by Doug Wilhelm
How did you celebrate publishing your first book?
I cleaned trash cans. No, I did! When the call came in that my book was being published, it was a Friday morning and I called everyone I could think of, but I couldn’t reach anyone to tell them. So I left a few messages, then collected all the trash cans in the house (the little, indoor ones), put them in the bathtub, and scrubbed them. I had to do something with all that energy.
Where do you write your books?
I have written in all sorts of places, from cafés to libraries to basements to bedrooms to actual offices. I don’t think it matters much where you work, as long as you work. Right now I like to write sitting on the couch in our living room, especially early in the morning. I’m here right now; I can see the bird feeder, outdoors. So can the cat.
What sparked your imagination for The Revealers?
My son, Brad, planted that idea. We were having lunch when he was in second grade, and he told me that at his elementary school, he and a couple of friends had a secret bully lab. I asked, “What is that?” And he said, very earnestly: “It’s a place in the school where we lure the bullies and dissect their brains.” I asked more questions and figured out that what he was really doing was sitting under a slide on the playground, during recess, and watching how some kids were cruel to other kids. Typical playground stuff. But Brad and his friends wondered: “What are those kids thinking when they do that? What’s going through their minds?” That was what he really meant by dissecting brains—and that’s what gave me the idea for The Revealers. To dissect something is to take a scientific approach to understanding it, and that’s what Russell, Elliot, and Catalina try to do in the book.
Of the books you’ve written, which is your favorite?
I still feel partial to my first one, The Heart of the Bazaar, which never got published. It was a nonfiction “journey” story about traveling in the Muslim world and just talking with people. I left my newspaper job in my late 20s, back in the early 1980s, to do it. I worked on the book for ten years, and it was rejected seventy-five times. I still think it was good! But getting your first book published is very hard.
What challenges do you face in the writing process, and how do you overcome them?
The most familiar challenge is the fear. This generally comes before you start writing something. It’s the voice in your head that says, “Who are you to do this? Why do you imagine this could be any good?” For me, at least, this uneasiness of fear is part of the process of doing creative work. I’ve learned that the more important it is for me to write something, the more challenging it is, the more scared I will feel before I start. So I just start. Once you’re actually doing it, the fear will start to drift away.
Which of your characters is most like you?
In The Revealers, Russell began with the memory of being me—a very awkward seventh-grader (I was actually much more awkward than he is), who is bright and creative but doesn’t realize that, tends to get down on himself, and is very confused by how annoyingly uncool he is to other kids.
What makes you laugh out loud?
I love to laugh! I really enjoy Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. I like people who make you see things in a new way—people who see, then find the humor that opens up the truth or helps you see, too. I’m a huge fan of humor writing, which is a very hard type of writing to do. The one thing I collect, sort of collect, is books by twentieth-century humor writers, like James Thurber and P.G. Wodehouse, who invented the butler Jeeves. He wrote over ninety novels, and I keep searching for ones I haven’t read.
What do you do on a rainy day?
I might like best to go to a used-book store, poke around, then take what I’ve found to a café and just read.
What’s your idea of fun?
I get excited to find books that you’re really sorry to finish, that you keep on thinking and feeling things about. I also have fun talking with friends, telling stories, and playing music or hearing music live. My wife, Cary, and I enjoy dancing together, and we really like being on the water. If I still lived near the ocean, I would walk on the beach every day. I love the edge of the ocean.
What’s your favorite song?
I could spend days debating that and never decide! I do know my favorite album or CD: It’s What’s Going On by Marvin Gaye. That is over forty years old, and it’s absolutely about what’s going on right now. Download it, you won’t be sorry.
Who is your favorite fictional character?
Of all time (this one I know), it’s Kim in Rudyard Kipling’s 1901 novel of that name, which is my all-time favorite book. When I was in seventh grade, the age of my Revealers characters, my favorite was Johnny Tremain in the YA novel by that name. I would imagine myself as a minor character in that book, toasting bread and cheese late at night with Johnny in Boston in 1775. I didn’t need to be a major character! A minor one was fine.
What was your favorite book when you were a kid? Do you have a favorite book now?
A breakthrough book for me in middle school—the first one that influenced me as someone interested in writing—was The Human Comedy by William Saroyan. This was basically a YA novel, about a poor Armenian-American boy in a California farm town during World War who gets a job delivering telegrams because he has a bicycle. Then he has to deliver a message from the War Department, saying that a mother’s son has been killed in battle. It’s a fine story, but what really struck me about Saroyan’s writing was its vitality. He described his approach as to “jump in the river and start swimming.” Today I have lots of favorite books by YA authors—but if I had to pick a single one, I’d say Louis Sachar’s Holes. That’s just a great book.
What’s your favorite TV show or movie?
Saturday Night Live. I also like the late-night comics, not just Jon Stewart but also Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel and Craig Ferguson. But I have to watch them on the Internet, because I can’t stay up that late!
If you were stranded on a desert island, who would you want for company?
My lovely wife, Cary. But we would need someone who could find food and have survival skills—so maybe also Crocodile Dundee. Remember that movie character from the Australian Outback? But he’s fictional. So that might not be a big help.
If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go and what would you do?
Twice in my twenties I spent time—once a year and a half—in Kathmandu, Nepal. That’s an amazing place, and someday I want to go back. Otherwise, hmmm … I would like to visit Cuba, Morocco, Botswana, Kerala in southern India, and Tahiti. Give me ten minutes and I’ll think of twenty more.
If you could travel in time, where would you go and what would you do?
I’d go to Paris in the 1920s, when a bunch of soon-to-be-famous writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald were messing around, working and struggling to get noticed. I’d also like to live in San Francisco in its early boom years. I just think I would get great stories out of that place and time.
What’s the best advice you have ever received about writing?
It came from an old-time newspaper man that I met when I was seventeen. He gestured toward a typewriter (this was a long time ago) and said, “Use it. Write every day.” I ignored that advice for a long time, but it was very good. In a similar way, the great writer E. B. White, in The Second Tree from the Corner, quotes another veteran newsman who advised him, as a young man straining for deathless phrasing on a story: “Just say the words.”
Do you ever get writer’s block? What do you do to get back on track?
The key for me is to say to myself, “I’m just going to write something. It’s not supposed to be perfect; I can change it later.” That takes the pressure off. If you view your first draft as a rough sketch, the way an artist sketches before painting something, then you can try stuff and make mistakes. That’s the only way to free yourself to be creative—to make it safe for yourself to make mistakes, to try things that don’t have to come out great.
What d
o you want readers to remember about your books?
I think characters and stories are what fiction is mostly about, especially YA. So I would like readers to remember my characters, the way I remember Johnny Tremain and Kim, or my stories, the way I remember The Human Comedy.
What would you do if you ever stopped writing?
I once taught English as a second language and loved it. I might try that again. You get to work with people from all over the world.
What do you like best about yourself?
I don’t knows … . I have a good sense of humor, and I think I am mostly kind to people. What I’m always trying to do better is listen. It’s a rare skill, and like most people I’m not that good at it.
Do you have any strange or funny habits? Did you when you were a kid?
Oh, when I was a kid I was a whole bundle of weird nervous habits. Made strange noises, had to touch every pole on a fence but wouldn’t step on a crack in the sidewalk—I was very odd. Today, luckily, I’m somewhat less so.
What do you consider to be your greatest accomplishment?
That my son, Bradley, and stepson, Nate, are both kind, funny, hardworking, very thoughtful young men. Of course, they get most of the credit for this. But parenting is the thing that has taught me the most and has meant the most in my life. I think I write for young readers for two main reasons—because books meant so much to me when I was young, and because my boy meant so much to me when he was young.
What do you wish you could do better?
I believe that awareness, what the Buddhists call mindfulness—basically, just being in the present and paying attention, without judgment—is the key to living a rich, happy, creative life. So I try to be “just right here.” This is like writing: You can never really master it, but it’s totally worth spending a whole life trying.
What would your readers be most surprised to learn about you?
That I’m six feet ten inches tall. That’s right!
You can find Doug Wilhelm on Facebook and at the-revealers.com.
An Imprint of Macmillan
THE REVEALERS. Copyright © 2003 by Doug Wilhelm.
All rights reserved. Printed in July 2011 in the United States of America by R. R. Donnelley & Sons Company, Harrisonburg, Virginia. For information, address Square Fish, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Square Fish and the Square Fish logo are trademarks of Macmillan and are used by Farrar Straus Giroux under license from Macmillan.
eISBN 9781466829961
First eBook Edition : August 2012
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wilhelm, Doug
The revealers / Doug Wilhelm.
p. cm.
Summary: Tired of being bullied and picked on, three seventh-grade outcasts join forces and, using scientific methods and the power of a local area network (LAN), begin to create a new atmosphere at Parkland Middle School.
ISBN 978-0-312-56374-5
[1. Bullies—Fiction. 2. Internet—Fiction. 3. Friendship—Fiction. 4. Schools—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.W648145 Re 2003
[Fic]—dc21
2002035321
Excerpts from Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, translated by B. M. Mooyaart-Doubleday, copyright © 1952 by Otto H. Frank, used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in the United States by Farrar Straus Giroux
First Square Fish Edition: September 2011
Square Fish logo designed by Filomena Tuosto
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