ll say, “Oh. It’s a book about addiction.” It depends on where you come to it from to life.

And the virtual reality stuff is very cool.

WM: Do you like VR? Like, have you spent a lot of time in it?

I haven’t. I’ve done it twice. I got one of those free headsets when I got my Samsung Galaxy S7.

WM: Like the one where you put your phone inside it? The plastic thing?

Oh yeah. I queued up the free Cirque du Soleil thing and then fell out of my chair because the clown came right at my face. And I was like, ahhhhh.

WM: Try it again. Try a new headset. I’m really prone to motion sickness and they’ve like fixed all of that. I mean, I wouldn’t go on a roller coaster in VR. But…

I don’t want to do it in real life.

WM: Exactly. I wouldn’t do it in real life; I wouldn’t do in VR. But otherwise it’s really great and saved my sanity since the 2016 election – I think that’s right where I discovered it when it came out to the public right before that – certainly up through pandemic life. It really saved myself. My kids. It’s a great way to connect with people too. Like friends who you know who have had headsets or just meeting people all around the world inside the headset.

Shifting to the VR, what do you see as the future of virtual reality’s utility? Beyond, you know, everyone says video games, and I love video games, but what else do you think virtual reality will be useful for? Is it just the stuff that you lay out in “Lo and Behold?”

WM: I tried to touch on a lot of the different things and “Lo and Behold.” There’s one scene where they show it to an elderly person and they take him back through one of Google Earth types of apps to the village he grew up in, which he hadn’t seen in 60 years. So in elder care, it’s a godsend. In health care, it’s just so amazing. I mean, there’s so many studies about how it helps lower your pain, give people distraction to the point where they don’t notice that they just got 20 vials of blood drawn, things like that. I think that’s really going to be a big deal.
In education, I mean, there are schools now, they’ll literally take field trips to different places around the world in their VR headsets. That’s really cool.

As a way of really giving a child empathy, it really does allow you to walk in other people’s shoes, like literally, you know, in these stories that kind of play out inside VR. I love that aspect of it. It’s also just a way of, when we’re all so distracted with so many different things, even when when you’re inside the headset, you’re completely immersed. Even though you’re doing something with technology, it’s also keeping you from doing the ten other things you would be doing.

I don’t know if that makes sense. In a way it’s giving us like this respite from all the things going on around us.

Like it refocuses and isolates within a single experience instead of having all these things happening around.

WM: Yes and you’re not mindlessly scrolling something, you have to be active.

One of the questions shifting back to “Lo and Behold, with the relationship between Addie and her father, were you trying to strike a balance there between kind of the absent father tropes – because oftentimes I’m thinking when you only seeing one parent, and especially when it’s like a father, there’s usually like one or two versions of that, and here, it’s very supportive you kind of feel that there isn’t a bad relationship between them. It’s just that Addie’s kind of pulled away.

WM: Yeah, I think that’s a really good point, that I didn’t want to make both parents absent, which could happen if the one parent just sort of shuts down or doesn’t feel capable of stepping in and doing both roles, but I think I’d already established the dad as an equal partner in raising her.

I think I tend to have close Father-child, relationships in my books, whether it’s a son or a daughter. I’m not sure why that is, I’m sure it’s some thing in my own life I wish I had. I don’t know. I think that it was important for Addie to have somebody who would listen, even though she wasn’t ready to talk.

Did you have situations like that in your own life, either as a parent or as a child?

WM: Not really. No, not really. It’s just… I try to think like, what does my character need to have around her? Before I write the story, I’ll interview the character and so I’ll fill in what their parents are like, what kind of three qualities each parent might have, what are the character’s fears and dreams and weaknesses and things like that. In this case, I knew that this was the kind of support that I wanted her to have. I mean, she really has one ally for the year that her mom’s missing in action or not there when the story starts, so I wanted to show that she’s only had her dad. She kind of lost her friends and I didn’t want her not to have anybody. That would be too hard for what she needed to go through in the story.

And now she’s got Mateo. Did you have fun writing their dynamic?

WM: I did. I really got a kick out of Mateo and the geocaching, which is something that he loves. That’s a big hobby of mine so it’s another kind of example of me throwing lots of things that I loved into this book. I wind up writing about geocaching in a lot of different books, it seems. I can’t seem to help it. But like, I love this scene and he’s walking through the woods in his pajamas because he’s just excited to do it and doesn’t realize he’s even wearing them. So little things like that I got a kick out of with him.

That was another thing that, as you said earlier, is very big in the in the book, showing this unapologetic enthusiasm for the things you like, for your hobbies and for the things you want to share. Do you kind of hope that more people take that from the book and go,” Oh, maybe I can be a little bit more open about the things I like.”

WM: I hope so. And that’s a really good point about Mateo kind of being that way, being kind of happy-go-lucky and doing the things that he loves even though you find out that he has been through hard things as well, just sort of being, like you said, unapologetically himself, which is something I hadn’t really thought about. I knew he would be a foil to Addie and help pull her out but I hadn’t been thinking of it consciously, you know? He goes and plays the piano for the people at the hospital and the retirement wing or something and he does these things that might not be what the average child his age would do and he’s not sorry about it. So yeah, I do hope that the reader gets that, maybe without thinking of it.

If I put it in subconsciously, maybe they’ll take it out subconsciously.

Last question. What was one of your favorite scenes to write? And then what was one of your favorite scenes to see drawn?

WM: Let’s see…I think one of my favorite to see drawn was- there’s a few of them – the scene where we first see the lab and there’s so much detail and all the different people are in it, I love that scene because it’s an important one. Like what the VR lab looks like. Also, the moon seeds. So Addie does this report on the moon seeds or moon trees and Gaby just illustrated it in this beautiful timeline fashion.

I should mention, on my website, I’m hosting these QR codes where the reader will be able to scan it and match up with the page number and go to the book and see some AR (augmented reality) experiences. One of them is a video that we made on the moon seeds spread so it’ll actually pop up and come to life and everything like that.

In terms of what to write, it would definitely be the stuff inside of VR. That was just really fun to try to put in there the different things you can do when you’re first starting. Like you’ll want to go and play paintball and you’ll want to try to, you know, shoot at aliens just to kind of do those things. And also, you know, when you start meeting people inside of it, people from all around the world. That’s a fun kind of social VR thing. Those were the ones that come to the top.