Six Questions with Margaret Finnegan

Margaret Finnegan’s latest middle grade novel is Spelling It Out (Atheneum Books for Young Readers). If she is not writing kid lit or teaching her students at Cal State LA, she is most likely walking her dog, having lunch with her friends, bingeing something funny with her family, or baking something that isn’t very healthy. Connect with her at www.MargaretFinnegan.com or on Instagram @FinneganBegin.

1. What kind of student were you? What were your favorite subjects?

I was your classic teacher’s pet. I loved school. I loved being helpful. I raised my hand constantly. I was ridiculously and annoying enthusiastic, and I still am. But part of it was that I felt safe and valued in the classroom. The playground could be intimidating; my family life could be chaotic and even scary, but my teachers were always so kind to me. Maybe they saw that I needed that kindness. I especially loved English and history. To me, they just seemed like different modes of storytelling, and I love stories.

2. What’s the best piece of advice a mentor has given you?

So much of a writer’s success (or lack of success) is out of their hands. Will the book be published? Will it get good reviews? Will it get any reviews? Will it reach an audience? You can have the best marketing team in the world; you can hire an amazing publicist. Even then, a lot of what happens to the book is beyond the author’s control. That’s why the best advice I ever got was this: Write the next book. The next book is a calling card for all your other books. And the writing of the next book is absolutely within your control. Write it. Release it. Let it go. Repeat.

3. What are some of the key ingredients that make a great book for kids?

I don’t think there is one answer to this. When I was young, I would be furious if an author killed off a dog in a book. I just got so attached to the dogs that their literary deaths would destroy me, and I blamed the author. For that reason, I have personally promised many a reader that no dog will ever meet an unfortunate end in any book I write. But I know many readers who love books that broke me—even ones where the dog dies. A great book is the book you need, for whatever you are feeling or experiencing, right when you need it.

4. Where did you get the idea for this book? What was your inspiration? 

Spelling it Out is about Ben Bellini, who spends a fateful summer preparing for the Scripps National Spelling Bee at the same time that his beloved grandmother is being pulled into the grip of Alzheimer’s. My immediate inspiration for the book was my sweet mother-in-law, who also had Alzheimer’s. But once I started thinking about it, I realized that what I really wanted to write about was memory. What do we remember? What do we forget? Why? And it seemed to me that a really interesting way to explore that would be to focus on a character whose relentless drive to improve his own memory is matched by the disease’s relentless energy to suck away his grandmother’s.

5. If you could tell readers one secret about this book, what would it be?

I wish I could say that I was a former spelling bee champion, but I’m just an average, run-of-the-mill speller. I had to research spelling bees in order to write the book!

6. If you read this book to a room filled with kids, what message would you want them to leave with?

I would want them to leaving knowing that, while many things—like the health of our loved ones—are beyond our control, there are many things we can control. We can control our responses to people who aren’t very nice to us or who are biased toward us. We can learn. We can grow. We can defy expectations.