yarrr, ye scurvy boy-king, halt ye whinin'

Moderator: A children’s book critic called Megan the queen of subtext – multiple readings of Conspiracy continue to yield a rich appreciation of the text. I think that could be said for all three of you. Would you like to share your thoughts on multiple readings? Do you try to set up situations that become ah-hah moments for readers the second time through?

Megan Whalen Turner: I think the answer is, yes.

Megan Whalen Turner: I’m glad you picked up on that… There’s actually so much to that question I don’t know where to start. Do I write a book meaning for it to be a different type of story the second time through? Yes. I know that a lot of people read my stories with the idea that there is a mystery, and that they’re going to solve it before they get to the end of the book and they’re going to find out if they were right or not. The deal is just to give them enough reasonable clues that a really clever person would have figured it out, but not too many. But that is not my concept of what I’m doing – I’m not providing you, as a reader, with the clues you would need to catch on before the end of the book. I’m telling you one story, and I’m giving you information at the very end of it that I expect to create a back-formation of an entirely new story. And I know that some people come to The Thief especially and they feel that they’ve been tricked. They thought they were in a mystery story and that they would be given enough information, so when they find out at the end of the book that it wasn’t the story that they thought it was, they feel like I should have given them more and bigger clues. But what I find interesting about that is that as you read the book a second time through, I think what you find is that the clues are roughly (holds arms wides) this big. It’s just the power of conventional thinking, because you think it’s a type of story, you just don’t think about other things, no matter how big and bookmarked they are. And I’ve been pleasantly surprised – it’s only now that people are saying in pretty much every review, wow that twist ending, that you’re starting to see people saying, I guessed it ahead of time – mostly people are still surprised when they get to the end, and that was what I was working for in The Thief. Not quite as much in the other stories, but it’s a pattern that I like for the whole series- you read one story, you receive information, then you get a slightly different story – because I’m a re-reader. Books I like I read again, and again, and again, and again, and I want to write for the people who read again.

from here!