YA Author Interview ~ Gary Schmidt

Gary Schmidt is the author of The Wednesday Wars, which won this year's Newbery Honor, as well as Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy, another Newbery Honor book. He is a professor of English at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Tell us about your current project.

The new book is called Trouble, and it tells the story of a kid who, because he is wealthy and well-connected, believes that he is absolutely immune to trouble—because everything in his experience tells him that he is. He is paired with a kid from Cambodia (it is 1978) who is newly refugeed, and who has lived his entire life with nothing but trouble. The story is about their journey together.

What are the highlights of your journey to publication?

I heard about the first contract for a book titled The Sin Eater when Virginia Buckley called me during office hours during an advising day at Calvin College. I had had about fifty calls that day, and so picked up the phone expecting it to be another student—and was amazed when it was Virginia. I was stunned, to say the least. That began our long relationship.

Why do you write for young people?

A difficult question. On one level, you write what you like to read. I also write the books I would have liked to have read when I was younger. But most importantly, I write to young people because I want to suggest the wealth and beauty and glories of a world, when our culture seems to be settling for the cheap and glitzy and tawdry.

What fiction most influenced your childhood, and what effect did those stories have on your writing?

I read fantasies and myths when I was a child—and I don’t write any of those now. But I am interested in the heroic—what makes a character into a hero? In an age when we have no more heroes—we have only celebrities—that seems to me to be an important question to ask.

What prepared you to write for children?
.

Being a child.

Your novel, “The Wednesday Wars” won this year’s Newbery Honor from the American Library Association, your second Newbery Honor in four years. How has that award changed the way you write, market and live?

I’m not sure that an award such as this—which is indeed an amazing experience, for which I will be forever grateful—should in fact change the way I write and live. Isn’t the award, in a way, affirming those things? So why should it encourage the abandoning of them? I once heard Avi say that awards are wonderful and affirming when they come, but you have to go on and write what you are supposed to write, as if they didn’t exist. I think he’s absolutely right on that. Though, on the other hand, it is wonderful and amazing to receive this kind of affirmation and support from the writing community—and that must have an impact on you. It says, You’ve done well. Keep going.

.

What are a few of your all-time favorite books?

.

Lois Lowry’s The Giver. Christopher Paul Curtis’ Bud, Not Buddy. Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia. John Christopher’s The White Mountains. Lloyd Alexander’s The Book of Three. Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising. Linda Sue Park’s A Single Shard.

.

What’s the best or worst advice (or both) you’ve heard on writing for young adults?
.

Best advice: Read, read, read, read, read everything.
Worst Advice: Write what you know. That’s too limiting. You write what you are desperate to know.

.

What is the first thing you do when you begin a new book?
.

I have to figure out the voice of the narrator—whether it’s first or third person, how limited it will be, how idiosyncratic it will be. I have to hear that voice before anything else—certainly before plot comes. That voice will then tell me a great deal about the character, and about how the book will picture that character.

.

You spoke at Calvin College’s Festival of Faith and Writing this past April. When leading workshops, what is the primary idea you want writers to walk away with?
.

That writing is hard work. Too often there is this sense that there is a magic formula, and there isn’t. The only formula I know is that offered by Jane Yolen: BOC—Butt on chair.

.

Do you have a favorite quote related to writing?
.

“There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there be.” Doris Lessing.

.

What aspect of a story is most challenging for you: strong setting, vivid characters, engaging voices, delicious prose? How do you develop your weak areas?

.

Well, all of those. It takes me about a year to write the first draft—sometimes more than that. I write slowly so that I can work on all of those elements at the same time, because none of those elements—for me—are divorced from each other. Setting has to respond to character has to respond to plot line has to respond to prose has to respond to setting. So I work very slowly so that the whole ecology of the novel is developed together.

.

Can you give us a view into a typical day of your writing life?

.

I work on three projects at a time—all at different stages of development. I do two pages—about 750 words—on each project each day. I work in a study outside of the house, with no phone and a woodstove for heat, surrounded by books and books and books. And I work at a typewriter—a 1953 Royal, with lots of scrap paper that I can burn.

.

If you could choose to have one strength of another writer, what would it be and from whom?
.

I would want to have Avi’s strength in creative memorable, vivid, amazing characters whose inner nature and outer appearance are so interestingly combined. I don’t know if he would enjoy this comparison, but I don’t think anyone has done this so well since Dickens.

.

What is the importance in today’s society for well-written books that boys can enjoy?
.

Huge. It’s too bad that as new technologies have come along, that these have replaced, instead of added to the possibilities for engagement with art. It’s reading, and not the quick video game, that presents the reader with questions that demand an answer. It’s reading, and not a Playstation, that helps someone to grow, to have more to be human with.

.

Your current work in progress is …

.

It will either be a western—which I have always wanted to try my hand at—or a companion book to The Wednesday Wars that follows Doug Swieteck. I’m working on both, and one will eventually demand full attention.

.

What piece of writing have you done that you’re particularly proud of, and why?
.

I suppose any writer, to be honest, is proud of each piece of writing. Each one represents a different battle, a different problem, a different approach. So it’s hard to compare any one work to another.

.

Do you have a dream, something you’d love to achieve with your writing?
.

I hope that I keep getting better. I hope that each novel is different. I hope that there will always be the next one to write, and that the same joy and pleasure and excitement in the writing process is always there.