Lisa Yee is a prolific author of books for children and young adults. Her latest series is The Misfits.
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Some writers are night owls. I connected with Lisa Yee at midnight. She told me, “I usually go to sleep around two or three in the morning. That’s when I’m most creative, really late at night. I think it’s because when I first started writing books, I had a full-time job. I had two kids. The only time I had to myself was late at night when everybody was asleep.”
Like many writers, Lisa had wanted to be an author since she was young. “I had always wanted to be an author. To me, authors were like rock stars. And so I was too embarrassed to even admit it. All my jobs involved writing, everything but writing books. It wasn’t until I was a mom; I had two kids, and I used to always say, ‘If there’s something you want to do, you’ve got to try.’ And here I was being this huge hypocrite because I had always wanted to write books and I wasn’t trying. So to save face, I began writing books.”
Lisa didn’t start out writing books for kids. The first book she wrote was for adults, and that helped her land an agent. But she got the itch to write for children, “because I always found myself in bookstores or at the library in the kids’ section. I had written a book, and I had sent it to Arthur Levine, the editor of the Harry Potter series. And he said, ‘I love this. This isn’t quite right for us. Do you have something else?’ And I said ’I have this idea for a book about a girl who’s a genius. And he said, ‘Okay, send it to me.’
Lisa sent a synopsis and the first three chapters, and when he said “Send me the rest of the book,” Lisa had to admit that “I actually haven’t written it yet. But that ended up being my first novel.”
The book, Millicent Min, Girl Genius, featured one of the first Asian-American protagonists in contemporary children’s literature. I asked Lisa if this made it hard to sell. She said, “I was so naive, I just wrote a book about a kid like me. There had been books about, you know, with Asian or Asian-American protagonists, but they were about like the journey of immigration and things like that. Millicent was a contemporary novel, and her being Asian was just part of the fabric of the story. I had no idea that it was groundbreaking.”
Lisa’s latest books are a series called The Misfits. When I asked what the inspiration for this series was, Lisa said, “Ballerina Battalion. I was at Disneyland with my agent and I said to her, ‘I have this idea about crime-fighting ballerinas. And it could be called Ballerina Battalion. About these kick-ass ballerinas who can beat everyone up.’ And it morphed into five really awkward kids who turned into super secret covert agents.”
“But I had written the DC Super Hero Girl series for DC Comics, and I love superheroes. I kept thinking, what if they were heroes, but they didn’t have superpowers? And what if they were like me, who as a kid, was a bookworm and awkward, and I could be that person who was sitting in the cafeteria that nobody saw? And what if being invisible to people was a plus? Because if you’re a super secret agent, you don’t want people to notice you. And I started thinking about all this stuff, like how I had allergies; what if allergies were a plus? So in the book, allergies are a good thing. I started taking all these things that were negative. And I thought, what if they were pretty great? And that’s how The Misfits came about.”
We discussed the business of children’s books, and how it differs from that of adult fiction. Lisa explained, “I was surprised when I first started, because when you go on tour, what you do is you visit schools. I didn’t understand that. You still visit bookstores, but they put you into a school and you have maybe, five or six hundred kids there. You’re not going to get five or six hundred kids at a bookstore. When I’m touring for The Misfits, I’m going to maybe 25 schools all over the country. You go in and you speak to the kids about writing and your latest book. And it’s usually paired up with an independent bookseller. They know what schools would appreciate an author coming in, and then they sell your book.”
Lisa has been using Scrivener for more than a decade. “I love Scrivener so much. I can’t remember how I discovered it, but it was just eye-opening like I could hear the angels singing. I used to have all these documents on my screen all over the place. With Scrivener, it’s all there at once. I have my folders with all my research and I have hot links and I have photos. Every chapter I have as a different document in Scrivener and then I compile the chapters at the end.
“I write notes, old-fashioned on a piece of paper, but then I always transfer them to Scrivener. I have a page that just has notes and things that I want to address. As I’m writing, when I go through a draft at the end, I look at those notes and I delete anything that I’ve addressed to make sure that when I’m done, that page of notes is empty. So it’s a reminder for me because if I relied on my brain to remember things, nothing would ever happen.”
Kirk McElhearn is a writer, podcaster, and photographer. He is the author of Take Control of Scrivener, and host of the podcast Write Now with Scrivener.