1029. This week, I talk with Jennifer Lynn Barnes, author of the bestselling "Inheritance Games" series and a former psychology professor, about the psychology behind popular fiction. We look at why readers connect so deeply with fictional characters, the science of parasocial relationships, and how understanding human psychology can improve your storytelling.
1029. This week, I talk with Jennifer Lynn Barnes, author of the bestselling "Inheritance Games" series and a former psychology professor, about the psychology behind popular fiction. We look at why readers connect so deeply with fictional characters, the science of parasocial relationships, and how understanding human psychology can improve your storytelling.
Find Jennifer Lynn Barnes on Instagram at AuthorJenLynnBarnes and on her website at JenniferLynnBarnes.com.
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MIGNON: Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and I'm here with Jennifer Lynn Barnes, author of the wildly popular "Inheritance Games" series, about four million copies sold, 80 weeks on the bestseller list. And we're going to talk about those books, and the fifth book in the series, "Games Untold" is coming out, I believe, next week.
You can definitely order it now. But I am most excited to talk about the psychology of fiction because Jennifer was also a professor of psychology and incorporated what she learned into her books. Jennifer Lynn Barnes, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast.
JENNIFER: Oh, thank you so much for having me. Ever since I left academia, I welcome any excuse to talk about the science of fiction.
MIGNON: Yeah, as a former biologist, when I learned that people actually run studies on why we engage with fiction, I was just captivated. And, there's so much to talk about. I think maybe a good place to start is why do we end up … why do we cry when we read about characters we know aren't even real?
JENNIFER: That's a great question. And in the psychology of fiction, it's the million dollar question. Like, why do people spend so much time, and so much money, and so much emotion on things we know quite well are make believe. There are a lot of different theories about it. Many of the ones that are specifically about the emotion fiction makes us feel relies on the fact that if you think about the environment in which our brains evolved, there was no reason for us to need to distinguish between reality and fantasy.
Like think about something like a television show, right? If you see someone's face in front of you, your brain is largely going to interpret that as there's someone in front of you, like if you see a favorite character every week for 10 years, you're going to feel like you know that person, right? In the pages of a book much of the research suggests the same thing.
Like, you get to know those people. Arguably, you get to know those people better than you know anyone in reality because with literature specifically, one thing it gives us is oftentimes access to the inside of other people's heads that you never get in the real world. In the real world, you might think you know what someone's thinking, but even if they've told you what they're thinking, you don't know for sure that's what's really going on.
The best we ever have at getting into someone else's head in reality is a theory. Right? They call it "theory of mind," knowing mind exists and our theory about what it's like to be someone else. But in the pages of a book, you actually get to experience being in someone else's head. You get to see them in the super intimate moments that no one would get to see.
You can think about it again like a TV show, like, you see the moment where the person's really tough and not vulnerable. And then they turn around and their face crumples. And no one in their world sees that. No one sees them breaking down in the shower. Or, total control, but closing their office door and then losing it.
So you get to see all these super intimate moments with people. So you form actual relationships oftentimes with fictional characters. They're called parasocial relationships. Those are the one-sided relationships you form with ... it can be a fictional character. It can be a celebrity that you've just consumed media about.
But those relationships look a lot like real relationships. And so you can watch these things, and it can have a very real effect on you because those relationships are real. Because you're inside the person's head. Because in some, to some extent, you're experiencing it along with them. And you know it's not real.
But there's this great concept from the philosophical literature put forth by a philosopher named Tamar Gendler that's called "alief." And the idea is you have beliefs, those are the things you consciously believe, and then you have aliefs. And in alief, the example Gendler always gives is imagine you're in a glass elevator, and you go up like a hundred stories, and you look down below your feet, and it's just a drop.
And you might believe you're perfectly safe because there's a floor beneath you, but your heart might still start racing. You might still start feeling kind of sweaty. Why? She argues it's because you believe you're safe, but on a gut, subconscious level, you alief that you're not. So one of the explanations she and other people like Paul Bloom have given for fiction is that maybe you believe these characters are fictional. But on this gut level, you have this alief that they're real.
MIGNON: That's fascinating. And that's why people like, like we dream and we daydream about fictional characters. So one thing that I was wondering, so you've been writing novels since you were really young, since you were like 19, you've been writing your whole career, and you did an undergrad in psychology and then a PhD in psychology.
And then, you were a professor in psychology. Were you drawn to the field because you were so interested in fiction or did you, at what point did you start melding those two and incorporating the ideas of the psychology of fiction into your own work?
JENNIFER: So it's actually, for a while when I started, my interest in fiction and my interest in psychological sciences were separate. Though I do think they have the same underlying cause, which is I'm interested in people. And people and relationships and how we work, and that is the stuff of fiction.
And it is also what psychologists study in laboratories. So in undergrad, my primary focus was actually, I didn't even work with humans. I did a non-human primate cognition, like I used to spend my summers on an island full of rhesus monkeys, trying to figure out, like, if monkeys could get inside other people's heads, like humans can, to try and figure out, like, how far back in our evolutionary history do abilities like that go.
And then I did a master's degree in Cambridge where I was studying neurotypical individuals and then, individuals on the autism spectrum. And I actually had a whole nother project that I was supposed to do that I was over there for three months. And then it turned out that I was going to have to get clinical trial approval to do that.
And I was there on a one-year master's degree. So there was no way it was going to happen. And so my advisor at the time, was a man named Simon Baron-Cohen. And Simon said to me, he said, "You do that writing thing. It's so interesting. Is there anything you'd like to study related to that?" And I was like, "Yes."
And so I started studying, so that version, I delved into what there was. That was one of my first studies. It was on how people understand and retell stories. So I'd go in, and I'd bring people in, and they'd watched these really emotionally intense clips from the television show "House" at the time, and then they'd rewrite in their own words what they saw.
And we looked at all the differences across groups and how they were rewriting and other things. I did some stuff on fiction preferences. Then I came back for grad school in the States. I was working with my professor from undergrad, whose name was Laurie Santos, and I was doing a few more primate things.
And then eventually she was like, "You know, you do that writing thing." And I was like, "Yes, I do." And she's like, "And that's great. But when you go on the job market for academia someday, people are going to think it's really strange that you do the writing thing unless the research is somehow connected to the writing thing."
And there was another professor I worked with at Yale named Paul Bloom who was actually really interested in the psychology of fiction. So they swapped me over to his lab, and he just let me start designing whatever studies I wanted to design on the psychology of stories. I was a developmental psychologist at the time, so at that point, I was working with young children and looking at how different story preferences changed over time.
And then when I came to the University of Oklahoma, I was so lucky and have this really unusual appointment where I was half in the psychology department and then the other half was originally split in different ways, but eventually ended up being I was half in the professional writing program, which is like genre fiction: romance, YA, sci-fi and fantasy, mystery, and I was half there.
And so once I had the chance to set up my own lab, it was all dedicated to the psychology of fiction and the imagination. And what I used to like to tell my psychology students is the most wonderful thing about psychology is that there is a psychology of literally everything. If there are people involved, there's psychology involved.
So as a psychologist, you can study whatever it is you're most passionate about. And, by the time I was a professor, I had published, I don't know, maybe 12 or so books already. And so I was like, yes, that's … now that I have my own lab, now that I can study exactly what I want to study, I'm just going to study the psychology of the fiction, fiction and the imagination, because what science is amazing for is you'll get a question. And then you actually design a study and run it, and you can get answers to that.
"Oh, what makes a good book title?" And I'm like, "I have theories about this. I've read in the literature. Let's see what we do." But then you actually, bring 300 people in and run them on a study in a computer. And you get answers.
And as a writer, I feel like you're always asking other questions. And one of the questions I was always really fascinated with was, this question that if you're hanging out around other writers gets asked all the time, which is "Why that book? Or why that TV show? Why that movie? Why was it that thing that took off?"
And I feel like writers often say this in a kind of despairing way where they're like, "Why that? Why not my thing?" But I always found it to be like a super exciting question because anything that became super popular and really took off, and captured an audience, created fandom, like that for me was a really rich data point.
So I would be like, "Oh, why that thing?" And then you start generating theories, and there are already theories out there about why we like fiction as a species. So I integrate those things, start creating more theories, start doing tests. And meanwhile, I also did a lot of studies on the effects fiction has on us.
Can fiction make you better at reading people? Can fiction … I did some stuff on fandom, like what's the difference between a shipper and a non-shipper, like people who really care about the fictional relationships versus people who don't. It would just be like any question that would occur to me when I was writing or when I was out observing, because observation's the first step of the scientific method.
I'd see an observation, it would raise a question, and then I'm like, "Okay, I've got a lab, let's go and actually study this question."
MIGNON: Very cool. Yeah. I have about four things I want to ask you now. First I had no idea you worked with Laurie Santos. That's just an aside. That's really cool. Her work on happiness was truly life changing for me. And then, and I want to put a pin in talking about book titles, but you said why that book and your "Inheritance Game" series was an absolute breakout success for you … and I wonder, why that book? Was that the book where you first, did you incorporate more of what you know into that book?
Or was there something else that you think contributed to its rocket ship trajectory? Yeah.
JENNIFER: To both of those questions is yes. First of all, no matter what a person as a writer puts into a book, there's always a million other factors that go into it that are completely outside your control. I like to say that like stars have to align for any book to take off. That the magic sauce has to be in the book.
If a book can't take off, no matter how many stars align, unless there's something about the book that is working really well for readers, but you can't just say, "I'm going to put all of this stuff in the book." And then it's, yeah, going to take off. So for example, before I wrote "The Inheritance Games," I wrote a series called "The Naturals," and it came out, and it was my best performer at the time, but it was nowhere near like "Inheritance Games."
And then, I guess it was a little more than a year ago, my publisher repackaged that, put it out, and in a year, we're up to over a million copies sold in that series, too. The first time around, the stars just hadn't aligned yet. No matter what you do as a writer, you can't look at your ultimate sales, be they really good or not so good, and say that's all because of you.
All you can do is you can write the best, most compulsively readable [book]. You put everything you have in the book, but ultimately you also have to realize that when you have a book take off, you've also gotten extraordinarily lucky in a bunch of realms that have nothing to do with you. But "Inheritance Games" did have a different process for me for the psychology of fiction.
So I had used the psychology of fiction to write several of my prior books. So for example, the "Natural" series, and this is about an FBI think tank that uses teenagers to profile serial killers. And for that one, there is a theory of fiction that we like fiction because it lets us get inside the minds of others.
So I was like, "Oh, well what does that predict we'd like?" And the "Natural" series is about these kids who are incredibly gifted, like one in a billion, and getting inside the minds of others. But they're also in this training program to make them better at that.
So one of them's a deception detector. One of them's an emotion reader. Two of them are profilers. And as you read the book, you actually learn how to do some of these things to some extent. And that was me saying, "Okay, here's one theory of fiction. It says we should like things that let us inside the minds of others and that make us better at reading the minds of others. What if I wrote a series that was about that exactly?" There's another theory, that's what I would refer to as the gossip theory of fiction. Again, put forth by Paul Bloom and others, and that's we evolved to like gossip, and fiction is just gossip about people who happen to be make believe.
So I used that theory for my "Debutante" series. I knew I wanted to write a mystery series. I'd come off "The Naturals," and I was like, no murder. Mystery, but no murder. And I was like, what are we hardwired to care about? What is the stuff of gossip? And I came up with paternity. And so that one is about a teenage girl whose estranged grandmother comes and offers her $500,000 to do a debutante year.
And she agrees, but only because she wants to figure out which one of the high society men is her biological father. Because her mother got pregnant during her debutante year and was kicked out of high school, right? So I'd done my, like, theory-of-mind centric book. I'd done my gossip centric book.
But when I came on to write "The Inheritance Games," I had been giving these lectures at writing conferences where I'd be like, I'm gonna tell you everything I know about the psychology of fiction in 90 minutes, and I would go through all of these different theories and what all of them predicted about the psychology of fiction, and fandom and what the different things predict.
I did a bunch of work on fandom trying to deduce what is it that a bunch of fandom-enabling properties have in common, and I built out that theory. So "The Inheritance Games" was the first book for which I actually put together for myself like this I think it's 27-pages-long workbook, it leaves lots of blanks, so it's like there's two questions a page, so it's not, or three, it's not as it, but it's just one that I can fill in by hand that looks at all of those predictions I'd made in all of these different talks about these are the things that various theories about why we as a species like stories say we should like in stories.
And these are the things that I have theorized are important for a property to become fan enabling. What happens if I actually go through and do all of that in one book. Not just concentrating on one theory or another theory, but actually consciously going through and being like, "What happens if I try and tick every single box?"
And what happened with "The Inheritance Games." So again stars had to get aligned. You have, I had to get exceptionally lucky for those stars to align, for them to put that gorgeous cover on it. For the timing, "Knives Out" had come out right before it. That was great for me. There were, and the stars aligning and part of it's your, you're a brilliant team deciding that they want to make this book happen.
You can't make that happen. you can't take credit for … honestly, the cover's so gorgeous, I know it sold a ton of those books, right? But, I was like, I'm gonna put everything I can in the book. And then when we were doing the packaging of the book, I said, I also want to try and hit a lot of these buttons in the packaging.
So the "Inheritance Games" covers have all these objects in the covers, and the objects are consciously chosen for what they do for psychology and why we might like stories.
MIGNON: That's what I was going to ask you next is how the cover, because I know the cover highlights some of these different theories of psychology. Can you talk about the elements of the cover and how they are clues to what's inside?
JENNIFER: Sure, on an "Inheritance Games" book, all of the objects actually are relevant to things that are happening in the book. It's so people can go and solve the cover like a puzzle and start to try and figure it out. But we also pay a lot of attention to some of those underlying elements.
So one of the theories of fiction that I worked a lot on elaborating on is the sort of pleasure-based theory of fiction. So this would be Steven Pinker in his book, "How the Mind Works," back in the '90s, being like, "Why do we like fiction?" We like it for the same reason we like cheesecake. We like cheesecake because we evolved to like sugar and fat and clever chefs were like, "What if I make something with tons of sugar and tons of fat?" And then it's cheesecake and people like it.
And he's said "What if books are the same thing? What if we like fiction because clever authors chock fiction full of all kinds of things we're hardwired to like?" So when I went on maternity leave with my now seven-year-old, my kind of project while I was feeding a baby and doing all this stuff just to keep myself sane was, "Okay, I want to figure out what are those things that I think people are hardwired to like?"
And I came up with a list of six things that I could find evidence for. So you want to see it appearing cross-culturally, early in development, and neurobiological evidence, all of these kinds of things. And one of the big things I did in the "Inheritance Games," so two of the things I came up with were wealth and competition.
So you'll notice the "Inheritance Games" is called "Wealth Competition."
MIGNON: Nice. Yeah.
JENNIFER: “Hunger Games” is "Survival Competition." "Game of Thrones" is "Competition of Power." Power is another one of my six things. Interestingly, the second book in that series, "Clash of Kings," is also called "Competition of Power." Yeah, I look a lot at that when I'm doing the underlying words in the different series, when I'm doing a new book, looking at, what buttons are we pressing with that.
But like on the "Inheritance Games" cover, okay, so we're gonna always have some wealth objects, like a jeweled necklace. We're gonna have a power object, like a tiara, or crown, or scepter. We're gonna have a danger object, because safe danger is on my list. Because it's fictional, and it can't hurt you. So there's always going to be like a dagger or a sword.
Touch/warmth. So that's the pleasure of petting a puppy or cuddling a child or running your hands on something soft or silk or being very warm or hot beach. That's usually on our covers with some kind of flame because that effect evokes the warmth and touch. Competition: we've got chess pieces. Beauty: we have roses in a Glass, ballerina.
So I go through, and I'll actually, like, when we look at the entire package of one of the new covers, We'll have the title, and we'll have all the cover objects, and I'll do this thing and be like, "Okay, what are we missing?"
For example, on "Games Untold," which comes out on November 12th, we'd done the cover. It was a gorgeous cover. We had everything. But for this particular cover, it didn't make sense to have any power objects on the cover. So we weren't hitting the power button. But we had room for a logline. So the logline on that book is just "Love is power" so that we could hit the power button as well.
MIGNON: Yeah. I just realized, I'm familiar with the books, but some people who are listening might not be. Can you talk about just the general overview of the book and maybe how it hits some of these, power, competition, wealth things?
JENNIFER: Right. So the "Inheritance Games." I originally came up with it using a prompt for gossip theory which was what could happen to make an ordinary teenage girl world famous overnight. So I wanted something that would make everyone in the world, you're not just gossip in your town or at your high school, everyone in the world talking about you.
And I wanted it to be a good thing, which was very hard because I wanted something that was going to be very wish fulfillment, very pleasurable, very escapist. And eventually I came up with a billionaire dies and leaves you all his money. And I had for years wanted to write a book about what I called my puzzle house.
Which was like a giant mansion full of secret passages and puzzles. So I've been wanting to write something set in a puzzle house since I was in college or shortly thereafter when my dad built his house, and he put in a secret passage for me, and I was like this but like lots of secret passages.
And so I was like, oh, girl, a billionaire leaves all this money. She's never met him. She has no idea why he gave all the money to her instead of his family, but to keep it, she has to move into his puzzle house for a year and live with the family he just disinherited, which includes his four incredibly attractive, very magnetic, larger than life grandsons who thought they were getting this money and have now been disinherited.
So some of the pleasures there, obviously there is a lot of wealth because she has just inherited like 42 billion dollars. And every element of this house is very over the top. There's a lot of competition going on. The old man, it turns out, has left a game behind, if you will, that she is trying to solve because she thinks it'll tell her why he chose her, which she wants to know.
But another thing I do is I make sure as I'm building characters, I want to know each of the characters’ underlying pleasure notes. So one way of making sure you're hitting those notes a lot is making sure that every character who brings, who steps onto the page, brings one or another form of some of those hardwired pleasures with them.
So for example, in the books, Avery ends up in a love triangle with two of the grandsons. One of those grandsons is Grayson Hawthorne. And he is his dominant underlying pleasure is power. He is my power character. He is the character who, he's the 19-year-old boy who absolutely always wears suits and issues orders all the time.
And everyone does what he says, even though he's just a 19-year-old boy. Like the first time she meets him. He waltzes into her high school, orders the principal around, is sitting behind her desk, and she's who the heck is this guy? So because Grayson's my power character, that is going to affect every single thing he says, how he phrases different things, the dialogue tags that go all in him.
It affects how he walks, how he stands, how he positions himself. I just always know that Grayson Hawthorne is power. His secondary note is danger, which is one of those. So he's power and danger. He is danger, because he just seems like he could be dangerous. So he's not the guy you ever see. He's not carrying around knives. He never throws a punch, but you get the sense that this guy could be dangerous. And of course when he finds out she's inherited all the money, he's like you're a con woman, and I will destroy you … as one of your vertices on a love triangle will be.
And the other part of the love triangle is Jameson Hawthorne. Jameson's dominant note is competition, which is one of those things. So Jameson is the brother of racing fast, playing hard. He is the risk taker, the sensation seeker. They've got a brotherly rivalry going on, but it's often more of a rivalry from Jameson's perspective. He's younger by just almost a year, and Grayson is perfect.
Grayson was the heir apparent. Grayson was the one who was expected to take over the family. Jameson's his one-year-younger brother, who always had to be super competitive and willing to take risks to come on top. Jameson's underlying note is also danger, but it's a different kind of danger than Grayson.
So Jameson is the danger of taking too many risks, going too fast, standing too close to the edge of rooftops. So he's the character who, if you have a Jameson scene, there's a very good likelihood that he will be on the roof of that four story house standing with his feet halfway overhanging the edge.
It's still got that danger note, but you don't ever get the sense that Jameson is a danger to someone else. He's just very much associated with this thrill seeking type of danger. And I actually go through and I figure that kind of thing out for most of the characters. It helps me distinguish them.
It helps bring some of the other elements of their personality that I want to have together in many ways. So the youngest brother, Xander, who I always referred to as a human Rube Goldberg machine, because he's like this super intelligent one. He builds Rube Goldberg machines, but he's also chaos and he's random.
And he's this, you don't, he's doing simple things in very complicated ways because he's choas, and he’s Xander. I was like, okay, he's going to be my touch character. So he's the cuddly one. So he's the one who is going to be giving platonic cuddles to this stranger who's just inherited all their money, right?
So he's the one who's going to be bumping her with his shoulders or putting his head on her shoulders or patting her. He's also very cuddly with his brothers. He is, his love language is tackling. So he likes to just fly and tackle them and wrestle and roll around. So Xander is just he's the, he is, he's that person. So that is one of his notes.
The oldest brother also has a touch note in a slightly different way, as well as a power note. So I go through, and I want to know who they are. And this also helps me when I'm writing, when I'm writing all the characters. It helps make them distinct in different ways.
Because it informs the language choices I'm making all the time. One of the first times I ever realized how important language was to evoking these pleasures is I had these theories and I was like, "Okay, I'm going to go and read a bunch of really best-selling books and watch the movies and stuff and see how good this theory is at predicting stuff that became really popular."
And so one of the things that was on my list was to watch the "Grey's Anatomy" pilot. And from what I remembered of it, I was like, I don't think that was very high in some of these things, but let's see how it pans out. And I turned on the "Grey's Anatomy" pilot, and one of the first voice overs you get says, something along the lines of "Surgery. They call it the game." And I was like, "Oh my gosh." And like in the pilot episode of "Grey’s Anatomy," there are two separate competitions that the interns have to engage in to see who's going to get to scrub in. There's the power differential between her and figuring out she's accidentally slept with someone multiple rings up in the power level.
They use danger language and dialogue when they're not talking about dangerous things all the time. So it really was like they're talking about the surgeons as if they are gladiators stepping into a ring. So really on the level of language, that was all there. When if you were just describing the setup of the episode, you could have predicted some of these things, oh, okay, there are two competitions, but the language that's being used to turn up the intensity of competition, of danger, of all of these different things, was really surprising to me because it wasn't something I had encoded, but I think it's something that does a very important thing in that pilot.
MIGNON: Yeah. So once you know to look for these things, it sounds like you're going to find them everywhere, at least in popular media. You were talking about, like, the love triangle and the characters who are, the best, the absolute most beautiful best at what they do. And I know sometimes writers will feel like love triangles, they've been like, they've been done and done and done. Maybe I should not use them, or I should not write characters that are so perfect. Do you think that, as writers maybe get more into their craft, they forget about some of the things that the, like, really deep down sort of base things in our psychology that make things popular?
JENNIFER: I do, so the talk I used to give on this was called "Writing for Your Id," and it had two parts. The first part was always about these universal pleasures that you can put in, and you can put them in many different ways, right? Like a love triangle is a competition, but let's say you're a writer who hates the love triangles, or you don't want to do one. There's many other ways you can put in competitions.
It's also bets and dares, actual games of chess going on. It's races. It's rivalries, a rivalry at work. That's competition. Two siblings who are in competition with each other, right? So it's not saying there's this really limited number of things that you have to put in books to make them popular.
It's largely saying look, there are these buttons to push. You can push most of them in like hundreds of different ways, but one thing I always encourage writers to do is to also get in touch with idiosyncratic pleasures. So not universal pleasures that everyone likes, but idiosyncratic things that you specifically just really … so I have out of my workbook — probably I at least 10 pages of it — is what I call my id list. The id is what Freud said is the part of your psyche that wants what it wants when it wants it, darn it, for no reason whatsoever, just because it does. And as readers, we all have things that we just really like. Some people might call them your bulletproof tropes, but I think it goes beyond tropes. You might have favorite tropes, but I just have random things I really like in stories. For example, I really like identical twins. Because, blame it on "The Parent Trap" being a formative movie, and "Sweet Valley," and all that.
But if something has identical twins, my chances of being interested in it have been turned up way, way big.
I really like characters eating ice cream. It's weird, but I like it when characters eat ice cream. And so I have this list of things that I just like. And I tell you, it is, I think, I can't remember if it's 14 pages now, 17 pages, it's more than 10 pages long. Single spaced, just of things I like. It's locations I like. I love hedge mazes, and secret passages, and rooftops, and waterfalls, and cemeteries, and, so I just have these extremely long lists of places I like, things I like, relationship tropes I like, not just romantic, but platonic, familial, just going through it, plot tropes I like, set pieces I like, I am a sucker for a masquerade ball. So I just have all of these things I like.
And so what I say in this talk is that I think oftentimes what happens to writers as we develop our craft is we also develop a very critical inner voice. And that inner voice very often asks things like, "Is this too much? Have I done this before? Is this overdone? Is this cliché?" s a big one. And so as people start to internalize that, and oftentimes authors will have read their reviews, and someone will be like, "I hate love triangles." And then you're like, I'm never writing the love triangle again.
Okay, but as you start editing out those things, as your inner critic makes you start editing out those things, what you're actually doing is you're editing the pleasure out of your book.
And so you can have a book, I have writers all the time who would, who I've heard and they'll be like, why is it that as my books get better and better from a craft perspective, they sell worse and worse and worse? Why can I never recapture the sales of a book I wrote early in my career that at that point, the person doesn't even, they're like, I'm so much better than that now. Why doesn't that matter?
And the thing is that what often happens over time is that when you're figuring out, first writing, you just naturally put in all those things you love. You don't have as much of a critical voice in your head. And early writers tend to be much more in touch with what they love, with the fun of it, and just jamming all of this fun in there.
And then, as you start to pull back on that, I think the books get less fun for readers, too. But usually when I tell writers this, it ends up being liberating, because it's like, "Look, I don't care if you've done 30 love triangles before, if you like love triangles, go ahead and put one in your book."
You know what? Because it's competition and lots of other people are going to like it too. And it really doesn't matter how many people don't like a given trope. What matters is how many people do. And also if you are jamming 500 different things into a book, with a coherent storyline and everything, but if you're just finding all these ways to add in all these things you love into your book, then it doesn't matter if someone doesn't like half of them because they might really like the other half, and so it's also I find it really inspiring as a writer, like, if I am having a really hard time with a scene I go back to my id list, and I say "What can I put in this scene that's going to make me excited to write it?"
And again, I have tons of little details on there, and sometimes it will be the smallest thing that really makes me, my most common one is I'm like, "Okay, they're on the roof. They're no longer having this conversation on the ground. They're on a rooftop." I love rooftops. But there's so many other things like that.
I'm like, nope. There's a hedge maze, and they're going to it. Or sometimes I just make them eat ice cream because, again, I like characters eating ice cream. And I think it's great to put the stuff you love in a book. I have editors, I always, I'm like, you know what, if this is too much, they'll tell me.
And it's almost never too much. I almost always get the nod, more. What if we did more of this kind of stuff? And I am also a person, I care a great deal about craft, and I think a lot about world building, and plotting, and character, and all of these other things. But I think we're falsely trained to think that craft and pleasure are mutually exclusive over time because there is no relationship between the two.
You can write a book with a very high level of craft that's very high in pleasure or very low in pleasure. You can write a book that has a lower level of craft, and it can be very high in pleasure or lower in pleasure. So I think it's very liberating to realize that okay, like I spend a ton of time plotting my books, and working out the puzzles, and figuring out who the characters are as people, and as a developmental psychologist, how they became that person, and trying to flesh them out, and trying, I, like every other writer I know, I, angst over the craft of things quite a bit, but at the end of the day, I do that, and I do the pleasure at the same time. Like I actually will go through my revision. I edit, like I highlight and figure out what I'm doing for my editor's edit letter, and then I go to my workbook, and I'm like, "How am I doing all these things, what am I missing?" and often times, I'll have a problem for my edit letter, and I'll have some buttons I want to be pushing that I'm not pushing yet.
And the solution to the problem can be done with a push of the button.
MIGNON: Nice. I keep thinking how lucky your students must have been to take an entire class from you in writing. And, you've mentioned your workbook a couple of times, and it sounds very personal, but I wonder if you have any plans to — I know you're busy, like, writing wonderful novels — but do you have any plans to write a craft book?
JENNIFER: Would love to someday, I actually started one. I have the, essentially the first chapter and everything. And that was something I was planning on doing and pursuing. And, I'm a scientist. I love the conveying of knowledge and all of that. But then I also put it all in "Inheritance Games," and those books took off. And now I just don't have any time.
So someday I would love to do that. Right now I keep … it's all in shorthand and anything, so it's not like it's something I could put out there and other people would even understand at the moment. But someday, when life slows down a little, either because of the books or because I have three young children right now, so I basically race to every deadline, and right now trying to make it between all the days school's out of session and every time someone's home sick.
So I'm just in a phase of my life right now where I don't have the opportunity to do that. Though someday I certainly would love to.
MIGNON: Yeah. Well, thank you so much for making time to talk with us today. I really appreciate it. We're going to wrap up the main section here. If you're a Grammarpalooza subscriber through either Subtext or Apple Podcasts, you're going to get a bonus segment in your feed. So we're going to talk about fandom and what's known about the psychology of fandom. And how Jennifer incorporates that into her books.
We might talk about audiobooks, and we're going to get her book recommendations. But, if you've enjoyed this, definitely go get, start reading the "Inheritance Games." There's five books in the series now. "Games Untold" is the newest one, so you'll have a lot of reading to do.
Jennifer, thank you so much. Is there somewhere you'd like to tell people to find you online?
JENNIFER: Sure, I am mostly on Instagram at AuthorJenLynnBarnes. You can also find my website at JenniferLynnBarnes.com.