Mary (29:03):

So the contemporary fantasy … your books seem like they have really strong adventure and propulsive drive to get these characters out, get them doing things, offer them agency, even within those constraints that we talked about of them being 12 and still having parents. How did you decide to add fantasy elements and did those kind of lead the story in your conceptualization of the story, or did they arise later when you were like, well, what kind of trouble can I get these characters into?

Tracy (29:20):

A little bit of the latter is, so obviously for my debut book, the way I kind of came up with that concept, I was watching the awarding of the Congressional Gold Medal to some Filipino World War II veterans, and I was watching it remotely and I had a notebook next to me. I was like, it would be really cool to write a middle grade story about a kid who returns a World War II-something. And then I tucked that away and it took a while for me to figure that out because what is he going to find? How would we possibly get it back? And then slowly realizing there’s kind of no way he could do this without magic.

It’s a lot more, it opens up a little bit more fun and hijinks for it to add in that magical folklore element to it. So once I kind of figured that out with Freddie, it worked its way into my other middle grades. So I wrote a book about a Filipino/Indian fusion food truck, and there’s some potions that the main character works with in that because again, it adds a little bit of extra fun to it. Then we’ve got all these other ones with there’s these goblins. And so it’s hard enough for Thea in the book, she’s trying to maintain her finally achieved popular girl status and she’s so excited that people actually know who she is. She’s trying to maintain that while at a summer camp where she’s awful at the subject matter of this summer camp. It’s like one of those ninja warrior, American Ninja Warrior-style things.

Mary (31:02):

Absolutely not, yeah.

Tracy (31:04):

She doesn’t like heights and she’s like, what have I done? And then of course, let’s throw in some goblins trying to destroy her town because we don’t make things easy for kids. We just refuse writers’ jobs are to make things really hard for 12 year olds.

Mary (31:21):

And how did you zero in on which threads of the mythology you were playing with? Were these stories that you grew up hearing, have you always wanted to work with some of these creatures and myths and folklore elements?

Tracy (31:41):

Yeah, I think once I got into the role of contemporary fantasy, I did want to explore the kind of superstition that I grew up with. And I was lucky enough that my grandmothers came and watched and hung out with us for a good portion of our young lives. And boy did they have stories. Some of them probably a little too scary for young kids, but whatever. That’s fine. So with Thea and the Mischief Makers, when these goblins are called duendes and they live in their backyard and they inhabit these trees that Thea kind of accidentally messes up, those are things that when I was younger we would be walking by some fruit trees or something, or you’re walking by some weird, I don’t know, an ant hill or some sort of natural thing. And a Filipino elder would probably say something like tabi tabi po or something, which is a little saying that is, excuse me, or permission for me to walk by or permission for me to grab some fruit or do something. They didn’t want to incur the wrath of these supernatural beings. And it’s something that literally never occurred to me that was like, oh, do not all people do this? Until later I was like, oh, that’s kind of cool. That’s kind of cool that I had that extra layer of otherworldly and supernatural growing up and I didn’t realize it until a little bit later.

Mary (33:21):

I love that we have kind of wood spirits and house spirits in a lot of folklore where it just adds a little frisson of something. Where did those socks go? The house elves must have moved it, right.

Tracy (33:40):

Exactly it. The duende for us is where’d car keys go, oh, it must be the duende. It’s not because you just threw them anywhere and ran off. It’s clearly, clearly the fault of a supernatural being.

Mary (33:54):

I love that. Do you feel like you will ever push into more of a fantasy kind of less grounded in contemporary or maybe YA romantasy or do you like playing in our world but with a twist?

Tracy (34:11):

So I do like playing in our world with a twist, and I think just literally in an operational sense, I do not currently have the brain for fantasy where I watch my friends who write high fantasy, they have notebooks and they hold these entire worlds in their heads and I’m sitting here blaming duendes for my missing car keys. So one day I think when the kids finally sleep and I’m able to have a full brain again, maybe I’ll kind of dive into the high fantasy space, but right now it’s like I need to be able to rest on some easy things of like, okay, I know what a phone is and my readers know what a phone is. Let’s just go with a phone.

Mary (35:00):

I feel that, we have kids similar ages and we work and have no life. Yeah. So let’s talk about your Filipino background and cultural representation. How important is that? I don’t want to ask a dumb or a leading question, but a lot of your characters share your background. So can you tell me a little bit more about that?

Tracy (35:30):

So I am excited that all of my books have a Filipino-American main character. And that is such a specific thing of Filipino-American too. It’s a very specific experience and I wanted to make sure I had that in my books just because growing up I really didn’t have access to stories like that. And that’s not to say that they didn’t exist, I just didn’t … in our local libraries or they weren’t really pushed or marketed towards us, I just didn’t have access to them. So now I get to write stories where I can throw a Filipino-American kid smack dab on the cover and it’s fun stories where kids are having adventures as opposed to sitting around and being like, oh, it’s so hard growing up different and that kind of thing. So at least I want to fill that little kind of part of people’s TBRs where it’s joyful stories with Filipino-American kids, and this is with one of my YA novels, We’re Never Getting Home. It’s literally about two ex-best friends that get stuck at a fake Coachella festival when their driver loses his car keys and while he’s crowd surfing and they can’t get home. But with that, it’s like, again, it’s one of those stories where it’s so zany and there was in a really reductive way, there’s no reason for the person, for any of the friends to be Filipino-American. But then also just like, why not?

Mary (37:02):

Why not? So the identity isn’t the issue.

Tracy (37:06):

Right, exactly. We also go to festivals that have irresponsible friends.

Mary (37:11):

And lose car keys, a theme is emerging of some lost car keys here.

Tracy (37:16):

That’s true. Maybe this is a problem that I should solve off the page is actually just knowing where my car keys are.

Mary (37:23):

I would just nail a nail right by your front door and just loop them on there.

Tracy (37:31):

Get a little lanyard and just have it on me at all times. Just so I know.

Mary (37:36):

I do think that a lot of this kind of new generation of stories with characters of color or characters with different lived experiences, I think the most successful ones are not just about, ooh, this is what it’s like to be Filipino-American, this is what it’s like to come from an immigrant background, this is what it’s like to have a limb difference, whatever the case may be, that’s just one part of a very multifaceted, expansive character who just happens to mirror the wide diversity of our population and our reading public.

Tracy (38:16):

And that’s what’s been really cool is I feel like we have started to enter that space in children’s literature where it doesn’t have to be an issue book. And we’ve got a lot of really good books that tackle issues about race and immigration and differences like you mentioned. But then at some point it is also nice for a kid to be able to pick up a book and be like, okay, I just want to see a Mexican-American kid like me destroy a monster. And it’s not only that, it’s not only for kids of that background to see it, it’s for other kids to see it too, to be like, oh, okay, so I’m not Mexican-American, but clearly this other kid can also destroy monsters the same way that Percy Jackson would and so forth. So it’s really just reading widely is I feel like it’s a win for everybody.

Mary (39:09):

Yeah, I think that’s an awesome point. But you did specifically make a point to say this is the Filipino-American experience. So what shade does that add to some of your characters that may be a first generation, well that would be Filipino-American too, I guess, but somebody in the Philippines compared to a Filipino-American.

Tracy (39:35):

Yeah, there’s a whole, I feel like different psychological difference of growing up here and trying to be part of American culture while also being expected to retain some of those beliefs of another country. So for example, with, This is Not a Personal Statement, Perla the main character, born and raised in some fictional Bay Area town that I made up where they’re very academically focused and everyone’s going to go to Ivy League schools and be super successful CEOs of everything. And her trying to navigate that kind of culture with these beliefs that her Filipino parents have bringing over from the multiple generations and everything of not only do you have to succeed for yourself, but you have to succeed because you have a cultural debt to us for doing everything we’ve ever done to get you here to this place. You owe us. Those kinds of things.

Mary (40:36):

You’re the vessel in which we pour our sacrifice and our unrequited dreams.

Tracy (40:42):

Yes. And I feel like that’s not only a Filipino-American thing, I feel like that’s any sort of intense parent thing, but it’s those very specific experiences where someone is not only dealing with that family cultural belief, but also all the things around them that may or may not clash or play up those beliefs in a toxic way.

Mary (41:11):

And also who are you? And this is kind of very YA, there’s obviously identity and who am I questions in middle grade. But in YA, I feel like the burden of other people’s expectations really tends to clash with the emerging sense of self that a teenager tends to have.

Tracy (41:36):

Oh yeah. Oh, just again, having grown up and being a teenage girl at some point, I don’t think it matters where you are, you’re going to clash with your parents, your ideas of what you should be doing and where are going to be different than your parents.

Mary (41:53):

And this character specifically has a misbelief of I need to, if this didn’t happen, I need to make it happen by hook or by crook. I need to pretend. Does she release that and how does that go back to her sense of self, her sense of identity?

Tracy (42:17):

Yeah. So real quick, because I did mention at the beginning that I’m a lawyer by day, nobody do fraud. No one do fraud. Please do not do fraud. This is not a manual on how to do it, it is fiction, please don’t do this. But that was part of the trick.

Mary (42:36):

I love the disclaimer, it screams lawyer because you’re like, wait a minute, we have to make terms and conditions of this conversation.

Tracy (42:47):

Just in case. Just in case someone’s like, tell me more about how she photoshopped a letter to do x, y, z. I’m like, no, I will not tell you more. But yeah, so obviously in the book she’s trying to, all of those pressures of culture and the environment that she’s growing up in her Bay Area town now, all of that results in her feeling like there is only one way forward. And that’s to pretend she’s going to this made up Ivy league.

Mary (43:10):

Let’s call it Schmanford.

Tracy (43:14):

Schmanford where she goes there. But it’s all of that pressure that makes her do that. And I dunno, it’s one of those things where I think in each of my books I try to touch on that little bit of clash of what it’s like to basically you’re at home with your family, with your parents, with your siblings, and things are a certain way and then you go out into the world and have to navigate that. The thing that comes to mind is in We’re Never Getting Home again. She decides to go to this fake Coachella that’s a couple hours away and she’s committed to being home on time and no one understands why she’s so intense about being home on time. But when you come from a family where people will get really, really mad that you are not home on time, there are ramifications beyond just, oh, I didn’t get home at 11 like I said I would. It’s like there’s larger cultural pieces. Are you a good daughter, are you down some rebellious, wrong path to ruin? It’s a lot.

Mary (44:37):

Are you bringing shame upon the family? Yeah. So even something that inherently might seem small stakes, we go back to that character layer of if you make it matter to the character, you make it matter to the readers.

Tracy (44:54):

Right.

Mary (44:56):

How do you build in something like a cultural expectation or a family system expectation into our understanding of character? How do you deploy some of those details when you’re sort of crafting this environment for your characters?

Tracy (45:14):

So this is definitely one of those things where the show don’t tell come into place because you don’t want to just tell people, Perla’s parents are intense. They’re going to be really mad if she doesn’t get into her dream school. So very early on in the book you see her and her dad, they’re driving home from school and he’s asking about her college applications and he’s asking where her friends have gotten in and kind of passing judgment on where they’ve gotten in or where they haven’t. So it’s little things like that of trying to weave it in to every character interaction that she has. And then also as we kind of talked about it, you also have to show them kind of responding to it and thinking about what that means for them of like, oh, my dad doesn’t like that so-and-so got waitlisted here. What does that mean for me? Who applied to this other school that’s on the same level?

Mary (46:09):

Yeah, perfect. So you put the conflict into action in this car ride, which can be completely neutral, but when we add that layer of parental expectation and especially the judgment, I really like that because teenagers are very sensitive to their social environment. And so if you see your family judging your friend, but you have a very close relationship with that friend that dredges up a lot of feelings, not only about your choices, your worth, your friend’s worth, and how that all reflects back on you. And it also drives a wedge between the parents. So this conversation takes on all of these layers of conflict, but those are enhanced by how the character is reacting,

Tracy (47:03):

Right? And all of that would I think be a lot less effective if we really just had it be like she comes from a very intense household where they want her to do x, y, z. I don’t think it would hit you the same way.

Mary (47:16):

Yeah, I love that. So you’ve chosen middle grade, you’ve chosen young adult, and in your head what I love is that there seem to be very big differences between the two. And you say, I have been a teen girl, right? You’ve also been a tween girl.

Tracy (47:33):

Yes.

Mary (47:35):

How do you either step into those shoes or mine your personal experiences or your personal experiences of various feelings, right? If it’s not the same event, it might dredge up some of the same feelings, but how do you channel that when you’re writing?

Tracy (47:53):

Oh man. So my joke with my editor, she has asked me at some point, she’s like, are you interested in writing adult? And I was like, well, I’ve barely processed my teen years, so you’re probably going to have to wait a while until we can get there. But I think one of the things that I’m lucky enough to do is again, live in an area where I’m around family and around younger, my cousins, younger kids and everything, and I’m kind of seeing real time what they’re going through. And not to say that I base anything off of them, they all went to the schools that they said they would. I am pretty sure.

Mary (48:32):

Okay, another disclaimer.

Tracy (48:34):

Just in case they’re going to come at me and be like, why’d you say that about my daughter?

Mary (48:36):

Oh, family expectations chiming in.

Tracy (48:39):

There you go. Look at me. I constantly covering because I don’t want to have to deal with that. But I think going back to just looking at what they went through and then there’s some feelings I feel like that never leave you. So for example with Thea where she’s finally got a good friend group and she’s finally feeling popular and she doesn’t want to do anything to jeopardize that. I feel like that’s something that could be any age. And so bringing that back down to middle grade of, okay, so what is within the realm of a 12-year-old being able to do to preserve that when she is stuck around the same people every day, she can’t just drive off somewhere else or go join something else. She has to be in the summer camp that her parents signed up for her. So it’s trying to navigate those kind of big feelings in the middle grade package or in a young adult package.

Mary (49:42):

I would argue you should tell your editor about an adult book. You should be like, well, I haven’t lived my adulthood because I didn’t sleep and I don’t go out and I have these young children, so I haven’t actually been an adult yet. Even though I’m wearing this adult costume, I work too much and I need to bank some adult experiences.

Tracy (50:05):

There you go. I’ll send her a nice hundred thousand word manuscript that’s basically just like, I need sleep over and over.

Mary (50:15):

And it’ll be a postmodern masterpiece. And every woman from 30 to 45 will buy it and hit their husband with it and be like, read this. This explains everything. This brings up a very granular point, but a very interesting one. For Thea, her goal is somebody else’s esteem, right, and not necessarily getting it because she has gotten there. She climbed the mountain already, but keeping it, however, a genie will always tell you, you can’t make somebody else fall in love. Right? So how do you navigate a character whose objective, at least at the beginning, is so fully external and dependent on other characters?

Tracy (51:16):

I mean, this was a tough one for sure because again, her goal is to keep the status quo as opposed to some of my other books where it really is just like they’re trying to return an amulet. They’re like a very active, I know exactly what I need to do.

Mary (51:28):

They need to attain something, she needs to retain something.

Tracy (51:32):

Right? So because middle grade writers are terrible people and we do awful things to our 12-year-old characters, I threw in her ex-best friend shows up to summer camp and he is clumsy and a little bit awkward, but totally okay with it. He loves who he is and he is very oblivious to when other people kind of side eye him for his interest or for what he is doing. So it’s throwing her up against that and then also realizing there is a benefit to being genuine. And her sidekick in this book, he is like a very genuine, awkward, clumsy guy, but he’s okay with it. And so part of it is her kind of reckoning with the idea of is it okay for me to be who I am around these other people who don’t know me in that certain way? I dunno. It’s a little bit tricky to do with younger characters because they do live such kind of, not static lives, but very compartmentalized lives where it might not be a frequent thing that their worlds will collide, but hers does because of course it does.

Mary (52:48):

I love the mechanic of a young character who has gotten it right. They are thematically just clicking. He’s genuine, he’s unapologetic. That’s the thing that she needs cuz the magic was in her all along. That’s a very big middle grade theme. But I love it when a character realizes that because somebody else is modeling it. And I would say that this friend, sidekick character is the rockstar for already living his truth and being—sure, he probably has his own issues to overcome. But there’s that leadership, that modeling relationship, which makes it a lot less heavy handed than if a counselor or a parent came and was like, but the magic is in you, can’t you see?

Tracy (53:44):

That’s also the tricky part of middle grade is you literally can’t have adults swoop in and be like, here is the lesson, move on. So it’s like trying to come up with a cast of friends or, so for her it’s the sidekick. And then also these duendes that come in.

Mary (54:01):

The duendes again.

Tracy (54:03):

They all have to teach each other in some fashion because it would just be weird if dad just strolled in was like, here is the solution to your problem. We are two chapters in.

Mary (54:14):

Yeah, it’s hard to write within some of these constraints, the freedom of movement constraint, the parent constraint, the technology constraint, the how do you drop the moral without condescending to your readers constraint. And it seems like you actually give yourself a taller errand than some other writers because you’re like, well, I need to get them to the Long Beach port, I just need to.

Tracy (54:43):

You’d think I’d make it easier on myself. Ugh.

Mary (54:48):

But I love what you said about the characters puzzling out the solutions to their problems because that allows us into their thought process and they are being proactive and they are using their smarts, their wiles, their talents, whatever. And it sounds like that’s exactly what you do as a writer.

Tracy (55:07):

It is one of the, especially with middle grade where you do have these kids who do have to do things on their own. It’s kind of a weird lesson that’s nice to impart to younger readers of there are going to be times where you are going to have to do this yourself, where you are going to have to use your own smarts and your own wits to figure out how to solve this problem. And you can’t always rely on adult to come in and swoop in and save you. So same as I’m an adult trying to figure out how to write now of, I kind of had to figure it out myself. I had to pick up some craft books. I did take a couple classes, but it wasn’t until I had to force myself to figure out where the issue was, what was holding me back in terms of my writing in order to move forward. And no amount of someone sitting there telling me “show don’t tell” was going to work. So sorry kids, I keep throwing lessons at you, but I swear you’ll be better for it. I swear.

Mary (56:11):

I love it because I think that you are obviously off to an incredible start in both middle grade and young adults. Somehow your insane system of not sleeping ever is paying off and working. You are finding that time to write. You are working on your craft. You’re thinking really intentionally about the stories that you’re telling. But I love the idea that it is a learning process. It is a journey, and you are reaping the product of the process with these books coming out. But you’re also, it seems really invested in the process itself, which is I think truly inspiring.

Tracy (56:54):

Thank you. Thank you. If we’re going to talk about that cultural pressure, again, it’s just my mom reads everything I write, she’ll let me know what she thinks about a story. So the pressure to put out a good story is internal and external.

Mary (57:13):

Internal conflict, external conflict, cultural context, and the character’s inner struggle. We have brought it all today.

Tracy (57:23):

I mean, this is where you figure out that most of my books are just, again, thinly veiled, Tracy trying to get her therapy on the pages as opposed to actually dealing with them in real life. But at least I don’t have duendes or family curses or a fake resume, I guess.

Mary (57:44):

I think that it is therapy and I think that you are dealing with it and every time you sort of process like you’ve worked through maybe your tween years, you’re on your teen years, you’re on your way, man.

Tracy (57:68):

One day. One day, I’ll write Adult.

Mary (58:03):

Well, Tracy, you have been just a delight and I would love for everybody to check out Thea and the Mischief Makers which should be out now by the time this is released. Tracy Badua, just thank you from the bottom of my heart for this far ranging, very insightful conversation.

Tracy (58:23):

Thank you so much again for having me.

Mary (58:26):

My pleasure. This is Mary Kole, and here’s to a good story. Thank you so much for listening to The Good Story Podcast.