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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart. Now we continue our hour of Get Little guest authors, writers who have joined us for our book club, Spinoff for Kids we host on holidays when school's out. Next up is the man behind Spy School, Moon Base Alpha, FunJungle, and more, New York Times bestselling author, Stuart Gibbs. Gibbs is known for his adventure-filled, suspenseful, and very funny series I mentioned earlier. He's also the author of Charlie Thorne and the Last Equation and the Charlie Thorne series.

He joined me in May of 2022 as part of our Get Little series and took calls from kids and fans. A quick reminder, since this is an encore presentation and not live, we won't be taking calls today. Now let's get to my Get Little conversation with author Stuart Gibbs.

Stuart Gibbs: Thank you so much for having me here. It is a pleasure.

Alison Stewart: All right. You said Stuart, you always knew you were going to be a writer. What are your earliest memories of writing?

Stuart Gibbs: My writing is really the earliest memory that I have. I was always just writing out stories from the moment-- I really remember learning to read and then I went right into writing. I would just find scraps of paper around the house and just write stories down.

Alison Stewart: Do you remember what you were writing about in those early, early years?

Stuart Gibbs: I was usually writing stories about animals. I've always loved animals which probably shows through in a lot of my books as well to this day. I think I would read a lot of stories about animals and then I would just think, "Oh, that's what a book is. You just write about an animal." I tried actually to get published when I was in 1st grade. I wrote a book called Furry Friends that was about a dog and a cat who were friends.

Alison Stewart: I like it. Optimism early on.

Stuart Gibbs: Yes. It did not get published though, but I tried.

Alison Stewart: Who was the first person who really encouraged you and realized, "Oh, okay, Stuart has talent as a writer"?

Stuart Gibbs: My parents were always amazingly encouraging. I had two people in my first elementary school, which was Garrett Park Elementary School in Garrett Park, Maryland. The reason I was able to submit a book to be published was because my 1st grade teacher helped me do that. She even typed the book up and helped me send it off to a publisher in New York. Also, one of the librarians there helped me put another story that I wrote in the school library. That was called The Day The Dinosaurs Came Back, which I wrote before Jurassic Park.

I'm not accusing Michael Crichton of stealing my idea or anything like that but I did write a story where the dinosaurs came back to life and that was put in the school library and other kids could check my book out. That was just amazing that other kids could come up and say, "I read your story and I have notes." I don't know.

Alison Stewart: When you started writing more seriously as you got older, what was a really good piece of advice?

Stuart Gibbs: I was always encouraged to read as much as possible, but I got a really good piece of advice right before I went off to college by a agent who I had gotten in touch with. He said, "Study things besides writing. Study things that excite you and be well-rounded and get inspired by other things out there in the world."

Alison Stewart: Now, you studied biology in college.

Stuart Gibbs: Yes.

Alison Stewart: You're an authority on capybara. Is that true?

Stuart Gibbs: I was an accidental authority on capybaras because what happened was I was studying field biology and we had to go do a research project. We just had to pick an animal at the zoo. It was winter and everybody else picked monkeys because they were indoors and they could sit in where it was warm. The zoo had just gotten these capybaras which do not live where it's cold at all. These poor capybaras had showed up and were freezing. I didn't know anything about them, and I thought, "Oh, it's the world's largest rodent. This would be fascinating. I'll learn some stuff." It turned out the reason I didn't know anything was that nobody knew anything about them.

There was really nobody from America had done any research on them at all, possibly any English-speaking country at the time. I'm not saying that people did not know about capybaras but certainly, they were running wild down in South America. I was documenting all this stuff and my professor was like, "I don't think anybody else has documented this yet." There was a brief period where I was noting things that nobody else had noted and so I was accidentally an expert on the capybara, which only meant that I got an A in the class because my professor basically had to take anything I said at face value. He couldn't check my work against anything that already existed.

Alison Stewart: All right. Drop a capybara fact on us. This is your opportunity.

Stuart Gibbs: They're really good parents for rodents. Most rodents are not known for their parenting skills. They just breed as fast as possible, abandon the kids and go, but capybaras they showed some, what we'd say, a higher level of parenting that you certainly see in the humans and primates where they stay in tactile contact with their young. If the young get scared, they'll go stand underneath their parents in the arch underneath their front legs. It's adorable, really. It is just something that you see that there's actually a bond between the parents and the young that doesn't necessarily exist in a guinea pig or a rat.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Stuart Gibbs. We are doing Get Little, our book club event for kids. We have a call on line 1. It is Tria who is calling in from Pearl River, New York. Tria, how old are you?

Tria: I'm 10 years old.

Alison Stewart: You are 10 years old. Okay, you're on with Stuart Gibbs. Tria, go ahead and ask your question.

Tria: My question is, when you get ready to start a new book, what is the first thing that you do?

Stuart Gibbs: Oh, that's an excellent question. All right.

Alison Stewart: Excellent question.

Stuart Gibbs: What is the first thing I do? I think it's important to point out that when I have an idea for a book, I really don't start writing right away. I do a lot of brainstorming. I do a lot of research. I tend to fill up yellow pads with ideas, and then eventually I will outline my story. Not every author does this. There's no right or wrong way to be a professional author. We joke that we were divided into the plotters and the pantsers. The plotters plot everything out and the pantsers fly by the seat of their pants.

I'm a big plotter, and I find that in plotting my story out, that gets me very excited to start writing eventually. I find that I don't really have as much writer's block as I used to when I didn't plot things out, so I spend a lot of time with my yellow pads working my ideas out before I ever sit down to write that story.

Alison Stewart: Tria, thank you so much for your call. We had some listeners leave voicemails for you, Stuart, some questions. This looks like is from Maiya, who is 10 years old. Let's listen.

Speaker 1: This is Maiya.

?Maiya: Hello. I like your books. My question is, what inspired you to make your books and how did you come up with it?

Speaker 1: That's for the author of Spy School.

Alison Stewart: Spy School, yes.

Stuart Gibbs: Oh, for Spy School. Where did the idea-- Okay, another great question. Thank you, Maiya. Spy School is actually one of the oldest ideas I've ever had. I came up with the idea for Spy School when I was a kid. I was probably in, I think, 5th grade. I saw my first James Bond movie and my friends and I all thought James Bond was awesome, and we ran around pretending to be James Bond. I wrote what we would now call fun fiction about not exactly James Bond, but James Bond's son, Jimmy Bond.

James Bond was 007 and Jimmy was 006 and a half, but he wasn't really a spy. He was just pretending to be a spy. I had the idea while I was writing that story that maybe Jimmy had to go to a top-secret spy school to learn how to be a spy. That was when I first had the idea and it was many years until I figured out the way to tell it as a book that was just about Spy School, but I thought that that was a good idea from the time I was in 5th grade I guess.

Alison Stewart: How would you describe your protagonist in Spy School, Ben Ripley?

Stuart Gibbs: Ben Ripley is really supposed to be representative of all of us. Even I think back when in 5th grade, my basic joke of what this whole series was was that it was just, as cool as I thought James Bond was, it's impossible to be James Bond. Saying I want to be James Bond is like saying I want to be Superman. Even if you took the most competent and intelligent person you knew and drop them into a James Bond movie and said, "Okay, you got to go jump this motorcycle onto a moving train and then fight eight bad guys and then diffuse a nuclear bomb, all of us are going to screw up every single aspect of that.

I wanted somebody to represent our reader, no matter how old they were, and recognize that being dropped into this world was just consistently ridiculous. I always want my characters to be really smart because I know kids who read are very smart and I wanted them to relate to him. Being smart is a superpower that we can actually all have. If you can't jump a motorcycle onto a moving train, you can at least be smart and be able to put some clues together and figure out maybe what the bad guys are up to.

You have to be quite intelligent to be a real CIA agent or FBI agent. I just always wanted Ben, the moment somebody hands Ben a grappling hook and says, "Well, you know how to use this, don't you," and Ben's reaction is what all of ours would be, which is that nobody knows how to use a grappling hook.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Dean who is calling in from New Jersey. Hi, Dean.

Dean: Hi.

Alison Stewart: What's your question?

Dean: My question is, I wanted to know what the thinking was behind literally thinking yourself to where you want to be in your mind. I wanted to know what the inspiration of that science fiction was in Space Case.

Stuart Gibbs: Oh, we're talking about Space Case and how-- yes, it gets the idea that there's-- well, that series I should start out to say is set in the first Moon Base in the future, and there it becomes this sci-fi element about possibly thinking yourself great distances instead of traveling them. That came from a lot of research, actually. The idea that we'll be able to do any long-distance space travel anytime soon is not very good. One of the facts I came up with when I was starting is that the fastest we can even make a spacecraft travel if we got in that spacecraft, it would take 17,000 years to get to the next star, which is longer than humans have really had civilization of any sort.

There are some people saying that there's some weird cosmic stuff we can never quite explain. I think it was Einstein who referred to it as spooky action at a distance where two things, very far apart, can somehow seem to be connected and we don't quite know how that works. I was just like, "Well, maybe there's a way to think yourself great distances instead of actually traveling great distances."

Alison Stewart: Thank you for calling in, Dean. We got a voicemail from 11-year-old Estelle who has a question about characters.

Estelle: Hi. My name is Estelle, and I'm calling from Manhattan. I'm 11 years old, and I would like to ask, which character that you've created do you relate to the most? Thank you.

Stuart Gibbs: Oh. Well, thank you for the great question, Estelle. Even though I just said not too long ago that I created Ben Ripley as the every man, I do relate to Teddy Fitzroy in the FunJungle series a little bit more just because Teddy does have this lifelong fascination with animals that was my childhood fascination as well. I think I grew up thinking that, "Hey, if I could just go behind the scenes at a zoo all the time and hang out with zookeepers and have the cool up-close encounters with animals, that would be the greatest thing ever." I put a lot of myself into Teddy.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to August calling in from Brooklyn on line 4. Hi, August. Thanks for calling. How old are you first of all?

August: I'm 12 years old.

Alison Stewart: Excellent. What's your question?

August: I know that right now you're mostly continuing books and I wonder if you're planning on continuing your smaller series like The Last Musketeer?

Stuart Gibbs: Well, thank you for that question. I should say, The Last Musketeer was a series I wrote about 10 years ago about a kid who goes back in time 400 years and finds out that the three musketeers are real people and he unites them. They're all as teenagers for their first mission. I loved writing that series, but since I've moved on from it and have other series going--

Sometimes kids are surprised to find out that authors can't even remember what we wrote 10 years ago. That series is so far gone in my mind that it would be a lot of work for me to pick it back up. I really at the time had a fourth in mind but didn't get the chance to write it and now I've got my hands full writing all the other ones, so at this point, I'm not going to do another Last Musketeer.

Alison Stewart: August, thank you for your question. I did want to ask-- we've asked many authors we've had on, some of whom have actually had their books banned or put on these lists of books being banned. Obviously, some have been banned, you've heard allegedly, for violence, maybe some nudity and drawings. A lot of them have LGBTQIA characters in them. You have those characters in your books, you take on climate change. First of all, have any of your books been targeted?

Stuart Gibbs: My books have-- not to the degree that lots of other people's books have. I think I'm possibly a little more subtle about these things, but to be completely honest, I'm a white straight writer, and I think that may be part of it that people aren't targeting white straight writers as much as they're targeting writers of color or people who are gay.

Alison Stewart: When you hear about these book bannings or these challenges to books, many of which are classics, what do you think as an author?

Stuart Gibbs: It's terrible. I was actually at the Texas Librarians Association in Texas last week, just a couple of days ago, and these librarians they're on the front lines. It is so awful what they're going through. Occasionally, somebody will challenge one of my books and the playbook generally seems to be that the way that the book gets attacked for-- if I talk about climate change, if I have gay characters and the opposing side will say, "Kids shouldn't be hearing about this stuff at this age." Sometimes they'll engage me and say, "Why would you do this?"

I write about it because I say it exists. To hide the fact that gay people exist-- first of all, your kids know they exist. They're not hearing it from me for the first time. I'm often told not to engage people, but I generally do. I'll say, "My kids live on a block where there are three gay families. That has not made my kids worse people. If anything, it's made them more empathetic and understanding." The more we're exposed to things-- I know that this is where it's coming. People don't want their kids exposed to things, but folks, they're going to get exposed no matter what you say. I know that's why people are upset because it's happening.

If I write back to somebody and say, "I put gay people in my books because they exist," that's a very hard thing for them to argue. They can't go, "Well, no, they don't." The whole banning books thing it's-- I would just say to people, I feel a good way to think about things in life is if you're trying to decide is this the right thing to do or the wrong thing do, you say, "Well, if the Nazis did it, it's not a good thing to do. All right." Just saying. The Nazis banned a lot of books, folks. That's what they did. Just know which side of history you're on if you're for a book banning.

Alison Stewart: That was my conversation with author Stuart Gibbs as part of our Get Little Book Club spin-off series for kids. Next up, the final installment of our Get Little series for this hour Diary of a Wimpy Kid's Jeff Kinney. Stay with us. This is All Of It.

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