Author Interview with Ron Bates! 

 

Any middle grader who’s ever been on the bottom rung of the popularity ladder or prefers a chemistry set over a football jersey will relate to the main character in author Ron Bates’ HOW TO MAKE FRIENDS AND MONSTERS (Zonderkidz; $12.99; August 2013).

The book follows 7^th grader and frequent wedgie victim Howard Boward. A bespectacled loner, with a mouth full of braces, Howard is often the target of a school prank. That is, until a lab mistake involving Wonder Putty helps him “make” a new friend.  What began as a blob becomes a big, hairy, jovial creature who Howard names Franklin Stein. They are instant buddies. For the first time, Howard doesn’t have to sit alone at the lunch table. The cool kids finally know his name.  Unfortunately, Howard soon learns that playing God has a price. When certain members of the UPs (über-popular crowd) hear about Howard’s secret experiment, they want him to make them a special friend, too.  But things quickly spiral when the true nature of each monster emerges. Howard must find a way to fix this disaster—even if it means going back to being friendless.  Bates effortlessly captures both the ruthlessness and charm of middle school, penning a relatable story that is as honest as it is entertaining.

HOW TO MAKE FRIENDS AND MONSTERS reminds readers that true friends are worth much more than social status.  Watch the trailer here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk-aOxjnkwA

I am honored to introduce the Author of  How to make Friends and Monsters, Ron Bates!  Thank you for being here Ron...

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Ron Bates began his career as a newspaper reporter in Texas, and later became an editor and columnist. His humorous features led him to a job as the resident humor columnist for three of Legacy Publishing’s regional magazines. As a freelance writer, Bates’ works include the children’s story, “Arnold Bought a Bug,” and “St. Mary’s and the Art of War,” the true story of how Italian POWs transformed a tiny Texas church. Bates also wrote the Cranium Comics series “Brawn,” the inspirational play, “Flight 1615,” and “Underground Ink,” a collection of funny poems.  An award-winning copywriter, Bates lives in Frisco, Texas. howtomakefriendsandmonsters.com  

TELL US A LITTLE ABOUT YOURSELF AND YOUR BOOK. 

As for me, my training is in journalism and I was a newspaper reporter and columnist for several years. Having a regular column was a great experience because it gave me a place to just let my imagination run wild. Unfortunately, my editors had the insane notion that the pages of a “newspaper” should be somehow connected to "the news.” Why they thought this, I have no idea. Fortunately, I eventually found other avenues.

 

How to Make Friends and Monsters is the part-confession/part-boast of Howard Boward. A friendless but scientifically minded seventh-grader, Howard, through a bizarre set of circumstances, creates a monster in his garage. While this means he finally has the best friend he’s always wanted, a huge, fur-covered buddy isn’t the simplest thing to explain to his family or the kids at school. As you can imagine, the creature changes Howard’s whole life and even improves his social standing. But playing God is a dangerous game. Ultimately, Howard is brought face-to-face with the problems he created--problems that threaten to destroy the school, his popularity and his only true friendship. This is a story about friends and about monsters and about how, sometimes, it’s easier to make those things than to be them.

 

WHEN AND HOW DID YOU BECOME A WRITER? 

My best guess is that it happened in Mrs. Campbell’s class in third grade. Each week, we had to write a story and read it aloud. But while the other kids’ stories seemed to get shorter and shorter, mine went in the other direction. I just didn’t want to stop writing. Still, I didn’t think of myself as a working writer until I took a job with a small-town newspaper and got my first byline. I don’t remember the story, or exactly where they put it in the paper, but I’ll remember seeing that name in newsprint for the rest of my life.

 

WHAT IS YOUR GREATEST WRITING ACHIEVEMENT?

Finding a rhyme for “purple.” I had read something that said purple was a word that could not be rhymed with anything else, which I took as a challenge. So I wrote this poem:

I gave Romeo lots of grape soda,

So much that his lips’ll turn purple--

And if that won’t stop Juliet’s kisses,

I’m pretty darn sure that the burp’ll.

 

WHAT IS THE HARDEST THING ABOUT BEING A WRITER?

For me, it’s the choices. When you sit down and look at a page, it can become absolutely anything you want it to be. Every sentence can be written a dozen different ways. And a line that sounds perfect the first ten times you read it suddenly sounds horrible on the eleventh.  You’ve got to develop the discipline to trust your instincts and keep moving forward or you will be stuck forever on some insignificant stretch of dialogue trying to decide if the character is speaking with a period or an exclamation point. There are more challenging parts of the profession, like trying to find an audience out there in an endless sea of readers, but I think the human tendency to constantly self-edit is the hardest.

 

WHAT ARE YOU WORKING ON AT THE MOMENT?

How to Make Friends and Monsters is the first book in the Howard Boward series. I’m just finishing the second book in which Dolley Madison Middle School is again threatened by one of Howard’s experiments gone wrong. The story takes place a little later in the year so we’ve got a concoction of bullies and winter and a brainy seventh-grader who can’t stay away from the science lab. The result? Let’s just say you’ll never look at a snowball fight the same way again.

 

WHAT GENRE(S) DO YOU WRITE?

Primarily, I write middle-grade fiction but I’ve written a play and a comic-book series that we’re talking about doing as a graphic novel. I write a lot of short humor and I’ve got a hard drive filled with quirky, juvenile poems that I’ll crank out unconsciously whenever I need something to get the creative juices flowing.

 

DO YOU EVR SUFFER FROM WRITER’S BLOCK?  IF SO, HOW DO YOU GET PAST IT? 

It definitely happens. I’ve mentioned that I’ll write funny little poems about anything just to get my fingers moving. But probably the most effective remedy is timed writing. I’ll give myself 10 or 15 minutes in which to write about anything that enters my head. The rules are that I can’t stop typing, I can’t think about it, and my hands can’t leave the keys. Generally, at some point in the process, I find myself entering “the zone” and then the words start to flow in a stream. Your best stretches of writing occur when you’re in that zone. It’s where you’re not pushing the story, the story is carrying you along.

 

DO YOU HAVE A FAVORITE PLACE TO WRITE?

There’s a little coffee shop near where I live and I like to walk over there with my laptop and hopefully find a vacant table in the corner. I never write anything good there. Mostly, I surf the web and people-watch and don’t write anything at all. But there’s something about that process that makes me feel more like writing when I come back home and sit in my desk chair and actually get to work. So the coffee shop is my favorite spot--but only in the same way that recess was my favorite part of school.

 

WHAT’S THE GREATEST COMPLIMENT YOU EVER RECEIVED FROM A READER?

I was working for a newspaper in Amarillo, Texas and my column appeared in the Sunday edition. The next week, I got a letter from a woman who told me she never contacts the media but that she was genuinely moved by the article. At the end, the letter mentioned that my English teacher must be very proud. I took that as a great compliment because, although she didn’t remember me -- that woman was my English teacher.

 

WHAT WAS THE WORST COMMENT FROM A READER?

I once had a reader tell me I should be arrested. It was in response to a piece I’d written about the U.S. Air Force aerial stunt team “The Thunderbirds.” I’d noted in the article that the Air Force did not allow those metallic, mylar balloons at their performances because if they got loose, they could damage the jet’s engine. I thought that was interesting. The reader, however, thought it was high treason. Apparently, I had just given the “commies” vital information about how to bring down our aircraft and, therefore, should be locked away for the good of the country.

 

OTHER THAN WRITING, WHAT ELSE DO YOU LOVE?

In no particular order: my family, brisket tacos, libraries, God, the San Antonio Spurs, drive-in movie theaters, early American history, Saturday mornings and everything Pixar has ever done.

 

DID YOU HAVE YOUR BOOK(S) PROFESSIONALLY EDITED BEFORE PUBLICATION?

I had fantastic editors and I’m eternally grateful to them. The first was my agent, Brandi Bowles, who got me to trim away all the peripheral storylines and see the book not as the writer, but as a reader. Then, when I signed with Zondervan, I was introduced to my editor, Kim Childress. Kim instinctively sees what’s missing in a story. She didn’t just send notes about what was on the page, she’d send ideas about what the characters should be doing or feeling in a particular section. It never felt like criticism, it was the kind of energy you get from working with a collaborator. Don’t get me wrong, a rewrite is always a kick in the gut but it wasn’t something I was doing alone. I had two people I trusted and together, we made it a better book.  

 

HOW DID YOUR BOOK COVER COME TO FRUITION?   

I was asked by my editor to provide a detailed description of the major characters in the book. She wanted to know what they looked like, how they did their hair, what they were wearing, things like that. Then she asked if I was thinking of any particular celebrities when I created these characters. As it happened, I was. When the list was through, she turned it over to the book’s illustrator, Andre Jolicoeur. Obviously, the characters weren’t exactly the way I’d pictured them (for that, we’d have needed some kind of PSYCHIC illustrator) but, ultimately, I liked Andre’s pictures much better than the ones in my head. So, for me, it was like meeting each of the characters for the first time. I was very pleasantly surprised. The cover was sent for my approval, I told them it was perfect and that was it.

 

DO YOU SEE YOURSELF IN ANY OF YOUR CHARACTERS?

Yes, I see elements of myself in Howard. He’s a middle child. I’m a middle child. He has two brothers and a sister. I have two brothers and a sister. Howard spends a lot of time alone and he’s not exactly sure how to fit in with the kids at school. To some degree, that was my experience in middle school. Fortunately, things got better for me later so maybe they will for Howard, as well.

 

DOES THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY FRUSTRATE YOU?

Everything frustrates me--publishing, drive-thru windows, setting my DVR. I don’t think I’m happy unless I’m frustrated. But I have to say that, so far, my experience with Zondervan couldn’t be better. When I need help with anything, all I have to do is ask. Everyone’s been great. I’ll admit that while the book was being shopped, I was frustrated with the industry in general. But at that point, it’s like the frustration of a job search--you’re putting in applications and you just want someone to say “you’re hired.”

 

DID YOU EVER THINK OF QUITTING?

No. The great thing about being a writer is that you don’t have to be published to be one. All you have to do is write. If I had quit, that would have meant I’d stopped being the only thing I ever wanted to be.

 

HOW WOULD YOU DEFINE ‘SUCCESS’ AS A WRITER?

I think it’s a movable goal. I think when I get to the place that I’d call “success” today, it will have moved to another level. But I don’t think it’s anything you measure in weekly book sales. My guess is that it has something to do with having the time to write the things you want to write, and being happy with the results.

 

DO YOU HAVE ANY TIPS FOR NEW WRITERS?

Read. Read good writers. Read until the rhythm of a perfectly structured paragraph spills out as naturally as the chorus of a song. Write when you don’t feel like writing. Join a workshop, a real one where participants growl at you and slaughter your work and push you to get better and love you when you do. Then, when you’re ready, attend an agent’s conference where you can get face to face with someone who can open doors you thought were closed to you forever.

 

ANYTHING YOU’D LIKE TO ADD?

Yes. I want to thank you for letting me talk about my book, and about writing, and about that strange, little world that exists inside my head. These kinds of things are immensely important to writers but, for some reason, no one ever asks us about them. You did and I appreciate it. Thanks again, I thoroughly enjoyed the discussion.

 

And now for the speed round of questions...

Ron's “BLONDE” BASICS:

FAVORITE FOOD?   A soft-serve chocolate-and-vanilla-twist frozen yogurt in a waffle cone.
FAVORITE MOVIE?  Around the World in Eighty Days. (Not the one with Jackie Chan. The good one.) 
FAVORITE BOOK? The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame
FAVORITE SUPERHERO?   “VERB -That’s What’s Happenin’ Man” from the Scholastic Rock video. (I’m in awe of his amazing powers of grammar!)
FAVORITE AUTHOR?  Jules Verne

A HUGE heartfelt thank you to Ron for sharing some insights on himself!   

Here's where you can find him:

To request an interview with Ron Bates or to receive a review copy of HOW TO MAKE FRIENDS AND MONSTERS, please contact Candice Frederick at DJC Communications: 212-971-9707, Candice@djccommunications.com.