 |
|
Zack Stentz (l.) and Ashley Edward Miller
|
Your work involved primarily screenwriting. What inspired you to write a novel with such an unusual hero?
Zack Stentz: Ash and I had written an earlier form of Colin Fisher as a television pilot that was widely read and appreciated but never bought, about a teen with Asperger's solving mysteries. Maybe if he were a doctor, lawyer or cop, there would be an audience for it.
Ashley Edward Miller: Doogie Howser was, what, 16?
ZS: The screenwriters strike of 2007 literally sidelined us. We're working dogs. If we're not working, we pee on things and chew on furntiture.
AEM: Our wives don't appreciate that.
ZS: Neither of us had written a novel before. Over the next year and a half, we wrote the book; 95% of it was written in two big bursts, by the end of which we had a manuscript. We sent it to our agency's big kids' lit guy, Eric Simonoff, and he said, "I think I can sell this," and two weeks later, he did.
How did you find the narrative voice, which isn't Colin's but is so simpatico with him?
AEM: When we wrote the original script, it was experimental, even for the screenplay form. We had some Walter Mitty–like things that were happening with Colin. He'd spell out words over people's heads. When we translated that into a novel, we had to figure out how to convey those storytelling techniques, the internal vs. external experiences. That's how we came up with the opening narration [in notebook form].
ZS: The chapter introductions [as notebook entries] are where you're completely inside Colin's point of view, and we pulled off what I think was a fairly nice trick, having the footnotes in the body of the book from a third-person point of view yet impressionistically conveying what it's like to think like Colin.
AEM: The footnotes came out in that voice, and then we'd think of things that amused us. One example is "the best movie of 1988... Die Hard.... Loud but good." We thought, "That kind of works." Even though the narrator has a different voice than Colin does, we wanted to make those voices compatible. The narrator is getting into the head of Colin.
ZS: An example would be that you never see someone else's emotions described directly but rather through their physical mannerisms.
Those design elements also highlight that Colin's life is a puzzle he must solve--attempting to read people's facial expressions and body language.
ZS: You hit on the theme that runs throughout the entire novel that we like to sum up as: "Life is a mystery."
AEM: Colin is constantly having to decode the world around him. We all have to, but he has to read a situation that requires analysis--things can lead him to the wrong conclusion. He doesn't know what he doesn't know, in a Rumsfeldian sense.
Tell us about Coach Turrentine.
ZS: We're doing two things with that character. We wanted to take the stereotype that you see a lot in kids lit and TV of the bullying gym coach and turn it on its head. With kids like Colin, if they're very lucky, they get a lot of help from trained professional therapists, but also people like Mr. Turrentine, who are accidental therapists, who know exactly how to reach someone like Colin in a way that's tough but fair.
AEM: He sees Colin for who he is. No agenda for Mr. Turrentine as far as Colin goes: "Any questions? Okay, didn't think so, moving on." This is a student who needs instruction. Everyone else has an agenda motivated by their emotions. The parents with their fear of what's going to happen to our son next. The brother and his resentment. Even Dr. Doran, the principal, looks at him, and he's among the problems she must solve.
ZS: A level of trust develops between Colin and Mr. Turrentine.
Your portrait of Colin as a teen with Asperger's is so convincing. Have you been exposed to children or others with autism spectrum disorders?
AEM: My firsthand experience is with my partner, and I'll leave it there.
ZS: I am on the Asperger's spectrum myself, and I have three kids, two of whom are on the autistic spectrum. There are big elements of imagination in there but also elements of autobiography and close observation. I think with all of our writing, not just this subject, what Ash and I strive for is a specificity of detail that makes someone feel authentic.
AEM: We didn't want the story to be about Asperger's, or autism, or dealing with it or living with it. They were facts of life for the people in the story. But ultimately Colin is a boy, and people would see the universality of it. On The Sopranos they only use the word Mafia once, and the one guy who says it gets killed. "Terminator" was only uttered once. Colin himself, because of how he's wired, can seem distant from the people around him in ways we don't understand. It would have been a colossal mistake to distance him from reality and then distance us from him.
ZS: By having Colin as a main character, you take everyone's feelings of outsiderdom and then "turn them up to 11," to use a Spinal Tap phrase. That's what Gene Roddenberry did so well in Star Trek--having a curious outsider look at a social structure to help you see it more clearly. Spock and Data are two of Colin's heroes. --Jennifer M. Brown