Now, I never start a novel until some young reader, somewhere, gives me the necessary nudge. For inspiration, I now travel about sixty thousand miles a year, on the trail of the young. My readers remained mysteriously the same age. Shortly, I noticed that while I was growing older every minute at the typewriter, At first, I wrote with my own students in mind. I'd quit my teaching job that day, liberated at last from my tenure and hospitalization.
"I wrote my first line of fiction on May 24th, 1971 - after seventh period. In all my novels, you have to declare your independence from your peers before you can take that first real step toward yourself. I found my future readers right there in the roll book.Īfter all, a novel is about the individual within the group, and that's how I saw young people every day, as their parents never do. And it was teaching that made a writer out of me. In Decatur we'd been brought up to make a living and not to take chances, and so I became an English teacher, thinking this was as close to the written word as I'd be allowed to come. "I went to college in Indiana and then England, and I was a soldier in Germany - a chaplain's assistant in Stuttgart - ghost-writing sermons and hearing more confessions than the clergy. Living easy lives through tranquil times novels are the biographies of survivors. The freedoms and choices prematurely imposed upon young people today have created an entire literature for them. When I was young, we were never more than five minutes from the nearest adult, and that solved most of the problems I write about for a later But Decatur returned to haunt me, becoming the "Bluff City" of my four novels starring Alexander Armsworth and Blossom Culp. My mother read to me before I could read to myself, and so I dreamed from the start of being a writer in New "I spent the first eighteen years of my life in Decatur, Illinois, a middle-American town in a time when teenagers were considered guilty until proven innocent, which is fair enough.
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