We love Nic Stone’s books! In anticipation of her newest book, Dear Manny, we asked her to share what it was like writing the third book in her Dear Martin trilogy. Read on to see how Dear Martin somewhat accidentally became a three-book series.
First, to answer the most Frequently Asked Question about Dear Manny: No, I did not plan for Dear Martin to become a trilogy. Dear Justyce was born out of a text conversation with a pair of Dear Martin–loving high schoolers who wanted to read a book with a main character whose experiences were more reflective of their own. So, I wrote it for them.
And then Dear Martin AND Dear Justyce became the targets of frequent book bans. The complaints were—well . . . are, as this is an ongoing issue—varied and frequently involve misinformation about the books. But when I scrolled through the lists of contemporary books that have been subjected to bans, it’s difficult to deny that many of them are written from the perspectives of marginalized characters—i.e. Black kids.
So, I looked out at the world around me (which was essentially filled with people yelling at and insulting one another for having different belief systems) and I decided to lean into an idea that popped into my head shortly after Dear Martin was banned for the first time: take a different character from the book—one readers don’t actually like very much—and humanize him by telling a story from his perspective. A story that explores the same topics the book banners complain about, but through the lens of a character who looks and lives like they do.
In the process, I discovered a new level of compassion and a broadened understanding of what it truly means to empathize on the level of another person’s humanity . . . a person who, when he sprung from my imagination ten years ago, I hated with the fire of a thousand suns. (Full disclosure: he was the coagulated incarnation of a handful of white boys I went to high school with.) But as I dug into his story and learned more about him, I realized something very important: no one gets to choose the circumstances they’re born into.
Do we all have to decide what we’ll do with our circumstances? How we’ll move? What we believe? How we’ll treat other people? Absolutely. But if writing Jared Peter Christensen’s story did nothing else for it, it reaffirmed something Doc says on page 152 of Dear Martin: “You can’t change how other people think and act, but you’re in full control of you. When it comes down to it, the only question that matters is this: if nothing in the world ever changes, what type of man are you gonna be?”
The question applied to Justyce in Dear Martin as much as it applied to Quan in Dear Justyce as much as it applies to Jared in Dear Manny . . .
As much as it applies to you and me.
I hope you dig this unplanned third book in what I guess is now a trilogy.
