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INTERVIEW WITH PATRICK JONES,
AUTHOR OF ‘THINGS CHANGE’

Order the book from Barnes & Noble here.

Most people probably know you for your nonfiction books and articles about young adult librarianship. What inspired you to write a novel? How was the process different from writing nonfiction?
I was inspired to write a novel by two events that came together in May 1987. Yes, 1987. I was working as a full time YA librarian and I was reading lots of YA lit. While there was some good stuff, some of it was horrible: preachy, false, and filled with happy endings. I thought I could do better: not because I thought writing YA was easy (if it was so easy it would not have taken me 17 years to publish), but rather that I had a different vision of what a YA book could and should be. Also, I took a long driving trip where I talked the novel into a tape recorder. When I got back from the trip, it was merely matter of unloading the movie I’d written in my mind onto paper. I’ve also met lots of YA librarians working on novels: in fact, some of us formed an online writing group which was instrumental in forcing me to update this book in 2000. I finally decided in 2000 to get serious about working on Things Change, but the process was so different. It wasn't about trying to share information, but an emotional experience. This takes a lot less research, but at the same time, is much harder to write than books or articles for the professional literature.

In "Things Change", Johanna can't make herself leave her boyfriend, Paul, even though he is violent and controlling. Why did you decide to address the issue of dating violence in a novel? Did you start out wanting to deal with that problem, or did you have one of the main characters in mind first?
I didn’t really set out to write a “problem novel” but rather a novel about two characters, and the conflicts between them. That is what I like most in books, movies, and even in professional wrestling, is watching how two characters solve the inevitable conflicts that emerge between them. The more intense the relationship; the more intense the conflicts. My interest was more in the obsessive all consuming nature of teen love/sex relationships than only dating violence. The real conflict in the book in some ways isn’t between Paul and Johanna, but within Johanna as her head battles her heart. I also wanted to write a break-up novel. Although a lot of that ended up getting cut, I’d never recalled reading a YA novel that dealt with the emotional abyss that teens experience when a relationship ends. I needed a reason, however, for Johanna not to walk out of the relationship immediately once Paul becomes abusive, and the key to that was developing the most important relationship any teen has in their lives: the relationship with their parents. It is something that rings true with lots of people who have read Things Change. There is a real truth when Johanna more or less says she would rather stay in an abusive relationship than end it and deal with the “abuse” of her mother’s “I told you so” face. I should add that when I wrote Things Change back in 1987, there wasn’t any novel and only one YA nonfiction book about dating violence. Since then, there have been a lot, but I've not read them for obvious reasons.  I wanted to write a novel about real teen characters with problems, not a problem novel in the classic sense.

"Things Change" alternates between Johanna's point of view and Paul's. Did you find one point of view more difficult to write than the other?
The differing point of view was the one of the “ah ha” moments that happened at my friend Patricia Taylor’s kitchen table. In early 2000, Patricia and I got together once a week to work on novels we’d started, but yet to publish. It was there that I decided on the alternating point of view, although Johanna’s story is the larger one and she gets more of a voice. It was hard writing in two voices, especially trying to imagine how a teenage girl would think about things. From my experience in YA library work and from Patricia's experience teaching at an all girl's school for years, I think that I was able to make the voice real. The hardest thing, according to my YA librarian pals who read the book in galley, was for them to get my voice out of their heads when they were reading Johanna’s parts. But how the story was told had to change. Years ago, Chris Crutcher helped me get a copy of my manuscript to an editor who said, more or less, you have a great story but no idea how to tell it. She was right, although I didn’t think so at the time. It took Emily Easton at Walker to help me learn how to tell it, as well as the comments of YA librarians, teens, and friends who read earlier versions and urged me to focus mostly on Johanna.

In writing this novel, did you draw on things you've learned as a librarian working on teens, through observations and conversations on the job? Or did you draw more on your own teen years?
There are certainly some autobiographical elements to the novel: I did grow up in Flint Michigan, which is similar to Pontiac, I did drive a firebird, and some other stuff. I wasn’t as a teen listening to Springsteen; I was more into the Stones, The Clash, and new wave. So while it was grounded in some real touchstones, but most of the novel was indeed invented. While I read it after the fact, it is really what Stephen “Where’s My Margaret Edwards Lifetime Achievement Award” King writes about in his book On Writing about not worrying about theme or plot, instead let the characters figure it out. The more I wrote and rewrote, the more the characters moved away from their reality moorings and into real, yet purely fictional, people. The thing that I probably brought in most from my work with teens in libraries was the basic understanding of core developmental drives, but also my observations about how teen boys would physically dominate teen girls. There’s a scene in the book where Paul is leaning into a girl as he’s talking to her, his arms are like bars on a cage: he’s not hitting her, but he is physically intimidating her. I think the stat the dating violence is 10% of teen girls experience it, but my guess that almost half encounter this kind of physical intimidation.

Did you ever have trouble sympathizing with Paul, given that he is abusive and violent toward his girlfriends? How did you avoid making him a totally unlikable character?
Paul has to be likable, even sympathetic or if not, Johanna would dump him right off. She loves him, that's her problem. One of the drivers of the book was the Springsteen song “Thunder Road.” The song tells a great story about this guy showing up at this girl’s house and talking her into car. It is a great romantic song, but "what if." What if he really was a manipulative jerk, who can use those skills to harm as well as charm? Paul’s hard life provides an explanation but never an excuse for his awful behavior. Paul is likable, and he does, in his own way, love Johanna. The problem for Paul is that he’s grown up in a house with violence and with alcoholism, and thus as happens in many households that cycle keeps repeating itself. The reader and Johanna have to believe he will change, if not, then there’s no drama to the story.

What do you hope teen (and adult) readers will get out of your novel?
They say if you want to send a message, call Western Union, so I’m not sure if the book has a clear message other than “be more careful.” My guess what teens will get out of it is an understanding about how life is very complicated, often unfair, and awfully messy. And that while love "solves" some problems, it creates a big steamy batch of new ones as the head and the heart don't always figure things out at the same time. For adults, the message is murkier. For one, while there is one adult sympathetic character in the novel, I wanted these teen characters, as many real teens do, to work it out on their own. There’s no school counselor to save the day. One of the most difficult issues in the rewriting process was Johanna’s mother. She’s not very sympathetic, but then again, the book is from Johanna’s point of view, so she doesn’t have a full portrait of her mother. That’s the hard part of anyone writing teen fiction in the first person: your teen characters have limited perspectives and experiences.

How was the process of getting a novel published different than the experiences you've had with nonfiction?
The process is different on every single level. In addition to the novel taking 17 years and a professional book having never taken longer than a year, everything else is different. The editors at the professional publishers want content: you still have to write well, but mostly they sell content; information and expertise. They will rewrite, edit, and reorganize your work to make it clearer, because it’s all about content. Fiction is an emotional experience, and the editor of Things Change, Emily Easton, made me do all the work: which is how it is supposed to be for fiction. She asked hundreds of questions, made some suggestions, but mostly left it for me to figure stuff out, which sometimes took a while. Because fiction writing is emotional, I found myself more emotionally tied to what I wrote, and it was harder to give up. While working with folks at Neal-Schuman for example, they might decide to delete entire chapters and rearrange the contents of the book, and I’m like” fine, I’m not married to it.” But giving up stuff in writing fiction is harder. It’s not that one of way of editing is better; they are just different for good reasons. The difference between a first draft and the final publication of a professional work isn’t normally huge: it is still the same book, but with some changes. But each draft of Things Change, and it went through six major ones, is a different book. It started only as my book, then as I let other people read it, such as teen librarians and teens, a much different book evolved. Then, as I started working with Emily, well…as the title says, Things Change. My funny story is there are only three lines that are the same from the 1987 version: the first line, the last line, and the inside joke to my Flint friends.

How to you plan to promote the novel, to both teen librarians and the general public? Will you be available for author visits?
I’m promoting Things Change a couple different ways. First, we got lots of advance reading copies out there to create a little buzz. I’ve not been real shy in letting this rumor I’ve been working on YA novel spread. I’m doing some interviews like this one with both Public Libraries and Voice of Youth Advocates. I’ll promote it on my webpage, Walker has a great spread on their page including a sample chapter, and I’ll be signing at ALA in Orlando. I would, time permitting, consider author visits, but it’s a tough book for that kind of event. The themes, the language, and the sexual content (although not explicit, it is there) make it a book that certainly some schools might shy away from promoting. I know, from my experience on the other end, if you can’t get kids at a school reading an author’s book, they won’t be excited and show up for a visit. I know that library sales rise and fall on the reviews, and all the early ones have been good, so I’m optimistic. It’s not a “perfect ten” which is a concept I coined at VOYA, but I think it’s an entertaining, engaging and emotional read.

Are you working on a new novel? Any nonfiction projects coming up?
I’ve just finished the first draft of a novel called “nail”. The theme is “the nail that sticks out gets hammered” which pretty much describes the theme of lots of great YA fiction, starting with The Chocolate War. The process was similar and different. I wrote the first chapter in April 2000, then wrote off and on but with no closure until recently. I finally, like with Things Change, let the movie unload from my head on paper and wrote / rewrote about 65,000 words in the space of ten days in January 2004. I like it a lot, but I know it is a long way from done. I know better now that writing fiction is a long road, but I’m gained confidence, experience, and I hope soon an audience. In professional work, I just had a chapter in the book Serving Older Teens (Greenwood, 2003) and have a couple of articles, one on teen web pages and the other on services to teens in corrections, upcoming in Young Adult Library Services. The third edition of Connecting Young Adults and Libraries should be ready for text book use in fall 2004. Almost 80% of the material in the book is new, in part because it is built on lot more on “best practices” I’ve learned about while training across the country, but also because I have two co-authors: Michele Gorman from Austin TX and Tricia Suellentrop from Johnson County, KS. The book should be called “YA advice from Interstate-35” since all three of us work in places connected by the same interstate. Michele and Tricia joined me because I don’t do during my “nine to five” a lot of pure young adult work, so I wanted to make sure the book wasn’t drowning in pure theory and preaching. Their work will keep the text very practical which seems to be the feature that has made the “big pink book” popular with library school students and practitioners.  Finally, I have an article about professional wrestling forthcoming in a book called Encyclopedia of Sport in American Culture, which was due out in 2002, but got delayed until this summer.

You say in your author's note that you've given seminars on young adult services in 49 out of 50 states. Any news yet from Arkansas?
Actually, soon after I sent in that author’s note, I got the call from Arkansas, where I am headed in mid February 2004. After I do a gig in Mississippi in late March, then I will have presented in all 50 states about connecting young adults and libraries. I hope these presentations have assisted librarians in building better services for teenagers. I know they’ve helped YALSA because it now has a larger membership that ALSC. That’s not all me, but I would like to think that my work as a “road warrior” and my involvement in the Serving the Underserved project have helped with this. I’ve tried to a share a vision about how to connect teens and libraries, but not just through cool programming or high tech stuff. I like to focus on the basics, on core values, and making sure we get those things right, not that there is one right way to do teen services. You do whatever works best for your community, and every community is different. Because of that, every library response is different, every collection is different. My last project was to identify a core collection for school and public libraries serving teens.  I hope Things Change and maybe there is one new novel to add to this core list..

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