Louis Sachar
The 51-year-old Austin author on the long-awaited sequel to Holes, ideas that don’t go anywhere, knowing what kids like, and writing for Hollywood.
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It was during this time that you started writing. I started writing Sideways Stories From Wayside School the summer after I graduated from Berkeley [in 1976]. During the day, I worked the sweater factory job, and at night I would write. My favorite part of the day was coming home and writing. I had my doubts that it would ever be published.
How’d you do it? When I finished the book—it was maybe a week or two after I was fired—I made ten photocopies of it and sent it to ten different publishers. All but one turned it down, but that company went out of business a couple of years later. So two years after it was published, I had to start all over again.
What happened after the first book came out? I began getting fan mail almost immediately—tons of it. They were telling me it was their favorite book at school, but it was only in a few places. In Texas, the Katy school district discovered it, and I was getting letters from there.
How did you know how to write for kids? The last year at Berkeley, I was an aide in a classroom. I knew nothing about teaching. I just had a great time with all of the kids. In fact, all the kids in Wayside School are based on the kids I knew. I pictured them in my mind and wrote stories about them.
It must be hard having grown-up interactions all day but putting yourself in the mind of a kid when you write. It used to be with these stories that I would pretty much think back to myself when I was that age, and that’s what I would write about. Kids don’t think of themselves as little kids; they think of themselves as people with problems or things they want to do. But now that I have a daughter who’s grown-up, or maybe it’s because I’ve gotten older, when I think of kids that age, they just seem like little kids to me. I might have trouble writing for them now. I’d have a harder time seeing them as protagonists.
With Holes, was there a conscious decision to graduate from that period of your life and write a book for older kids? Not necessarily. Again, I was trying to write a story that I liked and to keep it accessible to as young an age of readers as possible. And then Holes ended up being read by everyone from third-graders to adults.
What was the last number that you’ve heard on how many copies of Holes have been sold? I think it’s over six million.
That may not be Harry Potter territory, but it’s up there. And it’s in just about any language you can imagine.
Could you ever have predicted that? No. I had severe doubts about it. It’s about a kid who digs holes—that’s all he does—and there’s all this traveling around in time, which people were going to find confusing. Was it going to make any sense at all to anyone?
How exactly did the movie happen? And how did you get to write the screenplay? Shortly after the book came out, I started getting phone calls from people saying that they were producers in Hollywood. I remember I was out one day, and my wife took a message that someone named Andrew Davis called and was interested. She said something like “Yeah, yeah, he’ll call you back”—you know, that kind of attitude, though I’m sure she was more polite than that. Later we figured out that he was the person who directed The Fugitive, so it was pretty exciting. I liked him from the start. There was an auction for the rights, but I was kind of leaning towards Andrew, so we told him what the highest price was—could he meet that? And he got the rights.
As part of my contract, which I didn’t even ask for, I got veto power over the screenwriter. I got three vetoes, and then after that they could get anyone they wanted. So they started sending me scripts that people had written for other movies. I liked them all but one, and that was the one they wanted to hire, so I said, “No, I don’t want that guy.” Then Andrew flew me out to Santa Barbara, where he lives, to discuss things, and there was one screenwriter that I was really leaning towards; he had written Crazy in Alabama, which turned out to be not nearly as good as the screenplay. They were having trouble getting in touch with the guy, who lives in Costa Rica or someplace like that half the year, so Andrew said, “Why don’t you write it?” I said, “Well, I don’t know how to write a screenplay. Here’s my first book being made into a movie, and I want it done right. I’d rather you get someone who really knows what he’s doing.” And he said, “You write it, and if it’s no good, we can get someone else to do it.”
Did the characters on-screen look as you had envisioned them? No. I was worried, for example, that Stanley wasn’t overweight like he was in the book, not because it hurt the story in the movie but because I was afraid that people would think, “That’s not Stanley,” and be immediately put off. But they wanted to go with the best actor, and also they wanted a good-looking person in the lead. You can’t have everything.
So you didn’t feel proprietary about it? Does it cease to be yours once it’s no longer in book form? The book is always mine. The movie, though, ceases to be the book. In the end it became, “I want to make a good movie. It doesn’t have to be the book so long as the movie is good.”
You grew up in New York and California and arrived in Texas only fourteen years ago. Why’d you come here as opposed to someplace else? My wife wanted to move closer to her family in Oklahoma, and so I finally agreed to look at Texas. There’s this big prejudice against Texas on the coasts, and sad to say, I bought into it. But everyone said, “You should go to Austin.”
It’s a lot like Berkeley. Austin is to Texas what Berkeley is to California.
One difference is that Austin has a huge community of writers, although from what I can tell, you’re not really interested in that aspect of it. No. In fact, I guess, I don’t even know the world you’re talking about. I know that writers live around here, but are there events where they all get together?
Oh, sure. But a lot of people don’t know you’re here. You aren’t a big bold-face name. I’m wondering if that’s a deliberate decision. I don’t feel the need to be identified as a writer. I wouldn’t be averse to going where other writers are, although I’m not real big on cocktail parties.
My point is that someone with the number of books you’ve published, with the success you’ve had, who’s written Holes, which everyone has read, and has seen it made into a very good movie—that person is a celebrity whether he wants to be or not. I know. But that’s what I’m saying: I don’t relish that. I don’t care about being a celebrity.
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