A conversation with Doug Wilhelm
"How geeky is that?" - a conversation with Doug Wilhelm
This interview with author Doug Wilhelm, conducted by writer Spring Hermann, is published in the Fall 2007 issue of NERA Journal, a publication of the New England Reading Association.
SPRING: Although we've never met, I have learned about you through the www.the-revealers.com website. Tell me about your family and the kind of environment you grew up in.
DOUG: I grew up in a small house in a pleasant, suburban commuter town outside New York City. I'm the oldest of three, and we were lucky to live in a neighborhood that was full of kids. We were always outdoors playing games. Inside my house, things were more confusing. Although they're both sober now, my parents were active alcoholics all during my growing-up years.
SPRING: You say you read your way through elementary school. Do you remember any authors or books that touched you and guided you? Was the public library your refuge?
DOUG: It was! I remember once getting grounded for sneaking out of my bedroom window at night (it was on the first floor) to go to the library. How geeky is that?? In seventh grade, I became obsessed with the historical novel Johnny Tremain. Like Elliot in The Revealers, I was on the bottom of my grade's social ladder, and I didn't want to be living my life at all—so I would imagine myself as a new character in Johnny Tremain, playing minor parts in scenes in the novel.
I was so much tormented in the public junior high that my parents sent me to a private boys' day school for the next two years. Now I had hardly any contact with my neighborhood friends, and at the boys' school I was bullied horrendously—they were professionals. So books became basically my only friends. I remember getting into Twain and George Orwell, but my favorite author that I discovered then was William Saroyan.
SPRING: You note that you endured a lot of bullying even though you were quite tall. Was this mostly emotional bullying or physical? Why do you think you were a victim?
DOUG: I wasn't that tall in middle school—I was mainly incredibly skinny and awkward. I went through all kinds of bullying—verbal, emotional, physical. It was explained to me, even by my parents, that I got picked on because I was "annoying." I suppose I was—I had an emotional, verbal personality and no idea how to fit in, no capacity to be "cool." A lot of uncool, "annoying" kids are the ones who will have really interesting, creative, productive lives; but their middle school years tend to be hell.
SPRING: After graduating in English from Kenyon College, you became a journalist. Was it to write articles that you traveled through India and Nepal?
DOUG: I spent my junior year in college in Vienna, and there I learned, in the early 70s, of the then-storied overland trip from Europe to India and Nepal. In 1974, I convinced my brother and oldest neighborhood pal to take a year and make that trip. We painted houses for six months, took what money we hadn't squandered and flew to London; we hitchhiked and took trains across Europe, then took a travelers' bus run by two Englishmen from Istanbul through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan to Delhi. I then went up to Kathmandu. Five years later, I left my job editing a weekly paper in New Jersey at the end of the Iranian hostage crisis, in January 1981, and spent several months traveling in Muslim Asia, talking with everyone who would talk to me about what Muslims believed, who they were as people, and why they suddenly seemed so mad at us. I spent my best time in Peshawar, the old caravan city in Northwest Pakistan where the holy-war movement against the Soviet Union, which had recently invaded next-door Afghanistan, was just coming together. I was talking to people at the start of the movement that would grow into al Qaeda.
SPRING: Were you always interested in telling the stories of young people?
DOUG: During and after my ten-year losing struggle to write and improve and sell my book on Muslim Asia—it was rejected 75 times—I also did three other books: two picture books for little kids, and a collection of vignettes on New England that I'd written for the Sunday Boston Globe, for whom I covered Vermont from 1986-92. They were all rejected too. My first four books were turned down over 115 times. I became a freelancer, doing journalism as a stringer for the Globe and some of other big-city papers, teaching writing as an adjunct professor in colleges, and doing contract writing like newsletters and annual reports in Vermont.
SPRING: Tell us a bit about the book Street of Storytellers, and how it came together.
DOUG: After 9/11, I cut my Asia manuscript to the good part about Peshawar, and wrote some new stuff on how Muslim extremism led to the 9/11 attacks. I titled the new manuscript Street of Storytellers, which is a famous bazaar in the old city of Peshawar where caravans from Persia and India would stop and listen to professional storytellers. My agent thought it was too dated—but a couple of years later, an idea popped into my head for a suspenseful YA novel set in that time and place, involving an American teenage boy who is dragged to Peshawar during Christmas vacation by his dad, a religious historian, and gets sucked into the ferment in the bazaar. That's what I'm working on now.
SPRING: After writing eight "Choose Your Own Adventure" novels for children, can you talk about the challenges of this kind of writing?
DOUG: I ran into a writer friend whose husband, Ray Montgomery, created the then-popular Choose Your Own Adventure series. Ray needed a book written very quickly, and all he had sold to Bantam Doubleday Dell was the idea that a planet gets forgotten. I had never read sci-fi, but in ten days I wrote The Forgotten Planet, and that was the first of my eight books for the Choose series. They were great training for writing exciting stories for young adults. I would propose eight or so "Choose" ideas every year, and BDD would pick two. The nice thing about that series was that you didn't have to keep using the same characters—you just had to fulfill this unique, interactive format, where every few pages the reader got a choice. The challenge of the Choose books was to engage the reader immediately, keep the story constantly suspenseful, and make every choice hard. You couldn't go very deep, but the books were great training in writing strong stories with characters that you had to make vivid and engaging. I think that's absolutely the heart of YA fiction-writing.
SPRING: Your first single title was Raising the Shades. Let me ask about the difficult issue of voice in an adolescent novel. Your narrator Casey is 13—so you must master his voice. Then you have several other 7th graders who must have separate but authentic voices—as well as the adults. How do you nail the voices?
DOUG: I just write from day to day, and do the best I can. I've discovered that there are two basic types of fiction writers in the YA field: those who really have to plan and think through every aspect of their story, and those who don't want to do that, because then the story would be less engaging to them—less a journey of discovery. I'm the latter type. I want to start with a basic understanding of my main characters, an emotional connection with them and their situation, and I want to know how I'm going to make a strong, engaging start. Then I just go with the story, pushing it forward, writing at the same time each day, and often being surprised by what happens. I don't think about "voice": I just want the characters, and the things they say and do, to feel right—to feel like them.
SPRING: This was seemed like a "message" novel. What is your main goal in writing the novel: message or literary experience?
DOUG: I always recoil at these ideas of the problem or message novel. To me, they suggest that the book was formed around some narrow intent of the author, to portray some problem or convey some message. There is no "message" in this book—certainly none that I tried to put in there as if I were making a puzzle to solve. When I visit middle schools where kids have read The Revealers, I tell them that once they've read a book, it's their book. Whatever it means to them, that's what it means.
I think there's a critical difference between meaning and message. Message is something preconceived that a writer may try to put into a story. But meaning is what the reader gets out of the story—and that will always have as much to do with each reader's own experience, emotions, and personal struggles as with what the author has put into it. I think the really good YA novels are almost never message books. They're meaning books.
SPRING: Your next book was The Revealers, a novel with a unique twist. The middle school kids who are being bullied use the school "LAN" to let other kids "reveal" their abuses and yet remain anonymous and safe. Can you talk about where you got the idea to use technology in this manner?
DOUG: What might happen, I wondered, if three middle schoolers who each are "different," who each are not fitting in and are each getting picked on by different kids in different ways, got together and decided to try to figure out why? I got the idea from doing writing projects for Dartmouth College, the first college to install a school-wide computer network on which all students have an account and can email each other, their professors, anyone. I then heard about a Vermont middle school that had just installed a LAN—this was in about 2001, when email was very new and instant messaging was almost unheard-of. I visited Williston Central to see how the thing worked. I saw the kids' excitement in checking their messages between classes (this was before everyone had their own email and IM at home). That's how that part of the story idea came together for me.
SPRING: Cruelty of boys to boys and girls to girls has always been a mystery to me. In The Revealers you try and find some answers. I know you used a lot of true cases to help you.
DOUG: I asked kids in three Vermont middle school classes to each write for me one true experience they'd had with bullying, from whatever perspective. In two of those schools, I came back once a week for several weeks, and we worked with their stories as pieces of writing. So they got the experience of working with a writer on a story, making it as good as they could, and I got a pile of very true, sometimes very raw and revealing stories. I told the kids, "I'm not going to steal your stories, but I am going to study them." And I did.
SPRING: One of the hardest things about adolescent novels is that they have to end somewhere, when the kids lives go on and on. You came up with a very satisfying ending in The Revealers. Can you talk about that?
DOUG: To be honest, kids often tell me they're frustrated with the ending of The Revealers, because it doesn't wrap everything up all neatly. I tell them that I didn't want to do that, because life isn't like that; as you said, kids' lives go on. I take it as a wonderful compliment when a young reader demands to know, "Well, what does happen next?" To me, this means the characters have become real enough to them that they think something does happen next!
SPRING: The harshest portraits in The Revealers were of Richie the bully and Mrs. Capelli the school principal! Think they had a little something in common?
DOUG: Interesting! I never thought about that. Richie was based on a real kid, a solitary and very scary older boy in my junior high who punched me out for being wise to him one day, much as Richie the fictional kid does to Russell. I remembered how petrified I was of him, for weeks after, and how he knew that, and how he toyed with me for a while. Mrs. Capelli, the control-freak principal who doesn't want to know about the bullying in her school because she doesn't want to open up any messy problems, came out of the more traditional research I did. I learned that when the adults in charge of a school don't deal with bullying, the problem always grows much worse. Mrs. Capelli creates the problem that makes The Revealers work. There's bullying in every middle school—but in The Revealers, the bullying is out of control because the principal won't face up to it, or challenge the student power structure.
SPRING: In your newest novel, Falling, you explore the effect of the hardest, most devastating kind of drug abuse. Did you personally encounter young victims?
DOUG: When I was visiting English classes at my local middle school in Rutland. I was talking about how almost all good stories have some sort of problem at their center. I asked the kids to write down one problem that is true in their lives, or in a friend's life, or that they know to be true. I saw them breaking into two groups: the perennial problems that adolescents have ("I like someone but he's already going with my best friend"), and the breakdown-of-society type of problems ("my mom's boyfriend gets drunk and beats her up, and I'm afraid I'm next," or "my best friend is doing serious drugs and I don't know how to help her"). My idea that developed was about a boy and a girl who fall for each other, but each comes from one of those two sides. The drug-addict brother is mostly off-stage, though not toward the end. As I worked on Falling, I thought of it as "a love story with danger." I wanted it to be about the very real dangers I was seeing in so many local kids' lives. Basically, though, I wanted to write a love story.
SPRING: Falling is a 9th grade love story that uses text messaging and lyrics of contemporary songs to express what Matt and Katie are feeling. Do you worry that this will "date" the book—or that kids will always relate to these things?
DOUG: That's always a danger, in a story that deals with technology. But kids are clearly creating a new kind of communication, in IM'ing each other, that I'm confident will stay with us now, just as telephones have stayed with us and changed how we communicate. I found out it's hard, not only to write believable hiphop lyrics as a middle-aged white guy, but to write any song lyrics that work without the music.
SPRING: I was stunned to see your Afterward in Falling that claims your remote town of Rutland Vermont, the locale, is actually overrun with hard drug traffic. You state that Rutland Middle School students read chapters and agreed with your estimate of their town's problem. What do you hope this novel will accomplish for Rutland—and all the towns like it?
DOUG: I was just trying to write a good story out of real stuff that I saw kids dealing with. I also talked a lot with recovering addicts and with a police detective, who estimated that my little city of about 17,000 people has about 400 heroin and crack addicts. And Rutland is not in any way atypical, from what I've learned about the heroin and crack epidemic among young people across this country today.
SPRING: I should mention that this interview is being conducted via email, because you are on a writing assignment in Afghanistan. I have just read the article you sent me about the Provincial Councils, which were elected in 2005 in each of the country's provinces. These councils are bridges between the newly elected governments and the Afghan people, most of whom are illiterate. This is fascinating stuff, but the world over there is frightening—even scarier than middle school! How did you get into this assignment?
DOUG: I'm here in Afghanistan on contract for a Vermont firm, ARD, Inc., that does development work around the world. This particular project, funded by USAID, is providing a range of support and skill-building workshops for the country's 34 new Provincial Councils, whose job is to meet and talk with people, then convey their concerns and needs to government and advocate for what needs to be done. In this culture, this unusual approach - sort of a bridge between people and officialdom—is showing some promise and achieving some results. Although the government is underfunded and often corrupt, the Provincial Councils are helping to get problems addressed, roads and schools and clinics built, security improved, and opium-poppy cultivation reduced. By law, 30 percent of the Council members must be women: they are working for women's rights and safety while they're building new skills, stature, and influence in this very conservative, women-suppressive society. Trust in government is very shaky right now, and the Taliban and al Qaeda are resurgent and battling hard to end this effort to build a new representative system that is both democratic and Islamic. So the stories I'm writing, which are mainly aimed at the Congressional funders of USAID in Afghanistan, really feel important.
SPRING: We will be anxious to hear your further reports from Afghanistan, as well as where your articles will be published. Take care of yourself, Doug, and thanks so much from me and the NERA Journal for taking time to let us hear your thoughts.
