This spring, I lead my town’s 8th graders in discussions about Pete Hautman’s young adult novel Blank Confession, a story based on the novel Shane, which is about a mysterious cowboy who changes the lives of a family while working on their ranch for only a short while. In Pete’s story, a boy arrives in town and attending its high school (also for a short while), changes the lives of several of the kids and one family in particular.

I enjoyed talking with the classes about Peter’s use of point-of-view, the way he shifts chapters between third person limited for the point-of-view of a detective who is interviewing the high school boy named Shayne and the first person point-of-view when Mikey, one of Shayne’s new friends, tells the story of their time together. Shayne has come to see the detective to confess to a murder and tell him how it happened. Mikey is telling the story of his friendship with Shayne and how it transformed Mikey, who was continually bullied because of his small stature, into someone who could stand up for himself and what he believed in and wanted.

After teaching, I was able to attend a dinner celebrating the author’s visit. I had questions for him that he graciously answered. He followed up with more answers in our email exchanges. Here’s a composite of our conversation:

Sheila
When we met at the dinner in your honor, we talked about how you find stories. I’d love to hear what you said again. Let’s start with Blank Confession.

Pete
Blank Confession was not only inspired by, but is an homage to, Jack Schaefer’s 1949 novel Shane. It’s a modern take on the “a mysterious stranger comes to the aid of the oppressed.”

Sheila
Can you say something about why that book was the one you wanted to pay homage to? Was it the “aid of the oppressed” that interested you, especially for the Young Adult market?

Pete
It’s more the “mysterious stranger” part of the formula that excites me. In fiction, whether film or print, it can be  very satisfying for the reader/or viewer to slip into the skin of a character who is strong, confident, righteous, and driven. In films, there is often an iconic moment when the hero dons his armor (or best suit) and straps on his weapons, or when a heroine puts on her makeup and her best little black dress (sorry, my residual sexism is showing, but it makes the point). This moment models the fantasy we all share at times: to transform ourselves into a powerful avatar who can act outside the normal bounds of civilized behavior. Shane represents an American classic version of that. As for the “aid of the oppressed,” our hero needs that justification for his extreme actions.

(BTW, I find it interesting to watch how our politicians strive to present themselves as such strong, confident, righteous, driven characters, often going to great lengths to create evil straw men and oppressed classes to suit their narratives.)

I should add that the character Mikey represents the antithesis of Shayne: fearful, vulnerable, uncertain, and buffeted by forces he cannot control. In the end, we see the characters trade places to some degree.

Sheila
Thanks, Pete. That provides insight into how a fiction writer views story, which is all around us. Can you also say something about the point-of-view decisions you made for your version of the story?

Pete
Of course, I had to mess around with the structure and point-of-view, and turn the usual ending on its head, because that’s what keeps me entertained during the writing process. I try to make every book an adventure…for myself.

Sheila
In addition to talking about point-of-view in the book and how we felt as readers shifting from one to the other (propelled forward to find out what had happened even as we were learning about Mikey and his life problems), the eighth graders and I discussed Mikey’s unsent letter that ends the book. I am a big fan of the letter form in fiction, nonfiction and poetry. I find that writing directly to a person who I believe would benefit from hearing me out helps me write well. Most often, that writing is not meant to be sent to that particular person, even if it is meant for publication.

Might you talk about the unsent letter ending in Blank Confession?

Pete
There were a lot of different ways I might have ended the book. In fact, I wrote several alternate endings. I decided to leave a lot of the stuff about Shayne (his background, motivations, and future) unsaid, because the story I wanted to tell is more about Mikey than it is about Shayne. I don’t remember why I used the letter—I guess it offered the kind of partial closure I was seeking.

Sheila
In our class discussions, we also noticed that three male teen characters in the book each had difficulties with their fathers. You mentioned when we spoke that you hadn’t noted the father-son relationships being parallel. What did you think when I mentioned it? What is it like to have others notice things in your book that you didn’t while you were writing it? What is a writer concentrating on that makes him not always see the resonance set up?

Pete
I love it when people find things in my books that I wasn’t consciously aware of when I was writing. Sometimes they make me look smarter than I am.

When I’m writing, I’m mostly focused on telling an interesting story, and I don’t think much about metaphor, theme, etc. But humans are hardwired to attach meaning to random experiences. A bird pecks at your window, you wonder what it means, even though on any given day tens of thousands of birds are pecking on tens of thousands of windows. Your morning toast has a face-like burn pattern, you see the Virgin Mary, even though out of the billions of toast slices it is inevitable that some slices will produce such patterns.

Sheila
Thanks for that. I like telling writers that when we are immersed in our writing we are not thinking about themes but using specifics—those birds pecking at our window—and when we are in flow that way, our inner meaning-making selves are selecting the specifics that fit.

On to more of your stories. I was entertained by how another of your books, How to Steal a Car, came about.

Pete
Right, How to Steal a Car came out of a book club meeting with some teens. I was asking them what kind of books they liked when they were reading for pleasure. The answers were the usual: sports books, vampire stories, romances, sci-fi, mystery…and then one girl said, “I’m, like, fourteen, and my life is really boring, and I would like to read a book about a girl just like me who goes out and steals a car.” I thought that was a pretty interesting concept, so I did it.

Sheila
Speaking of How to Steal a Car, several of your young adult novels have won awards—the LA Times Book Award, “Thumbs Up” Awards from Michigan, two Minnesota book awards, an Arizona Young Adult Award and a National Book Award.

I smiled when I visited your website and saw that you’d written this about How to Steal a Car, “This book didn’t win anything. Can you believe it?” and then went on to say, “I love this book….”

What do you think makes one book an award-winner and another that is dear to you not receive a book award?

Pete
If I knew, I would write only award-winning books. Okay, maybe not, because that would get boring.

How to Steal a Car might, technically, be my best written book (in terms of language, voice, character development, and pacing), but a lot of readers found it frustrating because it doesn’t offer a clear moral coda at the end. I wasn’t really expecting any nods from book award people. It’s more the sort of book that will have a powerful effect on one person, while it will leave another empty and disconcerted.

It has been said that most book awards are given to the “second best book.” I think there is some justification for that view. Award committees are collectives.
Still, second best ain’t bad.

Sheila
Not at all!

I also noticed on your website that you have book categories for young adult novels and “old adult” novels. That’s another thing that makes me smile. What is a young adult then? It seems like we wouldn’t want to be old adults and that you are perhaps telling us reading young adult novels is perfectly acceptable for adults of all ages. Am I right?

Pete
Well, yeah. YA should not be off limits for any age group. And teens should be reading adult books

Young adult books are largely about the experience of becoming an adult—that transitional phase that lasts WAY longer than most of us like to admit. As for defining “young adult,” it’s easiest to think of it as a marketing category: 12-17, or thereabouts. There is also a sub-category of YA readers: forty-plus.

I recently did a reading for a room full of thirty-something’s. It went okay, but it was clear to me that this was not my audience, because at, say, thirty-two, most of us are still recovering from our teen years. We just don’t want to hear about it. Once we hit our forties, we are ready to contemplate our “young adulthood” once again.

Sheila
You seem to have left writing for old adults behind and concentrated on writing for young adults. Can you tell us about that path in your writing career and what you enjoy about writing young adult novels?

Pete
I’m still working on some adult stuff, but at the moment the YA books are more rewarding, both in terms of art and of economics. I often do not know whether a book will become YA or adult until I’m well into it. I’m working on one now that sort of straddles the categories. It may be unpublishable.

Sheila
I’d say most Writing It Real members came to writing later in their lives or are resuscitating their younger writing selves and want to write whether the work is publishable or for family. They are writing memoir, personal essay and dabbling in short fiction that is often biographical and sometimes novels based on life experience. I think they’ll be very interested in your career and your writing (lots of grandchildren to buy books for) and all you might tell them about your approach to writing.

Pete
Since you (and your readers) are interested in technique, this post from my blog might be of interest.

Sheila
Thank you for that link. It was a surprise to read about the way you make sketches of sites you are describing when you are writing a novel. I enjoyed seeing the sketches you posted and learning about how you work back and forth from words to visuals and back to words, changing aspects of a character’s looks and/or settings. For one sketch, you wrote that it helps you feel the woozy feeling of looking at something from a great height. I never thought to sketch to capture the emotion I am writing from, but that sketch in particular has convinced me of the value of sketching an emotion to keep yourself present to the emotional circumstances of the characters you are writing about. I think this can be applied to writing memoir as well–we need to feel as if we are there in the scenes we are writing about, not summarizing them from the distance of many years. If we are writing about running away from home, perhaps sketching footprints on our parents’ lawn or the dusty road ahead would help us recapture our emotions at the time. Thank you for this valuable idea.

As I browse your website, I chuckle some more when I come across a book you published this year, What Do Boys Really Want, and read the promo:

Lita is the writer. Adam is the entrepreneur. They are JUST FRIENDS.

So Adam would never sell copies of a self-help book before he’d even written it. And Lita would never try to break up Adam’s relationship with Blair, the skankiest girl at school. They’d never sabotage their friends Emily and Dennis. Lita would never date a guy related to a girl she can’t stand. They’d never steal each other’s blog posts. And Adam would never end up in a fist fight with Lita’s boyfriend. Nope, never.

Adam and Lita might never agree on what happened, but in this hilarious story from Pete Hautman, they manage to give the world a little more insight into what boys and girls are really looking for.

I’m not going to ask what prompted this story. I’m just going to click over to buy and read it!

One thing I learned from the eighth graders when we talked about Blank Confession is how many of them were writing novels. I put this down to their teachers and to the accessibility of so many young adult authors, both in person and in their writing.

Pete, thanks for being there for them and for us writers, including your fictional character, Adam, of course.