Holes - Louis Sachar: Author

I was born in East Meadow, New York on March 20, 1954 and lived there until third grade. My dad worked on the 78th floor of the Empire State Building. When I was nine years old, we moved to Tustin California. At that time, there were orange groves all around, and the local kids would often divide up into teams and have orange fights. The "ammo" hung from the trees, although the best ones were the gushy, rotten ones on the ground. Now most of the orange trees are gone, replaced with fast food restaurants, and big box stores.
I enjoyed school and was a good student, but it wasn't until high school that I really became an avid reader. J.D. Salinger and Kurt Vonnegut were the authors who first inspired me. Some of my other favorite authors include E.L. Doctorow, Margaret Atwood, E.B White, Richard Price and Kazuo Ishiguro.
After high school, I attended Antioch College in Ohio. My father died during my first semester, and I returned to California to be near my mother. During that time, I had a short but surprisingly successful career as a Fuller Brush man. For those of you too young to know what that is, I went door-to-door selling cleaning products.
I returned to college, this time to the University of California at Berkeley where I majored in Economics. On campus one day, I saw the unlikely sight of an elementary school girl handing out flyers. I took one from her. It said: "Help. We need teachers aides at our school. Earn three units of credit." I thought it over and decided it was a pretty good deal. College credits, no homework, no term papers, no tests, all I had to do was help out in a second/third grade class at Hillside Elementary School.
Besides helping out in a classroom, I also became the Noontime Supervisor, or "Louis the Yard Teacher" as I was known to the kids. It became my favorite college class, and a life changing experience.
When I graduated in 1976 I decided to try to write a children's book, which eventually became Sideways Stories From Wayside School. All the kids at Wayside School were based on the kids I knew at Hillside.
It took me about nine months to write the book. I wrote in the evenings. In the daytime I had a job at a sweater warehouse in Connecticut. After about a year, I was fired (my enthusiasm for sweaters was insufficient), and I decided to go to law school. 
I finished law school, graduating in 1980, passed the bar exam (which was required to practice law) and then did part-time legal work as I continued to write children's books. It wasn't until 1989 that my books began selling well enough that I was finally able to stop practicing law and devote myself fully to writing.
My wife Carla was a counselor at an elementary school when I first met her. She was the inspiration for the counselor in There's a Boy in the Girl's Bathroom. We were married in 1985. Our daughter, Sherre, was born in 1987. We live in Austin, Texas along with our dog, Watson. Sherre now has a job as a Zookeeper. Over the last five years, she has, at various times, taken care of tigers, lions, bears, great apes, giraffes, and a variety of smaller animals such as porcupines and sea otters.
I write every morning, usually for no more than two hours a day. I never talk about a book until it is finished. I spent two years on my latest novel, and nobody, not even Carla, Sherre or my editor knew anything about it until it was finished. Then they were the first to read it.
In my spare time, I like to play bridge. You can often find me at the bridge club in Austin, or at a bridge tournament somewhere around the country.

What process do you go through in arriving at a final draft?
I usually begin a novel with just a little idea, perhaps no more than a character trait. That idea will lead to another until it snowballs into a full-blown story. Since I do not plan or outline beforehand, I normally don't know what's going to happen next. I go through several drafts. The first draft is very unorganized, often with ideas at the end that are inconsistent with those at the beginning. In the second draft, I organize it better because I now have a pretty firm grasp of who the characters are and what is going to happen to them. By the time I get to the last rewrite (which may be the fifth or sixth pass), I try to convince myself that the story is all true, and that I am simply telling it, not making it up. After numerous rough drafts, I send the final copy to the publisher, but that's still not the absolute final copy. I then work with an editor, and I may do some more rewrites.

With each draft, the story changes and the ideas are transformed. I may initially have a real clear vision for different parts of a book. I know how I'm going to handle this problem. I know what I'm going to do here. And then I kind of get lost. What amazes me is that most days feel useless. I don't seem to accomplish anything—just a few pages, most of which don't seem very good. Yet, when I put all those wasted days together, I somehow end up with a book of which I'm very proud. Somehow I've now written eighteen books. I'm always amazed when I finish a book and realize, hey, this actually is what I set out to do.

How do you create the characters in your books, and how do you think up their names?
Well, the books and the characters and stories and settings all develop together. I start with a small idea—small piece of a character or setting, and as I write, all aspects of a story develop from there. Names are always a little difficult. Right before my daughter was born, my wife and I got a book called 10,000 Baby Names, and I still look through that book when I look for names.  The nicknames in Holes were just fun names to think of. Although, I came up with the name Stanley Yelnats because I didn't feel like figuring out a last name. So, I just spelled his last name backwards and figured I'd change it later. But I never did.

Do your books have a moral?
Yes, in the sense of thinking about right and wrong. But mainly my books are written to make reading enjoyable. That's my first goal with all my books, to make reading fun. I want kids to think that reading can be just as much fun, or more so, than TV or video games or whatever else they do. I think any other kind of message or moral that I might teach is secondary to first just enjoying the book. But, I don't mean to say that fun is necessarily frivolous. If a book is well written, communicating a moral can also be fun. People like it when the good guy wins and when good triumphs over evil.

What is the difference between writing for children and writing for adults?
I don't really believe that writing for children is very different from writing for adults. What makes good children's books is putting the same care and effort into them as I would if I were writing for adults. I don't write anything—put anything in my books that I'd be embarrassed to put in an adult book. The literary world often places children's literature below adult literature. But looking back through the ages, the really classic children's books have all had beautifully developed plot, structure, and characterization. I've always believed that I learned to write for children by reading books written for adults. For instance, Kurt Vonnegut's Hocus Pocus and William Goldman's The Princess Bride influenced the way I wrote Holes. I liked the way the opening chapters of these books were sort of short and jumpy, and how they led into the story. And The Princess Bride had these colorful characters and this bizarre setting, and that's sort of like Holes.

Will you ever write books for adults? Or are you fully dedicated to writing for kids? 
I may write for adults. I actually started an adult book, worked on it for about two years, and then decided it just wasn't coming together for me. At that point, I decided to go back to children's books, and almost immediately I started Holes, and it just seemed to take off on me.