Lex Thomas is the pen name for the writing team of Lex Hrabe and Thomas Voorhies. Their first novel, Quarantine: The Loners, earned a starred review from Booklist, and Huffington Post Books called it “one of the best books that I have ever read.” Check out the interview below to learn more about this writing team and Quarantine, their first novel.
Tell us 5 random facts about yourself.
LEX
I drive a Volvo station wagon with two car seats in the back, but I make it look good because I wear driving gloves.
I like soft rock.
If it wouldn’t kill me, I’d eat a cheeseburger every day.
In high school, I was student body president, like Dickie Bellman, McKinley High’s resident lunatic, so draw whatever conclusions you want from that.
I used to live in a box factory.
THOMAS
I drink coffee and strong British tea all day.
I once got surrounded by a moped gang in Tokyo.
There are often cookie crumbs on my shirt.
I write in the dark.
I don’t like acrylic paint and I don’t get why anyone paints with it.
What are the challenges you face writing together? How do you decide who writes what parts?
THOMAS
When we did screenwriting, we were almost always in the same room, figuring it out together, with one of us on the keyboard. That works pretty well for screenwriting, where there aren’t that many words on the page to fight over. If you tried to write a novel that way, I don’t know how you’d ever get anything done. Although, come to think of it, we’ve never tried. You never know.
But we don’t do that, we write separately, and it changes as to who is doing the rough draft of a given chapter, or section of the story, and who’s revising. But it is hard either way. It’s hard to take a hatchet to the other’s chapter, and it’s hard to be revised on something you just wrote, even when you think the revisions are sound. All that aside, this approach has worked well for us.
LEX
To answer the last question first…. we both write all parts. In the second step of the writing process, after we’ve read the raw, rough draft and taken notes, we execute those notes together, in the same room, with a lot of discussion.
The challenge is that there never seems to be enough time. A lot of people assume that the challenge of two people writing a novel is unifying our voices. I was worried about that very thing when we decided to write the first book. And while marrying two styles is not always an easy process, we’ve been working together long enough to see when something works and when it doesn’t. If we had all the time in the world, we’d use it to make each chapter as tight and effective as possible. Unfortunately, we’ve got deadlines. The best way we’ve found to manage the time crunch is to trust your gut and try to think at least two or three steps ahead.
Why do you feel you had to tell this story?
LEX
If we hadn’t, we might not still be writing. We had everything riding on this story. We’ll talk about this on occasion with a sort of wonder at how things worked out, but the truth is, before we started working on Quarantine, we were both at the respective ends of our ropes. We’d been working as a screenwriting team since 2005, and struggling separately as screenwriters before that. Right before Quarantine, we had worked hard for a year and a half on a project that just sort of fizzled out. It was really disappointing, and at that point, you start thinking about your plan B, and if you really even have one. We had this idea about gangs in high school, and a lot of people around us really thought it would be fantastic as a book. We were both wary of starting up a new project, especially in a new medium for us, but in our guts, we knew how cool we could make it. That’s all you really need to start a story. The potential for it to be awesome. This one just happened to be infused with our own life-or-death stakes. Thankfully, it was the best decision we’d ever made as a team.
THOMAS
I didn’t feel I had to, I wanted to. The idea sounded fun — a heightened version of high school that you’re trapped inside, where you have to fight the other social groups to the death to survive. I didn’t feel that it’s message had to be heard, or that it was timely or anything. It was just that the idea made my mind light up with fun possibilities.
What was your favorite chapter/scene to write and why?
THOMAS
I have a personal connection to a lot of the scenes, but most weren’t fun to write. I remember writing the first book in an anxiety haze, where there was never enough time, and feeling that writing a novel was an impossible feat, that we didn’t know what we were doing, and that we’d certainly never finish on time.
That said, my favorite is probably Chapter 33. It’s dense, so much crazy stuff happens in it, and I remember really enjoying writing the descriptions of a mind-bending battle scene in a hallway full of trash.
LEX
Chapter 20 comes to mind. It’s Sam’s first chapter of three in the book. He’s the villain of the story. It comes about halfway through, and I think it gives a nice jolt to the story. It reminds the reader that Sam’s not licked yet and there’s big trouble on the horizon. I don’t think it was in our first draft, but I think our editor had the idea to give the reader a window into what motivates Sam to do the awful things he does. We liked that idea a lot. I remember, when I wrote the first pass of it, I was reading Stephen King, so I was in the mood to really go dark. I had a lot of fun shaping Sam’s internal monologue and delving into his childhood. It gets gnarly, and I love the first line of the chapter — “They think I’m weak.”
What has been the toughest criticism given to you as an author? What has been the best compliment?
LEX
Based on reviews I’ve read on the internet, the toughest criticism for me is that some people find the set-up implausible. It bothers me that’s a stumbling block for some readers and it prevents them from enjoying the rest of the story. I wonder if we could have remedied those issues with time, but I also think some of those people’s opinions might evolve with the sequels. What’s always excited us most about the idea was being trapped in a world where social cliques battled like armies to rule high school. In the sequels, we’ll be focusing more on how the world within McKinley grows to be its own epic landscape.
As far as compliments go, it’s pretty simple. We’ve gotten fan letters that talk about how thrilling and entertaining the story is. Really, it’s the opposite of the criticism above. A lot of people have been completely swept away by our story, and that’s all we ever hoped for in writing it. Just that it works the way we wanted it to is an enormous gift.
THOMAS
We get some criticism for the amount of violence in the book, and the severity of it. I get that it’s not some people’s cup of tea, that’s fine. We knew if we wrote a story about teens sinking to acts of savagery to survive, that some people would be turned off right away. But if you don’t mind violence, read away!
My favorite compliments come in the form of fan emails with lots of ALL CAPS!!!
What is easier to write: The first line or the last line?
THOMAS
The last. When you write the first, you are forced to guess as to what it should be. You might have the story plotted out, but when you sit down to write on day one, you realize you have nothing. There is an endless void of white paper ahead of you. You don’t know what your book is yet because you haven’t written it.
When you get to the last line, however, you know what you’ve got, you’ve already created it all. The last line is really important and needs to be chosen carefully, but you have hundreds of pages of story to help tell you decide what it should be.
LEX
The first line. It’s a springboard. It’s the starting pistol. I love our first line. It’s a doozy. But a final line has to do so much. It not only has to be apropos of everything that came before it, but also propel you onward. It has to give you a sense of completion, a sense of satisfaction, while keeping your mind still percolating after you’ve put down the book. For me, starting something is easy. Finishing it is the hard part.
What one YA novel do you wish you had when you were a teen?
LEX
Rotters by Daniel Kraus. Kraus is the real deal. He’s an immensely talented writer who is genuinely fascinated by the horrors he’s writing about. He’s not selling you something, or packaging a story that’s teen-bait, the way the worst of YA can be. I mean, let’s face it… When the premise is graverobbing, you’re either in or you’re out. And I was in from the second I heard about it. Rotters revels in the dark side and the sloppy mess that pubescence can feel like. If I’d had it as a kid, my copy would have probably been pretty ragged with a lot of dog-eared, highlighted pages.
THOMAS
When I think about what I would’ve liked back then I can’t help but think of what I did like. The first book that really got me reading when I was around 12 was Twilight Eyes by Dean Koontz. It’s a coming of age story about a kid on the run with a traveling carnival. He had purple eyes and he could see that half the people around were horrible pig/lizard beasts in disguise, and of course he had to kill them in gruesome fashion, when he wasn’t losing his virginity or learning how to be a carny. After that book, I read every Dean Koontz paperback I could find.
Quarantine was recently optioned by Kami Garcia and Mark Morgan. What was it like to get the phone call saying your book has been optioned? What do you hope for in a film?
THOMAS
That was a great phone call to get. At first I thought it was some joker claiming to be a producer, but then as I looked into it, I saw he had been a producer on Twilight. I got really excited, ‘call your parents and tell them it finally happened’ excited, to be exact. But, then our reps told me to get unexcited until they looked into it, told me it was probably nothing, and then I called my parents back and had to tell them it hadn’t finally happened. Lovely feeling. That was only a momentary slump, though. As of now, the movie is going well, all parties are completely on board, and things are moving forward. Still, I don’t think I’m going to believe it’s really happening until it really happens.
LEX
Usually, you hear from your reps first about interests in your project, but since they’re telling you second-hand, it’s hard to gauge how serious those interested parties are until someone actually pulls the trigger and says “yes.” What happened with Mark, calling out of the blue, before the book even came out, is sort of the writer’s Hollywood dream call. Kami tells the story of how, from the moment he finished the book, Mark couldn’t stop talking about Quarantine and specific battle scenes and how they blew his mind. He was an instant super-fan. So, imagine getting a call from that guy, plus he’s produced all these big movies. I think I was at dinner, and I look down and there’s all these psyched texts from Tom about a Quarantine movie. And I’m like, what?! Uh… ‘scuse me a second, I’m just going to go in the other room and freak out.
We’ve been through a lot of ups and downs as screenwriters, so we’re acutely aware of how much it takes to actually get a movie to the big screen. It seems to be a series of good decisions, perfect timing and a little bit of luck. I think the best we can hope for is a smart team behind it. We’ve definitely got that with Kami and Mark, whose wheelhouse is YA film adaptations, and we’re hoping for the support of a studio that sees the huge potential in Quarantine that we all do. We’ve packed it full of exciting visuals and crazy story, and because of that we hope to inspire the right director, one that will know exactly how to translate that to the screen.
More about Lex Thomas
Lex received a BA in Drama and English from the University of Virginia and has worked as an actor, director and writer. Thomas graduated with a Bachelors of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design, and now writes and exhibits his realist oil paintings in Los Angeles.
Lex and Thomas met in a writers’ group in Los Angeles. Their friendship developed as they tried to blow each other’s minds with clips from bizarre movies. In 2005, they became a screenwriting team, and found that writing with a friend is much more fun than doing it alone. Visit them at www.lex-thomas.com.