“I’ve Got a Story You Haven’t Heard”: Conversation about the Art and Craft of Nonfiction with Candace Fleming

Candace Fleming

Author Candace Fleming’s books for young readers include novels and picture books, but she is best known for her nonfiction young adult books. These include The Lincolns: A Scrapbook Look at Abraham and Mary (2008), which won the 2009 ALA Notable Books, and The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia (2014), which won numerous honors and awards, including the NCTE Orbis Pictus Award and the Cybils Award in Nonfiction for Young Adults. Her works are characterized not just by their historic accuracy but also by the vivid detail and narrative Fleming skillfully weaves into her texts. From behind the scenes of the Civil War to the contrasting worlds of opulence and penury found in Russia just before the revolution, Fleming brings the past to life for her readers. Her latest publications—Presenting Buffalo Bill: The Man Who Invented the Wild West (2016), a nonfiction YA book on the life of Buffalo Bill Cody, and Giant Squid, a nonfiction science picturebook that was named a Robert F. Siebert Informational Honor Book—continue this tradition of presenting facts and making them as riveting to readers as fiction. In this conversation, Fleming discusses what attracts her to writing nonfiction, how she goes about finding the right balance of accuracy and suspense, and what she hopes her readers get from her books.

Terri Suico:

You’ve written a wide range of books for children and young adults, but you seem to have an affinity and a real talent for nonfiction for this audience. What drew you to writing nonfiction for adolescents, and what compels you to keep coming back to it?

Candace Fleming:

I come to nonfiction kicking and screaming, which is why I don’t have as many of those as I have of my other types of works. With nonfiction, I always say I’m not going to do it, and then invariably I end up writing about a nonfiction topic simply because it nags at me. I’ll read something that links to it or something that has completely had nothing to do with the topic, but in my head, suddenly the two are connected, and now it’s a bigger idea. It’s almost like you’re doing the research before you even get started.

Eventually, I get to that place where I say, “If I actually want this book in the world, it’ll have to be me who does it.” I will fight it, but I love it, which is interesting. I just know how work-intensive writing a nonfiction book will actually be, and that’s what my life will become, at least at the second-year mark of the research. But I have this master’s degree in American history, so every once in a while, I feel the need to pull out all those wonderful skills that I actually learned in school.

TS:

How do you go about choosing your topic or subject?

CF:

I’m not sure why subjects bite me, but they do. And the ones that I choose are always the ones that hang on. Even after I push the idea away, they come back. I’ll go to the Art Institute, seriously, and all of a sudden all I see is the American West and Buffalo Bill. He kept popping up everywhere, and I was like, “No, I’m not going to write about this. Nobody wants to read about the West anymore.” But I live in Chicago, and you would not think that he would be a guy that turns up in this area, but he was here a long time. So I just had to write about him.

TS:

You’ve written books about a number of figures from American history, including Presenting Buffalo Bill and The Lincolns: A Scrapbook Look at Abraham and Mary. And you also have The Family Romanov, which is a departure from your usual topics. How did you end up writing a book on the...