Meg Shaffer is the USA Today bestselling author of The Wishing Game, which was a Book of the Month finalist for Book of the Year, a Reader’s Digest and Washington Post Best Book of the Year, and has been translated into 21 languages. Meg holds an MFA in TV and Screenwriting from Stephens College. She lives in Kentucky with her husband and two cats. The cats are not writers. Her latest novel is The Lost Story and she recently talked about it with Daryl Maxwell for the LAPL Blog.
What was your inspiration for The Lost Story?
It all started because I wanted to go to Key West. My husband, author Andrew Shaffer, was going to the Key West Literary Workshops, and I decided I wanted to go too. The workshops offer weeklong classes with well-known and award-winning authors. One of my favorites was teaching—Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls. I adored his books. But I needed to write twenty pages of a story to "audition" to get into his workshop. I had just finished re-reading The Lord of the Flies and got a little obsessed with the question of what might have happened to the characters Ralph and Jack fifteen, twenty years after they survived their horrific ordeal on the island. I knew I couldn’t write that story, so I gave up the idea and put my copy of Flies onto my bookshelf. Just by happenstance, I sat it next to my boxed set of the Chronicles of Narnia. I put the two ideas together—two boys who survived a wild portal fantasy world as teenagers, and now it was fifteen years later. What would their lives be like? And then, of course, I had to give them a new adventure.
So blame Rick Russo and Key West and William Golding.
Are Emilie, Jeremy, Rafe, or any of the other characters in the novel inspired by or based on specific individuals?
Rafe and Jeremy have their origins in Ralph and Jack from The Lord of the Flies, but only in that you had two complicated, equally matched boys thrown together in an adventure. And Emilie’s a bit of an amalgam of all the twenty-somethings who were in my MFA program who kept me VERY entertained. But none of them are real people because, sadly, I don’t know anyone who went to a portal fantasy world as a child.
How did the novel evolve and change as you all wrote and revised it? Are there any characters or scenes that were lost in the process that you wish had made it to the published version?
The book changed completely while writing it from more of a dark sci-fi novel to a warmer, brighter, more whimsical fantasy novel. And I wrote about four drafts of the book I had to discard completely. So there are maybe 5000 words, if that, in the published version that are in the original version of the book. When I rewrite, I rewrite!
Emilie is a BIG fan of Stevie Nicks! Is that something that you share with her? If so, do you have a favorite Nicks "era" (Fleetwood Mac, solo career, etc...)? Do you have a favorite album? A favorite song?
Emilie definitely gets her Stevie Nicks love from me. Who doesn’t love Stevie? What happened was I got on a "Silver Springs" kick. Sometimes you just start obsessively listening to one song, and it occurred to me that the story behind the song–the tie between Stevie and Lindsay Buckingham—was similar to Rafe and Jeremy’s. They are kind of stuck with each other because of their association. Stevie and Lindsay were lovers and they were in Fleetwood Mac together. Rafe and Jeremy were these two nationally famous missing children who were found alive after six months lost, and they were given the name "The West Virginia Lost Boys" in the media. So I wrote a joke into the book about how people want Jeremy and Rafe to still be best friends because, "everyone wants to get the band back together." Emilie made the joke, so I just went with her being a huge Stevie fan. I’m an 80s baby, so my two favorite Stevie songs are "Talk to Me" and "Stand Back."
Have you ever visited The Eagle and Child in Oxford? If so, did you sit in "The Rabbit Room" (where The Inklings met)?
I have gone there, yes! And it was a bit weird how little tribute the pub paid to their most favorite members, JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis. I expected more swag or a gift shop. But there are a few pictures and plaques. It was just a very standard old but nice pub with a nice atmosphere. My guess is that Oxford is so old and has hosted so many legends that they take it all in stride. I mean, Lewis Carroll hung out down the street and Stephen Hawking and and and…so many legends!
I did have a drink there, of course, and toasted the Inklings.
The Lost Story reflects and plays with the tropes of traditional fairy tales. Do you have a favorite fairy tale story?
I will always have a deep and abiding love for Little Red Riding Hood, if only for the fantastic artwork it's inspired. There’s something so visually striking about the image of a little girl in red being stalked by a giant wolf.
Do you have a favorite version/retelling of your favorite fairy tale (novels, film, or television)? A least favorite? One that is so bad it is fun?
I prefer the retellings to the stories themselves. My favorite is the Disney version of The Little Mermaid. The original fairy tales had an agenda–scare children away from the woods. The woods meant danger and death. The retellings, however, tend to celebrate the world more than warn children away from it. And poor Hans Christian Andersen was a very depressed man, so his ending to The Little Mermaid needed an upgrade.
Did you ever have a Trapper Keeper and/or a pencil that was, or seemed, magic? How old were you? Do you still have them?
I have a Trapper Keeper now! Do I use it? No. But do I have it? Yes. Am I addicted to office supplies? Yes. I never had a magic pencil, but I did have something better—teachers, who believed in my writing and encouraged me.
The Lost Story would make a marvelous film or series. If you were able to cast the production of The Lost Story, who would your dream cast be?
It’s so hard to put real people in place of characters I can see so clearly in my mind. All I ask of Hollywood is to make sure Jennifer Garner, West Virginia legend, gets a part in the film.
The ending of The Lost Story hints that Emilie, Jeremy, & Rafe’s adventures may not be over. Do you have any plans to return to these characters and Shanandoah in the future?
I would love to write more about Shanandoah. Narnia got seven books after all!
What’s currently on your nightstand?
I just read the most incredible arc for a novel not out until 2025 called A Curse for the Homesick by Laura Brooke Robson. It’s both deeply realistic literary fiction about how people are tied, almost against their will, to their home, with a fantastical and allegorical element that explores the concept of love being a curse. It was wonderful.
What is the last piece of art (music, movies, TV, more traditional art forms) that you've experienced or that has impacted you?
The movie that changed my brain chemistry is Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky’s sci-fi masterpiece. It’s hypnotic in a way I cannot explain. I’m so obsessed with it, I’m learning Russian on Duolingo so I can watch the film without subtitles. I'm on an eighty-day streak so far!
What are you working on now?
A new book, and it’s giving me headaches! Typical.
Meg Shaffer, the author of last year’s marvelous The Wishing Game, is back with another masterful blend of the fanciful and the perilous, acknowledging how one rarely exists without the other.
The Lost Story is a self-described modern-day fairy tale, both relying on tropes that are tried and true, while also subverting and challenging them. Shaffer also illustrates how art and creation can be therapeutic in working through trauma and grief. She also highlights how even the smallest gesture at the right time, to the right person, can be life altering.
Through all of this, Shaffer emphasizes the need for hope. The hope that things can, and will, develop as they should. She also illustrates that one can find, or create, the family that they need.