HOSTILE QUESTIONS

This interview first appeared on the fantastically disrespectful Hostile Questions site, over here. Posted by: Daniel Kraus It’s just a couple weeks before Marcus Sedgwick accepts the Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature. It’s a pretty sweet deal: your books get these neat foil dealies and you get to take home a glass — well, I don’t know what to call it. It’s a thing. A glass thing. Perhaps they should rename the award to The Glass Thing? Anyhoo, what did Mr. Sedgwick do to deserve such unusual glassware? He wrote a historical-novel-in-reverse called Midwinterblood. I know, it sounds brilliant, but I have a theory. The Youth Media Awards are always announced at the ALA Midwinter Meeting, so isn’t it possible that Mr. Sedgwick wrote this book for the sole purpose that the title would worm its way into the minds of Midwinter-ing Printz  Committee members so that they rubber-stamped it like glassy-eyed Manchurian Candidates? Isn’t it possible we are all victims to a massive conspiracy by a foreign interloper? That’s right, Sedgwick isn’t even American. And to think, he almost got away with it. The clever little bastard.        The best picture we had on file. Just who do you think you are? I think I’m a 46-year-old British writer with a liking for red wine and the films of Stanley Kubrick amongst other things, but somehow I also think I’m a 17-year-old dude who plays bass in a garage punk band. There is no evidence for this whatsoever, any more than there is that I have always felt like I’m about 72, even when I was 12. I hope I’m not getting any weird looks now – I believe we all have this feeling; who else might I have been? Who else could I be? Isn’t that one of the reasons we like to read? So we can become a thousand-year-old telepathic go-go dancing cat living in another galaxy? If no one has written this book yet, please could they? In summary, I have no idea who I am; I’m certainly not the person I often find myself describing when invited to speak about being a writer. It’s odd that other people always seem to know exactly who you are. Or think they do. Where do you get off? Well now, that would be telling. I seriously don’t think I should talk about that here, on the Booklist blog. I mean, this is a classy place, right? But I could perhaps mention other forms of mind-altering behavior, such as writing. Because this is an interview about writing, isn’t it? It isn’t? Oh. Well, anyway, I don’t do drugs because that whole thing is incredibly boring. And people talking about it is even more boring. If you take even a few minutes to look around, it rapidly becomes obvious that the whole world is a spectacularly strange mind-bump anyway. And as a writer you get to pick and choose the freakiest drugs in the candy store. And then, rather than ending up as a burned-out, bankrupt bore with ruined health, you get to turn these things into stories, for which there’s even the slim possibility you might get paid. So that’s how I get off. But I’m not letting on where. What’s the big idea? The big idea is linked to the above. It seems that the world falls into two kinds of people; those who think the world falls into two kinds of people, and those who don’t. And of those that do, the world falls into two kinds of people; those who seemed interested in the universe into which they have been deposited, and those who don’t look further than their toenails. As a writer, you are always being asked what’s the most important trait to have, and BEING INTERESTED in the world is right up there with good typing skills and a sassy agent. It’s probably the most depressing thing in the world when you meet someone who simply has no desire to look around, to understand himself or herself, or anyone else for that matter, or, in the loosest sense of the word, to explore. Note, these kinds of people tend not to be readers. That’s a generalization of course, but the world falls into two kind of people; those that… Oh yeah. Sorry. What is your problem, man? How long have we got? Do you want a list? I could draw you a picture if that makes things clearer, or maybe I could do a matrix diagram, like those that the incredibly-intelligent and not-at-all-patronizing people who work in advertising use to work out how to sell us stupid people rubbish stuff we don’t need. Matrix diagrams (potential for unlimited harm..!?) are dumb because they try to make the world simple. The world isn’t simple, it’s very complicated, but that’s not my big problem. My problem is that many people seem to think the world can be simplified; black/white, good/bad, Coke/new Coke, when the truth is way more complex than that. It would be like trying to classify everyone in the world as falling into two types of people; those that… Oh, yeah. Right. Sorry. My other big problem seems to be using the phrases ‘seem to’ or ‘seems to’ because I haven’t got the nerve to say what I actually think. Haven’t you done enough? Yes and no. I’ve probably done too much of some things. I guess you know what I’m talking about. But I haven’t done enough of the things that really matter to me, and writing is one of those. The very best part about being a writer is the time when you are putting words next to each other, trying to find an interesting and original and good way of doing that. When it’s going well, it feels very, very nice. I don’t get to have that experience anywhere near often enough – and actually I don’t think it would be possible to. So in the meantime I will go on, trying to ‘fail better’ as Samuel Beckett put it. But I’ll stop doing the other stuff. Thanks for pointing it out.