Behind the book: Brainstorming!

and how THE TINKERERS took 20 years to write

I love learning about how things are made. As a kid, I was captivated by the famous episode of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood that explained how wax and pigments are turned into crayons. And now, as a lover of books, I think it’s equally fascinating to see the inner workings of the writing process, to get a glimpse of the strange and sometimes jury-rigged machines that turn ideas into stories. Each writer’s machines are unique, and each story is built differently, but I thought you all might like a few glimpses behind the scenes of the most complex book I’ve worked on yet: my upcoming middle grade novel, The Tinkerers. Over the next few months before publication in October, I’ll be sharing some of those behind-the-scenes glimpses to show you how this story came to be. If you’re also a person who loves to learn about how things are made, I hope you’ll follow along.

(And if you’re just here for the occasional news updates, not the craft essays, feel free to put this email aside—it’s a long one!)

art by Junyi Wu, design by Lissi Erwin

When I visit schools, I tell kids that each of my books starts with the brainstorming process. (They like hearing that, because they brainstorm, too!) When I come up with a story idea, I write down everything I can think of that might be connected to that story: character names, exciting plot events, themes I’d like to explore, or little details that make me laugh. I tell the kids that my brainstorming, note-taking work for a book might last for weeks or even months, depending on what else I’m writing at the time. For The Tinkerers, though, that brainstorming work took decades. And its story also happens to be the story of how several of my other books came into the world along the way.

In its simplest form, The Tinkerers is a book about a kid named Peter and his best friend, Linnet. While he’s working at his family’s inn, Peter discovers a magical device that can nudge time backward—but only by a few minutes. Strands of these elements show up in lots of my old writing notes and unpublished manuscripts, going back to my earliest serious attempts at writing fiction. Twenty years ago, after I graduated from college, I started working on a story about a group of mysterious people gathered at a remote inn; I loved the Agatha Christie-esque idea of throwing a bunch of different characters together and letting them reveal one another’s secrets over the course of a story. But I was still learning my way around novel-writing, and while I eventually finished a first draft of that manuscript, it was messy. I wasn’t ready to tell that story.

Almost ten years later, around the time I finished working on the Very Nearly Honorable League of Pirates trilogy, I jotted down some notes about a girl named Linnet and a boy named Peter who live at a remote inn where scientists have gathered to research an unexplained local phenomenon. I liked this idea a lot, and my notes are pretty extensive, but I couldn’t figure out what the unexplained phenomenon might be or why it would matter to the young characters in the story. So I turned my attention to a more fully formed idea and wrote The World’s Greatest Detective—another story about a group of mysterious characters stuck in a house together, revealing one another’s secrets.

art by Julia Sarda

The World’s Greatest Detective was the first book on a two-book contract, and I knew I didn’t want to write another mystery unless I had a great, twisty idea to give to my characters and my readers. I didn’t have a great, twisty idea. Staring down the question of what to write next, I looked through my notes and came back to my character Linnet: a girl living not at an inn this time, but at a strange fortress at the end of the world, where she finds a magical device that’s capable of turning back time. I felt good about this idea; for a few weeks, I felt sure it’d be my next book. But when I sat down to write, I couldn’t get through more than a page or two. The narrative voice felt all wrong, the scope felt too ambitious for that moment in my life, and I could tell that although the story idea might be promising, I wasn’t ready to write it. (I did like the thought of someone living at the end of the world, though, so I kept playing with that idea. With a different character, a different voice, and an entirely different plot, it eventually turned into The Door at the End of the World.)

art by Poly Bernatene

I worked on a few different projects after that, including Wicked Marigold, but as the world around me grew more uncertain, I started to think again about the idea of a device that could turn back time. (In the middle of political uncertainty and pandemic quarantine, the concept of changing the past to fix the problems of the present holds a certain appeal.) I thought about my own anxious tendencies, my own desire to control a world that absolutely refused to be controlled. And I realized one day, taking my habitual covid-era stroll around and around my home office, that I’d spent my life engaged in a particular kind of unconscious magical thinking: that if I could do everything right, I could prevent disaster.

It wasn’t true. Of course it wasn’t. But I’d spent my whole life believing it—and I was willing to bet that other people had, too. Maybe some of those people were my young readers. Maybe one of those people could be a kid in a story.

I knew right away that my magical-thinking, anxiety-fueled conviction was the thematic key that could tie two decades’ worth of story ideas together. I wrote it down with my other brainstorming notes, tying it to my thoughts about time-traveling devices and mysterious strangers with secrets and inns at the end of the world. But I was still in the middle of working on Wicked Marigold, so I couldn’t sit down to give The Tinkerers any devoted creative effort. Still, for the next eighteen months or so, I’d run back to my brainstorming document whenever I had a new idea that seemed like it might fit with the story: There would be hiking! And star magic, a mystical aurora! And a cozy town full of interesting people! And art! And folktales! And spies! And toddlers! And parents, actually present on the page! And real talk about what it’s like to be a kid with an anxious brain! And documents! (I hadn’t written a book in documents in years, and I missed it.)

By the time I’d finished writing Wicked Marigold, my brainstorming notes for The Tinkerers were 26 single-spaced pages long. I felt like I had a real story on my hands, a story I’d been trying to figure out how to tell for twenty years. But I didn’t know if my editor at Candlewick would want to publish anything like it—and I wasn’t convinced that I was finally capable of writing it.

Until next time,

Caroline

THE TINKERERS comes out on October 7, 2025 from Candlewick Press! Preorders really make a difference to authors—you can order your copy from your local indie or anywhere else you love to buy books. Thank you for supporting my work and sharing it with the young readers in your life!