How A Job At Jack In The Box Trained Madeline Cash To Write Fiction

"For novelist Madeline Cash, a copywriting job at Jack in the Box was as educational as any MFA program could have been. "I would sometimes have to write 500 headlines over a weekend that somehow incorporated the food and the Super Bowl," the author tells Bustle. "It was very gamified, and I love writing puns. So there actually is a really clear pipeline from Jack in the Box to writing this book.""

""I know there are some writers who go sit under an oak tree with a quill and just let it flow, but I really like restriction and formula. It actually leads to more creativity, having more confinement," Cash says. The writer also drew a map, which she initially wanted to have printed inside the book à la Christopher Paolini's. (Cash's publisher didn't share her vision.)"

Madeline Cash applied techniques learned from an ad copy job at Jack in the Box—rapid headline generation, gamified constraints, and pun crafting—to novel composition. Lost Lambs follows the Flynn sisters as their parents' marriage unravels, populated by punny local names like Lucky Penne and Our Lady of Suffering's Inner Beauty Pageant. Cash favored restriction and formal structures, drawing a detailed map to fix geography and scene relationships even though the map was not printed. The result is a bustling family novel that embraces the tensions and resentments characteristic of contemporary family fiction traditions.

Read at Bustle