"Hangman" Adam Page Talks Difficulties He Encountered Writing His First Children's Book
The Wrestling Inc. Daily podcast welcomed Adam Page on a recent episode where Page and Wrestling Inc. Managing Editor Nick Hausman discussed Page's new children's book "Adam and The Golden Horseshoe". The book is part of The Elite Team Series with The Young Bucks and Cody Rhodes already having books released. Page talked about being approached to write the third book in the series as well as how the series came about.
"The series itself, I have no idea," Page admitted. "I want to say that Trism Books maybe had worked with Colt Cabana in the past, and he maybe was one of the first kind of 'us' group of guys who'd written a children's book. And I guess maybe they approached Matt and Nick of The Young Bucks [to write] a book, and that kind of turned into a series of books that now includes a book by Cody and one by myself as well. So mine is the third installment in that series I guess."
Page's book is dedicated to his "Sunday Afternoon Family". Page gave context to who that is as well as details as to what fried pies are, which are referenced in the book.
"Since I was a kid, my grandma would cook Sunday lunch for everyone including some of those fried pies, but every Sunday, my grandma cooked lunch for the entire family. 10 or more people would come around every Sunday, and I guess that support system, even from the moment of birth really until now has been really the backbone of of my life, my confidence [and] my everything," Page explained. "Fried pies, it's kind of like crescent shaped. It's like a little circle. You fill it up with, usually, it's apples. Sometimes it's dried peaches. Apples and peaches are the best too. Fold it over, you fry them up. It's so good."
Page revealed that he put more time and effort into writing this book than most things in his life. He notes that while he did not work on the illustrations, a lot of his ideas were put into the book as it was more of a hands-on process than he thought it would be.
"I was really surprised because I had to write a whole book. I thought it would be a little more hand-holding," Page admitted. "I thought it would be an easy process. I've probably put more time and effort into this short writing, this children's book, than I have most things I've done in a very long time. So every single word, every piece of punctuation, nearly every piece of illustration is something that, I mean I didn't actually do the illustration, but it's mine. I was really surprised about how hands-on it had to be."
Page admitted this was his first time writing a book, and he also admitted that he thought it would be easy since it was just a children's book. However, he learned that there was much more of a learning curve to condense big ideas for a specific audience that took months to work on.
"No, I've never written a book certainly. It was different," Page said. "It was a big learning curve and like writing a children's book sounds easy, right? Because it's a children's book. How hard could it be? It's very difficult to take big ideas and condense them down into one or two little sentences and be able to keep telling that story with that same kind of cadence page after page after page.
"It's very difficult. It's very hands-on. I probably started writing it, man, it's probably been a year ago or more, maybe more than a year ago. I don't know. It's been a long time ago I started working on it. It was months and months and months of just emailing things back and forth and back and forth before we finalized the text itself."
Hausman asked if pro wrestling storytelling played into writing the book. Page answered saying that part of it did with establishing everything in the book for people to understand clearly.
"Kind of a little bit of storytelling generally, you know, follows similar patterns," Page said. "So kind of just figuring out within the book what that pattern's going to look like. You have to establish who I am, who these other characters are, what's happening, what's this quest for, what's it all about, how does it end and what happens in terms of the fallout? I mean that kind of universal with everything."
"Adam and The Golden Horseshoe" is now available for purchase at www.trismbooks.com. Page's full interview aired as part of a recent episode of our podcast, The Wrestling Inc. Daily. Subscribe to get the latest episodes as soon as it's released Monday – Friday afternoon by clicking here.