Posted
Posted
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John David Anderson on Posted
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.
Why he wrote it
A locker full of apologies, and no explanationAnderson has described his writing process as largely unplanned, but Posted broke from even his own habits: it arrived as a single unexplained image before he had a premise, a character, or a plot. He woke up with it and spent the rest of the project working backward to understand what it meant.
This is going to sound like a load of malarkey, but this book really was a kind of gift from the muses. I woke up one day with an image in my head of a locker covered in Post-it notes all saying pretty much the same thing: ‘I’m sorry.’
thehidingspot.blogspot.com, “The Hiding Spot: An Interview with John David Anderson, author of Posted”He didn’t know whose locker it was or who had left the notes. Those unanswered questions became the engine of the novel.
The image had somewhere to land because Anderson had spent decades carrying his own middle-school years with him. He grew up on both sides of the cruelty he was writing about, which gave the book its emotional specificity.
POSTED was a personal book, based, at least emotionally, on my own experiences in middle-school—as a target, yes, but also as an observer of the cruel things kids can say and do to each other. I also remember keenly what it’s like to have friendships fall apart at that age.
evie-bookish.blogspot.com, “Blog Tour: Posted by John David Anderson (Review + ...”A third pressure arrived while Anderson was already deep in revision, and it came from the news rather than from memory. Watching the 2016 presidential primaries, he saw adults who were supposed to model public discourse for young readers doing the opposite, and the novel suddenly carried a charge it hadn’t had before.
Anderson said he was revising Posted during the 2016 presidential primaries, watching candidates call each other names during debates, and thinking to himself that those were the role models his readers would look to for how to use language — and that was exactly why this novel mattered. [paraphrased from audio]
How he wrote it
Soldiers found after the war was already declaredBecause Anderson writes without an outline, he had a conflict before he had anyone to fight it. His drafting process on Posted became, by his own account, a character excavation: he knew the shape of the crisis and had to discover who these kids were and why it would wreck them.
Essentially I had a war; what I needed were soldiers to fight it. Much of my writing, then, became an exploration of the five main characters and the impact this event has on their friendships and personal growth.
thehidingspot.blogspot.com, “The Hiding Spot: An Interview with John David Anderson, author of Posted”The draft Anderson finished and the book that eventually published were structurally different animals. Revision forced him to abandon the instinct to escalate and instead trust the accumulation of small, quiet exchanges, a lesson he had not fully learned on earlier books.
Rewriting this book taught me the power of small moments. A lot of the revision process was a scaling back, an attempt to tease out the tension in the everyday exchanges that add up to form character and conflict. Honestly, not a lot happens in the book, but so much happens in the book.
The four friends in the novel go by nicknames rather than given names: Frost, Bench, Wolf, Deedee. Anderson built that choice into the book’s architecture deliberately, because nicknames do two opposing things at once, and the tension between those two things is what the story is about.
Nicknames are not just a way to express our identities, they are also a way to form circles, and to close the circles off from others. These are not the names the teachers use to take attendance; they are the names shared among friends, the ones who know your secrets and your dreams.
The Post-it notes that give the book its title arrive in the story partly because a cell phone ban forces students to communicate on paper. Anderson has explained that the ban was a deliberate craft decision, not merely a plot device: slowing the characters down changed the moral weight of what they wrote to each other.
Anderson explained that he wanted to create a situation where kids were forced to slow down, to think before they wrote, because words carry more weight when you can’t simply delete them before sending. [paraphrased from audio]
The personal thread
The kid he was, and the one he wished he’d beenAnderson has said that Frost, Posted’s narrator, is not a character he invented so much as a portrait he recognized. The description he gave of Frost in a 2017 interview reads less like a character breakdown and more like an admission.
A poet in hiding. An observer. A kid with a voice who lacks the confidence to use it. A good friend—most of the time. Insecure. Confused. Inquisitive. Compassionate. In short—me at that age.
Where Frost is Anderson’s self-portrait, Rose, the novel’s most outspoken character, represents the person he wishes he had been. Anderson drew her from real people in his life, and he is direct about the gap between her courage and his own.
She was inspired by anyone in my life who has the courage to say what needs to be said. The upstanders. The personal heroes who are confident enough in themselves to brush off the naysayers and live according to their own code. I wish she was based on me. She’s not. I’m not that cool.
skylarsbookshelf.wordpress.com, “Interview with John David Anderson By: Skylar Toddings – Skylar’s BookShelf”What he wants us to sit with
Language as a choice, not a reflexAnderson does not want Posted to produce a feeling that stays inside the reading experience. He has described a specific, behavioral outcome he is after: a reader who, weeks later, is standing in a hallway and decides to act differently than they would have before.
So that they’ll come across an experience- maybe they read Posted, and they see something bad happening at their school, and they’re like, ‘Dude. I should step in and say something.’
Underneath that behavioral hope is a philosophical claim Anderson makes explicitly. For him, the bullying in the novel is not really about the internet or the specific platforms kids use; it is about agency, and the argument he wants readers to leave with is simple enough to fit in a sentence.
Language has the power we give it: it can break and mend, include and exclude, uplift and beat down. We get to decide.
He has also said, in more measured terms, that he worries whether that message will carry the same weight outside the cultural moment of 2016, and that the immediate goal, in any era, is to get kids talking to each other about the courage it takes to say or do the right thing.