Catherine Ryan Hyde is my guest blogger for Author Tales today. Catherine is an extraordinary author and I have been lucky enough to read her work! You can check out my reviews for Chasing Windmills and The Day I Killed James. And you can be expecting reviews for The Year of My Miraculous Reappearance and Becoming Chloe. I asked Catherine what influenced her writing and why, and this is what she had to say.
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I come from a background that’s different from what most people expect. I don’t have a strong educational background (I’m only a high school graduate). I hated school. I never fit in. I spent years struggling with alcohol and drug addiction (pleased to say I’ve now been in recovery for almost as many years). It was a tough beginning.
That’s not a complaint.
I just say this to help readers understand why I write about tough subjects such as suicide, abuse, alcoholism, teen homelessness, etc. I can’t bring myself to write a book about "normal" (whatever that is) teens completely wrapped up in crushes, because I don’t relate to it myself.
When I was a teen I loved to read books like Flowers for Algernon, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Of Mice and Men, because they were about characters I could understand. People who felt "other." People who almost nobody wanted to know in real life. But exploring them in fiction brings out their humanity.
I am inspired by human nature. Some people are discouraged by it, but on most days I manage to look on the "glass half full" side. It’s definitely a mixed blessing. But it makes great fodder for fiction, and it generally gives me hope. Because people can change. They often don’t. Usually don’t, in fact. But at any moment, if they really want to, they can.
And that’s what a novel is, at its most basic level. It’s a fictional story about humans, and what happens to them, and how they change as a result of it. The reason I start my characters out in dark places is because (as I told the agent who rejected Pay It Forward because all the people in it were so "awful") why waste fictional salvation on a world that’s doing okay to begin with? And also, what world would that be?
So the overall point of my work is, I hope, that no one has gone down so far that they can’t get up again. There is no such thing as a disposable human.
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Thanks to Catherine for stopping by! The Day I Killed James will be released on May 13, 2008.
http://www.cryanhyde.com/
http://www.myspace.com/catherineryanhyde