Talks with Roger is a sponsored supplement to our free monthly e-newsletter, Notes from the Horn Book. To receive Notes, sign up here.

Sponsored by

In Alone, Megan E. Freeman chronicled the survival of a girl who finds that everyone around her has unaccountably disappeared. In Away, she shows us where they went.

Roger Sutton: I’m curious to know why you decided to take a second bite of the apple.

Megan E. Freeman: I had never intended to write a second book at all, or to continue the story in any way. In my mind, the first book was a standalone, and I moved on to other things. But I've had the very great joy of visiting a lot of schools in the last three years and talking to readers, and all of them had the same question for me, which was, “What happened with the evacuation, what happened with the imminent threat?” I realized there was another story that wanted to be told. I didn’t want to continue the first story. I didn't want to do a prequel or a sequel; that didn't interest me. What was really interesting to readers, and what they kept asking about, was what was going on with everyone else while the character in the first book was home alone. So I thought, Okay. I'm going to tell the story from the perspective of the people who left as opposed to the one girl who stayed. Then I thought it would be fun to have it be simultaneous with the first book. It was an interesting challenge to write within the circumstances that had been established in Alone.

RS: I was wondering, as you were writing Away, if you ever thought, Darn it, why did I make this...

MEF: Yeah, absolutely, there were several times I was constrained in ways that were challenging to figure out. But at the same time, it was also helpful to have those preexisting boundaries, whereas I didn’t have any in the first book. The first book was completely wide open.

RS: In Alone we don’t get a really specific picture of what happened, but we do by the end of Away. Did you know in the first book?

MEF: No. I knew what it wasn’t. Alone was very much inspired by re-reading Island of the Blue Dolphins with my daughter when she was in middle school. We had a whole discussion about the nature of being alone and surviving and how Blue Dolphins is a different kind of survival story from Hatchet. Whereas in Hatchet he’s dropped into a foreign land and has to figure out this alien environment, in Blue Dolphins, she’s home. Everybody leaves her, and she’s left behind. We asked ourselves questions like, “If you came home from school tomorrow and everyone in the neighborhood was gone and you had to figure out how to survive by yourself, what would that be like?” And that’s where the story idea came from.

I knew that I wanted the character in Alone to be alone for multiple years. I knew that there was no way I would be able to do anything plausible that would be on the scale of Blue Dolphins in a contemporary suburban setting. Eighteen years is out of the question — but maybe three, maybe three and a half. I didn't want it to be an environmental threat where the character would have to deal with poisons or anything toxic, like a Chernobyl kind of situation. I didn't want it to be an invading army where she would be dealing with other human forces. I knew I didn't want it to be lots of things, because I wanted her to have to figure out how to survive in this desolate place with all the resources that were left behind. It was a process of elimination. It can't be this, it can't be this, it can't be this, and ultimately what I arrived at was, “Okay, it's something governmental. It's something that is fraudulent. It's not what it appears to be. Everyone thinks it's one thing when in fact it's something else. And there's enough fear and the conspiracy is massive enough to get everybody gone.” So that's what I knew for Alone. There are tiny allusions to it at the end of the book with the denouement poem where her mother is filling her in on what's happened (“massive land grabs / unprecedented fraud”). But it’s very brief, and it goes over the heads of a lot of readers. They don't even see it.

RS: They’re just excited everyone is back together.

MEF: Right. So that’s where I started, and I “backwards designed” it from there.

RS: As I was reading Away, I wondered, Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys? I thought, If I’m a left-wing person I can read the story one way, and if I'm a right-wing person I can read it a different way, but both would come away satisfied. Did you think about the politics of it as you wrote?

MEF: Yes, to a certain extent. And at one point I was even playing with the possibility of it being more of a federal conspiracy as opposed to simply a statewide conspiracy. That got too complicated, and I needed to scale it back. But yes, I absolutely did. One of the things that frustrates me as a political person and as a citizen of this country is the lack of nuance in the conversation and the binary thinking that happens. We've seen so much of that, especially in the last eight years. I'm interested in the gray areas and in what's helpful on both sides of an argument, or all sides of an argument. Living in Colorado, we often don't feel very well represented by the powers on the coasts or by the conversation that tends to be centered on one coast or another. And the conversations in the middle are very nuanced! There are a lot of very, very conservative people here who are also some of the best environmentalists I know because they are hunters and fisherfolk, and they are keenly aware of the risks to our natural resources and the balance. So my temptation is always to look for that middle conversation and find the nuance, and to try to think critically as opposed to tribally.

RS: What was it like for you going from one voice in Alone to four main characters in Away, plus various news reports and other things coming in from the outside?

MEF: It was actually a delight. It was really fun to have multiple points of view to play with. Part of the reason the main character in the first book has a dog is so that she had someone to talk to, and to play off of and to react to. When I was writing Alone, I became keenly aware of how important that is. You might remember the film Castaway with Tom Hanks, and Wilson, the volleyball he talks to. I had huge empathy for the screenwriters of Castaway, realizing they had to introduce Wilson so that the main character could have a conversation with someone. For me, that was very much part of the advantage of having the dog in the first book. It was so lovely in Away to be able to have people have conversations with one another and learn from one another and bounce ideas off one another.

RS: You come to writing fiction from writing poetry, is that correct?

MEF: Yes.

RS: And Alone was a verse novel. What was the transition like for you going from a poem that stands alone to a narrative in verse?

MEF: Here’s the sad story of the first book. I originally wrote the whole thing in prose. And I revised it and marketed it and tried to get an agent for several years before I realized that I needed to rewrite the whole thing in verse. I was so much more fluent in verse, so much more comfortable in verse. It helped the story in so many ways. I’d played with prose, and I’d written some other manuscripts in prose that have not yet found homes. So I wasn't entirely unfamiliar with it, but I think like a poet — I can't not think like a poet — even when I'm writing in prose I'm always questioning every single word and every single modifier and, “Does that need to be there?” Because the process, for me at least, of writing poetry is very much a process of distillation — distilling the language down to the most essential moments to convey the story. I love—this is something else I've learned since the first book came out, just in talking with readers — the magic of a verse novel. The reason they're so appealing to so many readers across the spectrum, from reluctant to really enthusiastic, is that they invite a kind of agency and interaction that prose doesn't necessarily require. Jason Reynolds said in an SCBWI workshop a number of years ago: if there are ten words on the page, there are ten thousand words underneath, and it's up to the reader to excavate those ten thousand words, and it's up to the reader to color in all the white space that the poet leaves on the page. So it's this very collaborative relationship between the author and the reader. There's not a lot of description; there aren’t a lot of details about what the characters look like, for example. That's intentional on my part, because I want the readers to fill in those details with their own imaginations. I'm always playing with: “How little can I give you for you to be able to make sense of the story?” But I also want to make sure I’m giving you enough. It’s a fine line. And that’s where beta readers and editors are so important to tell me if I’ve succeeded or if there’s missing information that needs to be there. So I was still thinking very much that way with the second book and with the different forms and characters — thinking of how little can I give you for you to be able to co-create the story with me, but able to play with more words and more language and more style and more colloquialisms and all the things prose affords.

RS: How much did you know going into the second book about how you were going to write it?

MEF: For Away, I outlined the entire thing in advance. I'd never done that before, to that extent. It was about a twenty-five-page outline synopsis. I really structured it, with a very distinct skeleton for the story, and then I wrote about fifty pages and sold it on proposal. A lot of things changed as I wrote, characters changed as I wrote, but I knew the source of the conflict, I knew the nature of the conspiracy, I knew what they were after, and I knew that the kids were going to figure it out and save democracy. That was always my goal.

RS: It is amazing as one writes how what you thought you were going to write changes into what you actually do write. I do that with book reviews. I think, Here's how I feel about Megan's book, but as I'm writing, I realize I don’t think that at all.

MEF: That's right, we write to figure out what we think. And I was surprised because I had never outlined anything in such great detail and had never written a book on proposal before. I'd always had the whole thing written first. I was surprised at how creative it still felt. I was sort of afraid that if I told myself the whole story and then tried to write it that it would somehow lose something in the creativity and in the flow of the process, and I didn't find that at all. I actually found it hugely stimulating and inspiring. It was really fun.

RS: This is a publishing nuts-and-bolts question I've always been curious about. When you have a book accepted from an outline, how free are you to change things?

MEF: I don't know, because I never asked permission. I was working with the same editor as I did for Alone. She had great faith in me, and I trusted her implicitly. I think she trusted me to follow the story. I also think that she had some concerns in the original outline that she held in reserve to see how the entire story came out. It never felt to me — I'll use the word contract even though I don't mean that in the legal way — like we had this contract. It felt more like, “Here's the plan and we'll see where it goes, and we have mutual faith that wherever it goes we’ll end up in a place where we’re both comfortable.”

RS: Will a book three follow? You’ve still got some kids left behind.

MEF: Funny you should ask! I had students point out to me in a recent school visit that there were supposed to be three girls at the sleepover. Maddie is the girl in Alone, and Ashanti gets the second book. So what about the third girl, Emma?

RS: I wondered what happened to Emma.

MEF: Exactly. I am playing with ideas for a possible third book that would center on Emma. We'll see what happens with that. I have a lot of ideas and I'm very excited about it, but it's very early on in the process.

RS: I don't want you to give anything away.

MEF: There's nothing to give away yet!

Sponsored by