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Andrew Smith is the author of GHOST MEDICINE, a 2009 ALA/YALSA "Best Books for Young Adults," and IN THE PATH OF FALLING OBJECTS, a 2010 ALA/YALSA "Best Books for Young Adults." In November, 2010, Andrew Smith's THE MARBURY LENS will be released by Feiwel and Friends, an imprint of Macmillan.
1) Your book, THE MARBURY LENS, scared the hell outta me. Did it scare the hell outta YOU, writing it?
I don’t know if it actually scared me, but the process of writing the book did bother me. It kept me inside some pretty uncomfortable places for a long time. I live in my books when I’m writing them, so being in Marbury for all that time did take its toll on me. Also, and you may find this hard to believe, I never swear in real life. But there’s so much swearing in The Marbury Lens that I started talking and even dressing like the characters in the book. It’s a weakness, I’ll admit, and I am trying to work my way through it.
2) What gave you the idea to write such a dark book?
This is a great question, so bear with me as I take you through my convoluted reasoning. First of all, and I mean this in the least-sexist possible way, I find male protagonists to be more compelling because of their innate tendency to be evasive about their feelings and their reluctance to confront emotional issues. Males have all this internal and external pressure to “suck it up” and try to be tough when something traumatic happens to them. So I found this whole notion of Jack and what he goes through – both as a result of the actions of others and as a consequence of his own choices – to be a driving issue in the story I needed to tell.
Also, and this speaks more precisely to your question, when I was a kid I was kidnapped by a complete stranger, too. And like Jack, like a lot of boys, I think, I chose to only tell my closest friend about what happened to me, so I never said a word about it to my family or anyone else. I guess when you’re a kid, you don’t realize that things like that can really screw you up for the rest of your life. So, two summers ago, I started writing this book about Jack, his kidnapping, his best friend, Conner, and how things get screwed up for them. During the writing, I started having really vivid dreams about this other place – called Marbury – where people that I knew turned into monsters. I thought it was a cool dream. I keep paper and pens next to my bed so I can write things down in the middle of the night, and I remember how I wrote down stuff about these “Marbury” dreams and began incorporating them into the story of Jack’s kidnapping, and the book kind of wrote itself from that point.
3) What was the hardest thing to write in THE MARBURY LENS? What was the easiest?
For me, the hardest things to write in my books have always been the parts that are the most emotionally draining. In The Marbury Lens, this happens in the last part of Seth’s story (Seth is the ghost of a boy who lived in California in the 1880s), and the last few pages of the book where Jack and Conner leave England and come back to California. Those are really emotional parts of the story, I think, and it really zaps me when I write those kinds of things. They’re tough to go back to during the editing process, too.
As far as the easiest parts to write (besides the dedication to my editor and friend, Liz Szabla), there were two passages that I refer to as Jack’s rants. They’re the parts that begin, “Let me tell you a few things about Jack,” and “Let me tell you what Jack believes about friendship.” I liked those parts because Jack really lets it out about his abandonment, anger, self-doubt, and the pressures society puts on boys to be good soldiers. I’ll be honest, too, I did a lot of self-editing in these parts because Jack does have a lot of justifiable anger (and kind of a foul mouth, too), so I initially let him say everything he really wanted to say... but I cut out about half of those ranting passages before I submitted the original manuscript.
4) You teach high school, right? How has this impacted your writing? Besides, of course, your perfect use of the word “fuck.”
First of all, thank you for scoring me a five-out-of-five-possible-extended-middle-fingers in the use-of-the-word-fuck Olympics. That means a lot to me, coming from a teenager. To be honest, I struggled with some of the content issues in the book. I even asked kids about it. One boy who gave me advice, a seventeen-year-old named Tyler, told me that teen boys use the word “fuck” so they won’t have to be overly specific about how they really feel about things – that it’s the opposite of a “heavy” word to boys because it can be so universal without having to expose too much of what a boy actually feels about things. It’s an insulator, a defense, for boys. I thought this was a brilliant and insightful explanation, because I always assumed teenage boys used the word “fuck” the way that some of us use commas, or spaces between words, for that matter.
And I guess that explains the larger point of your question. I am very fortunate that I get to work every day with brilliant, energetic, unafraid kids who have absolutely no qualms about telling me what they think (and they’ll tell you I am not bothered by their honesty). I also get to hear a couple hundred different stories every day – and what could be better than that for a writer? That said, I do not base any of my characters on real kids I know – they are more likely based on me, or on people I’ve known more personally. But I will sometimes borrow a name or a phrase from kids, or use their initials and habits – things like that – when I add extra details to the fictional roles in my novels.
5) Your book mentions rape, dismembered corpses, and cannibalism. You enjoy banned books, just like the rest of us, don’t you?
Ha ha! Well, I am not afraid of the expression of ideas, if that’s what you mean. And I always thought that having a book banned or challenged due to content – ideas – was a sort of badge of honor. I have modified that opinion, though, because having been on the receiving end of angry criticisms about behaviors, actions, or language that have appeared in my books (every one of them, as a matter of fact), I can say that, as a writer, it kind of hurts. People who get all bent out of shape because of something that happens or is expressed in a book usually focus their outrage as a personal attack against the writer, as though there is some serious moral deficiency with the author. We’ve seen exactly this too many times, most recently to Ellen Hopkins and Laurie Halse Anderson. I’ve actually been called a “bad father” because of the things I write and for not having a problem with my own kids – who are 13 and 16 – reading my books.
6) Two characters in THE MARBURY LENS, best friends Jack and Conner, are completely different people. Who were YOU more like as a teen, Jack or Conner?
I was definitely like Jack in so many ways when I was a teen. And for some reason, most of the guys I hung out with were like Conner. I think he’s an interesting character, too, for a few reasons. A lot of guys have friends like Conner, who put a tremendous amount of pressure on them to be cool or to try to be like them. I don’t think it’s necessarily malicious, though. Conner genuinely loves his friend Jack, but there is that constant testing going on between them, buttons being pushed, the incessant pressure to be a man. I think that’s just part of the natural psychology of male relationships for teens. It’s almost like a psychological contest between the friends, jockeying for alpha-status, and it leaves Jack frequently focused on his failures and inadequacies. Just another one of the endless joys of adolescence.
7) Have you always been a writer? Even as a kid?
I used to write things constantly – stories, comics, and even full-length novels that I’d compile in composition books – throughout my childhood and growing up. And NO, none of them were any good. But I always knew I was going to be a writer. It was more than a “wanting” to be something. I just knew I was going to do it. So I never stressed about it, wasn’t impatient. I had a number of paid jobs writing. They were not exciting and unimpressive. I was patient with myself, and one day I just decided I was ready to do it. I don’t know that I was actually “ready,” but I did it anyway. And I’ll be honest here, too: there’s an awful lot about “being a writer” that I hate. Sorry, but that’s true.
8) What are some YA books that you’ve read recently and loved?
Yikes. Put me on the spot here. First off, I totally HATE the label “YA.” It’s kind of like Santa Claus – you either believe it exists, in which case it doesn’t matter what it looks like – or you’re the kid with no presents once a year. But I love these books: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy (I recently re-read this one, and I think it’s probably the most beautifully-written YA book ever). Stitches by David Small. All of these books are absolutely magnificent. You could make a case they are all YA, but, again, I think that’s an indefinable category. Huckleberry Finn? To Kill a Mockingbird? Something Wicked This Way Comes? (Ray Bradbury’s prose is delicious). YA??? Bullshit. Yeah, I’m the kid with no presents in December.
9) What’s the best thing about being a published writer?
The BEST thing: talking to young people who love to read and want to become writers. Seriously. That is the BEST thing. It’s not about hero-worship, it’s about letting kids know that it’s totally okay to want to write, to love doing it, to embrace books and the magnificence of written human expression. There aren’t too many of us believers left in this country, and the educational system is succeeding at killing the attraction toward creativity, inquisitiveness, and human ingenuity in young people today.
10) What do you want people to take from reading your novels?
Okay. That’s a question I’ve never been asked – and never thought about – before. I know there’s a school of thought that emphasizes the consideration of audience, but I don’t do that. I never have. I only write the things that I would want to read, the stuff that I feel like I really need to write. I’m happy that so many readers have connected to things I’ve written, but I never considered anything I’ve done as having some kind of prescriptive function. Maybe I’m over thinking the question. I do like people to guess, make their own assumptions, decide for themselves what the purpose of any chunk of writing is. I am frequently ambiguous. You know about the blind spot in the human eye? Part of your eye has a hole in it – a blind spot. Your brain automatically “creates” the image that fills in that blind spot on your retina. I like to leave blind spots in my writing because I really wish I could “see” what that spot looks like. It isn’t a mistake; it’s intended. So I guess that if there was something that I want readers to get, hopefully it’s a sense that they’re reading something that they haven’t already seen a thousand times before, peering into the hole in their own fields of vision.
Released: December 7, 2010 
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