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This month Eisha and Julie interview Alan Gratz for The Edge of the
Forest.
The Edge of the Forest: The story of what inspired you to write Samurai Shortstop is great. For those who
don't know, tell us about it.
Alan Gratz: I had already been writing children's books, but hadn't sold anything yet. The first is called
After School Heroes, an action/adventure story about a team of teenage superheroes. The second was Inventing
Julia, a romantic comedy about a high school kid who invents a fictional girlfriend for himself so that real girls
will find him more attractive. I was finishing Julia when I got onto a Japan kick. I read everything I could get my hands
on, including manga, fiction, histories, travel narratives. I was in a bookstore one day wistfully flipping through a
travel guide to Japan and wondering when I would ever get to go when I hit a photo of a man in a kimono throwing out the
first pitch at what the caption told me was the 1915 Japanese National High School Baseball Tournament. I didn't believe it.
I had always assumed baseball was introduced to Japan by American GIs during the Allied Occupation after World War II. More
digging revealed that baseball had actually made its way to Japan with western sailors as early as the 1870s, right after
the Meiji Restoration, and a story began to take root with me.
The Edge of the Forest: Samurai Shortstop is narrated by a 14-year-old Japanese boy during the Meiji era.
How difficult was that for a southern white boy to do?
Alan Gratz: Purty dang hard. As an outsider, all I could do was ground myself in eastern philosophy and history, and
try to develop the story from that perspective. More challenging was balancing that eastern mentality with my western
audience. I had to find a way to make my characters true to their culture, but at the same time make them accessible to
American readers. From a technical standpoint, I chose to write the book in third person and not first person because it
kept the culture at a distance, making it more "foreign" in the book.
The Edge of the Forest: Have you always wanted to write for young adults? Do you have any desire/plans to write for
younger or older audiences? Any more playwriting in the works?
Alan Gratz: My goals in writing have changed a lot over time, usually tending to go from the fantastic to the more
realistic. For years, I wrote creatively on the side while I worked "real" jobs. The projects tended to be things like
X-Files television scripts and Star Trek novels, despite the fact that I had no realistic way to sell such things. Then I
got a bit wiser and started writing for a local community theater company. That was a lot of fun, but I quickly learned that
playwriting could only be a hobby for the kind of money I was getting in return. I flirted with comic books for a
time—again, with no realistic way of selling them—and then found young adult novels. At the time, my wife was
working as the children's book and toy buyer for a chain of bookstores, and she was reading lots of YA fiction for her job.
She'd finish one and hand it to me and say, "Read this, it's excellent!" Thus began my YA education. I read great
stuff—like Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak, Garth Nix's Sabriel, Philip Pullman's The Golden
Compass—and realized I wanted to be a part of this great renaissance in young adult literature. I read more and
more, then gave After School Heroes a shot. That book still hasn't sold, but it placed as a finalist in a contest
at Random House, and began opening doors for me that eventually, meanderingly, led to Samurai Shortstop. I've
found my home with YA fiction, and I'm here to stay.
The Edge of the Forest: Do you feel like your blog helps you connect with readers?
Alan Gratz: To be honest, no. Not yet, anyhow. I'm not sure that I have readers. To explain: I think
Samurai Shortstop has readers, but I don't think I have readers, the way a Meg Cabot or a Sarah Dessen has
readers. They have fans who read everything they write. I have a bunch of kids who thought Samurai Shortstop
sounded cool and gave it a chance. They are reading the book, regardless of who wrote it. Hence I have far more hits to
my book's web page than I do to my blog. More kids are interested in Samurai Shortstop than in me. As I have
more books published (the next one comes out this fall) I hope to begin to cultivate a general readership, and thus get
more reader interest in my personal life. So far, I think the best thing my blog has done is allow my friends and family to
keep up with what's happening with me professionally without having to hear me blather on about it when I see them.
The Edge of the Forest: Do you find there are any difficulties with maintaining a blog while maintaining a writing
career? Are there any aspects of blogging that have been surprising for you as a writer?
Alan Gratz: Well, it's like the old Friends joke about the gynecologist who spends all day at work looking at the
same thing. When he gets home, the last thing he wants to do is look at another one. I sometimes feel that way about
writing my blog. I typically spend about 3-5 hours a day writing, sometimes more if I'm cruising. Writing is not an easy
process. It takes considerable mental energy, and as a physical activity it's pretty monotonous. I love what I do—don't
misunderstand—but when I'm done writing my chapter I'm done writing for the day. I doubt the blackjack dealer claps his
hands and walks away from his table just to go deal a few hands in the break room, either. Sitting back down to the
computer in the evening to blog often feels like a chore, and when anything feels like a chore, it's going to be done with
the same lack of energy and enthusiasm.
What surprised me about blogging is partially what makes it so difficult for me: I cannot simply "dash off" a blog entry,
just as I could never "dash off" a chapter. I plot things out meticulously in my fiction writing; I consider openings and
climaxes and resolutions, language and pacing. What I've found is that I often can't help but do the same when I blog. The
joke is, many editors encourage their authors to keep blogs. I even read a note one publishing house sent out that told
authors that blogs "would take no more than fifteen minutes of your time a day." Pfft. Right. A well-crafted blog entry
takes much more than fifteen minutes to write. And then there's editing, and linking, and adding pictures, and
spellchecking...
The Edge of the Forest: Do you feel the blog helps you market your writing, that it brings you more of a spotlight
than if you didn't blog at all?
Alan Gratz: Again, I'm not sure my blog is doing a great deal at this point. Part of the problem is that, up until
recently, my blog has been what I've seen referred to as a "flog," that is, a blog that's only purpose is to flog the goods
or services of the author. Guilty as charged, I'm afraid. I began with the noblest of intentions: write regularly, talk
about the writing process, review books I'm reading, reveal humorous anecdotes about my travels. I did all that for a time,
and then the pub date for Samurai grew closer, there was more publicity to do, I sold two more books and began writing and
editing them, and suddenly the free nights where I kicked around fun things to post on my blog evaporated. What remained
were the constant updates on how Samurai was doing and where I was traveling, but there was little other original content
to bring readers—again, other than close friends and family—back. All this has made me sit down and really
reconsider my approach to blogging. I don't want to give up on it—it's a free tool I would be foolish to abandon
simply because it's inconvenient—but I decided what was needed was a fresh approach. Thus the birth of Gratz
Industries.
The Edge of the Forest: Tell me about Gratz Industries.
Alan Gratz: Glad you asked! In discussing my blog/flog issues with my wife Wendi, who as a crafter had also begun a
blog, we struck upon the idea of combining our two blogs and then adding more about our daily efforts to live creative and
still financially viable lives. Some of my wife's favorite blogs focus on the same topic—creative people talking about
living the creative life—and it seemed to us that we could feature our successes (the stuff of flogging) while also
discussing those things that were uniquely us without necessarily being financially motivated. Things like the fabric
solstice tree my wife sewed and stuffed for our four-year-old daughter; the cut-paper designs we did as a family; fun
things found in my research that have nothing to do with any book I'm writing or trying to sell. As I'm writing this, my
wife has just broken the needle in her sewing machine and has the thing half taken apart searching for the loose end. I
suspect that will make nice blog fodder for Gratz Industries.
On a side note, Wendi's blog was slaying mine in hits, so I come out the better for the merger.
The Edge of the Forest: What advice, if any, do you have for writers aiming to have a first novel published? What
advice, if any, do you have for writers who want to blog?
Alan Gratz: Finish something. Trust me, it sounds a lot easier than it is. My file cabinet is filled with false
starts. It wasn't until I committed to finishing the novels I began that I truly committed to being a professional writer.
It's one thing to sit around and dream about writing a book, and another thing entirely to stay with it the three, six,
nine, twelve months it may take you to write and edit it. I'm also a big advocate now of heavily outlining your work before
you begin. My real breakthrough as a professional writer came when I realized that story development and story writing were
two very different things. Outlining in detail allows me to sit down to write a chapter and not worry about what I'm
writing, but instead how I'm writing. It broke my writers block and freed me to think far more about sentence craft than
I ever did before.
For writers who want to blog? If you are your own audience, if you share their same interests, blog about yourself. One of
the first things I do with a book I like is flip to the back to read the author bio and see if there's a picture. If there's
not much there, I go on the internet. I'm always interested in who authors are as people. Unless you're a serial killer,
share.
The Edge of the Forest: Something Rotten: A Horatio Wilkes Mystery, your upcoming second novel, is
scheduled for a Fall '07 release. You describe it on your blog as a "Shakespeare/Raymond Chandler mash-up." Do tell us
more.
Alan Gratz: Glad you asked! Ever since I took a Mystery and Detective Fiction writing class at the University of
Tennessee as an undergraduate, I've been kicking around a character named Horatio Wilkes. Originally, he was a middle-aged
forensic anthropologist. Then two things happened: one, I discovered I knew nothing about forensic anthropology, and didn't
want to; two, Patricia Cornwell and everybody else in the known universe began writing about forensic anthropologists, and
there seemed little point to continuing down that avenue. (And this was even well before all the CSIs and Law & Orders.)
But I had a really well-developed character, and for years I kept trying to put him into different things because I liked
him so much. Nothing worked. Then when I began to focus on young adult novels, I naturally tried to squeeze him in there as
well. This time he fit. Rewriting the same sarcastic character as a seventeen-year-old seemed even more natural, and I
found myself going back to my original inspiration for the character—Horatio, the very practical friend to
Hamlet—for inspiration on the story. Rewriting classics with a contemporary spin is sort of in vogue right now
(Son of the Mob/Romeo and Juliet, Jake, Reinvented/The Great Gatsby, Flavor of the
Week/Cyrano de Bergerac to name a few) and I thought it would be a lot of fun to retell Hamlet as a
contemporary mystery set at a paper plant in Denmark, Tennessee, with the minor character of Horatio recast as a wry,
sarcastic teenager who helps his friend Hamilton Prince solve the murder of his father. Luckily, my editor liked it too.
The book made me laugh out loud even on the umpteenth reading during the editing phase, so at least I know it'll entertain
me.
My editor seems interested in turning Horatio into a recurring character too, and I'm working on the proposal now for a
second book, Something Wicked, based on Macbeth.
The Edge of the Forest: What is the most recent book you've read that you would rave about? Who are your favorite
authors? And do you find yourself with as much time as you'd like to devote to reading for pleasure?
Alan Gratz: I'm currently reading The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, which many people are predicting will
win the Printz Award this year. It would certainly be a deserving choice. I recently read The Brave, the sequel
to the excellent boxing story The Contender by Robert Lypsite, and am finding myself a real fan of both the
author and the books. I'm going to make a point of seeking out his other work now, including two more sequels. I stumbled
on three trade paperbacks worth of Powers comic books by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming (say those names
three times fast) that I enjoyed, and I also read M.T. Anderson's The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, which
is brutal and beautiful and brilliant and many other superlatives that do not begin with the letter B. It recently won a
National Book Award, so it really doesn't need me to tell people it's good. A lesser known young adult novel I read
recently and loved is Catherine Murdock's Dairy Queen, about a girl who plays high school football.
(And she's not a kicker.)
My favorite authors are Raymond Chandler, Michael Chabon, and Rex Stout, both in terms of quality and quantity.
Do I have enough time to read for pleasure? Never.
The Edge of the Forest: On that note, do you have a writing schedule? Do you write at certain times of the day,
in other words, consistently? And do you bounce your ideas and/or writing off anyone else, such as your family?
Alan Gratz: I try to work five days a week, and often end up working on the weekends as well. I write in the
mornings while my daughter is away at school, and sometimes into the afternoons when I'm on a tight deadline or the
writing has been going well and I don't want to stop. I've also gotten into the habit now of writing a chapter per day once
I'm into the actual writing part of the work, and I hate to leave a chapter unfinished for the next day.
Do I bounce my ideas off my family? Perhaps ad nauseam. I woke up yesterday, still groggy, telling Wendi, "I've got this
great idea for an episode of House. This old man comes in dying, and they can't figure out what's wrong with him.
His daughter says she knows: he's dying of a broken heart. The guy dies at the half hour mark, and House spends the second
half of the episode still diagnosing a dead man just to prove her wrong." That's great, my wife told me. I'll call Fox.
I'm sure they'll be interested. Now get your ass out of bed and get your daughter to school.
Seriously though, I do some of my best thinking on car trips, when Wendi and I poke and prod a story idea until it comes to
life. Or dies. Sometimes I poke things and they die.
The Edge of the Forest: Okay, we're going to steal The Pivot Questionnaire (a.k.a. the "Inside the Actor's Studio"
questions that James Lipton asks every actor at the end of each interview), 'cause we love them and they're interesting (and
we may or may not use them; perhaps we'll use just some of them).
Alan Gratz: All right. I promise to try and not be too cute when answering.
The Edge of the Forest: Can you briefly tell us:
* What is your favorite word?
Rumpus
* What is your least favorite word?
"Edutainment," which, alas, isn't even flagged by the spellchecker anymore.
* What turns you on creatively, spiritually, or emotionally?
Daydreaming, generating ideas, brainstorming.
* What turns you off?
Learning that a particular daydream is impossible or unrealistic
* What is your favorite curse word?
Dumb-ass is my most commonly used profanity, so much so that my daughter has
taken to asking me if all the people in the cars around us are dumb-asses. I
also used it enough in Something Rotten to learn from the copy editor
that it is written with a hyphen, which I didn't know. Creatively speaking,
I've become rather fond of "mouthbreather" as an insult, and shall be using
it in my next Horatio book if they buy it.
* What sound or noise do you love?
Tires or shoes crunching on gravel.
* What sound or noise do you hate?
A tie: The sound my cat makes when her hackles are up, or the beep-beep sound
trucks make when backing up.
* What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?
Fashion designer. I'm so completely addicted to Project Runway that
after watching season two I actually went through a minor depression wherein
I lamented I had never gone to school for fashion design, and was doing too
well at this writing thing to legitimately quit.
* What profession would you not like to do?
Food critic. Long story.
* If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?
"Want to have another go?"
About Alan:
Alan Gratz is the author of the historical young adult novel Samurai Shortstop (Penguin, 2006) which received
starred reviews from The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books and the ALA's Booklist. Samurai Shortstop
was named one of the ALA's 2006 "Top Ten Best Sports Books" and "Top Ten First Books for Youth," and is a Junior Library
Guild selection. Librarians have also nominated it for both the "2006 Best Books for Young Adults" and the "2006 Quick
Picks for Reluctant Readers" lists. Elizabeth Ward of The Washington Post declared Samurai Shortstop a "2006
Top Ten Novel for Children," and the book has been nominated for a 2006 Cybil, a new children's book award to be given by
online reviewers and bloggers. In addition to Samurai Shortstop, Gratz is the author of a number of short stories
and plays, as well as a handful of episodes of A&E's City Confidential. His next young adult novel, Something
Rotten: A Horatio Wilkes Mystery, is due from Penguin in October of 2007. For more information, check out:
Alan's blog: Gratz Industries
Alan's author site
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