Features : Author Interview :
Louis Sachar: Success, Step by Step
By Jessica Rae Patton, Associate Editor
This accomplished author takes a measured approach to life, work and telling a wonderful story
"Most days it feels like, 'Well, I didn't do anything today.' And then somehow all those days add up and I have something that I really feel good about. That's my philosophy."
One would think that writing the follow-up to Holes (Yearling, 1998), the first book to win both the Newbery medal and the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, would be a daunting undertaking. But Louis Sachar approached it in the same way he'd written his previous 22 books for children: one small step at a time. His writing philosophy was adopted for the title and overarching theme of his latest book, Small Steps (Delacorte, 2005), which stars Armpit, a minor character from Holes. Back at home in Austin, TX, after doing his time at Camp Green Lake, Armpit (or Theodore, as he now prefers to be called) is trying to put his life in order. He's finishing up high school and working for a landscaping company, where he gets to dig holes for profit instead of penance. His neighbor Ginny, a 10-year-old girl with cerebral palsy, is learning to literally take small steps, and the two form a sweet friendship through which the reader gets to know the Theodore behind his Camp Green Lake bully persona.
Step one:know what you don't want to do. Louis Sachar, whose quiet demeanor is in contrast to the outsized humor and tall tales often found in his stories, stopped by the Teaching K-8 editorial office in Norwalk, CT, one afternoon while on a book tour for Small Steps. Coincidentally, Louis moved to Norwalk from Berkeley, CA, after college for a position at an apparel warehouse owned by a friend of his father's. "It was a chance to see the other side of the country," Louis told us. But managing a sweater inventory apparently wasn't his calling, and Louis was fired from the job.
Upon returning to Austin, he set five goals for himself. Five small steps.
- Graduate from high school.
- Get a job.
- Save his money.
- Avoid situations that might turn violent.
- Lose the name Armpit.
He decided to apply to law school, but his true career had already been started; when not sorting sweaters, he'd written his first kid's book, Sideways Stories from Wayside School (Harper Trophy, 1978) not far from the very office where we put him on the hot seat nearly 30 years later. Inspired by a job he'd had as a recess supervisor at an elementary school while in college, the book was about the wacky goings-on at a school built 30 stories high with one classroom on each story. Every chapter profiles a different student, all named for kids Louis had known in that job. Ever-present throughout the book is a sagely, likeable grown-up character named "Louis, the yard teacher," which is what the real-life students had called him.
"I was sending out 10 copies of the manuscript to 10 different publishers and I sent law school applications at the same time," he said. He returned to California and enrolled in Hastings College of Law – and learned within the first week of school that his manuscript had been accepted. "My heart was never in law," Louis confessed. He graduated law school, passed the bar and did part-time legal work while continuing to write books.
Step two: pursue what you love. Sideways Stories was originally published by a small company and wasn't marketed, yet whenever children managed to discover it, the fan mail followed. "That's kind of what kept me going," he said. "I thought if I could get a book really marketed, I could succeed at this." The publisher went out of business and it took several years for Louis to get the rights back. In the meantime he'd written three other titles. With the commercial success of There's a Boy in the Girl's Bathroom (Knopf, 1987), Louis was able to convince Avon, which had published Johnny's in the Basement (HarperTrophy reprint edition, 1983) and Someday Angeline (HarperTrophy reprint edition, 1983), to take on Sideways Stories. "They kept saying they weren't sure. So I started just forwarding all the fan letters! I didn't know if that would make a difference, but they finally agreed to publish it." As he had hoped, a new audience of kids loved Wayside and its silly inhabitants, and he was finally able to quit law and fully commit to his writing.
Step three: create a routine. Louis Sachar's writing habits have remained steadfast since pecking out that first book in short time periods between shifts. He writes in solitude (but for a family dog being permitted, on occasion, into his home office in Austin, TX) and usually for no more than a couple hours a day. "I just feel I'm not quite at my peak anymore after about two hours. I start to feel fatigued and concentration levels drop," he explained. "And then I just can't wait to get back to it. I'm sure there's a part of my mind that's always working on it." He works on one title at a time, and no one – not even his wife or 19-year-old daughter – knows what he's writing about or is privy to reading it until he completes the book. "The routine is the thing. It's not waiting for flashes of inspiration, it's just going through it every day. Most everything I start is so bad at the beginning that if I went away from it for a week, I'd say, ‘Forget it, I'll do something else!' It's only going to it every day that keeps me at it."
Step four: believe in yourself. We asked Louis what it was like, after a 20-year writing career, to become an "overnight" success with Holes. His response to the accolades was a measured one. He expressed his gratitude for winning the Newbery yet stressed the importance of not letting other people's opinions – complimentary or critical – effect him too deeply. "Because early on writers face lots of rejection, you kind of have to just believe in yourself and not let other people's rating of you interfere with whether or not you think you've got a good story," he said.
One autograph at a time - Louis affably signed several books and audiobooks for a Lucky Subscriber during his visit.
Step five: help others to do the same. Louis' characters are a motley bunch. There are the petty-criminal kids and the kiss-and-kill bandit in Holes; the pop diva Kaira DeLeon in Small Steps; the evil Mrs. Gorf and the jewel of a teacher, Mrs. Jewls, in the Wayside series; bullies, worriers, clique-starters, lovable misfits and kids who end up in wildly imagined, unpredictable predicaments. A common theme across the population of his 23 titles, however, is the importance of getting to know and like oneself, whomever that is, and caring about others regardless of difference.
In an exaggeration of this, difference is the norm at Wayside School; the whole notion of what's normal is put in a blender and poured onto the page. In the funny final scene of Sideways Stories, Louis, the yard teacher, tells Mrs. Jewls' class a tale of a school even weirder than theirs, where all the classrooms are in a building that's only one story high; where children don't trade names and no one is turned into an apple by a teacher; the walls don't laugh and two plus two always equals four. The teacher reassures the startled children that Louis is just telling a fairy tale. "‘Class,' said Mrs. Jewls. ‘Let's all thank Louis for his wonderful story.' Everybody booed." Which is the least-likely response Louis Sachar will ever receive from children to his stories.
November/December, 2006, Vol.37, No.3
