by James Phelan
What stories influenced you in creating Jesse’s world?
I wanted a fresh take on this. I love the movies 28 Days Later and Shaun of the Dead—two classics, right? I thought, what if I mashed those up, and added a touch of Catcher in the Rye and Life of Pi? That was my starting point, my inspiration, those four stories. The courage to have Jesse talking to his friends as a coping mechanism through the first stage of grief—his denial—was Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl. I first read that book at age fourteen and it’s stuck with me ever since. Huck Finn and Siddhartha helped a lot too, although not Lord of the Flies, which a lot of reviewers and interviewers have suggested.
Tell us about the virus and the Chasers.
On the Chasers, I thought they were kind of representative of the masses: most are poor and with no voice, while a very few are powerful and greedy. I also explored through them how we’re designed to be hunters and we’re in a society of shopping. There’s nothing to kill anymore, there’s nothing to fight, nothing to overcome, nothing to explore. In that societal emasculation, my everyman narrator of Jesse was created to act as foil. His journey probed into the despair and paralysis that people feel in the face of having inherited this value system out of our capitalist world where money trumps all. The attack on NYC was a metaphor for the need to push through the walls we put around ourselves and just go for it, so for the first time we can experience the pain.
In that sense it’s a little like Fight Club and Rebel Without a Cause; both probe the frustrations of the people that live in the system. The characters, having undergone societal emasculation, are reduced to ‘a generation of spectators.’ So Jesse and company watching the world from up high was my version of that. So the virus and the infected were, I felt, a new take on this post-apocalyptic setting.
What’s the feedback been like?
As a general sort of rule, kids seem to read it as an adventure. Adults get nightmares. What I love about the novel is that people will all take something different from it. That’s what I dig about it. Good books don’t tell you what to think or how to think. But it certainly encourages you to think and feel something. I could tell you what I think the character is about, but the right answer is what the reader thinks. I prefer territory that has an unknowable truth value. I’m a firm believer that sometimes life gives you what you want. Usually, it gives you what you need. Always, in the end, you realize you got what you deserved.
What was the writing process of Chasers like?
Fast! First draft was sixteen days, as it was a story that I’d formed in my mind over the years. Alone is in essence a story about identity, and leaves us with the sense that no matter what, you’re never really alone. I took plenty of risks writing it (having only one character was tricky!) but it’s nothing if not honest writing, and I went into it knowing that its style and content is fresh. Prior to putting pen to paper I had many meetings with my publishing house, and while they would have been happy to publish something that was safer (a Lachlan Fox–type thriller series for teenagers) this was the story I just had to tell, and it was far different from what I’d written previously. There’s something extremely fulfilling about charting new creative territory and I think that the angle I took on a post-apocalyptic scenario was a bold move—so bold, I was worried I couldn’t pull off the ending of the first book but I soldiered on in a feverish writing frenzy . . . and discovered that, with a lot of effort, the ending did work. Advance readers who I trust have loved what I created and they’ve all said that my passion for the story has come across. As an author, when you go into a project knowing you have a unique vision of a story you just have to tell, you have to trust that your passion and drive will carry you through to the end. With Chasers I enjoyed every minute of creating it and I couldn’t wait to write the sequel.
What accounts for the popularity of the zombie renaissance?
Well, the Chasers aren’t zombies but I guess they’re close to it. I think maybe it’s because we live in such uncertain times and zombies are apocalyptic by nature, so it fits.
How long was the novel gestating before you submitted it for publication?
After finishing it, I sat on it for around six months, thinking, ‘Have I just written a young adult book or an adult book with a teen character?’ In that time, I made about a hundred pages of notes for the two sequels, exploring all the territory I felt I had to cover.
Did you rely on your own memories from when you were Jesse’s age?
Memory for me has nothing to do with time. It’s more about how and why I’ve stored the item away in my memory banks. When you have an emotional memory or sensational memory it comes back very, very easily if your mind is in tune, or your heart is in tune with a kind of call. Trivial things to most people are vital to a writer; they’re part of our toolbox. So I’d say I remember very precisely the writing process of Alone, which was short but very intense. I remember the sensation of discovery, because it stays in you forever, especially with a character like Jesse. Even in Fox Hunt, the novel I wrote in 2000 or 2001 or something like that—the dates I often can’t remember, nor the hours at the keyboard tapping away to flesh out the scenes—it’s the story beats themselves I can remember, the breakthrough moments, and the magical sensation of creating it is always there. It’s like each novel has been a little piece of my life, a little snapshot of where I was and how I saw the world in that moment. Yeah, and it was a great exercise in bringing back pivotal memories, a first kiss or learning to drive, that sort of thing. Something has to recall it, a trigger in everyday life that may come along every now and then, but working on this book has been to immerse myself back in that time. And I can say that being a teenager a second time around isn’t any easier—all the emotions are so raw and new and intense in that period. You remember the sensation, even though there’s something that’s beyond time, and as an author that’s what you catch. You re-create the moment, because you catch with the sensation, with the cells. The cells have memory.
Did your post-grad study help your writing?
I think so. Doing my MA and PhD in lit certainly gave me the excuse to immerse myself fully into this life. I occasionally guest teach creative writing at universities and in high schools, and that certainly reignites a spark that reminds me why this job is so important to me, rather than just fun (the good writing moments) and daunting (the deadlines!).
You must do so much research to write about America while living in Australia.
Yes, but that’s boring to talk about. I read a lot, I talk to plenty of people, I travel with my eyes open. I take plenty of notes. That’s the short version. As a fiction writer, I use artistic license—30 Rock, for example, was a good setting for Jesse to live in as it was a place he knew, close to a happy memory (his kiss with Anna), high and dry, with good views. I said that the Rainbow Room was an operating restaurant, so that there was plenty of food and drink for him. And I added that there were a few apartments scattered through the offices, which is not true in reality. Same goes for when Jesse makes for the Boat Basin—they take a round-about route, because Dave is leading them up the garden path and Jesse’s lie to himself is falling apart. It’s a symbol of his despair and spiraling call of madness, which he breaks from and then admits to himself (and us) that he’s alone and that he’ll be okay.
Do apocalyptic stories only work in apocalyptic times?
The oft-quoted explanation for any disaster hit is that it’s the zeitgeist, which in the case of Alone would mean that it’s an era of foreclosures, global warming and general end-of-the-world jitters, war on terror, etc. Readers and moviegoers see the filmic apocalypse as a mirror of their own fears. You start with whatever inspires you and that can be anything. It’s not even important that the inspiration that started the writing stay in the writing. Because sometimes your imagination is cooking and the characters take a left-hand turn you never saw coming and the story goes in a direction you never anticipated. But you’re never going to find that wonderful ide
a until you start writing.
Let’s talk about the themes in your work and how they develop.
Well, I’ll distinguish here between the premise and the controlling idea. My premise was, What would happen if a 16-year-old tourist found himself a sole survivor in a mega city full of infected? But the controlling idea is the meaning of the work and that isn’t expressed until the final climax, i.e., our character finds the inner strength to survive on his own. So, the premise is the idea that starts you writing but the controlling idea is the meaning of the work you finally write.
You just start to work, and sooner or later, going backwards and forwards, you’re going to find your characters and you’re going to find your story and sooner or later you will have an inciting incident, progressive complications and a crisis, climax, and resolution. But who the hell knows when those are going to turn up? Writing, like reading, is an exploration, a discovery.
As someone who spends a lot of time trying to do better with my craft, I’m not content unless I’m making something as extraordinary as I think things ought to be or as things that I’ve read. I’ll keep working that way until I’ve run out of new things to try. What I found in writing the Alone trilogy was something that made me feel 16 years old again. I know as a novelist I have multiple decades of work ahead of me to get good at it.
Reading it becomes a three-dimensional experience, beginning in the book and ending in ourselves. Such a novel, while it is a mirror of, and a commentary on, a particular event, people, country or time, is on some level about each one of us, our central truth
Do you like being an author?
I love the creative freedom—I started out by studying architecture, and that didn’t have that same degree of creative control. I also love that as a novelist I remain anonymous to all but the most ardent fan, meaning that I can still be the man on the train or street or in the cafe or bar, watching, listening. My ability to remain the observer and not be observed and not be the focus of a lot of people’s attention gives me access to behavior and ideas that some other artists, such as actors or musicians, are not being exposed to. So I think we novelists are lucky, in that there is endless inspiration and material out there for us to snatch up and run with.
JAMES PHELAN ON WRITING ALONE
I remembered a movie I enjoyed as a teen: Red Dawn. Made in the early 1980s, it had a high school group in class in a country town, just another ordinary day, and then they see troops invading—literally dropping in out of the sky. The teenagers form a group of skirmishers, trying to survive while being a thorn in the side of their aggressors. It seemed like a great idea, of teenagers in a warzone, so I wondered how I’d do that in a fresh way. How to have that kind of sense of foreboding, of a worst case scenario, in a way that hadn’t been done.
The angle I wanted to try was something that would either work or not—there’d be no middle ground. I kept thinking, could I do this and have it accepted by publishers and librarians as a viable series? Tell kids that dangerous things can be overcome. Tell them that they’re not alone. Tell them that there are always options, there’s always a way out, a way ahead. That you can go out and dream. Any doubt I had was squashed by Neil Gaiman. I’d long been a fan of his work and I watched interview after interview where he spoke about his work, and in particular Coraline. His daughter, who was seven at the time, read it and loved it. Then he sent it to his agent and she read it and said, ‘You can’t be serious, this cannot be a children’s book.’ And he said ‘Why not?’ and she said ‘Well it’s terrifying.’ So he replied ‘You have two daughters. Read it to them and get back to me.’ She phoned him a week later and said, ‘They loved it—they just saw it as an adventure.’ I think it comes down to adults forgetting story—they’re so used to being spoon-fed dumbed down facts on TV, CSI and Law and Order type shows, that they’ve forgotten what a story can do to the imagination.
On day one, I wrote the first few chapters: Jesse and his friends on the subway, the attack, what they saw, how they’d run, and then getting to 30 Rock. I went to bed that night wondering if this really could be the story where I could do my version of Catcher in the Rye where Holden talks to his brother as he crosses the intersections along Fifth Avenue. If this is where my character could talk to his friends like Anne Frank talked to Kitty. If this is where my character could do as Pi had done on that boat for all that time. I slept on it. The next day, I decided that this was it. This was that story, and that the first installment would be all about what it meant to be truly alone.
Prior to publication, I’d had probably a couple dozen people read the book who had given me feedback. I do that with all my books, and more and more people are now reading them before my agents and publishers because I don’t want to go the way of so many of my favorite authors, where they write five or so good books and then their work drops off in quality. I think that happens because when you’re starting out, you get rejections and you get lots of notes from agents and publishers about your work. When you’ve been around for a while and have had half a dozen or more books published, they kind of accept that what you’re doing is up to standard and they don’t give you those notes or they don’t reject you—and I’ve got a lot of writer friends who miss getting rejections. They’re now sending in work that would otherwise be rejected and re-worked, but that’s not happening—it’s being published. So, I sent Alone: Chasers out to a few people, all ages, and got feedback. Many had questions in regard to wanting to know more about this or that, which is good seeing as this is the first of a series.
Some readers commented that Anna, Mini, and Dave were not fleshed out as much as Jesse. Well, I like to think that it’s pretty obvious why that’s the case, both from the standpoint that it’s from Jesse’s POV, and because of the revelation at the end. Some asked why they couldn’t be fleshed out like, say, Tyler Durdan in Fight Club. He was the same ‘person’ as the main narrator, only he was a separate ‘character,’ completely constructed from the mind of that protagonist. With Jesse, because he’d only known his friends for days, he had a very limited amount of information to go on. That’s why as the story goes along there’s less of them being revealed, as if it’s a slow fade away from what will be the climax.
KTEEN BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2010 James Phelan
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
Previously published in Australia by Lothian Children’s Books/ Hachette and in the United Kingdom by Atom Books.
KENSINGTON and the KTeen logo are Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.
ISBN: 978-0-7582-8067-1