Caroline Carlson is the author of the new middle grade novel The Tinkerers. Her other books include Wicked Marigold. She is the children's book columnist for Literary Hub, and she lives in Pittsburgh.
Q: What inspired you to write The Tinkerers, and how did you create your character Peter?
A: People often ask me if I’m anything like the characters I write, and until now, I’ve had to disappoint them by admitting that I don’t have an older sister who’s a perfect princess, and I’m much too prone to seasickness to ever be a seafaring pirate.
But Peter, the protagonist of The Tinkerers, and I have a lot in common. Not externally, of course: I’ve never been a 12-year-old boy, and I’ve never grown up with three younger siblings to look after and a small-town inn to help my parents run.
But Peter’s emotions are at the heart of this story, and Peter is an anxious kid. He happens to be very good at a number of things, but this doesn’t soothe his anxiety; it only gives him the misapprehension that he’s got to be good at everything in order to prevent awful things from happening.
If he behaves perfectly, he’ll be able to control his world. If he makes a mistake… well, he can’t let himself do that, because who knows what might happen as a result?
This belief—that if you never make any mistakes, everything in your world will be okay—is a form of magical thinking that a lot of real kids (and adults) engage in every day. I believed it myself for a very long time.
And on the day I finally realized that even if I did everything perfectly, I couldn’t stop terrible things from happening, I thought, I’ve got to write a story about that.
Luckily, I’m a fantasy writer, and a fantasy novel is the perfect medium for exploring lines of magical thinking. Peter shares the same magical belief that I held, but unlike me, Peter stumbles across an actual magic tool that allows him to erase his own mistakes. And the story unfolds from there.
Q: How did you come up with the idea for Stargazers Valley?
A: Stargazers Valley, the tiny mountain town where The Tinkerers takes place, was shaped in part by the book’s magic system.
The magic in The Tinkerers shows up in the form of a phenomenon called the Southern Skeins—bright colors that streak across the night sky sort of like the aurora does in our world, except that these colors are made of a tangible, powerful material called starstuff.
As soon as I realized that this book was going to center around night-sky magic, I knew I’d have to build a particular kind of setting to make that magic work. My setting needed to be a small town far from the glare of city lights.
And it needed to be nestled in the mountains, so that if you wanted to jump and grab a handful of starstuff for yourself, you’d be up high enough to try it.
Once I’d worked out those details, I started to think about how the geography and relative isolation of Stargazers Valley would affect the culture of life there.
All the people in town know each other well. There’s only one little school for all the kids, everyone loves a sport called clambering that’s kind of a hybrid between hiking and rock climbing, and people gather at the town’s one cozy café in the afternoons.
Since Stargazers Valley is a great place to see the Southern Skeins, it attracts both astronomers (who study the stars, just as they do in our world) and astromancers (academic magicians who study the properties and potential uses of starstuff).
As I created Stargazers Valley, I researched real dark sky reserves in our world—places that allow minimal light pollution so that humans can study and enjoy the night sky.
I was particularly inspired by the Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve on the South Island of New Zealand, and careful readers might notice some echoes of New Zealand’s geography, flora, and fauna in my descriptions.
For my protagonist, Peter, though, the most important thing about Stargazers Valley is that it’s his “safe spot in the wild, wide universe.” I wanted to allow readers to share that experience of Stargazers Valley—to feel safe and welcome in the setting, just like Peter does.
I hope that readers will be able to imagine themselves exploring the local trails, peering through the observatory telescope, or curling up with a cup of hot chocolate in one of the café’s purple velvet armchairs.
Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?
A: I don’t usually start writing a story until I have a general idea of how the ending will play out; I find it helpful to have some idea of where I’m headed on the book-writing journey, even if I don’t know exactly how I’ll get there. So I knew the broad strokes of the ending of The Tinkerers from very early on.
There’s one moment in particular, when Peter and his friend Linnet make a monumental decision together, that I’d planned out years in advance of actually drafting the book.
But other parts of the ending surprised me: There’s a climactic scene in the mountains that I’d expected to write from Peter’s point of view, but I realized pretty late in the drafting process that Peter couldn’t actually be present as an observer in that scene, so I had to change my plans at the last minute and tell that part of the story from another character’s perspective.
And there are several chapters at the end of the book that I didn’t plan to write at all.
I think it’s almost impossible to anticipate everything you’ll need a book’s ending to achieve before you’ve written the book itself. By the time you reach the end of the first draft, you’ll have introduced at least a few unexpected themes and plot threads that will need to be tied up, and I like to leave plenty of space to let that happen.
Q: The Kirkus Review of the book called it a “warmhearted fantasy tale about discovering the world’s complexity and finding one’s place in it.” What do you think of that description?
A: It’s a wonderfully generous description, and I particularly love it because I think it could apply equally well to each one of the books I’ve written for young readers.
The question of how kids find their own places in the world is one that all my work is a little obsessed with, which is why I write for a middle grade audience: At age 10 or 11 or 12, kids are figuring out how the world around them works, learning what the unwritten rules of their society are, deciding how they feel about those rules, and trying to understand where they might fit into that society—or whether they might try to build a new kind of society that will support them as they follow their dreams.
I didn’t always feel like I had a natural place in my own world when I was a middle grade reader, which is probably why I keep returning to these themes, trying to solve a problem for my characters that I sometimes found difficult to solve for myself.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Right now, I’m doing some experimenting—that wonderful part of the storytelling process that feels more like play than work. I’m messing around with a few different ideas, jumping from one to the next as I try to figure out which stories feel most exciting, most challenging, or most worth telling. (And which can accommodate a dragon, as my kids have requested.)
I’m especially interested in different kinds of story structures and formats these days, so along with my writing experiments, I’ve been reading some craft books about story forms that are new to me.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I am really excited for readers to see the amazing design elements that the Candlewick team created for The Tinkerers!
First of all, the cover art by Junyi Wu is absolutely breathtaking and features so many neat little details from the text.
Then there’s the interior. The Tinkerers is told in documents—school essays, letters, folktales, transcripts from hidden cameras—and designer Lissi Erwin gave each different type of document its own gorgeous style and personality.
I think the whole book looks really fun and appealing as a physical object, and I hope readers love it as much as I do!
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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