According to New York Times Best Seller Markus Zusak, he doesn't have a high IQ or a great imagination. "I try to do the simple things well....I just have a lot of problems."
With no written speech in hand, a great sense of humor, and fun Australian accent, 35-year-old Zusak candidly shared stories about problems he's had with his big brother, his writing, and becoming an author.
"I don't usually confess this sort of thing, but I feel like I can tell this audience anything."
The audience he felt so at ease with filled the Provo City Library ballroom, a much bigger audience than the one that "turned up" for his first book reading in western Australia. "Nobody turned up. That wasn't the worst part. The librarian still made me read to her."
The local librarians and other fans who "turned up" for Zusak Saturday, made him feel welcome enough that he greeted them by saying, "I'd like to move here!" After seeing "everyone plugged into something" while traveling 36 hours to Provo, "it made it that much more worthwhile to come just to see books in your laps."
When Zusak's first book, The Underdog, came out in 1999, he didn't want to invite family to his book launch. "I didn't want them there. I didn't want them to see that no one else was there." So, he recruited his rugby team who was more drawn to the box of beer than his box of books, and asked, "Can we come out every Thursday?"
Since the time a woman told him she liked his book, but his reading of it was atrocious, he hasn't read from his own works to an audience.
Saturday was a different story.
"This audience is so receptive," he said, grabbing for one of his books he never dreamed would reach so many. Reading from a chapter called "Confessions," his voice started wavering a bit towards the end.
When thinking about trying to sell this book, The Book Thief, to people, he imagined a conversation about it going something like this:
You've got to read this book. It's so good.
Really? What's it about?
WW II...Nazi Germany...death...
Oh.
Oh, yeah, and it's 576 pages long.
Even though this seemed problematic, Zusak said he went for it anyway because of a story his mom told him. While growing up in Sydney, Australia, his family would gather 'round their kitchen table listening about his mom's life in Munich, Germany, and his dad's in Austria. She'd tell how she saw a teenage boy who nobody liked in the town giving a piece of bread to an emaciated old Jew walking by. When a Nazi soldier saw this, he snatched the bread and threw it away. Then, he whipped the boy. "This story is why I wrote The Book Thief," and if no one else would have ever read it, he said he would have written it anyway.
Zusak's dad's stories also interested him. He was in Hitler Youth because he had to be. "'This is boring,'" he thought, and so he threw rocks in the river instead. "Then, the letters started showing up...I was always interested in opposites, like fire and ice." His parents would tell of going down into bunkers and coming out to find ice on the ground and fire in the sky.
As far as problems Zusak has encountered with his actual writing, he told about characters or points of view not working out quite right. But,"when you hear that voice in your head, you just go for it," he explained. This "voice" is what whispered the last line of the book to Zusak, "I am haunted by humans." By making his narrator slightly vulnerable, he was able to solve his problem of death being too comic-book like. This also introduced the unexpected, one of the essentials of a good story, he said.
He told of an Olympic swimmer who had that same voice inside his head tell him to "go (faster) now" earlier in a race thanhe'd planned. He listened and won the gold.
Just like Olympians put in their time, "If you want to be a writer, it has to be #1 or #2 for you," he advised.
Coming from someone who re-wrote the first 80 pages of The Book Thief 150-200 times, he's someone who's willing to put in the time required to be ready for those flashes of inspiration. "It's like waiting for a wild animal to come out of a hole. Put your hand in, and it'll bite. It takes patience to wait for it to come out. It's all about trial and error, spending time."
For someone who encountered a few problems during his humble beginnings as a writer, Zusak has no problem now getting hundreds of fans to line up for hours, waiting for his photo and a signature. Their only problem? Forgetting to bring their "paint tins" and "eskees."
Stay tuned for pics. and more on that story.
