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Lights, Camera, Write: A Guest Post by James Ponti

By James Ponti / September 4, 2024 at 1:36 am

Grown-ups: if you’ve been wanting to introduce the little ones in your life to the next Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys series, this is it. Author James Ponti has penned an exclusive essay on how he scouts for locations and inspiration for his stories and why Miami was the perfect setting for The Sherlock Society, down below.

Hardcover $18.99

The Sherlock Society (B&N Exclusive Edition)

By James Ponti

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Hardcover $18.99

There’s a conspiracy afoot! And few, if any, are as prepared to sort it out as the Sherlock Society. Great for modern readers looking to rediscover the magic of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys.

While writing The Sherlock Society, I frequently found myself asking, “Where should I put the camera?” Problematic considering there was no camera. I also worried about location scouts, casting decisions, and commercial breaks. None of these have anything to do with books, but everything to do with how I write them.

Let me explain. Or, as Inigo Montoya might say, “No, there is too much. Let me sum up.”

I’ll start with a confession. When I was a kid, my first love was movies, not books. This led me to film school and a degree in screenwriting. I began my career penning scripts for Disney, Nickelodeon, and PBS, not staying up late trying to hammer out the Great American Novel.

I have since seen the light and found my happy place writing middle grade fiction. But, despite the fact that The Sherlock Society is my twelfth book, my sense of storytelling was forever shaped by my time in television. Rather than fight the old urges, I’ve learned to embrace them.

The most obvious crossover is that I always think in terms of series rather than stand-alone novels. The Sherlock Society is my fourth series, joining City Spies, Framed, and Dead City. It’s about Alex and Zoe Sherlock, siblings who convince their friends and grandfather to form a detective agency so they can earn a little money and have some adventure over the summer.

I wanted to tap into my tween years growing up in a small Florida beach town, but because I knew it was a series, I moved them to Miami, where there would be endless potential mysteries to solve. (How many people watched Murder, She Wrote and wondered if Cabot Cove, Maine had the highest homicide rate in the world?)

I drove to South Florida to scout locations, just like when I made documentaries for the History Channel and NBC Sports. The book begins with Alex and Zoe getting rescued by the marine patrol, so I went for a ride-along in a SWAT boat racing across Biscayne Bay with three of Miami’s finest. All the while, I was figuring out how I would shoot the scene with a camera, so I would know how to bring it life on the page.

At Nickelodeon, we constantly scouted locations to find the right neighborhoods to fit the needs of specific scripts, so I did the same. I worked with a realtor to figure out where my characters might live and drove around until I picked out their homes. I walked the halls of their middle school, visited the marine biology lab where their father works, and went to the public library where they like to hang out. For me, this approach doesn’t just help the writing process, it’s essential.

I love it when a kid says, “When I read your book, I can see it in my head, just like it’s a movie.”

I always lean in and say, “Me too.”