Debut Author Interviews

Thatcher Heldring is the author of Toby Wheeler: Eighth Grade Benchwarmer (Delacorte/Random House, Summer 2007)

• Thatcher Heldring on...Ideas
• Thatcher Heldring on...Training
• Thatcher Heldring on...Setting
• Thatcher Heldring on...Influential Books
• Thatcher Heldring on...Ideal Reader
• Thatcher Heldring on...Character and Self
• Thatcher Heldring on...Favorite Teacher
• Thatcher Heldring on...Self-Help Books
• Thatcher Heldring on...Website
• Thatcher Heldring on...Favorite Library
• Thatcher Heldring on...Favorite Book
• Thatcher Heldring on...Cover Art
• Thatcher Heldring on...First Novels
• Thatcher Heldring on...Completion

Where did you get the idea for your book?

Where did the idea for TOBY WHEELER: 8TH GRADE BENCHWARMER come from?

As a senior in high school, I rode the bench on the varsity basketball team. I averaged less than a point a game and once forced a turnover without a single second ticking off the clock. Good times. For the book, I wanted to tell the story of a basketball season as seen through the eyes of a benchwarmer. Now, there are two species within the benchwarmer genus. Happy-to-be-here benchwarmers, which is what I was. And get-me-in-the-game now benchwarmers. Toby had to be the second kind if there was going to be any tension. What happens to him during the season, and the ideas for game situations, came less from personal experience than from imagination, reading, and surfing coaching websites. But if I hadn’t been the twelfth man (of twelve) on that basketball team, this book probably never would have happened.

What writing training have you had?

I have never taken a writing class. As a history major in college I learned to go an awfully long way on very little fact. This skill is very important if you want to be a novelist. I also rely heavily on other books in the most honest way I know how. What I mean is, reading stacks and stacks of other middle-grade and young-adult books has given me a sense of what I like, what I don’t like, and where I think I fit in. And, yes, I am terrified I will brain-pocket an idea that doesn’t belong to me and pass it off as my own. That’s why I cease reading during the writing process. But the most important training is experience. In order for fiction to come out, something has to go in. That some something is experience. That’s why you see author bios like So-and-so has been a teacher, a bartender, a navy seal, an arctic explorer, and an understudy for several members of the Culkin family . We aren’t bragging or trying to be clever. We just want you to know that we have the real-life experience to back-up all the stuff you just read in our books. So, that’s my training: reading and experience.

Where is your novel set, and why there?

Toby Wheeler: Eighth-Grade Benchwarmer is set in the fictional town of Pilchuck, Washington. The story takes place in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains, where there actually is a Mt. Pilchuck, a Pilchuck River, and a Pilchuck Pizza. The only thing missing is the town! And like a lot of real communities in the Pacific Northwest, Pilchuck is coping with significant changes. Nearby metropolitan areas like Seattle are expanding, sending more people into areas that were once rural. People who may have lived there and made a living in the logging industry are leaving for other jobs. Debates about land use rage. And meanwhile, it rains and rains. And when it rains, there are only two things to do (in a middle-grade novel anyway): join a band or find an indoor sport. Like basketball.

What books had an impact on you when you were growing up?

Growing up I read a bit of everything. Beverly Cleary, Judy Blume, Encyclopedia Brown, The Great Brain, The Call of the Wild. I finished Gentle Ben more than once and read The Hobbit like they paint the Golden Gate Bridge. Later, in high school, I took my literary medicine in doses of Wharton, Steinbeck, and of course Salinger, who made us all feel we were the only non-phonies in the classroom. Movies had a big impact on me, too. They are stories, after all. The good ones anyway. Empire of the Sun. ET. Stand By Me. The Breakfast Club. Hoosiers, obviously. And on television, shows like Family Ties, The Wonder Years, and much more recently, the incomparable Freaks and Geeks. But the books that really influenced me as an author came to me as an adult. Louis Sachar is the master of being poignant without being sentimental. Rich Wallace is the greatest young-adult writer nobody has ever heard of. His sense of the male perspective has heat-seeking accuracy. His use of setting is not his own invention, but he does it at well as anyone. Gary Paulsen is not afraid to kill the moose, and I admire that too. There’s Twain as well, but, where to begin?

If you had an ideal reader, who would that be and why?

I suppose my ideal reader is a bit like Toby - a kid on the bench who has to figure out how to help his team win without the ball in his hand, and how to prove to the world he can play when he does have the ball in his hand. But there’s more to it. As adults we like to say that we’ve all been there, that everybody once in his life has been the benchwarmer, but I’m not sure that’s true by eighth grade. Athletes are athletes. And before high school when specialization really kicks in, coordination and the other qualities that make a good athlete tend to apply universally. If a kid is a soccer superstar, I wouldn’t bet against him on the basketball court, the football field, or the baseball diamond. This is all to say that my other ideal reader might be the superstar who reads a hero story about a benchwarmer and uses it to push himself even further or who reads the story and begins to look at a benchwarmer on his own team differently. Maybe this is naive. But if you watch the tape of the high school game in upstate New York where the coach put his manager in uniform for one night as a thank you for years of hard work only to watch the kid, who is autistic, hit six three pointers, and you see how the other players react, you have to believe the story of a benchwarmer having his day in the sun can have an impact on anyone.

Is your main character like yourself?

There is a major difference between me and Toby. I was a walk-on benchwarmer in high school. I had nothing to prove and no life lessons to learn. A book starring me as a benchwarmer would put every anesthesiologist from here to Chicago out of business. To me, being on the team was cake. Playing time, when it came, was icing. Toby, on the other hand, wants to show the world he can play “real” ball. He is like me in some ways though. I think we are both on the young side of eighth grade. Friends I had built forts in the woods with a year earlier were now smoking, going to parties with girls, and clashing with the police (sort of), and this is what happens to Toby in the book. Except for the smoking and the police.

Describe your favorite teacher when you were your protagonist’s age.

I am afraid most of my teachers in eighth grade were either counting the minutes until the end of the day - or retirement. I did have an English teacher who taught us to diagram sentences like they teach Marines to march. I was a grammar nerd and I loved it. Recently I discovered another much better known YA author also had this teacher in eighth grade. So, Ms. Benz, if you’re listening, you must have done something right!

What are some of your current favorite writing or author-help books?

Two of the writing books I like a lot are The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell and The Art of Dramatic Writing by Lajos Egri. One thought I came away with after reading Campbell was that we use formulaic as a very pejorative word when I think what we mean to say is stale. The mythic structure has been around for a long, long time so what’s the harm in using it as a guide? Nobody likes Star Wars any less just because Lucas followed the hero quest page-by-page, right? The other book deals with conflict and motive, is much shorter, and I recommend it very much. Oh, one more thing. After I finished The Power of Myth, I picked up a book called The Key: How to Write Damn Good Fiction Using The Power of Myth. It basically translated Myth into English. I recommend this book, too.

Do you have a website for your book? How did you handle setting it up?

I have website at www.thatchertheauthor.com. I mostly use it to post about sports. Not professional sports though. I would rather write 10,000 words about a ping-pong game I won in junior high or why I like my soccer team so much. Right now I’m posting about the history of baseball in the northwest as I read about it for the follow-up to TOBY WHEELER.

Describe your favorite library.

I moved back to Seattle after eight years in New York and was blown away by the libraries. I had read articles about the main branch, which attracted national attention even before construction began, but it was really the neighborhood branches that made my eyes pop. Many, if not all of them, have been redone in the time I have been gone. They all conform to a certain style, but are by no means identical. All seem to feature high ceilings, glass exteriors, ample seating, rows and rows of computers, helpful staff I would like to have a pint with, parking, and self-service check out. Maybe all these things are standard where you live, but they weren’t in New York and they weren’t when I left, so, the bottom line is: this first-time author is IMPRESSED. The first branch I went into was the Greenwood Branch. I entered and spent the first five minutes gazing up, down, and around like those kids in the Bridge to Terabithia ads. Like I said, all the branches are great, but since that’s the closest to my house, I’ll call it my favorite. Go Greenwood!

What was your favorite book when you were your protagonist’s age?

Oh man. My favorite book when I was thirteen? Probably The Hobbit. I never got too into fantasy, but this one swept me away. It was as close as I came to a book I could read in one sitting. If I skipped over the dwarf songs. Another book that might have been among my favorites if it had been published is Hatchet. Either way I’m all about books with the unprepared in the woods cheating death with their wits. Hold the dwarf songs though.

Did the art director read your entire book to get inspiration for the cover?

I am not sure whether the artist who designed the jacket to my book read the book. I do know that she did a terrific job. I made two or three suggestions after my publisher showed me a first pass and the designer incorporated them beautifully. I even tweaked a scene in an early chapter to match what is shown on the cover!

Was this the first full-length novel you wrote, or rather the first that you sold?

No. I completed a manuscript in college. A middle-grade novel about nothing. The last time I came across it I cringed. It was written in third person and loaded with trite sentimental ramblings about childhood. Even worse, I realize now I wasn’t trying to write a novel. I was trying to write the novel. Oh brother. The good thing is I knew if I stuck with something I could find my way to the end. When the opportunity came to write a book I knew would be published, that experience gave me a lot of confidence.

How did you know you were “done” with your book and ready to submit it?

I agree with the prevailing sentiment. Like a funny cat story, there is no such thing as “done”. I sent in my manuscript when I thought I had begun to do more harm than good. When you trim the fat, you don’t want to cut too deep, right? And I think I was right to get the book off my desk when I did. Because what I have found is that the material I have come to loathe the most in a story, the gunk that makes me cringe, will be the stuff the editor likes best. It works the other way, too. Sometimes I think the sentence I am most proud of is the first one I should delete. Especially if I wrote it at four in the morning. It goes on and on. I’ll be getting ARCs soon and I’ve already asked my editor if I can make some minor changes.