Blake Nelson on Writing Young Adult Novels and Film

“BEGINNER'S LUCK IS REAL. That's one thing I guess I would tell beginning writers. That first book is going to have a freshness and vitality to it you may never have again. Don't screw it up!” - Blake Nelson 

Check under your belt. Are there eight published books there--three books for adults and five for young adults--seven other various manuscripts lurking about suspiciously in your nether’s? Dig deeper, have two of those books been sold for the silver screen and one for the flat screen? Blake Nelson has all this and more under his belt. Nelson’s newest book, Paranoid Park (Viking Juvenile), will drop on September 21st. It is a skate park novel set in Portland, Oregon and has been optioned by the illustrious filmmaker, Gus Van Sant, (Elephant, Good Will Hunting).  In a phone interview Nelson talked about what it is like being a YA author and optioning books to filmmakers.

Nelson began his novel writing career with the adult novel, Girl (Touchstone, 1994), which landed with a lot of praise and the eventual movie offer, that Nelson considered pretty typical at the time for any book that got a lot attention. He followed that with two more novels, which didn’t do quite as well. Then Nelson took a break and re-evaluated his options. “The circumstances lead me to think, wow, I wonder what else I can do. People had told me for a long time that my style was a Young Adult style, kind of minimal and simplistic.” Nelson says, however, that he was a little arrogant about writing a YA book, “I thought, well I’ll just write a great YA book and then it really wasn’t that easy.” He sat down and started reading. “You don’t want to think of yourself as naïve but I was shocked how competitive and how good the other YA books out there were.”  

And so it came to pass that Nelson’s first YA novel, The New Rules of High School (Viking Juvenile, 2003) came out to nice reviews and decent sales. But, most surprising to Nelson was the way he was treated by his new publisher. “They were very aggressive with me and they were like please write some more books, we really like this. And it just felt good to be wanted.” So, he did write more and he considers his success to be a happy accident.

Nelson’s natural interest in youth culture gives him plenty to draw upon for fodder in his novels.  He still gets a charge out of watching MTV and still can’t wait to see every new video from every new band. “I get this exhilaration of just sort of experiencing state of the art anything.” His respect for teenagers is evident.  While visiting Government Camp in Oregon, where he grew up, he randomly looked over a fence and observed a skate park. What he saw was a bunch of kids and a big stereo playing a Le Tigre song. All the kids, he says, looked really cool and they were all really good skate boarders and it looked so fun and so happening. “You realize that the design around skateboard stuff is the coolest; the clothes are really cool, the music is really cool, and the kids are really cool.” The perfect theme then for a YA novel. Nelson also dug the subtext of being a skateboarder. He liked the idea of it being a loner sport, that is has its own unique personality. “It’s very specialized and skater boys are this certain type, it’s almost like they’re contemporary cowboys, it’s such an expressive thing.”

To be clear Nelson would want you to know that though he observes and is intrigued by youth culture he does not pack a lunch and spend his days hanging with teenagers. Nor does he conduct interviews with them. He relies on his own memories of being a teenager and puts what he observes on top of that. Nelson’s advice is to remember that whatever age you are, the people around you seem like total people to you. “People want to think that Oh, they’re just kids, they’re not completely developed humans. Teenagers are just as complicated as anybody. This idea that their personalities aren’t formed yet is ridiculous. You change and become different as you grow older, but whatever you are you are.” He encourages writers to remember that this is a highly social time in a person’s life and so characters can be very specific. “When you are in 7th grade and you have a crush on a girl she is a total person. The intricacies of social life when you are this age are just as complicated as when are an adult, and maybe even more so—maybe they are even smarter and more in tune with each other.” Nelson says that they read each other really well, more so even than the half asleep 30-something’s he sometimes runs into at parties.

Nelson likes to read YA authors who put forth a lot of energy and a clear style like Rachel Cohn who authored, Gingerbread. A trustworthy voice is key if the reader is to buy into the premise or world and a writer who is genuinely funny in an interesting way is always a huge plus—it has to feel authentic, says Nelson.

As far as selling books for movie rights goes Nelson prefers to take a back seat to the process.  When Girl sold he never even sat down with the film company. He had no input on the script or process whatsoever, and that was just fine by him. “When your book gets made into film there’s two ways you can do it, you can either let go and just let them do what they do, or you have to assert yourself right from the start and say I want to write the script and I wanna do this and I wanna do that, because you have to put all that stuff in the contract. If you want to have control than you have to decide that right from the start.” Even if he had actually bugged them for the script it would’ve been a disaster because, he says, he wouldn’t have liked it and he would’ve written them back. The book was given to 8 or 9 scriptwriters who all took a shot at the adaptation. The movie ended up being a hodge-podge of some the scripts. It didn’t turn out so great and it took the convincing of a friend before he would even view it. When he did finally did so, on a couch with a blanket over his head, the first 30 seconds, he says, were amazing. Nelson is forgiving reasoning that most movies don’t work. “It’s a lot easier to write a good book than to make a good movie because you don’t have all those other people involved.”

Being the acute observer that he is, Nelson followed the careers of others writers he liked and recognized that many writers had bad movies made from their books and their careers were sailing along just fine. This is an appealing quality, Nelson’s ability to sort of go with the flow, to stick to what he wants to do and not worry so much about the results, but be happy in the process. “If you’re the kind of person who gets too worked up about stuff writing probably isn’t the right job for you”, says Nelson.

About his recent sale of Paranoid Park to indie film hero Gus Van Sant, to Nelson it seems like the best of all possible configurations. “It feels like a reward for being patient and writing the books I want to write even thought they haven’t sold all that well. I kept going and marching along and the best possible thing ever lands on my head—it’s one of those weird karmic things.” It is, as one might imagine, a surreal thing for him, he says, because you write books hoping that somebody will be interested, you hope, you just don’t think your favorite filmmaker will be the one. “It’s as if Keith Richards called me up and was like, “Hey, you wanna be in my band? You think, Oh I’m gonna be in a band some day, you don’t think, Oh I’m gonna be in the Rolling Stones.”

It took a few bold steps on Nelson’s part to land the deal. Van Sant had formerly expressed interest in another of his books so he had Van Sant’s agents’ attorney’s email hanging around. While writing Paranoid Park he had a feeling that it might be something Van Sant would be interested in so he promised himself he would send it to the lawyer’s email address in an attempt to get it to Van Sant.  He forgot his promise until one day he was sitting around and remembered and so he sent it off not thinking much of it. A month later it all started to come together. “It didn’t happen gradually, my agent called and said, Gus is buying the book.”

During a dinner with Van Sant Nelson admired his peculiar generous ways that made everyone feel included.  The same quality translates to his films where Nelson believes that,  “Van Sant has the ability to make you feel like you made the movie, you feel like you are a part of it—it’s a great quality for an artist because it really draws people to your work.”  It goes without saying really that Nelson is excited to see now Van Sant will interpret his book. Nelson is taking the same hands-off approach to this screen adaptation as he did with Girl. “I can’t wait to see what his ideas are.”

Paranoid Park comes out on September 21st. Gender Blender (Delacorte Books for Young Readers, 2006) is being made into a TV movie for Nickelodeon. Check out Blake Nelson's website @ www.blakenelsonbooks.com.