Ten Years after Writing The Girl with the Red Balloon
This is going to be long. You’ve been warned.
I’ve told this story a thousand times. Maybe more.
In 2013, I was driving to work. I worked at a mushroom farm at the time (true story) and I was late to work (this is an everyday occurrence) so I was driving a little fast and I was next to the median. A song came on the radio.
Goldfinger’s cover of 99 Red Balloons.
Instantly in my head, I saw a girl floating over a wall, holding onto a red balloon.
Let me rewind.
I’ve always been a writer. My mom has little picture books she wrote for me as I dictated and I have stories I wrote when my handwriting was so big that I could only fit six or seven words to a page (most of this is fanfiction about my own life where my mom and I had a farm and I had no siblings. Sorry to my siblings.) I wrote my first novel-length book in the front row of my 9th grade science class. I still have one of the two floppy discs I saved it on after typing it up diligently. I wrote extensive Wheel of Time fanfiction in a forum RPG throughout high school, including skipping lunch to log on at the library. I wrote another book in my freshman year of college and the sequel in my sophomore year.
In 2007, my junior year of college, I discovered AbsoluteWrite and joined a great community of writers, and decided one day I wanted to be published. Almost instantly, I couldn’t write. I was completely blocked. Everything I wrote was bad, so bad, and how could I ever think I wanted to be published or could be published?
I didn’t finish any books until 2012.
The first Avengers movie is what got me writing again. That, and the first Divergent book (thank you, Veronica Roth, forever and always). I wrote crappy, and I mean truly crappy, dystopian ripoffs all spring and summer, interspersed with mediocre Avengers fanfiction.
Nothing I wrote that year was good.
But all of it reminded me that I love writing.
And in 2013, I was working on yet-another-crappy dystopian book (not because dystopian books are crappy but rather that I’m not good at writing them), when I had this flash of this girl, this red balloon, and a wall.
So what I mean to say is that by the time this mental image came to me, I knew when my brain had an idea worth chasing. I knew how to let go, and let myself imagine all the possibilities. I knew how to ask myself the questions. This is so key to storytelling, I’ve found.
By the time I got to work, I knew it was the Berlin Wall. I knew that she’d time traveled there. And I knew she was Jewish.
So not only was I late to work, but I wrote the first chapter of the first draft of The Girl with the Red Balloon there. That chapter’s now the second chapter of the book, switched to Kai’s point of view, and with only a few minor changes. It’s otherwise almost completely intact.
That day, I also logged into Twitter where I did a writing sprint. Susan Dennard used to run these regular writing sprints on Twitter where we’d check in regularly with our word counts in tweets back to her and she would cheer us on as she too was writing. She was releasing Something Strange and Deadly that summer--she wasn’t even published yet!--and she was working on A Darkness Strange and Lovely. There was a spirit of camaraderie on those word sprints. And typically, there were a few of the same people on the sprints.
We reached out to each other, and formed a critique group.
I switched from the dystopian book to the “magicballoonbook” and it poured out of me.
I wrote it that spring. I shared it with my critique partners. I revised it. I wrote another book about two ballet dancers. I wrote another book for NaNoWriMo. I queried that December with my NaNoWriMo book. I felt unstoppable.
I got an agent with my ballet book in April of 2014 and I revised what I was still calling “magicballoonbook” that year. And this time, I knew how to revise it. I’d written two drafts of it, both quite different, both chewing on the same topics, but in between the second draft and the third draft, I’d written two more books and learned a great deal from both of them.
The writing of the 2014 draft was a magical experience. I remember feeling intoxicated by this book. I dreamt of it all the time. I could see it in my head like a story. 2014 was an impossibly hard year for me, and this story was my refuge. And when I sent it to my then-agent, I held my breath. She called me that winter and I remember this pause, and then she said, “I loved it. I loved it.” And she was not (and is not!) someone who is fast and loose with praise! The relief I felt in my body still echoes today.
I called this blog post 10 Years After Writing The Girl with the Red Balloon. Even though it’s been 11 years. Because it was the 2014 draft that got published.
The version of The Girl with the Red Balloon that sold in January 2016, released September 2017, and won two library association honors is so different than the version that I wrote in 2013. In one version, Ellie had a twin brother named Josh, who is alarmingly like my not-twin brother. In another version, there was 10,000 words of a magical circus, which is clearly because I’d read The Night Circus (one of my favorite books) and was mesmerized by the concept.
But in each version of the story, certain things stayed the same.
Ellie was always Ellie.
Her characterization changed very little. Recently I went back to my alma mater to give some talks to classes and the public, and my dad went with me. We were talking about something I said in a Q&A session with English Dept students. For me, stories are about characters. It’s about some journey that the character is on, the realization they have, the change that’s made inside of them. There are a thousand different plots that you can pick to put your character on the journey. The plot is a tool, a mechanism, for that character’s arc. And there’s nowhere that’s more visible in my own work than in the three drafts of The Girl with the Red Balloon. No matter what I did, and the strange turns I tried in plots, Ellie was Ellie, and her journey was the same.
It was always Berlin 1988.
I wanted a liminal place, at a liminal time. And 1988 was it. The book takes place 18 months before the fall of the Wall, at a time when things felt like they were on the brink of change but people had felt this before and been disappointed. I wanted that feeling that change was so close you could touch it, but you couldn’t yet see it. I didn’t want Ellie to be there at the Fall of the Wall because I wanted that moment to belong solely to Berliners, not an American and her outsider perspective.
It was always about Ellie wrestling with Germany, memory, and what happened to her family.
It’s a Holocaust book, and it’s not a Holocaust book. I really do not like to label this a Holocaust book because only 10,000 words of it take place during the Holocaust. But in a way, those other 70,000 words that take place in the shadow of the Holocaust also make it a Holocaust book. Is it possible to write about the granddaughter of a survivor and not feel the Holocaust between every line? I don’t know. I have yet to write that. But I really wanted to explore what it’s like to see a country as it is now, and to feel an attachment, a love for it, despite history, despite a family member’s hatred for the country. How do we navigate this? How do we navigate the complexities of place and memory? This was the first book where I dove into it. The groundwork I laid here I think I build upon in This Rebel Heart. I couldn’t have written one without the other.
And here’s what I learned while writing The Girl with the Red Balloon and in the ten years since:
If a book idea feels like something you should stick with, you should. Even if it takes multiple drafts, complete rewrites, and years (of your life and off your life). If a book idea is that sticky, you should stick with it like it sticks to you. The payoff is worth it.
You might need to write other books to learn how to write the one you really want to write. I’m not saying I’m not proud of the books I wrote between Drafts 2 and 3 of The Girl with the Red Balloon, but I couldn’t have written that 3rd draft, the one that actually worked and sang and did what I wanted to do, without the lessons I learned from those other two books. They are important on their own, but I’ll always appreciate the skills they gave me.
It’s important to let yourself play in a manuscript and to do the weird things (like the circus that was not mine, and also this weird subplot around books in one of these drafts? Like Kai had a whole magical library?). It’s also important to write with intention. When I went back into this book for the third draft, I had an outline. I followed it. Religiously, for once. I played in the outline, but I followed it in the draft.
If a book doesn’t sell fast, that doesn’t mean anything other than it didn’t sell fast. It took 12 months to sell The Girl with the Red Balloon. I didn’t see a deal agreement until 14 months after we went on sub. That was a long time. I had just had dinner with friends right before it sold and thought about pulling it from sub, and the next day we had an offer. Be patient. Sometimes the quirky books take awhile to find a home but you can find a home for it.
You’re going to need to believe in your book more than anyone else. Forever. More than your agent, more than your editor, more than your publicist and your sales team, as lovely as they are.
Separate out your book and the business. While I had a lovely, truly lovely editorial experience on both my Balloonmakers books, I had a poor business experience at that publisher (if you google that publisher and my name, you’ll see a 2020 article about that. For legal reasons, I won’t elaborate beyond what’s written there.)
You will always be chasing that feeling of writing your first book without anyone else in your head. When GIRL published, and when it was on submission, I heard again and again, “It’s such an unusual book.” I don’t think it is, honestly, and maybe I shouldn’t say that, but I heard it so many times that I got uncomfortable about it and self-conscious about it. Was it bad that it’s unusual? Why do people keep saying that? If I’d known it was that quirky I might have written it differently. I’m glad I didn’t know! That’s partially why SPY is a more traditional novel, I think, in its format and concept.
You will write yourself into corners. I didn’t think of a sequel to GIRL when I wrote it. So I wrote the magic every which way without any concern about what it would be like in a different plot or scenario. And then in The Spy with the Red Balloon, I was like... welp! I had written rules that were very confining to the plot of The Spy with the Red Balloon. You’ll need to get good at finding ways out of the corners of your own making. Slash, find writing friends who will text endlessly about those corners and help you out of them.
Debut books are beloved by the industry, both the structural systemic parts like publishers, and by readers. There’s something about Shiny New Things. You’ll likely be fighting for the visibility you got on the first book forever (this may or may not be true if you published at a really small publisher for your first book but this was true for me)
You’ll make mistakes. There are things you’d like to revise. You might get that chance, or you might not, but either way, own the words you wrote, even the ones that could be better.
I learned how to read contracts and clauses and royalty statements because of The Girl with the Red Balloon. I became a member of Authors Guild because of the Girl with the Red Balloon. I cried and screamed and felt so defeated at so many times because of the business side of The Girl with the Red Balloon.
But I also learned how to keep writing because of the Girl with the Red Balloon. I learned how to revise because of The Girl with the Red Balloon. I learned how to plot because of The Girl with the Red Balloon. I met so many people because of The Girl with the Red Balloon. People learned who I was because of The Girl with the Red Balloon, booksellers, librarians and readers alike.
I couldn’t have the writing career I have without The Girl with the Red Balloon.
Which means I couldn’t have the writing career I have without that bad first draft.
Without that bad second draft.
Without that perseverance that got me to that third draft.
Without the patience that got me through a year on submission.
Without the tenacity that kept me writing through a rough business side experience.
I owe everything to Ellie and Kai and Mitzi and Sabina and Benno.
And I owe everything to the strange ways that the writing world works. I don’t think I would have finished or written this book without my critique partners. And I wouldn’t have met them without Susan Dennard. And I wouldn’t have met Susan or her sprints without Twitter. (These are the things I miss about Twitter. There was an organic feeling to the “early” days.)
Thank you for reading The Girl with the Red Balloon if you’ve picked it up. It means the world.
**If you’re looking for the book, it’s only available in physical format right now. I got my rights back a year ago, and I haven’t gotten the ebook up yet. (If you’re an editor and you want to buy the rights, please reach out to my agent Lara Perkins at ABLA. They’re available!) So you might be able to find physical copies in stores, or just online. It’ll be hard for stores to order copies from what I understand.