Mike’s Story (or, How I Learned To Stop Living In Isolation and Get Involved in the YA Community)
My name is Mike Martin – more accurately, Thomas Michael Martin, Jr. – and I’m a young adult novelist.
I know you don’t know me yet, so you don’t know the back story of how I’ve gotten to the point where I may emphatically state that last sentence. (More accurately, the last part of the last sentence. I’ve been able to say my name since the age of two, yo.)
I’ll be honest: It’s been a booming, jaunty, exhilarating, obliterating road to get to this point. So, as opposed to me just type-type-typing away at it, how ’bout I just give a Timeline of My Writing Life as an introduction?
– 1984. THE TERMINATOR, GHOSTBUSTERS, and INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM are released. Also, I am born. Good year.
– 1992. “Welcome to Dead House,” the first “Goosebumps,” hits the streets, introducing the Nintendo generation to horror archetypes. I read the tome and promptly fall in love with Jovial Bob Stine.
– 1993. I write my first story, a two-page epic concerning a young boy named (I-josh-you-not) Max Maxwell who is troubled by strange anomalies in his own reflection, such as a skull showing through his skin and horns piercing from his scalp. It builds to a riveting climax, during which I build suspense admirably. (“Max looked into the mirrer. There was something wierd about the mirrer. ‘WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS MIRRER!’ Max shouted suspensfully!”) At last it is revealed that a ghost is in “the mirrer.” However, a shocking lack of foresight causes me to ruin the ending in the title: The story was called “THE GHOST IN THE MIRRER!”
– 1994. I write another story, this time about an archaeologist slug. When I am allowed to read it to the class, it goes down a storm. (I vividly remember that during computer class, in between rounds of Jezzball, a sea of peers crowded me, inquiring when the sequel would be written.) For the first time in my life, I am popular. Then the teacher installs Math Blaster, and my day in the sunshine is through.
– 1995-1998. Middle school. Middle school is terrible. Mostly it involves me being sixty pounds overweight and boob-grabbed by my classmates. However, I find solace in horror films. (Why this is? Yanno, dunno. Just the way I’m constructed, I think.) I am especially drawn to the po-mo SCREAM. As a result, over eighth grade Christmas Break I write a 61-page screenplay called WRONG ANSWER: THE NIGHT OF THE CALLS, a beyond-the-pale ripoff of Wes Craven’s mini-masterpiece. There is not a single page formatted correctly, the characters are Styrofoam, and yet when I am finished I feel a gentle, heavy exhilaration. I’ve written a real Something, and it is wonderful.
– 1998. Freshman year begins. High school is better than middle school, the same way root canals with anaesthesia are better than without. As I meet with a distinctly ork-esque guidance counselor, she tells me I must pick my career path before the day is through. I panic, but then see under “Arts & Entertainment” something that sounds much more pleasant than anything else: “Writer.”
– 1999. Thanks to the recommendation of a Journalism teacher who enjoys my writing, I am hired by a new start-up newspaper as their film critic. For the next three years, it will be the only job I hold.
– 1999 (cont’d). Inspired perhaps by my new job, I somehow manage to lose 75 pounds. I am now The Average-Sized Nerd, not The Stay-Puft Sized one.
– 1999 (cont’d). Enthralled by the works of Wes Anderson, I pen a new script, a RUSHMORE homage (see also: ripoff) titled G.P.A. Unlike WRONG ANSWER: THE NIGHT OF THE CALLS, this script has proper formatting. Like WRONG ANSWER: THE NIGHT OF THE CALLS, this script is a skunk.
– 2001. In Media class, I begin to make funny film spoof commercials for the high school’s closed-circuit morning show. Shockingly, these create a huge stir. Girls who would otherwise not spit on me had I spontaneously detonated now want my digits. Obviously, I am a cinematic wunderkind. I apply to every affordable film school on the eastern seaboard.
– 2002. I am accepted to a few of them. I decide on Ohio University, mostly because of its proximity to my hometown and its lovely campus.
– 2002 (cont’d). Six weeks before I am to move to Athens, OH, I receive a letter welcoming me to their Telecommunications program. I call them, amused by this error, since they obviously meant their Film program. They tell me no. They tell me it was a mistake. They tell me I was not admitted to their Film program. I tell them: Oh.
– 2002 (cont’d). I decide to attend West Virginia University for a year, during which I will take general liberal arts classes and apply to transfer to a film school. Concurrently, I am admitted to the University of North Carolina’s arts conservatory. I also meet a button-cute graphic designer who will, in a few years’ time, become my fiancee.
– 2003. I attend the School of Filmmaking at the North Carolina School of the Arts. I realize I am not a wunderkind. Very few girls, if any, want my digits.
– 2004. At the end of the first year, I become panicked by the thought of graduating from the program and working as a grip on reality television. Therefore, I devise a surefire fallback plan: I will become a children’s novelist. Easy-peasy, I think. Anybody could write that stuff.
– 2004 (cont’d). The peasy = not that easy. My summer is spent writing and rewriting the first 100 pages of a novel I plot as I go along. Autumn arrives. I am fairly certain the novel is on par with WRONG ANSWER, but nonetheless I give it to the Dean of the school, for he was a Pulitzer Prize nominee.
– 2005. Months later, the Dean surprises me by stopping me after an all-school meeting. He shakes my hand and tells me he is blown away by my voice, that he thinks I am “another Jonathan Sarfran Foer.” I’m thinking, He’s either joking or he wants my digits. Neither, it turns out. He just wants to send it to his agent, ICM’s Amanda “Binky” Urban. Following profuse thanking, I gracefully exit and Google both Jonathan Safran Foer and Amanda Urban. This time it is my turn to be blown away.
– 2005-2006 (cont’d). As I complete my children’s novel, I also come up with an idea – more-or-less-y: about kids fighting monsters – that I think could become my first non-skunk screenplay. I call it S.P.E.C.T.E.R. and breeze through it in perhaps three months.
– 2007. I finally complete my novel; five weeks later, I finish S.P.E.C.T.E.R. I send off the book to Binky Urban and wait in Hitchcockian suspense. (There’s something wierd about this waiting game! he shouted suspensfully!) At the same time, I hear from a friend interning at Phoenix Pictures that they are looking for sci-fi scripts. Never one to turn down an opportunity, I capitalize all the mentions of laser beams and jetpacks in S.P.E.C.T.E.R. and send it in, hoping to confound their genre-detectors.
– 2007 (cont’d). To my utter and gobsmacking shock, the story executive at Phoenix loves S.P.E.C.T.E.R.
– 2007 (cont’d). For the next few months, while finishing my last semester of school, I rewrite the script with him. I keep this development a secret and feel super-special.
– 2007 (cont’d). Heaven’s name, the bubble bursts! My friend then tells me of the story executive’s proclivity for stealing people’s ideas and claiming them as his own! As our Brit cousins might say: Shock-horror!
– 2007 (cont’d). Shock-horror no-more-r: I leave the company and go with another production house that has shown interest, Kopelson Entertainment.
– 2007 (cont’d). The day after I graduate film school, I fly to Los Angeles and meet with the executives at Kopelson. They want S.P.E.C.T.E.R. to be a SPY KIDS-esque franchise for them. They compliment and call me things like “Big Daddy” with no discernible irony. That same day, I check my e-mail, and find a note from International Creative Management. One of their top YA agents read my novel and wants to work with me on cutting it by 50,000 words. She, too, loves my voice.
– 2007 (cont’d). Sunset Boulevard pays witness, next minute, to me strutting my stuff.
– 2007 (cont’d [yes, again!]). I spend the summer rewriting S.P.E.C.T.E.R., writing a new teen thriller called THE APPLESEED, and cutting my book by a third. Most of my thoughts are like: OMG I CAN HAZ HOLLEEWUD CONTRACTS AND BOOK CONTRACTS AND BE AW3SUM!! REVISIONS, FTW!!1
– 2007 (cont’d). Autumn falls on West Virginia. The leaves are gorgeous and the air smells of woodsmoke and a mist plays across the hills like the breath of a witch’s cauldron. Also: My book is rejected by ICM and then twenty other agencies I send it to; my manager hates my new script and dumps me as a client, and the Writer’s Strike hits just when Kopelson was considering buying my script.
– 2007 (cont’d). Most of my thoughts are like this: Aw hell naw. I am promptly butt-kicked into a spiraling identity-crisis-depression.
– 2008. Said crisis turns out to be the best thing that ever happened to me because (Oprah moment alert!) I am forced to confront who I really am and what I really want. I become obsessed with self-development and the development of a peaceful inner life. Oh dear, and you thought this blog was cool until now, huh?
– 2008 (cont’d). I begin lecturing (for dollars, ya’ll!) at local schools on story structure. I learn more about writing from this, and come to love discussing life with teenagers. Moreover: I get a job reading scripts for money and doing “coverage” (like book reports about why it is they are teh suck) on them. I also adapt S.P.E.C.T.E.R. into a young adult novel. At the same time, I continue to develop S.P.E.C.T.E.R. as a screenplay with Kopelson Entertainment and then Valhalla Motion Pictures. However, I feel a growing apathy as to how it turns out. All I shout suspensfully into “the mirrer” is, Why do I no longer care!
– 2008 (cont’d). I finish the S.P.E.C.T.E.R. book but feel a very odd numbness toward the material. Two reasons I can come up with for this: First, I’m sick-to-effing-death of the material. Second: I have a new project, one that literally made me sit up gasping from a dream, titled THE END GAMES. And it is (he said humbly) very…good.
– 2008 (cont’d). I stop working with all film companies. Lunacy? Yanno, I don’t think so. ‘Cause deep, honest moments with self over the course of the year accumulate into the following conclusions, in no order particularly:
- While I’m good – and maybe could be great – at both, I love writing novels, and just like writing scripts. Put another way, I may want screenwriting’s digits, but I want novel-writing’s hand. (And yes, I do acknowledge that was such an awful pun I may want to reconsider this whole prose-writing = destiny! thing.) I therefore pour all energy into my growing as a novel writer, reading 3-4 novels a week and reading anything I flippin’ can on the craft of writing. Why? Well, ’cause…
- As Tony Robbins says, Success leaves clues. I humbly realize, all joking aside, I don’t know everything about everything. And that’s fine. (Own the truth: It’s pretty much a huge relief.) So I decide to study the masters. And I get much, much better for it. Yet, fascinatingly and at-first-glance paradoxically, I also learn tons more by reading those really bad scripts than I did in four years of A+ performance at one of the best film schools in the world. I realize that…
- I’m really dang good at looking at a story and figurin’ out where THE SUCK is inside them. (Flip side: I’m equally good at rooting out THE AWESOME in there, too.) Additionally, I find I’m solid at looking at something complex and distilling the essential, most useful essence of it into an easy-to-understand form. Thus, I think I should begin somehow to contribute to the online resources on the craft of young adult writing, which are, doubtless, legion. However, I soon find…
- THERE ARE PRECIOUS FEW FREAKING RESOURCES OUT THERE EXCLUSIVELY ON THE CRAFT OF YOUNG ADULT WRITING. Yes, there are some wonderful blogs out there. And no doubt, there are some terrific books (and we’ll get to them at some point, trust me). But what I wanted was a single-source place where I could find enlightening, useful interviews with the very best writers in the world, about how they do what they do. How do they plot? Which comes first, character or theme? Do they have a regular way of finding The Zone? I wanted something that could help my own writing, and also the writing of the invisible multitudes out there longing for tips both basic and esoteric. I also thought: Gee, wouldn’t it be radical if Said Blog also had cool YouTube stuff?
And, thusly:
– 2009. I start MIKE’S WRITING TIPS (OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE YA CRAFT), a resource for the invisible multitudes, complete with cool YouTube stuff.
And that is the story of how I came to understand how to make my stories better.
