Neil Patrick has a new trick up his sleeve.
Harris, currently starring in Netflix's adaptation of Daniel Handler'sA Series of Unfortunate Events, is known for doing, well, a bit of everything in the entertainment industry — He sings, he acts, he performs magic, he's a producer.
And now he has a new title to add to his extensive resume: children's book author.
In November, Harris will debut his first novel for young readers, The Magic Misfits.
SEE ALSO:Neil Patrick Harris' family Halloween portrait is here, and it's absolutely perfectThe book stars runaway street magician Carter who, along with a group of fellow magicians, is tasked with stopping the greedy B.B. Bosso from wreaking havoc on a sleepy New England town. For the novel, Neil also channeled his own passion and expertise for magic by adding practical magic tricks that kids can learn.
Magic Misfitsis not Harris' first book, a few years ago he made his literary debut with a choose-your-own adventure autobiography for adults, Neil Patrick Harris: Choose Your Own Autobiography. But it is the actor's first time writing for kids, which, he says, was a type of escape from reality.
"[With] the world right now, it's a hard conversation to have with adults without having it steer into something that is traumatic. It's a truly traumatic news cycle right now," says Harris. "And I do think there is something great about not talking about that and being a kid and reading a book you can escape into, and escaping into something that's realistic, that's not super fantasy, and that teaches a thing or two."
Join us this week on the MashReads Podcast as we catch up with Neil Patrick Harris and chat about writing, reading, and Harris' new children's novel The Magic Misfits.
Credit: Little, Brown Books for Young ReaderThe Magic Misfits
Neil Patrick Harris
(Interview edited lightly for length and clarity. For the full interview, listen to the MashReads Podcast episode above.)
On the inspiration of this book
"I happened to write an autobiography a few years back. And with my same publishing editor, I thought, 'An interesting idea would be to do a younger version of a book, a kids idea, because I have kids of my own.' So I'm reading picture books to them relatively constantly. David, my husband, and I read to [my kids] every night. That's a big part of their go to sleep ritual.
And I love magic — I'm a magician. and I thought a picture book idea would be cool with magic. I'm a big proponent of a fan of practical magic. And so I thought that would be a cool picture book to create for kids, maybe teach them a trick or two. Have a simple idea for a story, it wouldn't be too hard to write. So we pitched the idea, it got sold, but in the conversation, they said 'why don't you make it a larger book, make it a series of four books, and make it almost three hundred pages.'
And that was a daunting and interesting challenge, because now I was writing for my kids who haven't started to read yet. l I was writing sentence structures, and characters and descriptions, adjectives, vocabulary, that would be a little more advance than they are right now."
"I want to provide entertainment for any age of kids who need to be challenged in a literary way"
On balancing writing and acting
"The writing is the hard part for sure. [Writing] makes me value and appreciate the fact that as an actor, you don't have to often craft the words yourself, that you're honoring words that someone has written.
I know a lot of actors that will paraphrase words in a script, who use [a script] as a guideline for what to say as the cameras are rolling. But having written [a book], I know value what the writer wrote and why they chose it in this exact sentence structure and why it should be pretty particular. So I have great admiration for that, but it's tough. I'm a better re-writer, and it's a hard thing to not want to write it correctly and do the final version in the first draft.
And that's a hard thing to do to write things that you know are not good with the knowledge that you're going to go back and fix it. That's innately not in line with what I like to do as an actor."
On writing for kids
"This all came about from a really simple idea, and the idea being that I want to provide entertainment for an age of kids who need to be challenged in a literary way, and also learn some magic and have some appreciation for it. So, I was more interested in an end result than I was trying to get my specific voice heard. And I think that's why it ended up being a young readers' book because I didn't have to stress so much about having a David Eggers-style creating my own Neil Patrick Harris way of writing.
And because of that, it was its own challenge because I had to pull back on long, run-on sentences, and I had to pull back on not using the same verb over and over. OR using the same verb over and over. I'm trying to think more as an educator as well as an author, because I'm dealing with kids who are fresh at reading. I thought an interesting idea would be to do a kids book because I have kids of my own."
Then, as always we close the show with recommendations:
Neil has a host of recommends including the podcasts Comedy Bang Bang,The Daily, and Human Brain; the TV shows Survivor andAt Home with Amy Sedaris; and Kelly Clarkson's new album The Meaning of Lifeand P!nk's new album Beautiful Trauma.
MJ recommends "The Apex of Insanity: A look back on the fifth anniversary of Rihanna's ill-fated '777 Tour,'" a history of Rihanna's ill-fated attempt to perform seven shows, in seven countries, in seven days.
Peter recommends the album We Can Die Happyby Tennis.
Neil is also producing a show In & Of Itself, a mix of theater and magic by Derek DelGaudio. ("It's sort of a theatrical existential crisis" DelGaudio explained on The Late Show with Colbert.)
Next, we're talking to R.J. Palacio about her novel Wonder, which was just adapted into a movie. We hope you'll join us.
And if you're looking for even more book news, don't forget to follow MashReadson Facebook and Twitter.
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