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Author 411 May 2007 - Laura & Tom McNeal Photo © Courtesy of the Authors
Sixteen-year-old
Lana Morris wishes her life were different, that she were somewhere
else, some one else. Her foster mother wants her gone, she's stuck
taking care of the other kids in the house, she longs to become
closer to her foster father, and the only cool people around refuse
to acknowledge her. Then Lana stumbles into Miss Hekkity's mysterious
shop, and she begins to realize that she might actually have the
power to change things—to make some of her wishes come true. But
wishing isn't always as harmless as it seems. . . .
AUTHOR 411
1.) The Decoding of Lana Morris has multiple layers to it. Some readers describe it as a coming-of-age novel, while others suggest it can be considered fantasy. There’s even a mystery component woven into the story. How would you characterize this book? Can it be categorized in more than one genre, and if so, which one do you think best represents it? Laura & Tom: If a coming-of-age novel is a story about a young person gaining wisdom and experience, then The Decoding of Lana Morris fits into that category. It’s harder to consider the book a fantasy because most fantasy novels either begin in the real world and transport the main character to a foreign, magical place (Narnia, Oz, Peter’s Neverland, Alice’s Wonderland) or are set from beginning to end in that foreign, magical place. There is only one element of our novel that seems supernatural: the drawing kit. Is that enough to make it a fantasy? Probably not if you’re a fantasy lover.
2.) The mention of Ipods and Podcasts resonates with readers, and serves to implant this story in current times. That said, were you at all hesitant to mention generation-specific terms like these? Did you write this story so that it’s primarily for teenagers of today’s day and age, or can you see it being just as accessible in the future? Laura: It’s hard to predict what will be comprehensible to future generations. People still read 19th- and early 20th-century fiction, and they don’t find it difficult to understand references to telegrams. When we wrote the novel, we had never once listened to a podcast. The form was barely emerging then, we didn’t yet own an iPod, and we were the last two people on earth still to have dial-up Internet service. But when I heard a radio story about podcasting I thought immediately of Chet, and I knew that Tom would be good at writing soliloquies for him, which is what a podcast is: a new form of soliloquy. Chet does what characters have always done in plays and novels: reveal his true self through speeches made to an invisible audience.
3.) What inspired you to write about foster children? What are your thoughts on the foster system in our country today? Laura: Tom has a cousin in Nebraska, a near-saint, who, along with her husband, once took in special needs foster kids, and we were disturbed by the way a sweet, difficult, cheerful boy in their care was taken from them. He was learning to be happy and productive in her house, but the state decided to move him into a group home and medicate him because medication and group care was cheaper. He regressed, and that seems like an unforgivable waste.
4.) Did you purposely convey Garth’s mother as cold-hearted, or did you intend for readers to have a hint of sympathy for her? Laura & Tom: The character of Garth Stoneman was inspired by an actual case of abandonment, one that prompted us to say, “How could a mother leave?” We wrote a fictional answer that tries to acknowledge the fact that giving birth is like entering an arranged marriage, with neither party choosing the other, and developmentally disabled children may be dependent for 70 years. That’s a long time to be nurturing and self-sacrificing.
5.) Why, from your perspective, did Veronica choose to host disabled foster children if she had such a negative opinion towards them? We never hear about Whit and Veronica’s punishment for failing to properly care for their foster children. Is there a reason you didn’t include this follow-up? Laura & Tom: We were much more concerned with what would happen to the children. That was the nature of the story. As to Veronica’s motives, she’s an opportunist. Whenever there’s a financial incentive to do something, the possibility for exploitation exists.
6.) One reader, who has a mentally handicapped brother, commented that the Snicks were “pictured just right.” Additionally, we noticed that Lana was considerably patient with her housemates. Have you had any experience working with handicapped children and the people who care for them? What kind of research went into the creation of these characters? Laura: When Tom wrote the first scenes of this novel, he was remembering his own experiences with neighbors and relatives who had cared for children with Down’s Syndrome. I had no experience to draw on, and I felt I couldn’t write truthfully about that situation. I read a newspaper article about a local Arc center, which is a place for developmentally disabled adults to learn life skills, and I asked the director if I could come there two mornings a week to volunteer and observe.
7.) Readers had a lot to say about the presence of magic in The Decoding of Lana Morris. A great debate has ensued over whether the paper from Ms. Hekkity’s shop is truly magical, or if events following the drawings are merely coincidences. How would you respond to this dispute?
Laura: The ambiguity is intentional. For me, Lana’s faith in the paper resembles the faith people have in wishes and prayers. I grew up in a church where everyone believed in the power of healing. My father and most of the men I knew carried vials of consecrated oil in case they needed to bless someone, which was called “the laying on of hands.” This made me feel very protected even though I knew that if a man giving a blessing felt, while saying the prayer, that a sick person wasn’t supposed to be healed, he couldn’t say, “Be healed.” Something was supposed to move through the person who was saying the prayer, and then he would know what to pray for. I think wishes on stars, dandelions, birthday candles, and pennies thrown into fountains are a secular form of prayer. Religious or not we still need a ritualized way to ask for things, even if, as often happens in fairy tales, what we ask for is wrong. One afternoon when I was about six, my mother decided to go on a long bike ride and I desperately wanted to go. My mother rightly said I was too little, and she rode off without me. I was furious, and I shouted something about wishing she would die. A short time later when my mother rode into the driveway, her legs and arms were bloody from skidding along a gravel road. I believed I had wished the crash on her.
8.) Do you think Ms. Hekkity was aware of the potential power of the paper? Laura & Tom: Miss Hekkity’s role is deliberately ambiguous, too. There’s a sign on the door to her shop that says, “What you desire/ Miss Hekkity provides” and her name is an Americanized spelling of Hecate, a mythological figure sometimes called the Goddess of the Crossroads and sometimes credited with the power to grant wishes. But Miss Hekkity offers no advice about the drawing kit. Perhaps the sign on the door is just a hopeful exaggeration, and she just happens, by coincidence, to be the person who can help.
9.) Although Ms. Hekkity has an important role in The Decoding of Lana Morris, we don’t have much “face time” with her in the book. Why did you choose to show only a limited glimpse of her? Laura & Tom: Her shop is a place of refuge, a place where abandoned things can belong to someone again. Her role, and the role of her shop, is to elicit hope and then to fulfill it.
10.) As the creators of Chet and Lana, how do you envision their relationship following the conclusion of The Decoding of Lana Morris? It seemed like Chet was most “himself” when he was on the radio, and some readers wondered if he is less mature than Lana, and therefore unable to have a relationship with her. Laura & Tom: It seems to us that Chet is just as Chet-like when he’s in Lana’s presence (in the car with the Snicks, for example, and on the bleachers during the odd-ball Olympics) as he is during his podcast. What’s hard for him is to tell Lana how he feels about her.
11.) In a similar vein, do you think Chet truly had any listeners besides Lana? Laura & Tom: He has two other listeners that are mentioned in the book—Whit and the “sanitation engineer”—but the strange and wonderful thing about podcasts is that people talk without knowing if anyone will listen. They do it in the hope that someone, somewhere, will hear what they have to say, and that makes the world a little less lonely. It’s easier than going on stage, for example, where you would quickly lose heart if the theater were empty.
12.) How come Chet was so open with Lana, after being so secretive at first? Laura & Tom: He knew she was listening, and he could tell she thought he was funny. If someone thinks you’re funny, you become funny.
13.) Some readers noticed that the Snicks, as characters, were more multidimensional than their foster parents, Whit and Veronica. Was this portrayal deliberate? Laura & Tom: We never intend a character to be two-dimensional. Perhaps it’s merely that the Snicks become more endearing over time, while White and Veronica become more self-interested. Whit, in particular, is less than he seems, and so perhaps loses dimension in Lana’s eyes.
14.) Did you mean to paint Whit as a predator? Readers were impressed with how delicately you handled his and Lana’s relationship. Laura: In doing research for this book, I read several deeply disturbing case histories of foster children who were raped while living in group homes. I also read a long case history of a girl who married her foster father and had a number of children with him, despite the fact that he was more than 30 years older than she was. This was a deeply disturbing story, too, but for a different reason. In providing parental affection, that foster father also provided romantic love. The girl in his care could not refuse either form of love because to refuse one was to risk losing the other, and that painful, needy confusion is what interested me. I think it’s very common—at least it was in my adolescence—for male authority figures (coaches, camp counselors, teachers) to feel a confusing affection for the girls they teach, and even more common for young girls to form attachments that resemble romantic love. Most adults can draw the line between mentoring and seducing, and most adolescents are secure enough in their relationships that they can draw the line, too. But what happens if you need a father, and the father you’re given looks and acts like your boyfriend? Wouldn’t that be harder to resist than obviously predatory behavior?
15.) Of the characters in The Decoding of Lana Morris, do you have a favorite? Laura: It’s easy for me to answer this question, because my favorite character is always the one that sprang fully formed from Tom’s head (not mine). In this book, it’s Chet. He’s funny, sweet, and self-effacing, my favorite kind of protagonist.
Tom: With our other books, a question like this would be a breeze because in each of those books there was a character who—at least in my mind—resembled the teenaged Laura, so that character by default became the book’s romantic interest and my personal favorite. But in this book, Lana is not Laura, so I’m going to split my vote between Lana and Tilly. Lana has spunk, she isn’t afraid to try to move objects that seem immovable, and, by the end of the book anyway, her heart is in the right place. What I love about Tilly is the clarity of her altered vision. I’ve always liked people—and characters—who without any conscious effort seem to bring out the better qualities in those around them. Tilly does this, too.
16.) Do you see characters’ faces as you write? Laura: I think to some extent I do see characters’ faces as I write. Usually it’s the face of someone who inspired the physical features of the character—a pretty babysitter who had a gap between her two front teeth, a disabled teenager I met 20 years ago at a community center, my Sunday School teacher when I was 12.
Tom: This is a really interesting question, one I’ve never been asked. I don’t have complete images in mind, though I have real ideas of each character’s physical attitude—the way he or she might walk, sit, listen, or smile. One of the aspects of fiction that always seemed ingenious to me is the way the reader is asked to create most of the specific physical images to go with the character’s personality.
17.) If this novel were a movie, are there actors who come to mind whom you think would best depict your characters? Laura: No particular actors come to mind. For one thing, we prefer to see movies in which the actors are people we’ve never seen before, so that their celebrity personas and previous roles don’t intrude on the story. A few years ago, someone made a good independent film called Tully based on one of Tom’s short stories, and one of the real pleasures of that was watching the young, relatively unknown actors morph into the teenager characters in the story.
18.) How do you come up with the names of your characters? Laura: Naming characters is one of my favorite things about writing fiction. I look in the phone book or in those name-your-baby books or on web-sites of names divided by ethnic origin (Irish or German, for example) until something has the right number of syllables and a sound I like. I usually settle on a name that doesn’t already belong to someone I know, either in my life or in fiction. I don’t know anybody named Chet, for example, or Garth or Alfred or Veronica. Sometimes Tom and I disagree, but hardly ever, which is strange when you consider that he is currently preparing papers to effect the legal name change of our second child, whom he really, really wanted to name Clyde after my grandfather. I thought, at the time, that “Clyde” was too old-fashioned, so Tom settled for naming a character Clyde (the hero of Crushed). He still couldn’t give up on the name, though, so Hank is about to become, at age seven, a person with four names, beginning with Clyde.
19.) We’re fascinated that this incredible book has two authors. How does your writing team “operate”? Do you each write different parts, or do you sit down and compose one piece together? One reader asks if you divide your writing based on whether a particular section features boy characters or girl characters. Do you always write together? Laura: Our writing team is like a road trip. I drive for a long time, and when I’m tired, I let Tom drive. We hand the manuscript back and forth, revising each other’s additions very, very politely. Instead of just deleting sentences or paragraphs or words, for example, Tom will put brackets around the questionable part. Then he will usually put his own idea in brackets, too. Brackets save the marriage, essentially. We also do a lot of talking about the book. We usually discuss major changes and ideas before trying them out. It probably helps that we have our own separate work. When Tom is working on a young adult novel-in-progress, I work on something else. We are both currently revising novels that will appear under just one name.
Tom: I like the road-trip metaphor. When I get the manuscript back and find how much territory’s been covered, it’s as exciting as finding you fell asleep in, say, Barstow and have awakened in Las Vegas. Like any long road trip, there are bad stretches, too, but I can’t let this question pass without mentioning that writing these books with Laura is more fun than any writing I’ve ever done.
20.) Moreover, readers are curious about your writing habits, and your particular writing style. Which ideas tend to come first—the characters that populate your books, or the storylines that drive them? Laura & Tom: This is our fifth collaboration, and it’s different every time. The first was a picture book called The Dog Who Lost His Bob, and it started with that title. Our first young adult novel, Crooked, started with a girl named Clara who wanted to do odd jobs for money. Zipped was inspired by a story we heard of a person discovering a husband’s infidelity through errant e-mails. I think if there is a general rule, the storyline comes first, but the characters are what make the story interesting and real for us.
21.) How do you determine a story’s setting? Laura: The first three novels were inspired by my affection for little towns around Syracuse University, where I went to graduate school. There was something idyllic about those towns, something that fulfilled an image of America I had formed while reading picture books in tract houses on the fringes of various Air Force bases. The Decoding of Lana Morris is set in Tom’s fictional territory—he spent his childhood summers with cousins on a Nebraska farm. I think the setting has to evoke something for you as a writer; it has to suggest stability or violence or comfort or mystery.
22.) Do you know how a story will end before you begin writing, or does it unfold in the process of writing? For instance, one reader asks if you knew from the start that Lana would end up with Ms. Hekkity. Laura & Tom: We don’t usually know the ending at first. Not the precise ending, anyway. But in the case of Miss Hekkity, we knew that she was Miss Hecate, Goddess of the Crossroads and sometimes grantor of wishes. We knew she was the source of the drawing kit, and that she had Lana’s lucky two-dollar bill in her cash register, and that she was someone you could come to in trouble. The rest of it evolved slowly, over several revisions.
23.) How often do you usually rewrite? Laura: It’s impossible to say. Computers allow you to erase over and over again without leaving a sign of your indecision. But without counting all the indecision and word-changing that Tom and I do individually before we share the new version with one another, the manuscript is probably revised five-to-ten times before it goes to the editor, and at least four times after that, during which time our editor, her assistant, and a copyeditor consider the implications of every single word. Your English teacher pales by comparison.
24.) Would you consider writing for audiences besides young adults—children, or adults, perhaps? Where do you write—in an office, at the kitchen table? How does your family figure into your writing? Laura & Tom: We both write for adults, too, and we have written one picture book. We write in adjoining rooms in our small guesthouse, and also at the kitchen table, in bed, on the porch, or on vacation. We have two young children, and all of our books have been written in the midst of raising children. That’s why we started writing in the guesthouse, actually, because when the children were in the house with a babysitter, I needed to be somewhere close enough so that I could stop and nurse them, but far enough so that I couldn’t hear them cry.
25.) How did writing The Decoding of Lana Morris affect your lives? Laura: When I was volunteering at the Arc center, I was profoundly moved and disturbed by the struggles of the 30- and 40-year-old adults who spent their days learning to count money, to make a two-dollar purchase at Wal-Mart, or to make dinner from a mix. They faced a world that I found unbearably forbidding, and they faced it, by and large, with a grace and acceptance that I have never possessed.
Tom: Laura would come home from those volunteering sessions with real admiration and fondness for both the workers and the disabled adults. She’s talked about working with the developmentally disabled once our own boys are raised, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she does. For me, it was a chance to give a little shining light to these people who we often want to shunt to the sides of our consciousness.
26.) Why did you choose to become authors? If you weren’t authors, what other jobs would you have pursued instead? Laura: I write because I have a very intense need to record experience in some lasting form, in what Nabokov called “durable pigments.” The only other thing I know how to do is teach literature—to talk about how other writers record experience. I would go back to teaching high school. Tom: I can’t say it was a conscious choice. I love the whole process—the creation of characters, the situations that test them, the weave of each sentence into the next. When I can’t write, I’m miserable, and no fun to live with. I learned this early on, and I also learned early on that few people make a decent living writing fiction, so when I was 22 and in graduate school, my brother, brother-in-law, and I started a general contracting business. It was a good move. Over the years, it’s paid the bills and still allowed me a certain amount of time to write. Not to mention all the kind and generous and quirky people I met along the way.
27.) It’s been said that the best writers are also avid readers. What kinds of books do you like to read? Do you have favorites? Did you read a lot as teens? Laura: I read all the time as a teenager. Reading about adolescence was so much easier than living it in person. I suppose I was looking for a how-to guide. I thus read everything Judy Blume and Paula Danziger wrote, and because my parents were great readers I also read Thomas Hardy, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald on my own. Thomas Hardy is still the sentimental favorite, but I tend now to read novels set in other countries or in immigrant communities, most recently The Namesake (Jhumpa Lahiri), Brick Lane (Monica Ali), The Hungry Tide (Amitav Ghosh) and Crescent (Diana Abu-Jaber). Tom: I’ve always been a demon reader, but as a teenager, I was sidetracked by sports and buddies and my generally unrequited yearnings for girls. During that period, I did read and love Great Expectations, To Kill a Mockingbird, and A Separate Peace, but I’m embarrassed to admit that I didn’t read an actual young adult book until Laura and I had begun writing one. The book I read then was The Chocolate War, which, as they say, knocked my socks off and made me understand that writing for this genre was a more-than-respectable thing to do. Lately I’ve read and loved two of Dana Reinhardt’s books— A Brief Chapter in My Impossible Life and Harmless—and Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, which is everything a book in any genre ought to be—engaging, inventive, and morally substantial.
28.) Finally, a sure sign of reader approval: will there be a sequel to The Decoding of Lana Morris? Laura: Only if this one sells ten million copies. Give it to everyone you know! In hardback!
Tom: I trust everyone can recognize Laura’s irony on these rare occasions when she bares it to the general public. The truth is, where we left Lana, Chet, Tilly, and the rest was where it seemed we should leave them—on the brink of a new and, with any luck, improved life. I prefer to think that they, and all the rest of us, will live happily every after, more or less.
Thanks to the following Teen Book Groups for participating! Beech Grove High School Book Discussion Club Beech Grove, IN BookMasters II Little Rock, AR Chicago Waldorf Teen Book Group Chicago IL Timber Creek High School Book Group Orlando, FL Webb School Central Library/Mother Daughter Book Club Knoxville , TN
And
thanks to graduate students from the University of San Francisco
School of Education Young Adult literature class for submitting
questions while working towards their Masters in Children’s Literature.
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