Think Like A Kid

Debbie Reed Fischer spent her childhood getting used to new places. Her father, a colonel in the Air Force, was reassigned every few years, which meant the family spent years hopping between England, Greece, Israel, Florida, New York and Virginia. It was an exposure and appreciation early on to the ways other people lived.

“My mother collected people, the way other people collect things, and so we always had a mix of people in our home,” Fischer recalls.

This was back in the 1970s and ‘80s, when many of the destinations had limited TV. She found entertainment in books, often imagining herself writing one of them someday.

It would take a moment Fischer calls “absolute burnout” for her dream to become a reality, but now the Boca Raton mother of two has three published books, an anthology on the way and a new novel in the works. Her latest, “This is Not the Abby Show,” was published by Delacorte/Penguin Random House and won the Royal Palm Literary Award for Best Children’s Book of 2017.

Fischer says the moment that inspired her to pivot careers and ultimately led her to where she is today happened in her late 20s, when she was working on Miami Beach in the film and TV industry. With a degree in screenwriting from the University of Miami already under her belt, Fischer went back to college to get a teaching certificate and landed a job at Donna Klein Jewish Academy in Boca Raton. 

“I loved, loved, loved teaching,” she says. 

While teaching, she began working on novels on the side, and after six years finally became a full-time author. 

She takes inspiration from conversations she overhears, especially in one of her favorite spots, Mizner Park. “I like to go anywhere I can to eavesdrop,” she says. “I have lifted dialogue from restaurants and ladies’ rooms and put it right in a book.”

Currently, she’s working on a novel set in Cuba in 1939 that’s based partially on her family’s experience. Writing books for children, she realized, took getting in the mindset of a kid, always being told how to act or what not to do so the books must avoid being too preachy in imparting a lesson. 

“First you must entertain, and everything else is secondary,” she says. “You have to take off your adult hat.”