Haddayr asked Greg Van Eekhout:

How do you approach your adult fiction as opposed for that for kids? I certainly notice a difference in tone, and I'm guessing there are some things you can't do in one or the other for marketing reasons, but I guess what I mean is literally how you approach it? Mindsetwise. "I just write what I wanna" is obviously an acceptable answer, but it will make me have a sad.

Greg Van Eekhout I've been wrestling with this question a lot, for years, and still don't think I know how to answer it. Because it is so much more than knowing which books you can cuss in and which cusses you can use and how graphically to depict violence and that sort of thing.

When I set out to write a middle-grade book, I imagine the physical object on the shelf. I imagine roughly (very roughly) how thick it will be. What the cover might look like. How it will feel in my hands. I imagine what it will look like surrounded by other middle-grade books, and what the reader might be like. What kind of kid, with what kind of mind, with what sort of interests and likes and dislikes. I don't do this to a great degree of detail, not like I have a dossier on them or anything like that. But I have an impression of them. Unsurprisingly, this imaginary kid is very much like I was when I was a kid. And I don't write the book for that kid, but I do write it from a headspace that I imagine is similar to that kid's.

The characters, who are as different from one middle-grade book to another as characters in different adult books are to each other, grow from the same process: putting yourself in the mindset of that specific, unique person who happens to be a kid, and seeing the world through their experience and perspective, and writing in their voice.

Is that at all helpful?

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