How a former Hollywood screenwriter became a prolific author of books for tweens.
Stuart Gibbs C’91 was listening to a podcast, as he often does, when he first heard about the animal urine industry.
Apparently, it’s big business. Not just fox pee to keep rabbits out of gardens, but deer urine for hunters, and even mountain lion stuff to scare off coyotes. There are big-box brands, artisanal blends, and specialized farms devoted to collecting it all.
And just like that, Gibbs had finally cracked the opening sequence for his new novel, All Ears, which came out in May.
When you write books for middle-grade readers—kids roughly 8 to 12 years old—the discovery of something as offbeat and delightfully gross as bottled animal urine is pure gold. “I was like, yeah, this is exactly what I need,” Gibbs recalls. Now his newest book starts off with a deer urine heist, a car chase, and a culprit soaked in the pee he stole.
That gut instinct for reeling in young readers has helped Gibbs publish 42 books in the last 15 years, several of them New York Times bestsellers. His Spy School series has been translated into a dozen languages, and all together his books have sold nearly 10 million copies—with more titles still underway at Simon & Schuster.
Whenever James Ponti, a fellow bestselling middle-grade author, goes on school visits and asks kids which books they love most (aside from his), “the only name that is mentioned at every stop is Stuart’s,” he says. “And he’s usually the first one mentioned.”
“He has a really strong sense of what appeals to kids,” adds Ponti, who is also one of Gibbs’s close friends. “That’s the key to this job.”
While deer urine and hippos flinging feces make appearances, there’s more to a Stuart Gibbs book than excreta. Mystery and adventure abound and, underlying it all, “the deeper element is wisdom,” says Adele Griffin C’93, another fellow middle-grade writer and Gibbs’s pal.
Belly Up, his 2010 debut about a murdered zoo mascot, is stuffed with animal trivia while also dipping into the ethics around animals in captivity and, in its sequels, poaching and international relations. His most popularseries, Spy School, introduces readers to the CIA and issues like surveillance and privacy.
“I don’t really write down to my readers,” Gibbs says. “There are a few topics that I have to avoid because of the age of my readers—basically sex and gratuitous violence—but I don’t want to write about those anyhow. Almost anything else they can handle.”
That extends to the language itself. “People always say that I put big words in. I just write however I would write it. Hopefully they’ll look it up if they don’t know it,” he says, adding that he’s especially fond of vertiginousand malodorous.
Gibbs has been captivated by stories and syntax for as long as he can remember. From the time he could read books, he was trying to write one of his own. A kind elementary school librarian added one of his creations to the school shelves. (It was called The Day the Dinosaurs Came Back, and Gibbs likes to joke that he scooped Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton.)
By the time he arrived at Penn, he’d already spent years working on novels and trying to get them published. His then-agent had some advice: don’t use college to take writing classes, since you already know how to do that; use it to study everything else.
So he took film classes in Annenberg and became a communication major and psychology minor. He wrote a play for Quadramics Theatre Comedy and performed improv comedy in Without a Net. A field biology class and grant from University Scholars took him to the Philadelphia Zoo, where he investigated capybaras. “I started to realize it was this amazing setting for a story,” he says. The experience ultimately led to Belly Up, now his longest-running series, which is set inside a fictional zoo called FunJungle.
With his Penn graduation looming and rejections piling up for his latest mystery novel, “I figured the book thing hadn’t really worked out for me, so maybe I would try Hollywood,” he says. Film producer Mike Karz C’89 W’89 helped him land a job writing kickboxing movies for Imperial Entertainment. (Synopsis for the 1993 film Showdown, written by Gibbs and starring Tae Bo guru Billy Blanks: an ex-
policeman/school janitor shows a new student how to defend himself from a martial arts bully.)
He soldiered on in Hollywood, writing a slapstick kids’ movie (See Spot Run)and a raunchy body-swap comedy (Repli-Kate). But when the Writers Guild of America went on strike in late 2007, Gibbs—then on the cusp of turning 40—decided to give novels another shot. “I figured I’d maybe write one book and then go back to screenwriting,” he says. “I did not ever think that 17 years later, I’d have so many books out.”
But here he is, with book number 42, Space Case: The Graphic Novel, due out in August and number 43, Spy School Blackout, set for October. “I think I’ve figured out a bit of a system over the years for how to write books faster,” he says. Some of it involves a new intern from Penn’s Kelly Writers House every summer, who researches things like animal urine sales or panda poop quantities. (His first KWH intern suggested Belly Up’s title.) He’s also big on outlining and brainstorming, often tinkering with a plot for well over a year before he ever starts writing.
At this point, Gibbs is mostly adding to the universes he’s already created. The FunJungle series is up to nine books; Spy School’s 13th installment comes out soon. Other series include Once Upon a Tim—medieval adventures for slightly younger readers—and Moon Base Alpha, which is set on a lunar colony.
“He’s like a middle-grade Shonda Rhimes,” Ponti says. “He’s got all these series going. They all stand alone, but they all work together.”
Gibbs’s background in screenwriting is “the secret sauce” that makes his books so beloved, Ponti adds. “Knowing how the language of visual plays, the pace of a movie, the structure of a movie—it sucks kids in and propels them through.”
With 15 years of books behind him, Gibbs has been confronting a new plot twist: some of his earliest fans have grown up. Three current CIA agents have told him that they went into it because of his Spy School books. “I hear from a lot of very young readers how much they enjoyed the books,” he says, “but I’m starting to hear from people that my books made them who they are.”
That’s the most rewarding part for him—and why he does this in the first place. The heroes in his books don’t have magical powers or super strength. They’re just smart kids who know a lot and are good at figuring things out. Gibbs wants his young readers to recognize “the value of knowledge and school and intelligence,” he says.
And fun. When you write for middle-grade audiences, you need to have some kid-at-heart spirit. Griffin remembers when she first moved to Gibbs’s neighborhood and they went to a local fair. Her younger son was nervous about going on rides alone, so Gibbs—a father of two himself—hopped on with him and they bumped their way down a giant bouncy slide together.
An avid traveler who’s mainly in it for the wildlife, Gibbs has gone on seven safaris in Africa. His visit to Botswana inspired last year’s Spy School Goes Wild and his new FunJungle book All Ears. Observing gorillas in Rwanda led to another yet-to-be-announced book, and a trip to Indonesia brought him up close to orangutans and Komodo dragons (and supplied an idea for Spy School Blackout).
“He is never tired,” Griffin says of Gibbs. “He’s just always out in the world. It’s great to be around that kind of energy.”
It’s no surprise to hear that Gibbs doesn’t plan to stop writing anytime soon. “I still have lots of ideas that I want to get out there,” he says. “One of the great joys of this job is that there is no retirement date built in. I came to this on the late side, but I’m going to stay as long as they’ll let me.”
—Molly Petrilla C’06
