If you are lucky enough to have signed up for next weekend’s SCBWI Western Washington Conference, Imagine That!, this interview with Mina Witteman is a warm-up for the adventure to come! The interview between Mina and illustrator Kary Lee is below.
KARY LEE: As members of SCBWI, most everyone has a story that centers around the friendships and bonds formed at meetings and conferences. My meeting with Mina Witteman is no exception. We met as fellow mentee’s during the 2014 SCBWI Nevada Mentorship. We began the weekend as roommates and left as friends. Our friendship has continued to grow through major life changes, career highs and lows and of course many SCBWI events, including the upcoming SCBWI Western Washington Conference: Imagine That! I am delighted to be able to share her with Seattle.
Kary Lee: What made you want to become a writer?
Mina Witteman: I’ve always been a writer or, rather, a storyteller, but the writing started blooming in high school. At my school, whenever you were sent out of class, you had to write a disciplinary essay. And that was right up my alley. I made sure to be sent out of class on an almost daily basis. When the principal realized his punitive regime wasn’t exactly successful, he ordered me to write the essays in German, rather than Dutch. That too didn’t force me back between the lines, so he subsequently told me to write the essays in French and later in English. Needless to say, detention was my most favorite subject in high school (although I loved math, physics and chemistry, too).
Kary: Are you a plotter or a pantser? (Translation: Do you plot out your stories first, or just do by the “seat of your pants”?)
Mina: I am a plotting pantser, if that makes any sense. I plot. I draft outlines. I let a story steep and stew and plot and outline some more. And when the story is ready to come out, I start writing, usually disregarding all previous plotting and outlining. Though I might start the way I planned, it’s the story and the protagonist that actually take me by the hand and lead me to the end. More often than not that is in a decidedly different direction than I had thought the story would go. This doesn’t discourage or scare me and I never force myself back to my initial plot. I just let it happen. To me, ultimately, the conception of a story is an organic process: it carves out paths and bends like a river, finds alternate routes and unexpected turns when obstructed, eventually flowing where it should.
Kary: What do you do for fun when you’re not writing?
Mina: I read! A lot! But I also love to wander around Berkeley, where I live up in the hills in a tiny wooden writer’s refuge with redwood trees in the yard and a view of the San Francisco Bay. My goal is to walk every step or pathway in this quirky town and I am not nearly done, because Berkeley has many, many steps and pathways to explore.
Kary: What’s next for you?
Mina: Next for me is getting my work out in the US, either my Dutch work in translation or my English manuscripts (I write in both languages). It will happen. Winning the San Francisco Writing Contest of the San Francisco Writers Foundation in the category children/YA, I consider a promissory note. Yes, it will happen.
Kary: What’s your earliest creative memory?
Mina: My earliest creative memory dates back to when I was about three years old. Whenever my father, an architect, was designing houses, I would climb up on the table and start writing the specs with his designs. Of course, I couldn’t read or write at the time, but I told him elaborate stories with my squiggles, about the how and why of my specs. Why there had to be a tree inside the children’s rooms (to climb in, hide in the crown and read!), why there had to be an ocean in the backyard (to sail!), why the roof had to be made glass (so the people living there could always watch the sky and the birds!).
Kary: How has your writing process shifted through your career?
Mina: I wrote my first middle grade novel upon finishing the four-year program Writing Prose for Children. At that time, I thought I knew it all, but I wasn’t able to sell the novel until after I finished the master Book Editing at the University of Amsterdam, two years later. It’s during the master and the subsequent internship at one of the Netherlands’ most prestigious publishing houses, that my writing process shifted considerably. Though still a writer, I learned to look at my work as a professional editor. Working with my first editor was revelatory, too. She was a seasoned editor of children’s books and her feedback and guidance were instrumental to the way my writing process, or rather my revision process, evolved. That was a hands-on crash course in looking at my own work with not just a writer’s eye, but with the eye of an editor, too.
The biggest take-away? I can revise and delete beautiful passages and sentences without any regrets; I don’t cry when I have to let go of endearing characters. If they’re not part of the story, they have to go. Easy as that. ☺
Oh, tip! I never cut and paste until the absolute final, final, final version. For every earlier revision I start a fresh document. It’s the way to not end up with aforementioned superfluous passages, sentences or characters.
Kary: What have you learned writing for multiple ages, or cross-genre?
Mina: Despite my history of essay writing, my main love is fiction. Within fiction I venture into contemporary stories, into science fiction and in light fantasy. But it’s the variation of story length that strengthens my work most. I have written and published adult, young adult and middle grade novels, but also shorter read-aloud stories for the youngest (up to 1,500 words), as well as picture books and adult flash fiction (less than 500 words). Writing shorter fiction strengthens my novel writing. Short stories, be it a picture book, a read-aloud or flash fiction, push me to concentrate on the bare bones of a story. What is imperative and what is fluff? It’s when I start padding my project—usually when I get stuck—that I force myself to put the work aside and write a short story. Luckily, I am blessed with an editor who somehow can sense that I am in a too verbose a mood, as often she shoots me an email asking me if I’m up for a short story about such-and-so for their next anthology. To me, “750 words max!” is the best line in such commissions.
Kary: How do you first approach a new project? Do you tend to start with character, plot arc, or…
Mina: A character pops up first but is almost immediately followed by a major plot point, a twist or a ‘what if?’. The Boreas series started with this curly-headed boy, who didn’t like change. At all! He liked order and predictability and security. No surprises. No unexpected twists and turns in his life. I didn’t even have time to breathe before “What if I plunk him on a sailboat and have him sail around the world?” came up. Four books of rollicking, action-packed but also serious and heart-rending adventure ensued…
Kary: What do you wish you knew at the beginning of your career?
Mina: It’s a sloooooooooooow business and your middle name needs to be Perseverance! Also, you need to take it seriously. It’s a business. Treat it as such. I love the camaraderie and friendships in this business and within SCBWI in particular, but when it comes to publishing, it’s not about how much you like the agent or editor or how much the agent or editor likes you. Hard as it is, don’t take it personal. We’re all in it to sell books, the best books, and to make a buck or two. Like with any other business it requires you to be professional, graceful, and open to change and learning and amending your plans when necessary. But it’s an amazing business and I wouldn’t want to trade it in for anything in the world.
Kary: What kind of character are you drawn to?
Mina: I am drawn to the brainier characters, feisty but with a tender side. I like characters who like to find out stuff, because that compels me to find out stuff and I am a true lover of facts. I live by my favorite quote, which is from the Dutch master of flash fiction, A.L. Snijders: “Nothing is as beautiful as useless knowledge.”
PROFILES OF CONTRIBUTORS
KARY LEE, the interviewer, is a visual storyteller who splits her time between her passion as an editorial/book illustrator and her day job as a graphic designer for UW Medicine. Her work has been featured in various magazines and picture books including DIZZY, a Mom’s Choice Award winner for Best Picture Book adventure. She has a Communications degree from Washington State University and lives in Seattle in a little apartment on the west shore of Lake Washington with her husband, Charles, under an eagles nest.You can learn more about her work on her website, www.karyleeillustration.com.
MINA WITTEMAN writes in English and Dutch and has published seven adventurous middle-grade novels in the Netherlands, a Little Golden Book, and over forty short stories in magazines and read-aloud anthologies. The final book of her successful Dutch middle grade series came out in October 2018: Boreas en de vijftien vrienden / Boreas and the Fifteen Friends. Her English work gravitates toward dark Young Adult and adventurous middle-grade novels.
Witteman is SCBWI’s International Published Authors’ Coordinator and the Program Associate Children’s and Young Adult of the Bay Area Book Festival. She trained at the University of Amsterdam’s Book Editing Master Program and has worked as an independent editor for some of the most prestigious publishing houses in the Netherlands. She is a certified teacher creative writing and has taught master classes and intensives at writers’ conferences in the US and Europe. In her private practice, she teaches creative writing to children and adults alike, and she coaches published and pre-published authors. Witteman lives in Berkeley, California. Her blog is at https://minawitteman.com/boreas-series/