[Upbeat music] >> Meg Medina: Today I'm talking with author Eliot Schrefer, who wrote this book and this book and this book. So, Eliot, "Let's Talk Books" is all about connecting through books. I hope that you have a book with you today that you would be willing to book talk with us. >> Eliot Schrefer: Absolutely. I brought one of my favorite books with me today. It's called "Nimona." It came out in 2015, and I don't write graphic novels, but I really, really love to read them. And this is a book that just pulled me in right away, right from the very start. Nimona is a villain like she's an assistant to another villain. Blackheart is his name. And together, they're scheming against this kingdom. But she's a shape shifter, and she turns into all these funny shapes. She turns into a shark, a dragon, a rat. But slowly, it makes you question, like, who actually is the villain and who is the good guy in ways that the story keeps changing over and over and over? So it's this, like, totally hilarious, rollicking, action filled book that constantly surprises you and actually makes you sort of question what we want in a just world and who we make villains and why. And I think it has a lot to say and also a lot to entertain us with. >> Meg Medina: Wonderful. So since you don't write that form, what was it that hooked you immediately when you started? Was there a personal connection? What was it that attracted you to it? >> Eliot Schrefer: Yeah, I think I love things that are funny. I write a lot of serious books, and occasionally I write funny books. And the humor of this just, like, totally tickled my tickle, my funny bone. It was like, the perfect style of humor for me. And there's also things that I, when I read a graphic novel I'm jealous of because I write prose fiction. And there's a way in which just the colors that Noelle Stevenson uses in this book, you know, like, you just open to any page and you feel like a mood, you know, you can feel like tension from the darkness of this page, but the bright lights of the characters and their repartee in the middle of it. Then you move to a different section and she's totally, like, changed the palette so it like, feels entirely different. Like the moment you hit the page, you have a mood and a tone. Whereas like we who write texts, like it takes pages to set up a mood like, and by the end of the chapter, they're like, okay, I have the feeling of it and they can go right in right away and just nail it. And so I think it's such an interesting form that way. I still love the way that when we write prose novels that you can really get inside a character's mind, which in a graphic novel works a little bit more like a movie, right? You can't get as deep inside. But I do love that how agile and versatile they are around how it feels. >> Meg Medina: One of my favorite books of yours was "The Darkness Outside Us," and it was all things, Eliot. It was mystery. It was love story. It was science fiction. It kept me at the edge of my seat. And so it was so complicated. I loved that it was so complicated and I couldn't figure it out. There's nothing I hate more than reading a book. And at the beginning, I already know, like, how this is going to pan out, but I couldn't do that with yours. So can you tell me about, first of all, the decision to merge all of those sorts of forms? And also, how is it that you write something so complicated and hide your tracks so well? How did you do it in that book? >> Eliot Schrefer: Well, thanks, Meg. [Laughs] That book, "Darkness Outside" is my basically a love letter to a plot twist. Because when a plot twist gets me like something like the movie "The Sixth Sense" for example, right? Like where all of a sudden you're like, oh my gosh, like, the whole rules have changed, and this is not the movie I thought I was watching. That experience is like my top narrative experience as a reader. And so I wanted to try to make that happen, to have this moment where I'm going to spoil, just like vaguely, the fact that there is a plot twist in the "Darkness Outside Us" this moment halfway through the book where everything changes, right? That was what I started with. And so I was thinking about how do I take that moment and how do I get someone to read all the way up to the plot twist because it's risky. So if you change the book halfway through, the reader has to be equally engaged in the book they thought they were reading in order to get to the plot twist. Right? So you can't... if they get turned off 20 pages in, they put it down, then we're done. They never even read to the plot twist. So I had to create this engaging, apparent story and then an equally engaging real story once the twists and you realize what's actually going on for these two boys that are locked into the spaceship, that so creating those two equal parts and then like just figuring out how to plot my way up to this moment of reveal and then plot my way out of it. >> Meg Medina: So I'm going to ask you sort of a philosophical question. So is there something you believe is true about growing up and reading and where those two things meet? >> Eliot Schrefer: I do. Yeah, that's a really great question, I think kids believe they're reading for story, that they are swept up into the events of a tale, and they want to see what happens in the end and get swept along. And that is absolutely true. But I think really we read, especially as young people, we read for company, that this feeling of connecting with the characters you read about, and it's such a crazy, magical thing, right? Like we don't... we know going into the book, these people, this is a work of fiction. These people are not real like no one is kidding you about that. And they're not pretending it's an actual biography. But you go in and then you cry over these characters you know are not real, and you laugh about what these characters are doing that you know are not real. But our emotions get lulled in and start to believe it. >> Meg Medina: Well, let me tell you, it's been such a joy having you here, Elliot. I am a huge fan of your work. It's just epic. It engages people. It teaches people. It's beautiful. And I'm so glad that you're part of "Let's Talk Books."