>> Yukari Matsuyama: I'm so excited to be here, and I feel like excited is just such a generic stupid word to use today. But part of it is this excitement. Because both of your books just piqued my curiosity. And I know a book is really good when I get curious and I put the book down and I start googling things because I just need to know more. And both of your books did that for me. There's a lot I want to talk about, but I think we'll start off with how did you come to these topics of young women serving in World War I and World War II is specifically in some kind of code or cipher related occupations? >> Candace Fleming: Oh, go ahead. We're so polite, aren't we? I was at Bletchley Park, 50 miles outside of London, had looked at most of the park and had gone back to the visitor center. And on one of the walls they had all these graphs showing statistics like how many meals were served a day at Bletchley Park, and one of the graphs that they had on the wall was how many people actually are Bletchley Park and the number grew, of course, from 1939 to 1945. But I got to that 45 part, and I realized that fully 7000 of the people at Bletchley Park were female. And then when I looked at their numbers, fully 70% were teenagers between the ages of 14 and 19. And that's when I stood there and I went, well, the question that always starts for me when I have to write a book, the question is always like, huh, really? And then I had to go and do some research. I didn't intend to write a book, but I fell in love with those young women and the slogging, in many cases slogging, grinding work that they did every single day that historians now say their work probably shortened that war by 2 to 3 years. So lots of lives saved. >> Monica Hesse: So my book is is a novel, but it is based on a real group of women who served in World War I. And I, in school, remember learning that American women first participated in the war effort in World War II. I learned about the WACs and the waves and and it blew my mind to learn that, in fact, the first military participation, official military participation of young women was in World War I, when a group of 200 young women were sent over to be bilingual telephone operators serving in the on the front of World War I in France. And these were women who were chosen because they could translate on the spot between English and French, and their job was to go over and connect calls between platoons and between generals and their staff assistants. They were doing all of this while bombs rang in their ears. But because it was 1919, they were never considered officially part of the army, which meant that they never got pensions, they never got official recognition. They still are not considered officially part of the army, despite the life risking work that they did. So, I felt really compelled. Whenever you learn about a story that you feel like not enough people know about, you feel like you want a lot of people to know about it. And that's kind of how it started. >> Yukari Matsuyama: So that goes straight into how did you do your research? How much research do you do? And like my personal question I always want to know is how do you know when to stop? >> Monica Hesse: Never. >> Candace Fleming: I would just say never stop. >> Monica Hesse: I am still researching. >> Yukari Matsuyama: And then how do you choose what to keep and what to leave out? And that must be really difficult. >> Candace Fleming: It is difficult. And "Enigma Girls" is non-fiction. So for me, I have to say this first, even though it's non-fiction, I'm a storyteller, not a fact teller. And so, the reason I'm telling this particular piece of history is that I want readers of the 21st century to make some connections. So it's more than just a piece of history that you all should know. There's more to it than that. And I actually call that my vital idea. And typically, what happens for me, I shouldn't say typically, it's always what happens for me is once I know what it is, I have to stay with this particular piece of history, then I know exactly what goes in and what goes out. And unfortunately, a lot of stories that I uncovered is particularly of young women did not end up in this book. Which makes me very sad, but at least I know about them and, yeah, it's it's hard. And as for the research, where do you stop? You never stop, right? I'm still reading things about Bletchley Park. I'm still wishing, oh, why couldn't I have squeezed in one more life? Why couldn't I have? Yeah a nd then, of course, as you do the writing, you're constantly doing research as well. >> Monica Hesse: I think as a novelist, so the "Brightwood Code" is a historical mystery. And it's fast and it's suspenseful. And my primary goal is to write something that you want to stay up all night reading. But the trick with historical fiction is that I know that I'm writing about real things that happened, and you don't want to betray the people who really lived those kinds of lives. And I do a lot of research that feels really 360. So I'll find out what were the foods that people were eating in 1919? What could you order in a restaurant? What were the most popular books? My main character is a switchboard operator. I spent an insane amount of time learning how switchboards worked in 1919 and talking to the curator of AT&T Historical Collection in like Bumble Branch, New Jersey, who and asking him but, when you push this lever, what could happen and what about that? So I think a lot of people think about research as trooping off to a library, and especially when I'm talking to young people, I try to make it clear that it's really about figuring out what it meant to be alive in the time that you were writing about. >> Yukari Matsuyama: Yeah. Monica, I really loved because I didn't... I was like, oh yeah, switchboard, sure. But their process of when they're changing shifts, standing behind the chair and they have to like, smoothly transition from one operator to the next shifts operator like those tiny details? >> Monica Hesse: Yeah, they would practice so that there would never be a break in the operator connection. It was like a ballet. >> Yukari Matsuyama: Those kinds of details or like heck's department store. That was one of the things I had to Google was like, oh, because it's literally down the street from here. And it was... Those were the things that really brought it to life. It was like, oh yeah, this is a real thing that happened in a real place that's here. And my favorite detail from yours was when they were fooling around and pushing each other on the basket, one of those doors. >> Candace Fleming: I know I was really searching for because they're kids, right? So, I mean, you think about this, these were women. I mean, think about it. You're 17 years old. You get a letter from somebody you don't know, who tells you that you have to report to station X, you don't know what that is, and they don't tell you what you're going to do. Your parents can't write to you, at least not right at Bletchley Park. They have to send it to an entirely different address. The parents can't know where you're going. And you turn up at this place, and you have a job that you can't tell anybody about. You can't tell your friends about your family about. You can't tell the girl that's working literally next to you. You can't talk about the work that you're doing. And so for me, it was really important to find those moments when there were still teenagers, when they're childlike, high spirits and they came out all the time. But I love that when they're just bored and they start pushing each other in the mail carts right into the men's room. And then she came back, right back out of the men's room. So obviously some officer pushed her right back out the door. My favorite story, though, was and it didn't make the book for various reasons, was they would oftentimes be bored, right? Because nobody broke a cipher. Nobody broke the key that day. And so, the Typex girls were bored one day, and they thought they were getting flabby because they were sitting so Much so, they decided to do some calisthenics, and they were laying on the floor with their legs up in the air, bicycling. And Alan Turing walked in and he said that all he saw was rows of panties. So needless to say, he walked right out. So yeah. >> Yukari Matsuyama: So sort of building upon this research question, though, Monica, if you have a sort of basic background of all of these details, how do you build that into your plot, the mystery, and or does the mystery come first? The research come first. I was like, how do you get that all together? >> Monica Hesse: Yeah. So my book is about a young woman named Etta who comes home from the war carrying a terrible secret. She made a drastic mistake while she was serving in France, and now she's working as an operator at Bell Systems, and one day she tries to connect a call and she realizes that the secret she left... she thought left behind wasn't left behind at all. It's followed her home, and I always look at a mystery as a sort of working backward. I feel like it's a big knot sitting in my lap, and my job is to untangle it. So, I often start off with what I know is the solution to my mystery. Like the pinnacle scene, how would you get in this really emotional state and then try to figure out what would have brought her here? What would the setting be that would make sense for her to be in? I thought of her as a character, actually, long before I had learned about the "Hello Girls." And sometimes you're just looking for the right match to fit with your character. >> Yukari Matsuyama: And it fits so well. It worked really well, I thought. Candy, I was really impressed with how well you condensed World War II history into very like, concise chapters. They weren't, like going on and on and on. But I think for the age group you really explain things simply by not sugarcoating it. How do you do that? >> Candace Fleming: Oh, it's a miserable. >> Monica Hesse: How do you author? >> Candace Fleming: In the case of the "Enigma Girls," it was those battles, those incidents that my ten teenagers, their work actually made a difference too. So, of course, D-Day, every single one of them was there. And I like to think that even though those soldiers didn't know that those girls were there behind them, they were working by this point around the clock, and they were getting information, deciphering it and getting it back out in about half an hour, which is amazing and so that's what I sort of focused on. What were those places that I could pause on that I could bring to life, but that were actually connected to the young women who are doing the work that were saving, that were saving those men's lives. They were alongside them. >> Yukari Matsuyama: And I really liked how you also had little sections about how codes and ciphers work and like, hey kids, try this out. Is that your idea or is that a... >> Candace Fleming: That was definitely my idea because the whole what's the difference between a code and a cipher? How does an Enigma machine work? How do you find keys? Right? What does the bomb do? What does Colossus do? What I discovered was that if I stopped to tell readers that essential information, I lost my story, right? If I stop and I give you three pages about how Enigma works, you're going to go away. You know what? I played with the enigma, and I wanted to go away. I have no idea how that works. Even though the man at the science industry kept trying to help me so much. So, I decided that what I would do was put those in their very own sections. If you read them, you gain this knowledge that you can actually understand how difficult it was to decipher Enigma. But if you don't want to read it, if you still want too just read for the story, you can as well. >> Yukari Matsuyama: And speaking of story for you, Monica, how did you develop your characters besides Edda? Because there are some other key figures and they're all young. Well, most of them are all really young people. How did you come up with their purpose in the story and also how they were going to affect Edda? >> Monica Hesse: I mean, again, I think that historical fiction is it's sort of a double edged sword. What makes it really hard is that you are bound by these facts and what really happens, and you want to honor that. And what makes it easier is anytime you get stuck, I have a favorite editor who used to say, anytime you think you have a writing problem, you really have a research problem, and it means that you just don't know enough yet. You don't know enough yet about what you're writing about. So, it was it was easy because if I felt stuck on, I have a character named Theo who is is of the age of a person who would have gone to war, but he's at home for some reason. So you could look into, well, what might have happened to a person of that age. Why? Why would he be at home? What could he be carrying? What would that experience be like of knowing that he was at home while while all of these other young men his age were at war? So it's really helpful to read oral histories and nonfiction books to draw on and figure out you're creating a fictional character who feels as real as possible. So what were real people going through at that time? >> Yukari Matsuyama: So besides the codes and the history, which was all very interesting to me, the two things that really stood out reading both of your books was that this really the experience really affected the young people's mental health. And I know that back then that was not something that they really talked about. I can't even imagine I have a daughter who is about that age to think like, hey, go off to this secret place. You don't know what codes are, but you'll figure it out and don't tell anybody, ever. And lives are at stake and have fun with that. And then to then not give them any kind of support after the war. It's it seems like with the "Hello Girls" it's like they didn't even really get acknowledgement or recognition of any kind by the military. So how does how did you build that tension with the with the mental health aspect? Because it's a little bit different. I feel like Candy in your book because there were so determined to not say anything, and they didn't say anything for decades and decades. But Monica, for you, Etta struggled so much with her mental health after she returned, and she was really dealing with it. And sometimes she wasn't particularly likable because she was having such a hard time dealing with her emotions that she sort of lashed out at other people. And I was just wondering, how do you bring that reality of the mental health struggles for your character and for the real people who existed. >> Monica Hesse: I'm going to answer your question by answering a different question, which is I often get asked, what's the difference between writing YA and writing adult fiction? And my answer is always there's very little difference. It's in the eye of the beholder. Adults should absolutely read my books. But I think a more nuanced answer is that writing about especially young women of this age, the thing that I love about this demographic is how much, how in touch they are with their emotions at any given time, how they are able to live in their emotions and live in their bodies and wear them on their sleeves in a way that we don't. And so writing about Etta, in a way, I feel like she was going through this immense trauma carrying this secret, carrying what had happened to her, what she had done. But she was... I felt like I was able to tap into that in an authentic way because she was young. Not in spite of it. Because we always ask so much of young people. Because we always load them down with so much on their plates, and they're always undergoing something massive that we're barely even aware of. So it felt like a natural place for her to live. It felt like a natural thing for me to explore. >> Candace Fleming: And none of my ten actually went to battle. So your character actually goes and hears it and is in the middle of it. My teens are not and so their mental health is something different. It's about isolation because they can't tell anyone what they're doing. The fact that they get absolutely no acknowledgement, I mean, they tell stories about how they would go to London for the night, they'd have a night off and they would take the train to London, and there were other young teenage friends that they would meet, would talk about all the wonderful things they were doing for the war effort, which was a real badge of honor in Britain at the time. And these girls had to say, oh, I'm a secretary, or oh, I'm just filing or and they were actually, encouraged to tell lies to people about the work that they were actually doing. And then of course, when they left, they weren't allowed to tell anyone they had were sworn they had to sign a secrecy if they were sworn to silence for the rest of their lives. And of course, that broke down about in the 1970s. But one of the teens in the book later on said after that silence had been broken, she said that it was such a relief to be able to explain to her grandchildren. Now we're talking her grandchildren at this point, her grandchildren. It was such a relief to explain to them why she was so good at puzzles. (laughing) And I mean it's like so endearing. But you think about how they were so silent. And so even if you had a roommate, you did not talk about the work that you had done that day. If you wrote a letter, you did not talk about the work that you were doing and so, some of these young women tell stories about how they had what was then called the nervous breakdown back in the 40s. And they would have to actually be put to bed. And they did would put them to bed and they'd be in bed for a week, right. And then once they are sort of less nervous, they would actually, return to their jobs. So yeah, it was... And again, that time when nobody thought about supporting. >> Yukari Matsuyama: One of the other details from the "Brightwood Code" was the humanity of the individual really came out in interesting side characters I found. I think a lot of times there's an image of the boys who go off to war. They're so heroic. And then, of course they are. But there are also these stories of like one of the families that Edda visits, the young boy who's now the head of the household. And it's like, yeah, he wasn't actually living at home. Dad was not living at home for a long time, and it didn't seem like the mom was like it was better that he didn't come back, or it was really hard to read, but also very realistic about the details of like, not everybody was heroic in the traditional sense, but they were all battling their own conflicts of like morality or sense of duty and in Theo was sort of like an image of that for me because he was like, oh, I'm in school. He doesn't really explain why he wasn't at war, but he was. That part, I was really touched by Theo sort of struggle. And I was just wondering, how did how did you come up with that part? I know you sort of explained it a little bit before, but I really want... >> Monica Hesse: I think that so I've written four historical fiction novels now, and three of them are set in World War II. This is the first that's set in World War I. But I think that why I keep returning to these wartime narratives is because there's a grand narrative that's happening in the whole world, and that narrative is the war. And then there are millions of small lives that are still being lived. And just because you may be sent off to battle doesn't mean that you immediately lose your foils, your foibles, and your frailties and your faults and all of the things that made you human. And I'm always so interested in those tiny human dramas that still exist, that have always existed, that are now being forced to exist against the backdrop of a war. It's like you're talking about your characters still finding ways to be teenagers. My characters were teenagers who were forced to into these very adult professions. That didn't mean that they were emotionally ready for them or equipped for them. And sometimes the grief and the stress of that is going to come out sideways and in unpredictable ways. >> Yukari Matsuyama: Yeah, I definitely felt that with Theo. Sort of going back to this topic of teenagers. I think, Monica, I think you're talking about how we sometimes we dump so much on teenagers or we expect a lot from them. And I'm a middle aged woman and I have my own young people in my life. And I'm like, oh, they're so young and they don't know anything. And then we had the Olympics recently, and there were so many young, accomplished athletes. >> Monica Hesse: Like a 12 year old gold medalist skateboarder. >> Yukari Matsuyama: And then I just reading an article about Time's Kid of the year who has developed a soap to treat skin cancer. And I'm like, teenagers are so amazing. And why do as adults do we not often give them credit? And I think what you touched on, Monica, was that we because they're very different from us as adults, we sort of dismiss or diminish their accomplishments. And so, I know there's probably a lot of young people in here or people who deal with young people like, can you tell me, like, what is special to you about teenagers or young people? >> Monica Hesse: I just think they're amazing. I mean, I think that they're so smart, but there's a freshness to the way that they think. There's both like the gimlet eye, as anyone who has ever been witheringly evaluated by a teenager is well familiar with. But there's also just a lack of weight that allows them to see the world in a really clear cut way. I always feel privileged that that's my audience. And also, I think that we have to remember that in the time periods that Candy and I are writing about, the distinction between teenagers and adults was less than it is now. If you were 17, you might, for all intents and purposes, be considered a grown up. You would have had different responsibilities. We would have asked different things of you then. So, I'm always trying to find the right boundary in describing someone who is mentally an adult and who is being asked to do adult things, but just through their years isn't quite there yet. >> Candace Fleming: And I think teens well, I know a large reason that I wrote "The Enigma Girls" was to show just how extraordinary teenagers are, that there is this history of teenagers doing amazing things. And I think sometimes we underestimate or underestimate teens. Now, I also think teens are truth seekers, so I think they naturally come to things like the "Brightwood Code" and "Enigma Girls," because they are sort of searching for the truth. Yeah. They're great audience to write for, I think. >> Yukari Matsuyama: So, speaking of the audience, so you also rate picture books and books for younger readers and then you write for adults also like with your column. How do you like I don't want to make you choose favorites, but like, do you have one that you like to write more for or are... >> Candace Fleming: I was like the one I'm not working on now. So, if I'm doing huge big old non-fiction piece, I think to myself, I really, really want to write a picture book about talking construction trucks, and I have done that Before so, I don't think I have a favorite, but I enjoy them all, yeah. >> Monica Hesse: Yeah, I think that. So, I'm a columnist for the Washington Post and I write historical fiction novels, and I think that the two collaborate really well with each other. I think that being a journalist teaches you to have a really good ear, to listen for how people talk, how people actually construct sentences, the imperfections of language. And that's really helpful in writing dialogue and in having realistic sounding fictional characters. I think that fiction teaches you how to build suspense and to have pacing, and to break off at a time to make your readers want to turn the page again. And then that is really helpful for nonfiction writing, because good nonfiction writing is as you can talk as well as I can, is should be just as propulsive. The stories should be just as interesting. >> Candace Fleming: Are those same skills right. The same toolbox. Yeah. >> Yukari Matsuyama: Do you find like what kinds of challenges do you face, though, as you switch your writing for different audiences? >> Monica Hesse: It's sort of like I was going to say it's sort of like a triathlon, but I'm so unathletic that if this is not like a triathlon, just let it ride Just pretend. >> Candace Fleming: Just don't tell her. >> Monica Hesse: Just don't tell me. But it does feel... It feels like if you're working on a fiction project and you're running a marathon and you don't think you have anything left to give and you're exhausted, but then you jump in the pool and it turns out you do have something to give. You just needed to exercise a different set of muscles. And that's what it feels like. It feels like sometimes it can actually, be invigorating because what you needed was a different project. >> Candace Fleming: Yeah, I always think of it as like right brain, left brain, right. So if you're working on a really long project and almost invariably I write a picture book in the middle of those really long, those three four year projects, and I'll write a couple of picture books at the same time. It is you just need that switch to something else. >> Yukari Matsuyama: Just sort of talking about your writing and switching. Can you talk a little bit about your writing process or like your writing routines, especially if you're writing a picture book that probably, I'm assuming, looks a little bit different than if you're doing a long term project, like your day-to-day sort of looks like. >> Candace Fleming: I write every day. I try to, I go at the same time, so I treat it like a job even though I'm at home. And I write everything with wide lined loose leaf paper, seriously. And a blue BIC pen for a couple of reasons. One, I love the... At least for me, it makes me feel like what I'm writing isn't precious. I can throw it across sweep it across my desk, I can crumple it up, I can throw it to the dog to eat up. If it's that bad, go ahead. It's not precious, right? And I also love the smell. I know this sounds so weird, but I love the smell of blue BIC pen. I actually smells like writing to me. And at the end of the day, I leave my office and my whole forearm is covered in blue because it's cheap ink and I can go around to people and say, I have written today, so everything. Picture books get written longhand, but so do big pieces of 300 pages of nonfiction become huge piles of paper. And so my next draft is one, I actually, put it into the computer so that I'm rewriting while I'm doing that. But if there's really bad parts, I will actually print those out and do revisions by hand as well. >> Monica Hesse: I like to write... I like to go by word count rather than hours. If I tell myself, I have to sit for two hours, I will find every possible way to not write a darn word in those two hours. So it's important to me to know you're going to write a thousand words, and you can do this the easy way or the hard way, but we're not getting up until those words are done. And what I like about having a firm thousand words is if I'm in the middle of a sentence. Great. At least I know I have 17 words I know how to write tomorrow because I got to come back and finish that sentence. And so, I always try to stop when I'm excited so that I know that I can carry on tomorrow. If you stop after you felt like you've poured yourself out, then you're only going to dread coming back the next day. >> Yukari Matsuyama: And this is kind of a every writer probably gets asked this are you a planner or a pantser? >> Candace Fleming: Oh, a pantser. Yeah. Are you a planner? >> Monica Hesse: No. I mean, I always... I never write in order. I think that often the first chapter is often the last thing that I write. I sort of will sit down and if I know a scene or a stretch of dialogue, I'll write that scene, and it might end up being the back half of chapter 17, and then it just kind of gets put together like a puzzle. >> Candace Fleming: Yeah, I never write in chronological order either. I write what I know and once you write what you know, it's amazing what you discover that you actually know something else. Yeah, yeah. >> Yukari Matsuyama: Can you talk about any projects that are coming up for you that you're working on right now? Things that we can look forward to. >> Candace Fleming: What are you working on? Look at me. What are you working on, Monica? >> Monica Hesse: I'm actually returning to a manuscript that was just a bear for me a couple of years ago that I couldn't finish. It had to go in a drawer. And once it turns out that I just needed a break to write a whole other book. Because when I took it out of the drawer again, I realized, like, I know what to do with it now. And it's another mystery. It's another mystery set in World War II because that's my jam, and I find it endlessly fascinating. >> Candace Fleming: I'm just finishing a nonfiction book, "Young Adult," about people's Temple and Jonestown and the teenagers that were actually there in People's Temple, some that went to Jonestown, some that did not, some that survived, some that did not. It's been a really long four years, but I've met some wonderful people, former Peoples Temple members, who I spoke with and told me all kinds of fascinating, terrifying, wonderful stories about their time in People's Temple and with Jim Jones. All of them were unbelievably generous when I said that I was writing this book for teenagers, that they actually, had something they wanted to say to teenagers. And so some of them that were hesitant or reluctant when I said, but it's why it's young adults. So, it's for teens. They all had something that they wanted to say. So, they were unbelievably generous people. Yeah. >> Yukari Matsuyama: What makes you come back to writing for teens? And then when you go out and actually, meet your teen readers, how do they influence you? Do they ask questions that are like, oh, now I understand teens better? Like, what is that experience like of continuously being inspired by your teen readers? >> Monica Hesse: I think on a practical level, there's a reason that I'm comfortable in historical fiction and why I like historical fiction the best, and that is because there's a timelessness to it. If you try to write today sounding like a teenager, by the time your book goes into print, you will just sound like an elderly woman who is... Hello fellow kids. (laughing) So what I like about living in historical fiction is you can be accurate with how teenagers really sounded and talked at the time without having to keep up with technology and keep up with language that is rapidly and ever changing. At the same time, I think that the fears, hopes, dreams, aspirations of humanity have been steady through all of time and so, there is a steadiness to the emotional realness that comes to any project you're working on. >> Candace Fleming: Okay. I'm just going to say it. History is sort of my jam, and I really want teens to love it, too. And so my goal is, has been for a long time now to write history that reads like a novel, so that I always think about history or non-fiction and fiction this way. Fiction is when I decide, well, my goal for writing, for writing fiction is I want to bake a cake that is so delicious that you guys gobble it up in one sitting. And when you finish, you have a stomachache because you couldn't stop eating even though you knew you needed to. And so to do that, I go to the grocery store and I buy all the most delicious ingredients I can. So I have marshmallows and sugar and chocolate and coconut, all the good stuff. I mix it together. I bake this cake and I give it to you and you gobble it up. Fiction. Nonfiction. My goal is exactly the same. So I'm going to bake you a dessert, a cake that you're going to gobble up in one sitting. You're going to eat it so fast your stomach is going to hurt even. And when you're done, you're still going to want more. The difference is, like I sent my husband to the store and he brought me back all these disparate elements. So I've got some liver and I've got some Tabasco sauce. And I've got some Pepto-Bismol and probably a six pack of beer. And I'm supposed to take those. Those and that's all I can add to the mix, right? Because it's nonfiction. And I still have to bake you this cake that you gobble up in one sitting. And that's how I look at the difference between the two. Because what I want is for teens to pick up this book and read it the same way that they would read Monica's so, there are places where their imagination can enter, and they can see that person and smell their world and taste what it is that they're eating. All of those very same things, except when they get done, they can go, "Wow, that was absolutely true." And in case they doubt it, and every once in a while, I get a teenager that doubts me. There's a ton of source notes in the back, so yeah. >> Yukari Matsuyama: My last question is for the younger audience members who might be here, do you have any words of encouragement for them as they are developing into young adults and adults? Things that you might have learned from researching your books or just writing for them? >> Monica Hesse: I will say the only time I have ever done a school visit, which I love doing, I love school visits. The only time I have ever done one and actually become enraged on a deep and profound level is when one of the kids raised his hand and said, "I think I want to be a writer, but my English teacher says I can't because I'm a terrible speller." And I was so angry on this child's behalf. Because writing is not about spelling and it is not about grammar, and it is not about knowing where you're going, and it is not about having something perfect. If I could leave any aspiring writer with one word, it would be, it doesn't have to be good yet. It can be good later. It can be good in ten drafts. It can be good never. The work that you do now is going to make your work better later. It doesn't have to be good yet. Now it just has to be done. Write anything. Write anything that you can. And every word that you write is a pay it forward down the line. >> Candace Fleming: And it doesn't have to be perfect. >> Candace Fleming: Yeah. And I would add I'll take your answer and I would add be curious. Stay curious because I know you are curious, but I would say stay curious. Ask those questions. Ask them again. Keep looking, keep searching. Be curious. >> Yukari Matsuyama: I think it's now time for Q&A. So there are two microphones right here in front of the stage. If anybody would like to come up and ask questions about codes and ciphers. Women, young women in history, anything at all about their favorite ice cream flavor is can be anything. >> This is happening. >> Yukari Matsuyama: Yes, here we go. There you go. (laughing) A professional? Yeah, that's good. >> How would you compare the mental support from the time when these teenagers were doing the code breaking to the mental support now? >> Candace Fleming: I mean, in the time, I would say that at least in the early 1940s, where this book is set, nobody even considered the fact that a teenager might actually need some mental support. Not in the way that we think about it now. So, I would come... Yeah, I would say that the possibility of having mental support, I should say, is certainly bigger now than it is in the 1940s. What would you say? >> Monica Hesse: Yeah. I mean, what's really interesting is that the things that we're talking about, like PTSD, have obviously always existed. They were just called different things. They would be called in World War I, shell shock, maybe. And so, the question isn't whether these were issues. We were just so rudimentary in knowing how to deal with them. And especially for young women, it was chalked up to just being hysterical, to just having to just being too delicate, to just not having the right constitution. Rather than chalked up to the fact that these were girls under immense pressure, doing immensely difficult things. >> Thank you. >> Yukari Matsuyama: Monica, what I really appreciated about your characters though, as even though they struggled, all of your female characters had this really inner strength and resiliency about... I might not get outside support, but I am going to get through this. And it came through as really encouraging for me that even when during hard times is whether you're young or older, that you can, if you acknowledge it and you can work through it. And I saw that in Edda a lot as she progressed through the story. >> Monica Hesse: Yeah. And I think that the "Hello Girls" were chosen probably much like the "The Enigma Girls" because they had both the skills and this fortitude. >> Yukari Matsuyama: Please. >> Hi. I'm a school librarian in Alexandria. That's not a question. That's just a plug. (applause) Okay. Cool. Secondly, my family's Guyanese, so thank you very much for covering Jonestown. There's no literature for teens and kids about that spectacle. Okay, my question. Do you all choose the topic first in terms of like, oh, I'm going to cover World War II, or I'm going to cover World War I or code breaking, or do you hear about a singular story somewhere and you kind of grab on to it, fall down the rabbit hole and then it becomes a piece of literature? >> Candace Fleming: The rabbit hole, that's it. Yeah. Yeah. So, you come across one story, and then you go down that rabbit hole. For research, I'm sure you do the same way. It's really organic and it's sort of one thing leads you to another and you never know what's coming next, what you're going to discover next. And for me, that's how it works. And pretty soon I go, I've got a book, I've got something I need to say. Yeah. >> Monica Hesse: Yeah, I agree. The "Brightwood Code," actually, the character of Edda was originally her backstory was just supposed to be a small backstory in a completely other book that I was writing. But as I was working on that book, I learned that her parts were the parts that I was most interested in, and before I knew it, that was the whole book, yeah. >> Thank you. >> Candace Fleming: Thanks. >> Do you think there are any other groundbreaking female stories that you would want to write about, like later on? >> Candace Fleming: Stories about women, females, girls? >> Female jobs, stories that you would want to write about later. >> Candace Fleming: I know I can't think of one that's on my horizon right now, but I bet I do find one. Yeah, I bet something comes up. Well, you're in the middle... >> Monica Hesse: I mean, the novel that I'm in the middle right now is about a young woman in a very rural area in what wouldn't have been a groundbreaking job. It would have been an acceptable job for a girl her age. She was a governess and a tutor. But I think those stories are just as interesting to watch girls have to take on jobs that are considered appropriate for them. Yeah. >> Thank you. >> How do you build the depth of background characters and the depth of their relationships with the main characters? >> Candace Fleming: That's for you, fiction writer. >> Monica Hesse: I mean, it really is. It really is like a tip of the iceberg. It really is like for everything that goes on page, you know so much more that's not on page. And that, I think is probably something that's the same. You kind of have to know... You have to know a character's whole life in order to even make a few scenes with them feel realistic. So I do a lot of... if my editor says, well, this scene, when he reacted that way, why did he react that way? It'd be like, well, when his grandmother came over from Ireland. And none of that goes in the book, but it's always really helpful to know in the back of your mind. >> Candace Fleming: And I think you can feel the weight of it. Right. And it sounds really weird, but when you read a really good historical fiction novel, or even a piece of nonfiction. Like "The Enigma Girls," you can feel the weight of the rest of the research there. Do you know what I mean by that? So, you know there's more depth there than that's deeper than what you see on the surface. >> My question is when you were in school, did you always know you wanted to be an author? >> Candace Fleming: No. I was a writer. I was always a writer, I always wrote. And before I wrote, I told stories before I could actually physically write like a second grader with their pencil write. Or I would have a story in my head, but my ability to put it on a piece of paper was not as fast as my brain. And so, I would tell stories to people. I would oftentimes tell them completely made up stories that I forgot to then tell them I made them up. So, I did gain a reputation for a while as a fibber but I am a storyteller. But no, I didn't. It was one of those things that I didn't think people actually did for a living. Isn't that terrible to say? And so, I didn't, I actually, I went to college and I majored in history. Right. Still using that, but, yeah, I didn't think so. Yeah. >> Monica Hesse: Yeah. I didn't write my first word of fiction until I had long graduated from college because I grew up being a voracious reader, but the idea that someone actually wrote those books was just like a foreign concept entirely. So it's never too early and it's never too late. >> Candace Fleming: And author's never came to school. Right. Never had authors come to schools like we do now. So, I never really saw anyone that actually wrote those books either yeah. >> Thank you. >> Where do you draw the line in terms of age appropriate content balancing. This is for teenagers who are just beginning to explore a world that they don't have the tools to cope with yet, whether it's the details like Alan Turing's response to [inaudible] a cult mass murder. Where is the line? >> Candace Fleming: It's a careful line. And I'm aware of the line, but I also don't want to pull my punches. Right. So history isn't always happy. Most of the time it's not. And I really am a firm believer that histories are written. You have to look into the abyss, right? So history is both your gift and your burden. Right? And so what can be learned from a story about Jonestown? There's a lot that can be learned for teens about Jonestown, about influence, undue influence. Well, there's just so much I could get into lightweight. I was just stop right now, because he just held up my five minute sign. But knowing that some details, I will definitely pull back on. I'm trying to think of an example. Here's one of the examples in my book, which is actually called death in the jungle. And it's out in March. There's your plug. There are no pictures. Those iconic pictures of corpses at Jonestown. One, I think they're terrible. But two, here's the thing. We've all seen them. We saw them on the covers of magazines, newspapers. We still see them all the time. Right? One of the people that I spoke to, Mike, said to me he had left People's Temple before they went to Jonestown, but his mother and his sister did. And so, he didn't see them again until he opened up a copy of "Newsweek," and they were there and they were dead. And all of a sudden, I thought to myself, those iconic photographs of Jonestown will not appear in my book. But at the end, I mean, we have what they call is called the death tape. And any teenager can listen to it on Facebook at this point, right. So here's my job. Those might be details that we think are too much for teens, which I don't actually. But those are details we might think are too much. My job is to put those details into context. How did they get there? What forces led them to this event? So, it's not like a titillating event, but it's by the time the reader gets there, it's a sorrowful event, an event that you wish they had actually listened to the truth. You wish they had not had so much influence. You wish that the group had not bolstered each other's beliefs. Right? And that's sort of where I draw the line. Does that make sense? >> Monica Hesse: I also think that there's a measure of you. Sometimes you hear parents ask, when is my child old enough to learn about discrimination or something? And I think that the answer is always if a child is old enough to have experienced discrimination, then it's actually, our job to teach them about it and to give the tools to understand it. So there are ways to do it and there are ways to talk about any topic in an age appropriate way. But I think it's our job as authors to write about every topic in an age appropriate way. >> Candace Fleming: And of course, the topic like that you'd never give to you would never be a preschool book, right? It would never be a picture book. And in my mind, it's not middle grade either. It's solidly, solidly young adult. And if you were to say to me, who's the reader for that book, I would say, don't let anyone under 14 read that book. So, I agree. Yeah, you could write a picture book about discrimination, but it would be appropriate material for the picture book set. Yeah, thank you. >> Yukari Matsuyama: Do we have any more questions? Don't be shy. This is your last chance. >> Candace Fleming: You can ask us anything. >> Yukari Matsuyama: That's right. >> Monica Hesse: I think we're also both going to signings after? If you had a question you did not want to ask in a crowded room. >> Yukari Matsuyama: That's true. Speaking of photos, you know your book has lots of photos. >> Candace Fleming: It does. >> Yukari Matsuyama: Did you meticulously find all those in archives? >> Candace Fleming: I meticulously found those in my research through archival material or things from Bletchley Park. Yes, I found all of those. >> Yukari Matsuyama: Question for both of you after you do your research. What do you do with all your research material? >> Candace Fleming: Oh, mine are in ginormous plastic bins that I get from Target. And they're in a complete mess and they're shoved into... we have a big closet upstairs and they are shoved into. We have piles and piles of them now. I'm afraid to give them away for fear I'll need something. You hang onto it. I'm a hoarder when it comes to my research materials. >> Monica Hesse: Sort of. I have shelves, and I sort of never want to look at them again. >> Candace Fleming: Which is thus the Target. Where you take everything and you dump it in there, put a lid on, shove it away, and then invariably you need something and you go, why didn't I keep that organized? >> Yukari Matsuyama: All right. Do we have any more questions? Both of them will be signing after this immediately. Pretty much immediately after this at 5:30 in Hall DE which is on this level, but on the other. Oh, yay! More questions? >> Yeah, I'll just ask a quick one. >> Just because young women are often erased from the historical record, right? They're not usually the people that history books remember. How did that impact the research that you did? You know, what kind of roadblock did you run into just because of the subjects? >> Yukari Matsuyama: Great question. >> Candace Fleming: Well, it's certainly fueled my reason to tell this story, because they are when we think about Bletchley, we automatically go to the men, the Alan Turing's, the Tommy Flowers, you know. And of course, they certainly, deserve that recognition. But so did these women that sort of did that grinding, slogging work that nobody even talks about. So that certainly fueled it. I think I was lucky because, we didn't really start paying attention to the history of Bletchley Park until the 1970s, and so many of those women realized that they were allowed to toss the Secrecy Act, right. They don't have to worry about it anymore. And so they went and did interviews, and Bletchley Park filmed them talking about their work and their day to day life and what their billets were like and what they ate and what they did for fun. And then many of them before most of them are gone now. Many of them wrote their memoirs of those times, so they left behind a pretty good record. >> How and when do you decide what you want the cover to look like? >> Monica Hesse: Oh, that's like almost the last. It's like the book is done, it's copy edited, and it feels like a joyous event when instead of just staring at black and white words, someone instead sends you four beautiful covers and says we're considering these options. Do you have one that you like? And sometimes sometimes you get to choose your own cover. Sometimes your publisher has a different thought about what should go on the cover, but it's always toward the end of the process and it's really informed by. >> Candace Fleming: And so, I don't know how you are, but I'm sort of like after how many years you go, any cover you want to put on there is really great at this point. But yeah. >> Thank you. >> Yukari Matsuyama: All right. These are going to be our last two questions. >> If nobody can know about the jobs they were doing, how did they go to the war? Because like did people tell their parents they were going? >> Candace Fleming: They told their parents they were leaving, but they didn't tell them where they were going. And their parents couldn't visit them there. And they could write to their parents, but not from their real address. And their parents could write to them, but not at their real address. Isn't that amazing? And it's kind of scary and great. >> Thank you. >> Candace Fleming: Thank you. >> Hello. Thank you for the lovely talk. We've been talking about how history gets erased and then dug up again. And I was wondering, what your, like, advice or instructions might be for like adults or... Let me do the end of the sentence and then the beginning editing. So, we've seen a lot of efforts to ban books and restrict what information people can have access to easily. And I was wondering what your advice would be to both kids and adults, writers and readers, teachers, librarians for like fighting against those efforts to ban books and restrict access to historical information. >> Monica Hesse: So, we're going to end with an easy question. (laughing) To adults, I would say this is probably preaching to the choir in this room. But all of the things that you are afraid that your child will learn about, they already know about it. What you've done by restricting their information is not restricting their knowledge. It's just restricting their ability to cope with the things that they are already learning about. And that's never an effective strategy. To kids, I would say, there is a trusted adult in your life. It might not be the adults that you live with, but there are whole teams of librarians and teachers and aunts and uncles and people who care about helping you understand the information that you need to have. >> Candace Fleming: That was the perfect answer. >> Thank you. (applause) (upbeat music)