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INTERVIEW WITH PATRICK JONES, author of "Nailed"

"Nailed" is your second novel. How has the experience of having a novel published been different this time around?

Well, I’m more prepared for negative reviews. I’d never received a bad review for any of my professional books so the bodyslam that Johanna Lewis did on Things Change in School Library Journal was a different and difficult experience. But the process of writing was much different: I think I know what I’m doing now. I think my first draft of Nailed was much more developed than my first draft of Things Change, so I learned more about the writing process, although I’ve still yet to learn to punctuate dialogue correctly. Finally, I’ve learned that writing fiction is a collaborative process between an author and an editor.

How do you think you've changed as a writer since the first novel? Was this one easier or more difficult to write?

I’ve gained confidence even more than technique. I worked on Nailed off and on, sometimes writing unconnected chapters, except for the Bret character and this very traditional teen theme about being an outsider. I was almost finished in 2003, but decided I hated most of it, and gave up for while. Then, after getting positive comments about the advanced reading copy of Things Change in late 2003, I got this surge of confidence and creative spark, hurling me into a huge writing / rewriting jag in January 2004. If you’ve ever been to Minnesota in January, you know why I’d rather be inside writing than outside doing anything. This burst-o-energy and ball-o-inspiration got the essential story on paper.

Then I asked librarian friends, some teens who emailed me after reading Things Change, and a high school book discussion group to read and respond to the manuscript over spring/summer 2004. And while there were certainly rewrites based on their comments, as well as suggestions from my editor Emily Easton, the core of the story stayed the same (things didn’t change that much this time!) from that first full draft to the final version.

Could you briefly describe your main character, Bret, and the challenges he faces in the novel?

Bret’s the artsy theater kid with the colored hair and a smart mouth, and thus doesn’t fit in. The challenges Bret faces are both at home – a father who greets him in the first line of the novel (“Bret, what the hell is wrong with you?”) and at school – a jocko bully who greets him the first day of class (“freak faggot”). So, he’s fighting to be his own odd self on two levels, while at the same time he’s desperately lonely and seeking female companionship. He’s somehow thinking that will make the bad stuff not so bad, and make him, for all his uniqueness, feel “normal.”

I think the strength of the book is that it's not about a “problem” other than the issues of growing up where teens need to deal with changing relationships with parents, peers, as well putting themselves in risky situations. The thing I like most about Bret is his voice: it's full of puns and alliteration, thus showing him to be a little smarter, a little better read, and a little stranger than your regular teen character.

What inspired you to write about a boy who doesn't fit in, and doesn't want to if it means sacrificing his individuality?

Well, parts of the story are somewhat autobiographical. While I wasn’t as “out there” as Bret, for Flint in the late 1970’s, I certainly felt like a nail. I wanted to look at how do you make it in the world as a "nail" -- as someone who sticks out. At the same time, as Mr. Douglas says in the book, “we're trying to have a society”, so what's the balance between being yourself and being part of a society?

While there's a mention of Columbine in Nailed, I don't have any idea what I could write about school shootings. Yet, I did want to write about the environment in schools where certain kids (Bret calls them water walkers) are privileged and others, like Bret, are somewhat disenfranchised, not just by the other students, but by the school establishment itself. The reference to Joseph McCarthy is very deliberate: the culture of school shootings seems to have created an atmosphere of fear and a hostile environment where being different isn't tolerated and snitching on friends is applauded.

The relationship between Bret and his father is central to the story. Why do you think they have so much trouble understanding each other?

Because they both have unrealistic expectations of the other, and expect the other person to change. The dad knows the path his son has taken is a hard one and tries to teach him that lesson; the son wants his Dad to accept him for who he is. He wants to be different, but suffer no consequences for it. While lots of Nailed is autobiographical, the father and son stuff is almost all fiction. Other than wanting me to cut my hair, my dad didn’t get on me about any of this kind of stuff and was supportive.

As in your first novel, "Things Change," you focus on a boy growing up in a working-class family. Why do you think you're drawn to this type of character?

Two reasons: first, because I grew up working class in Flint, Michigan. Everybody I knew had parents who worked for GM or as we called it, “worked in the shop.” Well, those jobs are gone so many parents of Flint kids now work, like Paul’s parents, in low-wage, no-health-insurance jobs. I also don’t think there are enough books about kids like Paul in Things Change or Bret in Nailed living on the very edge of poverty: living in trailer homes, single parent families, etc. I never want to write about teens (at least as the main characters) whose parents are doctors, lawyers, artists, etc. I want to write about working class kids in a county where the working class is disappearing. These kids need a voice.

Since Bret and his girlfriend, Kylee, are involved in a sexual relationship, how did you decide what level of detail or graphic description you would include in the novel?

That was a tough one in this book: my early version had more sexual detail much of which got edited. In rereading Nailed before a school visit, I was actually amazed at how much remains, but it is important to the story. Just as in Things Change, Paul used his physicality to dominate and control Johanna; Kylee in Nailed users her sexuality to control Bret. Also some of the references, mostly those to oral sex and masturbation, are not that graphic, so if the teen knows what I’m describing, they will understand.

I don’t know how you can write an honest teen realistic novel and not have teen characters thinking, talking, or engaging in sexual activity. All teens are sexual beings: some act on it with others, some with themselves, some do both and some do nothing, but that doesn't mean it is not part of them. What I want to do in my books is to have sexual feelings/actions as part of the teens’ lives. I don’t want to write a book that is just about sex, but about teens where sex is part of their lives. I don’t want to write a book like Rainbow Party where people get bored with the story and just read it for the good parts (like I did). I want to write books that don’t apply the standard formula of teens plus sex equals bad things (STD, pregnancy, etc). Teen sexual involvement has consequences, but there are not always tragic or dramatic. The numbers don’t lie about the amount of teen sexual activity in US, nor do hormones.

"Nailed" has some unsympathetic adult characters, including the school principal and at least one sadistic teacher, but there is also an admirable drama teacher who sticks up for Bret. Did you have any teachers who were role models? How important is it for teens to have an adult who is on their side?

One of the critiques of Things Change was there were no positive adult role model, so the first version of Nailed went overboard with lots of positive adult role models teaching Bret lessons. Emily wisely had me cut those back. The principal is kind of a stock villain, but very real to my experience in high school, as is the coach/teacher. A teen girl who read Nailed in manuscript form insisted that both the principal and coach/teacher work at her high school.

The drama teacher is very much based on my high school teacher Doug Dixon, thus I named him Mr Douglas. If you look at the assets models (www.search-institute.org), the idea of positive adult models appears in several parts of the asset framework. The new book I’m working on features a teacher as mentor.

What kinds of reactions have you had to the novel so far, from teens or other advance copy readers?

Just tremendous. I did a school visit in North Carolina recently where one of the students – a kid who liked to read and write but not play sports – told me, more or less, that I must have stolen his diary because I wrote his life. The few school visits I’ve done the reaction has been great. I was a little worried about it, in part because the majority of teen fiction readers are female and I wasn’t sure how they would like a book. Not just because the book has a first person male protagonist but one who is, for all his uniqueness, sometimes shallow. From adults, the reaction’s been very positive, with one person comparing it to Rats Saw God, which is, along with Speak, THE best teen novel ever.

The couple of reviews I’ve seen very positive, in particular talking about the richness of Bret’s voice and the “rawness” of the story. We’ll see what School Library Journal and/or Johanna Lewis have to say.

When you write, do you tend to draw from your own experiences or from the lives of teens you know now, or both?

If Paul in Things Change is who I might have been in high school if not for a few factors, then Bret in Nailed is who I wish I would have been in high school. While I was certainly a little outside of the mainstream as a theater/yearbook guy and not a jock/preppie, I didn't push it as far as Bret did.

There are many scenes in the book which are inspired by growing up in Flint, but not all of them directly involved me. The concert in the K-mart parking lot is something that did happen and I attended, but it was friends who did it, not me. I was in theater in school (and actually did play the part of Hugo Peabody in Bye Bye Birdie) but not in a punk band. I think I've mined my own high school days as much as possible, so I think most of the teen characters I write from now on will be more based on teens I met while on the road.

I see things in school when I do visit that I make notes about that I’ll work into a story. I have several teens I’ve established really good email relationships with who’ve offered to read manuscripts in early stages. One guy in Texas (Nick) sends me stuff every now and then about his life and times that I’m working into something I’m writing. There’s another (Lauren) from Ohio is helping me “think” out a novel that I just have the first line for : “I’m 15 years old and I’m driving a stolen car.”

As I talk about books I’m working on, teens help a lot. There’s a scene in my next novel, Chasing Taillights, that totally comes from talking out the scene (set at a teen dance club) during school visits. Finally, I like to share manuscript versions of my books with teens, either through email or as part of a school-based book discussion group in order get lots of feedback early in the writing stage So, yes I mine the memories, but also look for new fields of energy to tap into.

Are you working on another novel? Can you tell us what it's about?

My next novel for Walker/Bloomsbury is called Chasing Taillights. It should be out in spring 2007. The book was inspired by something I saw one day while visiting Flint. Right near Flint’s Southwestern Academy is a pedestrian bridge over the expressway which connects a pretty nice area of Flint with one that is getting a little rougher. One day, during the middle of the school day, I drove under the bridge and saw two girls – one white, one black – getting high up on the bridge.

That image lead to a questions about who these girls were, why they were together on the bridge, etc. My first version of the book was told from the black girl’s POV, but after talking it over with Emily, as well as two female African American authors and another female African American librarian, I decided that the book would be stronger if I made the characters white. It is hard enough to write with credibility in the voice of another gender, let alone a different ethnic experience. We were concerned that people would be talking about the idea of a white writer writing in first person black character rather than the book itself. Also I was very concerned about being accused of stereotyping, even if the incidents or experiences might be totally true to the experiences of the characters I’d be writing about, so I let it go. So, while I changed a lot due to changing the ethnic background of the main character, most of the book remains the same.

It's still a story about a young woman (Christy) growing up in poverty in Flint. She and her best friend spend a lot of the book getting high. From Christy, getting high provides a temporary release from her home / house of horror where she is raped by one of her older brothers on a regular basis. Her rape is his sex life. I should add this part of the story was inspired by a girl I met at a juvenile correctional facility.

If Things Change was about a girl moving from innocence to experience, Chasing Taillights is about a young girl trying to reclaim her innocence through empowerment. It’s a tough book because of the subject, but also I’m making heavy use of flashbacks, making it very deliberately a little more literary. So, that is due in spring 2007.

Never one to rest, I’ve finished the first good solid draft of a fourth novel, called Cheated which I’m just now letting teens and the “usual suspects” of YA librarian read in manuscript form. The broad outlines of the story is based on a Flint news story from a few years ago. Cheated is about three teens who brutally murder a homeless man because he shortchanges them after they get him to buy beer. That incident, however, is just the inspiration; everything about the book is fiction and has nothing to do with any of the real people involved.

I’m also trying different ways to tell the story. It's told in 3rd person rather than 1st person. Also, while my other three books more or less take place over one school year; the first 2/3rd of Cheated happens in one day, from when the main character Mick wakes up all through his school day until he goes to bed that night after participating in this murder. As I mentioned, I have a title (Stolen Car) and a first line for a fifth novel.

I’m not going to write professional books or articles anymore, so I can concentrate on fiction. Given that, I think I should be able to do a book every 18 months at this rate, which is a lot different than the almost 18 years it took me to publish Things Change.

Anything else you'd like to add?

I’m reluctantly joining the “Borg” of the blog with my revamped web page. The address is the same (www.connectingya.com) but I hired YASLA member (and one day YALSA president, I predict) Meg Canada to revise my page. There’ll be a “door” about my fiction writing life, and one for my training life. I won two lifetime achievement awards in 2006 – one from the Catholic Library Association and one for the American Library Association – so that’s a nice cap to the work I’ve been doing the past twenty years training librarians. While I do plan to still go on the road to train librarians about young adult services, I continue to hope my focus will shift more toward the author side with more books and more school visits. As I once read, things change.

Read more about Nailed at Patrick Jones' web site: http://www.connectingya.com/nailed.html

Contact info:
Patrick Jones
http://www.connectingya.com/
Patrick@connectingya.com