Alex London, author of Proxy and the upcoming Guardian, spoke with us about writing a sequel and his panel at Book Con with Veronica Roth.
Tell us 5 random facts about yourself.
1. I spent a month as the Maryland State Jr. Skeet Shooting Champion because I was the only one entered in the “Junior” Category. It might actually have been in Delaware. My triumph didn’t last.
2. My full name is Charles Alexander London because my parents saw the monogram “CAL” on a towel in Macy’s and liked how it looked
3. I was born three months premature and lived in an incubator for quite a while. I weighed about two pounds and slept on a Ziploc bag filled with water that the nurses could jiggle when I forgot to breathe. I think I’ve been drawn to those breathless moments in life ever since. Also, I still love Ziploc bags.
4. I don’t remember how to write cursive.
5. I quit my job as an assistant to a movie agent in order to get a Master’s in Library Science because of a speech Chris Crutcher gave. At the time, I hadn’t read a single one of his books.
Tell us about your journey to becoming a writer.
I always loved writing stories, from about the time I was 7 or 8 years old when I wrote my first book, Lawrence and Luther Lizard Go to Camp. The journey started in earnest, I suppose, when I wrote a letter to Brian Jacques, the author of the Redwall series about how much I liked his books. Much to my surprise, he wrote me back. I was in the 5th grade and didn’t get much mail, so opening an envelope was already exciting. But to see it was a famous author who lived all the way in England? That made my day.
He encouraged me to keep using my imagination and said that I could be a writer too if I wanted. And, well, that sealed it for me. It was all I ever wanted to do from that point on. I had a lot of odd jobs — some more odd than others — but I was always aimed squarely at making my living telling stories. I did journalism for a while, which was excellent training for fiction. I had to learn to render the truth of other people as accurately as possible before I could manage to render the truth of imaginary people. But in the end, I still do the same thing now as I did making up stories in 5th grade, rearranging the same 26 letters over and over again to see if I can make somebody smile, somebody laugh, or somebody feel something.
Where did the concept for Proxy start?
The concept in Proxy, where the rich pay for the poor to take their punishments was sparked in elementary school too, actually in 4th grade, although I couldn’t have known it at the time. Our teacher had us read a novel called The Whipping Boy, the story of a bratty prince and the poor, put-upon boy who takes punishments in his place. (Because a commoner cannot strike the Prince, and the King can’t be bothered to raise his own child.) I didn’t think about the book for a very long time, until one day I’d neglected to do the dishes I’d sworn I’d do. My partner came home, took one look at the sink, one look at me sitting on the couch having spent all day not doing the dishes (or much of anything) and called out, “Fetch the Whipping Boy!” I remembered the book from childhood and it just struck me as such a profoundly twisted idea — how could there be a society so corrupted that the children of privilege didn’t have to face the consequences of their actions, while a poor boy of the same age suffered terribly in their place…and on looking around, it sure looked a lot like the direction our own justice system was headed, with vastly different punishments meted out for kids from different strata of society. It wasn’t much of leap to build that society in a not-too-distant future.
Proxy is a unique combination of sci-fi and dystopian. How did you create the Mountain City society and world for your novel?
I like to think of Proxy as cyberpunk, which implies more of an urban high-tech but rough-around-the-edges world, although really, labels only help so much. For me, creating the city and the badlands beyond was an exercise in looking at our world and extending the extremes I saw. I’ve spent some time working with youth around the world in cities like Nairobi, Goma, Mumbai, and Rangoon…even New York City, where you have great wealth slammed up against great poverty. I grew up quite privileged in Baltimore in the ’90s and was very sheltered from the harsher realities lived by many kids my own age a few miles from my prep school. So writing Knox and Syd’s respective neighborhoods was more a matter of distillation than invention. Of course, my imagined backstory for how the world got the way it has in Proxy made setting it in former Denver essential…climate change had made a lot of other places uninhabitable. Again though…not that far fetched. Maybe we should all be buying real estate on high ground…
Syd is very diverse and a proxy while Knox is the privileged son of a Patron. How did you create such rich, diverse characters?
I find that readers enjoy stories where the characters that populate them look more like the characters that populate real life. In real life, we all know diverse people. Everyone is more than just one identity. So Knox is privileged, yes, but he’s also got his own wounds and needs and wants. Syd is a proxy—poor and deep in debt, but also resourceful, hard-working, honest. He’s gay, but his sexuality doesn’t limit what he can do in the world of Proxy. Knox is straight, but it doesn’t limit the kinds of friendships he can form either. And of course, there are a lot of people of color in the story — Syd, Marie, Gordis, and more — purely because I was imagining a plausible future. In any future I can imagine, most of the world is not white, so it simply made sense. It wasn’t a nod toward diversity that pushed me to write queer characters and characters of color in major roles in the story, it was a nod toward plausibility.
Authors often talk about their characters doing something different from what they expected. Did that happen while you were writing Syd and Knox? Or did you always know exactly where the story was going?
I never had any idea! I knew how it would begin and I knew the world where it was set, but other than that, I tried to create complex characters and put them into situations to see how they would react. I grew worried when they were not surprising me, in fact. I didn’t want them to act like receptacles of my plot ideas, but like teenagers reacting to some intense situations. They don’t always make the choices I would’ve made and they don’t always make good choices, but that’s what makes a story compelling, I think. Their bad choices and the consequences drive so much of the action. Knox, however, probably surprised me the most. His growth as character was a joy to guide and that last kiss of his…well, that took me completely off guard, but I knew it was right. It was so very him.
In Guardian, the sequel to Proxy, we see a shift in power and a new challenge for Syd to face. What were the challenges of writing a sequel compared to a first novel?
Oh the pressures of the sequel! I knew I had to do something different; I had different questions to explore as an author. Proxy is so much about debt and friendship and justice and the different character’s relationships with those things. Guardian is both a story of the aftermath of the events of Proxy and a story about other questions I have…about forgiveness, about the dangers of justice untempered by mercy, and about healing. Syd is traumatized by what happened in Proxy and has to learn to live with himself in the aftermath…he has a choice to make: in a brutal world, how can he heal? Can he accept love and trust from others or will he be tempted by the nihilism offered by the new bad guy in this story, an enigmatic figure I call Cousin. Guardian is a very different story from Proxy, but the stakes are high, the action is intense, and the questions are just as big. I really hope readers are ready to follow me on this crazy journey.
This week you will be at BEA on a panel with Veronica Roth. Can you tell us a little about what you will be talking about?
We’ll be talking, of course, about her new short story collection from Tobias’s point of view, FOUR, as well as my books. We’re looking forward to chatting about how we build the broken worlds each of us have created, the overlapping themes of technology run amuck, self-sacrifice, and how young adults truly are capable of reshaping the world, for good or ill. Also cookies. We’ll probably talk about cookies.
At what point in the development of an idea do you know that it will become a full-length novel?
Three years after it’s published? Really, I don’t know. I suppose it is kind of like that Japanese video game, Katamari, where you roll around collecting more and more flotsam until you go from the size of speck to a galaxy-devouring monster. For me, the better an idea for a story, the more stuff sticks to it and the more it picks up as it rolls until the momentum is unstoppable. But there is some magic to it too. I’m skeptical of anyone assuming that can completely fathom how a novel comes alive in the process of writing it. I’m writing my 15th book right now, and that any of them come together as a coherent story at all still surprises me.
What has been the scariest thing about deciding to publish your novel? What has been the most exciting?
You would think it gets less scary to publish after certain number of books, but nope…every single one is a bit terrifying. I chewed on by doubts: Will people like it as much the last book? Will they understand what I’m trying to do? Will they care about the story and relate to the characters? Will the new book be a total commercial and critical failure that will not only ruin my career but destroy the major publisher who released it and also somehow unleash a mutated version of the SARS virus that wipes out 2/3 of humanity, leaving the rest of us to develop sadistic death cults around the licensing tie-ins of long forgotten television shows while we battle for survival in the post-apocalyptic hellscape that used to be Brooklyn? You know, normal publishing fears.
Also, I really hope people like the new characters who come into Syd’s life after the events of Proxy. I’m proud of the book.
Do you have things you need in order to write (i.e. coffee, cupcakes, music)?
Coffee. That’s the only constant. Sometimes there is music, sometimes not. Sometimes there are Tate’s whole wheat dark chocolate chip cookies (my favorite), sometimes not. But always, there is coffee.
Where’s your favorite place to write?
I’m very traditional. I like writing at my desk by the window where I can hear and then ignore the street sounds of Brooklyn. I do, however, sit on a yoga ball instead of a desk chair. I like to bounce. I’m a very physical writer.
What is easier to write: The first line or the last line?
First lines, definitely. They come to me like scents on the breeze. Last lines are like swarms of mosquitoes. There are millions of possible ones, and a lot of the bite, but it’s hard as hell to smack the right one down.
What one YA novel do you wish you had when you were a teen?
Is it the height of arrogance to say my own? I wrote Proxy and Guardian to be the kinds of books I would’ve loved as teenager. But really, David Levithan’s Two Boys Kissing would have opened me up to a million possibilities for bliss I was long too afraid to pursue. Also, Andrew Smith’s Grasshopper Jungle would’ve probably made me a better writer. That’s a book that screams, there are no rules to the stories you’re allowed to tell as long as you tell them your own damn way. Never hold back. I spent a lot of my teenage years holding back, out fear of rejection, out of shame, out of a lack of confidence that my stories could matter to anyone. Things got a heck of lot better when I just let my voice speak. David and Andrew’s books are so thoroughly them and so completely unique, I could’ve learned a lot.
What are you working on now?
A few projects, but I can’t really talk much about any of them yet. There’s a globe-spanning, a gangster raccoons and rat pickpocket, a killer robot boyfriend. Not all in the same project…
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