#1 New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Lynn Barnes joins Zibby to discuss THE GRANDEST GAME, a brand new series in the lush, romantic, puzzle-filled world of THE INHERITANCE GAMES, where fan-favorite and new characters collide a year after we last saw them. Jennifer delves into the story, which revolves around Avery Grambs, a now 20-year-old billionaire heiress who designs a high-stakes game made to give someone a shot at fame and fortune. Jennifer also describes her writing process, including how her psychology and cognitive science background informs her storytelling and her love for crafting complex riddles.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Jennifer. Thanks so much for coming on Mom's Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss The Grandest Game and your whole career and everything else we decided to talk about.

Jennifer: Well, I am so excited to be here. 

Zibby: Oh, yay. Well, congratulations on The Grandest Game. I had so much fun diving in and getting to know your characters and all of it. Just super interesting. It's not the type of book I normally read and now I'm like, why do I not read these types of books? Like what is wrong with me?

I don't know why I'm like reading memoirs about people dying all the time. But anyway, so congratulations 

Jennifer: I'm so excited. You've read it these books, like almost no one but my editor and my mom really publication date. So like you're pretty much other than my mother and my dad is like halfway through. So you're the first person I've gotten to talk to who's actually.

Zibby: Oh my gosh. Wow. Oh my gosh. Well. That's, I'm, I'm hugely honored, so thank you for that. Okay, well tell listeners about The Grandest Game, but also back up and talk about everything Hawthorne and all of it, like just go into the whole things for people who don't know. 

Jennifer: So we started with a series called The Inheritance Games, which was about an eccentric, puzzle obsessed billionaire who dies and leaves his entire Like 40 billion fortune to a teenage girl he's never met.

And that girl who is the protagonist of the book has no idea why to the best of her recollection, she's never even met this guy, but to inherit the money, she has to move into his sprawling secret passage filled mansion and live alongside the family he just disinherited for a year and that includes his four very magnetic very charming, very attractive grandsons, at least one of whom thinks she's the enemy, and a con woman and another one thinks she's the grandfather's last puzzle to be solved. In the original trilogy, there was a love triangle with those two brothers. And so there was an original trilogy, there's a sequel to that trilogy called The Brothers Hawthorne, and The Brothers Hawthorne is also a prequel to The Grandest Game, which is kind of the next phase of storytelling in this world.

The original trilogy, the core mystery was why did billionaire Tobias Hawthorne die? Leave Avery all her money. So there are individual mysteries in each book. There is danger and twists and turns. And reveals going back generations in both families. The Grandest Game is coming in with three characters who are somewhat new to the world.

They were all introduced in Brothers Hawthorne, but just as very secondary kind of characters and they're taking center stage. Because now, it's a book about an eccentric billionaire again. But this eccentric billionaire is Avery Graham. My protagonist from the first book, she is 17 when she inherits, she's 20 at the start of the grandest game.

And she has had this, like, tremendous experience over the course of the inheritance games. One, coming into all this money before she was living in her car and trying to plan for college, and then all of a sudden she's the richest. Teenager and one of the richest women in the world. And it's as she comes into this new life, but it's also this world sort of steeped in puzzles and riddles and games, because that is how the old man raised his four grandsons.

And after his death, his death, he's left all these games for them to play that sort of lead them to answers about why he might've chosen Avery. And at one point in the original trilogy, one of the brothers kind of is having this discussion with Avery about the games because the grandfather used to play these games where you'd go puzzle to puzzle to clue to clue like them with them every Saturday morning, just like is another way of pushing them and making them extraordinary and Avery, um, is talking to one of the brothers and he tells her like, the point of the game was never to make us extraordinary.

The point of the game was to show us that we already were. Uh, and to stoke this competition, and Avery, over the course of playing all of these games and coming into this fortune, she's gone through kind of like her origin story to become this powerful and very, very wealthy woman, and she wants to give that experience to other people.

So in The Grandest Game, there's an eccentric billionaire who is 20 year old Avery Grahams, and she has set up a game called The Grandest Game, which is a chance to win life changing amounts of money. So something more like 20 million. Each year in this game, and it's the same kind of game that the old billionaire Tobias Hawthorne liked to play, that he raised his sons playing, and that Avery, and in particular one of the other brothers named Jameson, loves these kinds of games and loves designing them.

So they build these grand, sprawling competitions that look different every year. So we're coming in for the grandest game for the second annual grandest game. The first annual grandest game was like, she flashes a clue. Anyone in the world can play takes you across the globe. There are private jets flying everyone from puzzle to puzzle.

If they are one of the first ones to solve it. So. Second annual Grandest Game is a more intimate affair. So it starts up and there are four wildcard tickets hidden somewhere in the United States. There's one clue released to them. So whichever four players find those tickets first get to enter the game.

And then there are three players of Avery's choosing. And so over the course of the book, we follow three protagonists. who are all playing the game. There is Gigi, who is the younger half sister of one of the Hawthorne brothers, who we have met just in Brothers Hawthorne, and she's kind of your sunshine, happy, random, always blurting things out character who really kind of wants to prove herself in this game.

She's just graduated high school. She's kind of lost and looking for direction, and this is something to do. You have Lyra, who has a, um, twisted past with the Hawthorne family that revolves around her father's death when she was very young. And it's very mysterious, but she knows that it is related to the Hawthorne family in some way.

And then you have Rohan, who doesn't even, he's so mysterious, he doesn't even have a last name. Um. Playing for these big grand stakes in this sort of organization of power he's in, he needs money in order to ascend to the top of that organization. So he is playing the game, coming to the game with the background of having created similar games of his own.

So you put these three together, on a private island full of luxuries like helicopters and masquerade balls and the most incredible ball gowns and they're getting ready to play just the most incredible mind bending puzzle filled game of their life. 

Zibby: Wow. So where are, where, how and when and Where is all of this coming from with you?

Where is the fascination with the games? Where, how did you, I know you've been writing since you were in college. You published books at 19 and gosh, that just made me feel so old. But anyway, which is amazing but tell me, like, you have to have a certain, and I know you have a PhD and all of that, but like, how does your brain work that you're coming up with all of the other puzzles and all of the plots and all of that?

Like take me through how you're piecing it all together. 

Jennifer: So I have always. So, um, I've always wanted to write some puzzle centric books. In fact, it's something I spent like 10 years trying to find a premise that would actually get one of my editors to let me write my puzzle book. So that's actually part of the origin of the original Inheritance Games series was that.

So for years, I've been wanting to write what I called my puzzle house book. I'm like, there's going to be this incredible mansion. And it's full of puzzles and riddles and codes. And that element of it was actually inspired because when my dad, uh, when I, right after I graduated college, my dad retired.

And then he and my mom spent like five years designing and building their dream house. And like, he sat down in Google SketchUp and he would draw a room and take it to the architect. And like, he helped design.

Zibby: Wait, what is Google, what is Google SketchUp? 

Jennifer: Or something like that. It's a program that lets him like draw rooms and he can draw furniture to put in the room.

Oh my gosh. I want to do that. Okay. And I might be getting the name of that wrong, but it became his hobby right after he retired was like, he would actually draw like what the cabinetry should look like and then sit down with the person who actually does that and they'd bring it to life. So they spent years doing this.

He used to walk the site like every day while it was being built. And he'd asked my brother and I, do you have any requests for the house? And of course I'm immediately like secret passage. I would like a secret passage. And indeed, like in the library of their house, there's this bookshelf that if you press a hidden button, it just disappears into the wall.

It's a floor to ceiling bookshelf. So I got my secret passage and I have this feeling the first time I ever walked into the house. Where I was like, Oh my gosh, this house is my dad. Like he has spent so much time on it. He has literally picked out every minute detail of this house himself. And I had the very morbid thought where I was like, Oh my gosh, one day he's going to be gone.

We're going to have to sell this house, and I don't know how we'll ever do that, but then my writer brain said, you know, but what if, what if it wasn't just someone who put themselves emotionally and mentally into a house, but what if it was someone who had actually like coded things into the house and built elements of different puzzles into the house?

What if instead of one secret passage, there were 50? And what if instead of being a house, what if it was like a 40, 000 square foot castle mansion? And so for years I wanted to write about my puzzle house, in part because I wanted to write puzzles, and I never had quite the right premise. And then with the Inheritance Games, one day I was generating premises for books using a theory from the psychology of fiction, which is a, this theory is one called Gossip Theory, which is basically the theory proposed by, um, Paul Bloom and others, that we like fiction because it basically co ops an evolutionarily hardwired liking for gossip.

And fiction just happens to be gossip about people who aren't real. And the brain is not excellent at distinguishing between real and not real when it's super immersive and when you're reading it through the pages of a book. And so I was like, okay, what would get the whole world gossiping about you at once?

And so I wanted worldwide gossip and I wanted it not to be a bad thing. And then I eventually come up with, came up with the billionaire dice and leaves you all his money. And then I was like, that's great. That passes gossip test and I was like, oh, and then you have to move into his puzzle house. So that's where the puzzles came from originally.

And since then I've fallen in love with it. So the writing process for all of the books has in many ways looked very similar. I do the puzzles very early on because the puzzles are the absolute funnest and easiest part for me. So I can do, you know, an 8 to 12 step puzzle sequence in a day. Where I just like sit down and make all the puzzles.

And I will have a document that just says like, here's the first, here's the, like, here's the clue. Here's the answer. Here's the clue. Here's the answer. And each puzzle can lead into the next puzzle. And I'll have that all written out. And I can literally just sit there and do that in a day. I keep a running list on my phone.

Whenever I see something in the real world, I was like, Oh, that would make a great puzzle. So I'll make the puzzles first. These books are also mystery books and specifically mystery series where you have some mysteries that are arcing across multiple books. For that I tend to use what I call the three mysteries method or the three questions method which is usually in each book there are like Three core mysteries that are going to play out over the course of the book or the series.

And so when I'm sitting down to start, I'll write out lists of possible questions that might form the mystery on all of these books. So for inheritance games, I always knew the big mystery was going to be, why did he leave her the money? But I wrote out all these candidates for the supporting mysteries and ended up with there's something that happened one year before the book started that split two of the brothers apart, Jameson and Grayson, and then there was basically who's trying to kill her now that she's inherited was the third mystery.

And they're not always all apparent at the beginning, so the who's trying to kill her comes in like halfway at the midpoint of Inheritance Games. So for Grandest Game, I always knew. The biggest mystery for the Lyra character was going to be basically what happened to her father. So we come in and very early on we find out she has this back story of she never even met her biological father.

She was living with her mother and the guy she calls dad who later adopted her. And then one day her biological father basically kidnaps her from preschool. And it's a memory she had then suppressed, so she went through what most of her life having no idea this happened, but he takes her to this house, and he says a few cryptic things to her, one of them is, A Hawthorne did this, and then he goes up the stairs and he kills himself, leaving her alone in the house.

So she has this huge trauma and immediately repressed it and had no idea it ever happened to her until the events of the Inheritance Game started and then the whole world is gossiping about Tobias Hawthorne and Avery Grahams and as soon as she starts hearing the name Hawthorne in the news, she starts remembering what happened to her. So her story actually starts at the same time Inheritance Games did. That's three years before the start of The Grandest Game. Soon as Avery inherits, all of this is dredged up from Lyra. So she goes through this like crisis where she's like, I don't even know who I am anymore. I was like this happy, like 16 year old living my best life with my wonderful family and like, she knew she had a biological father. She knew he was dead. She didn't really think that much about that. And then all of a sudden she starts having these dreams. and flashbacks and she remembers this thing and it just completely throws her for a loop to where she doesn't even know who she is anymore.

She doesn't want her family to know she remembers. Um, and so at some point before the grandest game starts, she somehow gets a hold of the phone number of one of the Hawthorne brothers, which is Grayson Hawthorne, and she calls him for answers. And so this happens in the brothers Hawthorne, they have some very charged phone conversations last under a minute each.

They're not saying that much. But he eventually, in a time of crisis for him, tells her to stop calling. She feels betrayed because she thought he was going to help him. So then she gets a ticket to the grandest game that shows up in her post office box, like in her early chapters in the book. And she's like, the Hawthorne family had something to do with the biggest trauma of my life.

Grayson Hawthorne made me think he was going to help me and then he abandoned me. And, but this would get me like 20 million dollars and I'm not going to turn down a chance of having a one in seven chance of walking away with 20 million dollars so she goes to this private island with all of these feelings kind of in there so her mystery was always obvious and then I have to think a little bit about okay well what's Gigi's core mystery going to be in this book and what's Rohan's core mystery going to be in this book so I'll actually write out what those questions are you And then I write out every possible answer to the questions.

So just stream of consciousness. I'll spend a full day writing out possible answers. And then eventually, once I have all the answers written out to all the different questions, I start looking for ways they might dovetail or fit together. Or ways that I will like, oh, I like this one and this one and this one.

So I pick the three answers I'm going to do. But then the great thing about having brainstormed all the answers that aren't true is that now those all are living as red herrings in my subconscious. So as I'm writing the book, they can come up very organically without me planning to put in that red herring.

It's just my brain's already generated every possible answer there could be to these questions. So they're just sort of living there. So when I start, I know the puzzle sequence. I know the questions and the answers. I have an idea of the romantic arcs in the book, because there's a very strong elements of romance in all of these books is, um, subplots.

So I have an idea of what those arcs might look like and what some of the character arcs might look like. What, like, what is everyone, how are the characters arcing and what does that mean for different romances? And then after that, I don't like plan out an outline or anything like that. Um, but I do tend to then plan in short bursts.

So I'll have the puzzle sequence, I'll have the mysteries, and any day when I sit down to write, I'll have an idea of what I want to write that day. And so I will often start with saying, here's what I want this scene to accomplish and usually it's like five things at once, like it needs to establish this, it needs to show this clue, it needs to have a this moment, I want this kind of big romantic thing, and then I write about what those should look like, and so I do a lot of writing about what I want to write.

And then when I'm ready to actually block out the scene, I usually write just the dialogue of the scene, back and forth between the characters, and then I'll go and write the actual scene. And all of the pre writing on the day of is totally new for me, as of about seven years ago, so I have three kids, and the oldest is eight, and so, and the youngest is, or the middle is almost seven, and the youngest is three.

So when my now almost seven year old was born. I had a 15 or I had a 17 month old and I had a newborn and I was writing books. And at that point I was still a psychology professor and my middle child did not sleep through the night until he was like two years old. He was up three times a night for two years.

And so I've been writing books since I was a teenager myself. I'd been writing them my entire adult life, but suddenly I couldn't write the same way anymore because I was sleep deprived and I was writing in different hours. And there was. It's not as many hours in the day anymore. So I had a brain that couldn't write an entire scene at once anymore.

So I have to decide what's going to happen. And then I have to kind of decide the order in which things are going to happen. And then I have to write out the dialogue. And then I can write the scene. And ever since my second was born, that's just how I've written almost every scene where I can break the different things you have to do to write a scene down just to make it something that my brain can handle in a smaller chunk. 

Zibby: Wow. You're so impressive. I like just listening to you talk and hearing your brain work. First of all, that's fascinating and I feel like that's such a good A trick to just do the dialogue of a scene, because you have to get so much into it, right?

You have to distill it down to like its most important things, right? And how to communicate that. That's genius. I'm actually trying to adapt this draft of a middle grade novel that is not published and my daughter and I are turning it into a graphic novel and I'm like, oh, you just need the words really, right?

You just need, and I'm like, what an interesting experience. experiment versus like what I normally write, which is like on and on and on. So anyway, I find that fascinating that you do that. Tell me a little bit more about your background and how you started getting into all this, how you started writing in college, the fact that you're a Yale psychology professor, or you were, I guess, and all of that.

Just give me your, your other life, your brain development, so to speak. 

Jennifer: Right, so I started trying to write professionally when I was in high school. So I wrote my first attempt, I wrote my first like five or four attempts at a book my senior year in high school. And then I went off to college, but I always knew I wanted to major in something that wasn't English, because I was always kind of like an English writing person and then also like a math science.

Um, so I had a lot of different ideas, took a random array of classes my freshman year and landed on cognitive science as a major, which at Yale is interdisciplinary in between psychology, philosophy, linguistics, neurobiology, anthropology. It's basically just like any class in any department. That has to do with the human mind.

And so you take an array of those classes. I got into research and started working in a primate cognition lab and, uh, child cognition labs, really looking at like how our minds develop and how they might have evolutionarily developed. And so I fell in love with the science of things too. People are always like, Oh, those seem like two very different things, but in a sense, like.

Writing and psychology are both about the mind. They're both about understanding people. They're about beliefs and emotions and how people become who they are. 

Zibby: I was a Yale psychology major. I'll have you know. Okay. There's there too. So I get it. I feel like it was the best training, but go on. 

Jennifer: Um, so I did research all through undergrad.

I went on and did a master's at Cambridge where I did autism research and specifically looking at people with and without autism and how they respond to different elements of stories and how they create stories. Then I came back to Yale for my PhD in psychology. I was doing kid research. And at one point, one of my professors said to me, you know, if you're going to keep doing the book thing, because at this point, my, you know, I sold my first five books while I was in college.

And so by the time I was in grad school, these books were starting to come out and my, everyone was always so supportive of it. They thought it was so cool. No one had a problem with me doing two things, but one of my mentors said, you know, if you're going to do the book thing. You should probably segue into studying more of the psychology of fiction like you did kind of in grad school.

So then, um, I worked with a professor at Yale named Paul Bloom, who was really interested in the psychology of fiction. We kind of matched up and I started doing research. And then at that point, I was doing developmental research on kids and story preferences and those kinds of things. And then I eventually went on to become a professor at the University of Oklahoma, where I was a professor for almost a decade.

And I have this really neat story. split appointment where I was half in their professional writing program, which is a genre fiction writing program. So it's like you can go and you can major in writing, but you can write romance and YA and sci fi and fantasy. And like, it, it doesn't do any literary fiction.

It's all just popular fiction. Uh, and they have classes and all the different things. Specialties, and so I taught half in their program and then my other half of my appointment was in the psychology department where I had my own lab where we studied the psychology of fiction and the imagination as well as the psychology of fandom, and I loved it.

I loved that when you're a scientist, it looks so real. So different than people think science looks and especially with something like psychology, you know, I get students in my classes and one of the first things I want them to know is that they too could do science that no one had ever done. Because when you're talking about psychology, all you need are questions and thoughts about what the answers might be.

You need something you're interested in. So for me, it was, It was fiction. It was stories. Because as an author, I'd always be like, huh, I wonder what makes a good book title. And I noticed that like Game of Thrones and Hunger Games will have the word game in it. I wonder if that's a good word for titles.

And if so, why? And then you dig into the theories of things and like what theories might predict you'd like certain titles. And the wonderful thing when you have a lab is you can actually like, One of my graduate students and I actually generated, we were like, here's five theories and here's the kinds of words they predict would be good in titles.

And my graduate student went off and she designed the survey and we got like reaction time data and memory data and likeliness three data from hundreds of participants. And we were able to see that like actually all of the theories we were working with generated buzzwords for titles that outperformed controls on the desire to read.

And so we,. 

Zibby: What were they? 

Jennifer: And the ones we tested were theory of mind words, which are words having to do with the mind, so example titles would be things like a beautiful mind, or cruel intentions, because intention is a mental state word. Also words like secrets and lies and then there were, um, gossip words, so words like scandal and rumor and reputation were all very good words for titles.

There were morality words, and particularly it seemed like immorality words, like cruel or wicked. Might do some work there, and then there were pleasure words, which were words related to things that we are hardwired to find pleasurable, so those can be things like competition, or wealth, or beauty. So I had all these theories of what we found pleasurable that I'd worked on when I was on maternity leave with my youngest, just my, like, state kind of saying while taking care of a baby full time project and so even before we ran the test That's where the title inheritance games comes from because two of the buttons I was theorizing would be good to push for wealth and competition So I was like, how can I name a book wealth competition? And so inheritance is a wealth word and game is a competition word and that's where inheritance games came from.

And actually one of the neat things we do on the covers of the book is I have like the different buttons you can push. And so they're wealth, competition, beauty, danger, touch, which we usually do visually through something like warmth and power. And so when we're designing the covers of various Grandest Game books, we always try and make sure that every single button is being pushed at least once.

On the cover. So like for the grandest game, we have a glass rose. for beauty. We have a knife for danger. We have a spark of fire for warmth. Um, we have dice and a chess piece for competition. The tagline is only one can win because that's a competition tagline to things are golden and full of jewels, which is wealth.

Uh, and we did that on the Inheritance Games cover too. So you can actually go through every cover in the series and you can be like, what's your danger object? What are your competition objects? And so it's just even in the way we package the books and the way I write the back cover copy and the way I write the books themselves are, I have this giant workbook now of like 27 pages of questions I ask myself about all the things that theories predict we would like in fiction.

And at one point I actually just said, here's all the theories. I made all my predictions. And then I actually, it was like, what would happen if I wrote a book and did every single one of these things. As much as I could, and what happened with the Inheritance Games, which was my 21st book, but it was the first book I ever wrote that really took off.

Zibby: Wow, that's so interesting. Oh my gosh, so you can really break it down into something totally quantifiable. That's fascinating. 

Jennifer: And it's, it, it, the writer in me loves it because I can still be like, just as creative and just as invested in the characters, but I also love puzzles and it's a puzzle aspect too, to be like, okay, how am I going to get my competition note in this scene, because competition can come through something like a love triangle, it's a competition, it can come from.

Yeah. Through, okay, we're randomly going to play a game right now. It can come through characters who are rivals or sibling rivalry, or, you know, so when I'm revising, I'll actually often look at each individual scene and be like, I'll just make a list in the margins of what pleasures are in this scene.

What buttons. Am I pushing? How am I doing, like, in every chapter of the book on making sure that I'm pushing some of these buttons? And then the, like, puzzle solver in me who likes to quantify things and who was a scientist and loved looking at data and having graphs and stuff. That part of me is like, can take sort of a raw draft that's more written by the writer half of me and then say, okay, well, we're going to punch up this, this, this, this, and this.

So often I wait until I have my revision letter back from my editor so I can figure out what's kind of missing from the reader's perspective and the trained eye, which is usually like, we need more romance. We need more this pacing here, you know, a little more reveal and then I can do that and also look for answers to those problems using the psychology of fiction to find the answers.

Zibby: Wow. Are there books written about the psychology of fiction? Like all this research that you use? 

Jennifer: There, there are some good ones that will give you different overviews of different elements, so there isn't yet a book that kind of synthesizes all of it, but there's like, um, the storytelling animal by Jonathan Gottschall is one I pulled from, um, such stuff as dreams by Keith Oatley has a lot on fiction and theory of mind, Paul Bloom's book, how pleasure works, has a chapter devoted to fiction.

That's where I first learned about gossip theory, and he was one of my advisors at Yale, so I'd also heard about it from him. The pleasure theory of fiction comes from, uh, Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works. So it's kind of pulling from all over to get all of the theories, but there are all of those books out there that you can read to see any kind of one theory.

And then like as a writer, you just kind of like, Think about that theory for a while and be like, okay, what parts do I think apply? What parts don't, what more can you theorize like in your gut or based on the books you love, and then you just kind of integrate like the existing scientific theory with those intuitions and like every writer I've ever met has those intuitions.

You might not know you, but if you've read a bunch of books or watched a bunch of movies or written books, you kind of have those intuitions. So for me, it's just a matter of like using the intuitions I already have to inspire scientific questions, which I used to then research, but also then using the scientific theories to kind of elucidate where my intuition might be leaving gaps that I could fill.

Zibby: Amazing. Oh my gosh. Well, I could clearly listen to you talk about this stuff all day. Oh my gosh. Well, congratulations on The Grandest Game. Congratulations on all of your success. I love hearing what you have to say, and I feel like you need to teach a class on how to write using all these things or something, because I feel like cracking the code on what makes fiction work is something that everyone really struggles with.

So, anyway. Congratulations. Thank you. And it was so nice to meet you. I feel like we barely scratched the surface. There's so much more to discuss, but, um, I'm totally inspired by you. So thank you. 

Jennifer: Oh, well, thank you for having me. This was so much fun. 

Zibby: Wow. For me too. Thank you. What a pleasure.

All right. Bye bye. Thank you, Jennifer.