We caught up with the brilliant and insightful J. E. Bright a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
J. E., appreciate you joining us today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?
At a certain age, 8 to 11 years old, a dismaying number of children, especially boys, get put off reading fiction and never come back to books for entertainment. Certainly much of this turning away from fiction is due to the multitude of other, faster-paced entertainment options available. I certainly enjoy video games, streaming TV and movies, the internet, and social media apps myself, so I understand their appeal. In addition, the rapidity of contemporary information and the ease of access has affected my attention span along with seemingly everyone else’s. Reading the written word (as opposed to listening to audio books) doesn’t allow for multitasking, either, which limits its efficiency. So it’s not surprising that written fiction has been in decline for these children.
I find it unfortunate that printed narrative is endangered. Written stories have effects other forms of media cannot emulate, such as a personal connection to printed language, the full sensory absorption into an engaging tale, and the intimate connection to an author’s individuality. Above all, though, written fiction develops the interior imagination, exercising the internal mind’s eye, and cultivating a rich inner life through experiential transference. With every good book read, we welcome others’ knowledge, insights, and perceptions into our own selves, broadening our understanding of humanity and encouraging empathy and compassion through shared dramatization of life’s vast possibilities. Other media does this to certain extents too, of course, but I believe written fiction is unparalleled in its personal connectedness, allowing us to live another’s experience on a deep internal level.
My goal since the beginning of my writing career has been to write for reluctant readers, the ones who are discouraged along the way and forever lose interest in novels. By emphasizing action and scenic imagery in motion, dramatizing emotion, simplifying setting to its essence, and constructing stories using easy but precise language, I hope to allow more welcoming access to narrative writing. There is no excuse for being boring. By keeping the storytelling accessible and imaginatively active, I hope to help carry those children who might otherwise disengage with fiction into pleasurable reading habits in their adulthood, and into fully developing their humanity within.
J. E., before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
My name is J. E. Bright, and I’ve had more than 125 novels, novelizations, novelty books, and non-fiction titles published for young readers since 1997. I started working in children’s publishing as a first year college student at NYU, and stayed in the industry for nearly 20 years, doing stints at HarperCollins, Scholastic, and Simon & Schuster. I left publishing as an executive editor, and sustained myself writing full-time for almost a decade before the downturn in children’s books made exclusively writing too difficult to maintain. I now teach Composition and Humanities at San Jacinto College South while I continue writing. I hope my vivid, kinetic imagination, skills at storytelling construction, and stirring emotions are some of the most appealing qualities in my writing, which I use in the service of engaging reluctant readers, trying to write books that keep kids reading. I’m thrilled that my body of work has been welcomed by so many children over the years, and I hope to continue for the foreseeable future, even as I move into new media to regain audience. To that end, my first graphic novel, The Legion of Forgettable Super-Villains, is forthcoming from Dynamite Publishing in August 2022, and I’m deeply thrilled about that.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
Soon after I had finished and submitted the first full draft of the 190-page, 36,000-word script for my upcoming graphic novel, The Legion of Forgettable Super-Villains, in late 2019, COVID-19 hit the planet. I did not hear from my publisher, Curiosity Ink Media, for months, and I assumed the book was being illustrated. Unfortunately, the pandemic forced the publisher to put the book on hold until they could find funding. As years passed, I was heartbroken that the script I loved was languishing, dreading the news that it was deceased. It was a painful regret, constantly carrying around the festering disappointment over a beloved opportunity I had hoped would restart my writing career. It had taken me more than 6 full-time months to write the script — to love and develop the characters, to visualize and describe the more than 1,500 action panels for the illustrator, to hammer out the quick dialogue, to compose the humor and feel all the emotions — and the intense effort of that writing marathon now seemed tragically squandered. Saying it was devastating is an understatement.
But then in late 2021, Curiosity Ink reached a publishing agreement with Dynamite Books, and the graphic novel was back on! I did a major revision, cutting 20 pages, about 7,000 words, out of the script, and then my work was sent to an illustration team. Now The Legion of Forgettable Super-Villains is due to be published in paperback and Kindle editions in August 2022, and I cannot wait!
Looking back, are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?
The most useful tool I’ve found that I wish I had from the beginning are the thesaurus and related words apps on the website Rhymezone.com. (I mean, I wish I had the entire internet from the beginning — Microsoft Word would have been nice too!) — but I don’t use any site for writing more than Rhymezone. It’s free and quick, and allows me to avoid repetition in my writing while barely pausing the flow. Whenever I get stuck with a word on the tip of my tongue, looking up similar terms helps me locate the precise one I was seeking time and time again. It’s incredibly useful and well-organized, and I recommend it to my Composition students each semester as well.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://jebright.com
- Instagram: @jebrightwriter
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jebrightwriter
- Twitter: @jebrightwriter