Smart Shoppers Secrets

Today we’re talking to Adam P. Knave, author of Stays Crunchy in Milk (among other things!) We began by discussing the inspiration for his pop-culture fairy tale — a story that contains surprising depths.

What was the role of brands and/or media through your childhood?

I was raised by TV. Not to say my parents did a bad job or anything, they didn’t neglect me or lock me in a cage or anything but I was a child who was born in 1975 and raised through the 80s by the light of television. MTV launched when I was 6. I remember it, actually, as my sister and I were playing on a pong console that night and stopped to check out this new thing her friends had told her about (she’s older than me). I watched the rise of reality TV with the first Real World, the height of 80s commercial cartoons, syndicated runs of sitcoms when I got home from school … I grew up so mired in popular culture it is, looking back, almost odd. There was nothing I wouldn’t watch and digest.

One of the things I noticed though, while also going to school and learning things, was that a lot of pop culture fit in with myth retellings. So I was able to see a line from the old mythologies right to the stuff I was ingesting. Which made me feel better about watching a Facts of Life marathon.

Brands didn’t factor into it as much. I mean I had my favorite cereals and all, and I trusted the Jolly Green Giant’s peas above all other pea contenders but that was about it. I did love the commercials though. They were mini-cartoons! Who wouldn’t love that?

What inspired you to bring your main characters ‘further’ than life on the front of the cereal box?

Well at first it was a spare thought. My good friend and comic writing partner (comic as in sequential art) D.J. Kirkbride had been discussing wanting to tackle a novel of some sort. We were emailing back and forth, as we often did and still do, and I said something like “Here, have an idea” and tossed off the kernel of three cereal box characters going to find their fourth, missing, friend. It was a joke, just a toss off of an idea that maybe he could use for something somewhere.

On my way back home that day I suddenly realized it was a novel in my head and I needed to write it. But I had given it to D.J.! I got home and called him and he told me he had no real use for it. It didn’t work for him. So I stole it back, cackled like mad and wondered what to do next.

Well, the obvious part to me was that the Universal Monsters cereals (Count Chocula, Frankenberry, Boo Berry – still being made today and Fruit Brute and Fruity Yummy Mummy which have both been discontinued) were the only cereal box characters to have their own cereals but also to know each other. Sure Fred and Barney on Fruit Pebbles knew each other but that didn’t count (and they were on the same box). The Rice Krispie triplets knew each other as well, but once again, same box! So there was something interesting. They crossed over behind the box, as it were. Which meant there had to be a world back there. At least that’s where my mind went.

And you tied that into the concept of the hero’s journey. Do we all make that hero’s journey, do we make it as a society?

We should all make some form of it as individuals but more and more we don’t. We watch other people make it and then rent the sequel. This is less a classic myth journey and heroic quest as Campbell would have liked and more a story of growing up. There comes a time in your life, for me it was around 30, when you get to really look back at your life. You get to stop and take stock and see the things you held dear with an adult’s eye. I have been calling my 30s the decade of nostalgia for myself. But it is a critical looking back, because that’s truer.

And I revel in how silly the things I adored as a kid really are. I love them more because of it. Because they don’t work at all but they did then and I will always love them for that. But as you grow older you realize, or I realized, that what got you where you are might not work anymore. That you need to grow up.

Now when I say “grow up” I don’t mean putting childish things away. To hell with that. I mean grow up and take ownership of who you are, as a person. Face your own demons, really see where you want to go with life and go for it. And that can take a lot of looking back and a lot of self-searching and sacrifice.

The dangerous part is once you’ve traveled those lands of your youth you are more of yourself than ever before. If you face down your history with a critical, but loving eye, you can end up quite happy. Content. And that’s a problem, potentially. Because if you are too content you can just stop moving. Take stock of where you are and declare it good enough. Or you can push forward and really grow. It’s a choice everyone has to make. More and more I worry that we’re, as individuals, making the choice to stay where we are, and that society is putting weight behind that. Moving forward is “dangerous” and “risky” and “ill conceived.”

Well. Yes. That’s the point.

And that’s what I wanted to show with this novel. Sure it’s risky and rough and hard and ill advised and sometimes boring and often painful but MAN ALIVE how awesome is it to really try and come into your own, even if you fail?

Very.

Switching gears, tell me about your process while writing this.

Well. First I sat down and then I typed. I tried typing standing up but it was too hard to reach the keyboard without stooping. So I really did fall back on the whole sitting down thing.

Uhm, no. Generally I spent two hours a day, roughly, writing. I turned on some music and sat and wrote. I knew the structure, if not the overly detailed plot for the story. So I didn’t bother writing out a detailed plot. Some stories I do break out that much and some I don’t. It depends on the story. This one didn’t need it. I knew where they were and where they needed to go. So I sat down, turned on some music and just picked up from where I left off yesterday. After about a week or two of doing it I found it harder to not sit and write for a few hours on these characters than to write for them. Habits form fast.

But there were no notes, no extra files. Just a document and go. As opposed to the novel I’m working on now which has a scratch file. It has bits of business I want to use, random plot points I don’t want to forget and so on. Every project is different in how I work on it and I try to not suffocate any of them by forcing them to work in a box just because something else did.

You’ve told me how much your editor contributed to the book. Can you talk about that?

Lauren came in like gangbusters. She understood what I was trying to do, on every level I was trying to do things and was instrumental in the book being as strong as it is. One of the better examples is that, in the early drafts, the opening three chapters were slightly different. Well. The first chapter. It was about twice the length it is now and went a bit too slowly.

I worried about the book opening too slow. I still do sometimes. But I knew that the opening I had was too long. We spend far longer with Ra than we do with ‘Were or T.C. and that made sense, not really from a character point of view but from the view that he has the most stuff around. ‘Were lives in a glade. T.C. is at the bottom of a lake. Here, on the other hand, is a chocolate mummy with a whole pyramid and animals and such to explore.

Lauren instantly flagged it and we kept discussing how we wanted to tackle it. We nudged it into shape bit by bit, always knowing it was one of the biggest things to get right and also by her not making it the number one “oh my lord the roof is one fire” priority the stress level of nailing it went down.

So she not only guided me to where I needed to go but she did it while being both relaxed and perfectly firm. That’s a hell of an editor. The other thing is she came to the book cold. We discussed her working on the project and then she went off to read the book. She got back to me and we had a long talk about what we each felt worked and didn’t and what our goals were for the end project. So we approached it very much like a partnership. Lauren also brings a solid foundation in editing skills and a keen eye for what is funny. Crucial things, those.

Talk to me about your favorite parts of writing this, and the parts that made you crazy (ier, as you would say)

The whole book came oddly easy to me. The only part that actually drove me nuts was Section Five. That took a while, in fact I had to stop and wipe it out and restart it once.

You know the book uses pop culture things in it but I had rules for how I would use them. I had to boil them down to their core concept and then build them up so they were recognizable but different. I had to end up with a concept that would sell well as its intended thing. Every reference had to say something about the thing being referenced just in how it was presented. I didn’t want any of it to be lazy. Given the fifth section of the novel, and I don’t want to go into details, this became harder and I admit to relaxing some of my standards. However, also to be fair, by then you knew the game and I could take a short cut without it being just a lazy thing to do.

Still, it made that section harder to work on.

Outside of that the hardest bits were always making sure ‘Were had an ‘ and T.C. had both .’s … I’m simple.

Also, really, the thing that both drove me the craziest and gave me the most joy, often at the same time, was writing exactly what I wanted. Which is very generic. Let me unpack that a bit.

I wanted to write a book about hope, but it couldn’t be mushy and simplistic. I wanted the book to read like a parable for 30 yr olds, which meant riding a line between the simpler language of a fairy tale type of story and putting in enough for adults as well. The line I had to constantly dance on gave me a bunch of headaches until I found the right tone. Even then I had to watch myself. I evolved the language use throughout the book. Subtly, one hopes, but even so, I had to pay attention to things like that. To how I formed sentences and paragraphs, to what words I would use when, all of it mattered on a deep structural level.

The book has a point but I hate preachy books. So I needed to find a way to make myself happy, to write a book I would enjoy reading and that still got my thoughts across without needing a hammer. I needed to promote hope, I think we need more books that do, frankly. Even while I read dark evil books myself, I still want a dash of hope, a ray of light in the darkness that seems to just be everywhere. Somewhere along the way we, as readers, seemed to get trapped by a false sense of “realism” in literature. As if “reality in literature” only meant darkness and horrible things happening. That isn’t the life I live, honestly. Amazing and wonderful things happen too. Hope is real and can power you through things. Both sides of the coin exist and augment each other and I needed, for myself, to show that.

Adam’s Books: