1046. Jennifer Lynn Barnes, author of the "Inheritance Games" books, discusses how writing from different points of view can help readers connect with characters in different ways. We also talked about her book recommendations, and how the "Grey's Anatomy" pilot surprised her by having almost all the elements she had identified as important for the success of novels.
1046. Jennifer Lynn Barnes, author of the "Inheritance Games" books, discusses how writing from different points of view can help readers connect with characters in different ways. We also talked about her book recommendations, and how the "Grey's Anatomy" pilot surprised her by having almost all the elements she had identified as important for the success of novels.
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MIGNON: Hey, everyone. This is the last Grammarpalooza bonus segment you're going to get before I start doing new interviews next week. If you've enjoyed these extras, and if you appreciate the work I do, please sign up to support the show. It would mean a lot to me. I actually get really excited when new people sign up. You can sign up right in Apple Podcasts, or you can sign up to get texts from me too through Subtext. And you can find out about both those options at quickanddirtytips.com/bonus.
OK, well, greetings, Grammarpaloozians. This is your bonus segment with Jennifer Lynn Barnes. And, we just finished up the main segment, and she mentioned her Instagram account. And if you check it out, you'll see she has just an enormous amount of very enthusiastic fans. So that seems like a great place to start to talk about, Jennifer, what's known about the psychology of fandom and how have you incorporated that into your books?
JENNIFER: When I was first getting into studying the psychology of fandom, it's a very new area of study within psychology. Granted, I've been gone from academia for about three years. When I left, there was some very exciting work being done, but a lot of the early work that was very inspirational for me wasn't just from psychology, but it was from like sociology, anthropology, where people were actually, like, describing the phenomena that were going on.
So, like, here are the 12 different kinds of fan-fiction stories that you tend to see, just as an example. But one thing I did that ended up being very influential for me is at one point I was like, "Okay, I want to see if I can pinpoint certain things that a lot of big fandom-enabling media properties seem like they have in common."
So to get my initial data set, I went to fanfiction.net and clicked on TV shows. And I wanted to see what were the top 20 shows for which the most fan fiction had been written. Not the only way you could select shows, certainly not the be-all-end-all, but this was just like a quick and dirty first stab to get some observations from which I could generate some theories.
If I stayed in academia longer, I would have been doing a lot of testing of theories in lab, but instead, I've gotten to test them in my writing. So one of the first things that struck me is one thing that a lot of people would have predicted was very associated with fandom would have been fantasy elements or something like that.
Because fandom tends to be highly associated in popular culture with sci-fi and fantasy. But I, looking at what I was, I can run statistical analyses like, "Is there any difference between realistic shows and fantasy shows here?" I ran the analysis. That was not a significant contributing factor, at least in the data that I looked at.
They were just as likely to get non-fantasy shows as fantasy shows, at least at the statistical level. So the statistical level can kind of like take out the noise. So that doesn't mean if it's 12th and 8th, that's probably not going to be a statistically significant difference.
Then I made some observations. One of the first observations I saw was that of the realistic fiction things that were on there, you had a lot of police procedurals, and you had some medical procedurals. And even among the fantasy, there were a lot of things with a procedural element. So like a case-of-the-week, monster-of-the-week structure to it.
"Grey's Anatomy" has all these serialized romantic things, but it also has case of the week procedural things pretty much every episode. A lot of the crime shows where you've got the case of the week were on there. Things like "House," case of the week, right? So I was looking at that. And so I was like, wow, I wonder if that is significant.
And I ran the data, and it was, so there are even fantasy shows like, say, "Supernatural," had a case-of-the-week structure. "Once Upon a Time" had a flashback of the … , so they have these very strong procedural elements. And I was like, "Wow, that's really interesting. Why is this procedural stuff generating fandom?"
And so that's one of those things where it was an observation. And then I was like, "Okay, what is it about this?" And all I have at this point are theories, possible answers. But one thing that I have noticed about procedural shows is that because the case of the week takes up a certain amount of screen time, that means a lot of the interpersonal elements are rationed throughout the episode.
So you're watching "Supernatural." There are going to be some good character moments there, like some really stellar moments either between the brothers or for one character in particular, but you're going to have a lot of the episode about fighting monsters. So it's not like you just get solid wall-to-wall brother relationship moments. Those are a little bit sparser.Â
You look at something like "Grey's Anatomy," you watch it, maybe you have a favorite couple. But how much do you get to see your favorite couple in most episodes? You're not watching your favorite couple for 42 minutes. Your favorite couple might be getting five minutes of really great scenes, or three minutes, or just one really intense, awesome moment every three episodes.
And people are investing in that. I think, to a large degree, and this is specific to things like fan fiction. So fan fiction, I had theorized prior to this, required two things: emotional investment in the character and some level of resistance to authorial authority, meaning you have to believe that the author isn't the be-all-end-all about what's happening to these characters and who they are.
So oftentimes among people who are really engaged in fandom or writing fan fiction, they'll say something like, "The author was wrong about that," like the author actually doesn't know who she would have picked. Or these different things, and that indicates to me a high level of imaginative engagement.
So you're imaginatively engaging with text. No two people ever read the same book because half of the book is written by the person reading it as they're reading it, no matter what words you put on the page. And so I think one thing that procedurals get for you is it gets for you a rationing of some of these really big moments, which means that people are there … I basically call them cookies. And when there's cookies, what do people want? They're like cookie monster. You're like, "Want more cookies!"
MIGNON: It reminds me, I trained a dog once, and I was told that you're more likely to get a good response if you don't give them the cookie every time. That they have… there has to be some… they have to know, like, sometimes they'll get the cookie, but not always they'll get the cookie.
Is it like that?
JENNIFER: I think it's also like there's a certain pleasure to be had in anticipating the cookie. You're like, "Oh, they're both in surgery, but when they get out, something's going to happen."
So it's not really a matter, even I think, of necessarily holding back from readers. It's just like in "Inheritance Games" books, some of the readers are in it for the puzzles. Just like as a watcher of a police procedural, you might be in it for the cases. But the people who tend to be really actively involved in fandom tend to be very engaged with the characters, with the relationships, with theorizing. On the other hand, if you're mystery-related, trying to figure things out, if there's a big mystery, trying to solve the puzzles, those are all things that can happen outside the text.
And so like, when I'm writing an "Inheritance Games" book, it's very much I have an elaborate puzzle sequence, and in fact, my first drafts always have the same problem, which is they're always 80% puzzles and people talking about puzzles, and there's not enough of the good stuff. So then I have to swap it where I'm swapping in a lot more of the good parts and decreasing the talking about the puzzles.
But you still have that procedural element of having the puzzles to solve and a mystery to solve in every book. Another thing that I noticed of a lot of the things, and this again is in some ways related to cookies, which is that a lot of the fandom-enabling things tend to have fairly … they don't always have expansive casts, but they have a multitude of relationships going on.
I call it a multitude of love stories. Now those do not have to be romantic love stories. Like it can be the story of two brothers, right? It can be a lot of other stories, but a disproportionate number of those things are going to have multiple romances, multiple like "Grey's Anatomy," she's my person, Platonic, strong relationships being built.
So as I switched from the "Inheritance Games," which was first person, in the perspective of the heiress, Avery Grambs, there's also a spin-off series called "The Grandest Game" that just came out. Ties in with all the others in terms of some overall mystery stuff, but it has three new protagonists.
And one reason I wanted the three protagonists is in "Inheritance Games," there were a multitude of love stories, but it was always a really awkward thing where the supporting love stories, you only got to see the bits that Avery was present for. And of course, she's not present for the grandest bits of everyone's romance, because why would they be having this grand romantic moment all the time with Avery standing right next to them?
So I wanted multiple characters, so I could do that multitude of love stories and relationships without just one person at the center. I also needed multiple protagonists for other reasons, but that multitude of love stories is there.
The stories also tend to be [those] that provoke fandom, temporally expansive; by that, I mean that there's a significant element that takes place, usually in the past. It could technically be the future, but you think of "Game of Thrones," and it's 10,000 years ago this happened. Or "Grey's Anatomy"—again, that's in the pilot episode, it's her mother, who now has Alzheimer's, had a relationship with Meredith's … with the chief of surgery, when she was young, like 30 years earlier. In "Supernatural," they have then-and-now flashbacks, where it starts then, and you come to now. "Once Upon a Time," they're flashing back to their former lives.
So you often get this kind of temporally expansive storytelling where this story is not just about the now. So like in the "Inheritance Games" books, it's the same way. So usually in those books, I always say I'm not a mystery writer. I'm mysteries, plural. There's always at least three mysteries that they're solving in any given book—that also helps with making the answers to the mysteries more surprising because readers, like, just cannot guess all of it.
So I'm going to surprise almost everyone with something. But one of the mysteries almost always has to do with something that happened in the past.
So I'm a writer who defaults to first person and likes writing in first person best. I think "Games Untold," the fifth book in this series, I got to get back to first person. That's a collection of short stories and novellas that actually fills in some of those romances you don't get to see on the screen of the original trilogy. There's one that takes place in the past, because it's temporally expansive, so you get like Avery's mother's grand romance back when she was back in the day. You get Avery's. Probably about two-thirds of the book is in first person, and the remaining third, I would estimate, is in a very very close third.
I think there are trade-offs. Like I said, third person makes it easier to have that multitude, especially third person with multiple protagonists, or first person with multiple protagonists. Multiple protagonists in general make it easier to have that multitude of love stories going on. It oftentimes makes it easier to do temporally expansive stuff.
And another key element is emotionally expansive. So you want sad stuff, and happy stuff, and funny stuff, and fluffy stuff, and tragic. Like you want the whole kind of thing. But I think what first person gives you, and often uniquely gives you, is I think third person is the point of view at which it is easiest to evoke in the reader a sense of belonging.
So there's a whole nother theory of fiction that's about belongingness. I actually think that's a huge part of the fandom-enabling stuff too. So fandom-enabling stories also tend to be multi-generational. And they tend to have something at their core that functions like a family. It can be a friend group, it can be a crime-solving team that's like a family.
The multi-generational comes in because usually there's someone who is like the dad of the team or the mom of the team. You've got those like multiple generations within the team. So it's, oh, we've got the attendings, the residents, the interns, or we've got Gibbs on "NCIS," who's like the total dad of all these younger agents.
And one thing that fiction can provide you with is this sense of vicarious belonging. Humans have this thing called "the need to belong." It's not just that we need to have relationships, but we need to have this feeling that there are people with whom we belong in a place where we belong.
And I write young adult literature, and I feel as a teenager I had friends, but I didn't have that belongingness feeling yet. I didn't have that kind of group and place and people where I felt that deep underlying sense of belonging. And I think many of my readers don't. And so one thing the books can give people is it can give them something to belong to.
That's one of my big litmus tests for my books. So in the "Inheritance Games," you've got the Hawthorne family and particularly the four brothers. And it would have been very easy to write those books and have them really dislike her or exclude her, and that would have created a lot of conflict, but it wouldn't have offered belonging.
So like by book two in this series, even the brother who was like, "I will destroy you" is like walking around in Latin saying, "She is one of us. We protect her." It's like that one of us, that big belonging moment. And I think first person, if you have first-person point of view and you have an outsider coming in from the outside and becoming a part of the group, I think that provides a very strong, vicarious sense of belonging.
Very very close third, if you were limited to one character's perspective, you could probably do the same. But that's where the trade-off for some of this stuff, I think, is that there are some buttons that are easier to hit in first person and some that are easier to hit in third.
So when I was writing in first person, I had to create these grand romantic love stories that were happening largely off-screen, but I could still give you enough of them for you, for readers to be invited to fill in those blanks. And that was really hard. Now that I'm writing third person multiple points of view characters, it's much harder to get that sense of vicarious belonging, where you as the reader feel like you're reading it, and you're kind of becoming a Hawthorne too, because you're scattered amongst different points of view, and different things developing, and there's conflict, and all of this kind of stuff.
So I don't think there's any definitive answer on which is better, but I do think it's worth thinking about what are the pleasures at the core of what you want to write? Which serves your story the best? Like I needed the multiple points of view for my mystery to let my master plan come to fruition.
But then when I wrote "Games Untold," and I got back to the first person and really letting them have that fully vicarious experience where you are immersed in one protagonist's head, where you are that person, it did feel like there was maybe a little more immediacy or something to some of those emotions.
MIGNON: Yeah. Amazing. You used the phrase "off-screen," and it made me wonder, have your books been optioned? Do we have any hope of getting a movie?
JENNIFER: As often the case with Hollywood, I have a lot of things that I'm not allowed to say anything about. There are announcements out there from several years ago. I am not allowed to give any updates whatsoever. I can just say, not about any particular book series, but about multiple of my book series in general. I have lots of secrets, so there are tons of things I'm not allowed to tell anybody. But maybe someday I will be.
MIGNON: Fair enough. Now, the way that I initially experienced the books was through audiobooks, and the narrator was wonderful. We evolved; we first told stories around the campfire; we weren't reading them. I'm wondering if, when you're writing your books, when you're putting them together, if you think about how they'll work from an audiobook angle.
JENNIFER: No, I don't consciously think about audiobooks until the audiobook narrators and producer are like emailing me about something. But I do have a very kind of audio experience of writing books. Fun fact about me is I have aphantasia, which is a lack of visual imagery. Meaning that unless I'm dreaming, I can see stuff when I dream.
But otherwise, the test is, they're just like, "Close your eyes and picture an apple." And I close my eyes, and I just hear a little voice say, "Apple." That's I have a concept of an apple, but all I see is the back of my eyelids. I got nothing. Not a vague outline, not a shape. Some people apparently can close their eyes and see an apple, and I was so astounded. I was, like, I thought imagery was like metaphorical, like I literally did not know until a few years ago that anyone saw stuff in their heads because that's just not how my brain works. But when I'm writing, I very much hear it in my head, things going on.
So I know how the different characters sound, but I can't visualize them. And so I have a very distinct way, when I'm writing, of hearing the different elements of what's going on and feeling it. So I am always thinking about how something will sound read aloud because when I'm writing it, I'm hearing, like, in my head, I'm hearing the words to a good extent, and I'm not seeing anything.
So that's all there is.
MIGNON: Oh, that's fascinating. So to wrap up, we always ask the guests if they have book recommendations. So this can be books about the psychology of fiction. It can be a novel you've recently enjoyed. It can be your favorite cookbook. Just something that you love that you think other people should know about.
JENNIFER: So I have what psychologists call a recency bias, which is I'm much more likely to be able to tell you and recommend things I've read recently. But I actually have read three books recently that popped to mind as good recommendations. The first one is "House of Marionne" by J. Elle, or Marionne, I think, which is this—it's a paranormal debutante story where you learn your magic, coming of age, cotillion with different houses and power. I really enjoyed it.
The second one is "Long Live Evil" by my friend Sarah Rees Brennan, who I just finished doing an event with, which is about this 20-year-old woman who is dying of cancer and gets offered the opportunity to go into her favorite book series. If she can find this one flower that blooms once a year in the book series, she'll be healed in reality. So she gets sucked into her favorite book series. So it is very like meta and almost parody at points, and yet she makes you come to care. She gets sucked into the story in the body of a villain the night before the villainess is supposed to be executed. And so she's changing the story. She goes into it thinking these people aren't real, they're characters, and yet she starts forming the real relationships with them. It just did that; I actually laughed out loud and actually cried while I was reading it multiple times, so really loved it.
And then the last one is another book I just read because a friend has it coming out, and I'm doing an event with her. It's called "The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year," which I love the title, by Ally Carter. And it's like the movie "Knives Out," but with kissing in it. So it's about these two rival mystery authors who are called to the home of this Agatha-Christie-type grand dame of mystery.
So they're called to her English manor estate, along with some of her relatives. Then, while they are there, she disappears from a locked room, and it's not clear if there's foul play going on. So those two rival mystery authors are trying to solve this woman's disappearance while they're snowbound and while they're with her squabbling family, "Knives Out" style, with wills and inheritance. And it was just a really fun time.
MIGNON: Wonderful. I've enjoyed Ally Carter's books too. These are some great things to pick up after you've read "The Inheritance Games." If you haven't read it yet, pick up the first book in the series, and you'll have five more to read. And if you're like me and anxiously waiting for the new one, then "Games Untold" is out; you can order it now.
So, Jennifer Lynn Barnes, thank you so much for being here today.
JENNIFER: Oh, thank you so much for having me.
MIGNON: And to all of you, thanks for listening. And again, if you'd like to support the show and help us keep doing two shows a week and interview shows, you can visit
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