***Please ensure you are only following official social media accounts for The Redhead Notes. A fake profile has been contacting people on Instagram. Jennie Griffin will never ask you to send money for a book review or to enroll in any programs.
Due to the high volume of requests that have been received, Jennie has temporarily closed submissions. Learn More
I’m not the best when it comes to introducing myself. Like my author profile says, I’m a novelist and that’s about it. I’m 32 years old and much like the protagonist of Paper Castles, I grew up in a rather insignificant place. I’ve done a bit of everything in life until I decided to go for the one thing I feel I can really do right: tell stories.
What was your inspiration for writing Paper Castles? How did this story take shape in your mind?
I can’t remember exactly how or when it came to me as a complete story, but I do remember one thing very clearly. Many years ago, when I was 19, I worked at a debt settlement company. It was 2009. My job was to take the clients’ calls and deal with whatever problems they were having. Every day there were dozens of people calling to file bankruptcy, to tell us they had just lost their jobs, or their homes. I was struck by the dimension of everything that was going on during those years. I was studying Economics back then, and it really hit me. I wasn’t going to write anything for a long time, but that experience stayed with me. Ten years later, when I decided to write Paper Castles , I knew I wanted to write a story set during the time of the economic meltdown. I was haunted by it and what it did to people’s lives. So what I essentially did is this: I took a character, placed him in that time, gave him a background story, and then I just let the circumstances hit him. I closed my eyes and let him talk to me. I’m being bloody honest when I tell you this: I don’t really know where all the rest of the story came from. At the beginning, I saw loose scenes. I felt a certain vibe. I saw a guy who was lost in life, trying to figure out what to do with it, trying to make sense of his personal life and the world around him. I just took it from there. Things started to fall into place on their own, and before I knew it, I had a story.
I chose to read Paper Castles after you told me the story started and ended in a coffee shop. Coffee ended up being a topic that came up frequently throughout the book. What made you decide to make coffee a prominent part of the story and interaction between characters?
I needed to give James something that would get him from one day to the next. Being emotionally orphaned, lonely and jobless, he doesn’t have that. At the beginning of the story, his life is a mess, and he tries to establish a routine for himself in order to get by. The coffee is that one thing he looks forward to in a moment in which he really doesn’t have much to look forward to. It was also a great way to get two people together on a regular basis, which is what James and Karen do throughout the story. Why coffee and not something else? Well, I am a coffee lover myself, so there’s that!
James and Karen felt so real to me in how they viewed the world and interacted with each other. Even their dialogue was believable. Are they entirely fictional, or is any part of them based on your own experiences?
I’ve been asked this before, so I’ll phrase it the same way I did on my last interview, because I think this is the best way to explain James, Karen, or any of my characters. I prefer to think of them as collages. I use bits and pieces of myself and of people that I’ve come across at some point in life, and put them all together. Then I add some entirely fictional elements to the mix, and that way I create original characters which (I hope) don’t resemble anyone I know.
What characteristics do you think make a relatable character?
Confession. When a character lets the walls around them fall and gives us unhindered access to what’s inside of them (the good, the bad, and the ugly—especially the bad and the ugly), that’s when we can really connect to them. It’s about showing the reader the core wound the character has, how he’s bleeding, and whatever that wound is, the reader will relate to it because we all have one big wound. It might be a different one, but we are all struggling with something, we all hurt in one way or another. And that’s when we, as readers, relate to a character because the story stops being just about them and becomes a story about us.
What does pursuing and achieving the American dream mean to you?
First off, I’d like to say, that even though they call it the “American” dream, I think this it is an ideal that exists all over the world: an ideal by which equality of opportunity is available to everyone, no matter who they are, allowing people to achieve their goals and aspirations. To me personally, it’s the idea that you can do anything you set your mind to. Whether you take is as materialistic or not, the bottom line of the American dream is that “It’s all in your hands.” During my childhood, I felt like that message was being delivered to us over and over again, especially through movies and pop culture. When you grow up with this illusion, and it starts to fall apart as you become an adult, it’s not always easy to wrap your head around it. Facing the fact that not everything is in our hands and that circumstances are often bigger than ourselves is something I’ve seen all my generation struggle with, and it’s part of what inspired me to write Paper Castles.
Initially, I was worried about how Paper Castles would end; however, I loved the ending. Did you always know the story would finish in that way?
I love this question. No, it was not the ending I had originally planned, but I always kept an open mind about this. I decided I was going to write until chapter 33 (River’s End) and then let James decide what he was going to do with that. In fact, he surprised me in that very chapter already, because when the decisive moment came, he said something I hadn’t planned. It was like he rebelled inside my head, and it felt so real, I just wrote those four words down, and that was it. I let him take it from there, and the ending became very clear all of a sudden.
My second novel is titled Fiver, which tells you nothing at all, right? You’ll have to wait and see what it’s about, but I can say it’s completely different from Paper Castles. And still, I think anyone who has read my first book will immediately recognize Fiver as mine. It’s also an emotional story, although there is more action in it than there is in Paper Castles. To sum it up without spoiling anything, this is a story about redemption, friendship, and what it means to be human.
What advice do you have for other indie authors?
I would say this: Be ready to work twice as hard as any traditionally published author. Be aware of the fact that not everyone will love your work and that’s okay. You need to have really thick skin. Take your writing career seriously if you want serious results. Believe in your story, and keep in mind that self-publishing is a marathon, not a sprint.
What is the one question I didn’t ask that you wish I had?
I would have liked to talk about the cover of the book and what the image is meant to represent. A lot of people have described it as a broken clock, but it’s not exactly that. If you look closely, the clock is flipped, which means it’s not a clock, but the reflection of a clock. What’s broken is a mirror and the clock is in the background. I wanted the image to be unrelated to the title; I wanted people to think about it. I don’t like to make things easy for my readers, ever! I want them to do a lot of work actually. So why a broken mirror and a clock? Well, the broken mirror will be clear for anyone who reads the book, but the clock is something you’ll only understand if you read between the lines. Time is often mentioned in the book in different contexts. Time moving slow, time moving fast. “Time is money.” “Your clock is ticking, you gotta do something with your life.” Now put those two elements together (the broken mirror and the clock), and you have a distorted image of a clock, which is meant to symbolize the distorted values that we, as a society, nowadays have.
Supporting Indie authors one thoughtful book review at a time!
