fiction

Q&A by Nicholas Maes, author of Locksmith and Laughing Wolf

One of my teacher friends keeps telling me that Locksmith is her favourite teen fiction!  Nicholas Maes has just released a new book, Laughing Wolf.

Tell us about your book.
Locksmith tells the story of 12-year-old Lewis Castorman who can pick any lock, no matter how complicated it might be. His talent comes to the attention of the chemist and industrialist Ernst K. Grumpel, whose mixtures can affect incredible transformations and who wields tremendous wealth and power. It turns out Grumpel desperately needs a locksmith, one who can open a most unusual lock, and when Lewis refuses to help him, threatens to kill Lewis’ father whom he is holding hostager (Lewis’ mother died one year earlier while working on a mysterious project). This task requires Lewis to travel to northern Alberta’s Yellow Swamp, the scene of a mysterious and horrifying environmental disaster one year back, just at the time of his mother’s death. Lewis is accompanied by his best friend Alfonse, together with Alfonse’s sister Adelaide, two frogs (who have been transformed by Grumpel’s chemicals) and a very odd creature whom they meet within the swamp itself. After a number of hair-raising adventures, Lewis and his companions eventually solve the mystery of Yellow Swamp, only to discover they must save the world from Grumpel’s scheming ambitions.

How did you come up with the idea for this work?
The initial ideas occurred to me in the late 1990s. First, I had been toying with a story about magic and talking animals, but Harry Potter appeared on the scene and the use of magic no longer seemed so original. At around this time I watched a documentary on the human genome and announced at one point to my son that chemistry and magic seem to have a lot in common (to neophytes like myself). I was struck with this observation and revisited my old ideas, only chemistry would be the operative element instead of magic. Second, my family and I had rented a house at this time. Besides the modern lock on its front door, there was an old-fashioned one that we were not supposed to fiddle with. One of us did fiddle with it, the result being we were locked outside (on a bitterly cold night in January). Not wanting to call the landlord, I set about picking this lock and actually managed to work the lock open. This experience led to the second element in Locksmith.

How did you come up with the title?
It was suggested to me by an experienced reader of children’s novels. The original title was the much more cumbersome Adventures at Yellow Swamp.

Describe your ideal writing environment.
It depends on my mood. Sometimes I love to write in a busy café – I know all the cafes in my part of town. Then there are times when I like to close the door to the ‘office’ in my house and bang away at the computer. Overall, because I have three children and spend a good part of my day teaching high school (history), I have learned to work with noise and bustle around me.

What was the hardest part of writing your book?
The plot is a complicated one and I had to piece it together rather painstakingly – I made a number of false starts in the process. Locksmith involves several animal characters and I wanted to avoid ones that were too cutesy-pie and saccharine. And then there was the writing itself. It always amazes me how difficult the process of stringing interesting, colourful sentences and paragraphs can be. Still, the fact writing can be maddeningly difficult is the very aspect that makes it so appealing.

What inspired you to write your first book?
I discovered I wanted to be a writer when I was cycling by myself in Greece one summer. At first I started keeping a journal, then the entries became more and more fictional in tone, and finally I realized I liked the process of stringing wild ideas together and decided to make a life-long habit of it. As far as novels are concerned, I am long-winded by nature (as you can probably tell from this blog) and therefore book-length pieces are more suitable to my frame of mind than are short stories or poems.

In your own work, which character are you most attached to, and why?
I published an adult novel, Dead Man’s Float, two years ago. Its central character, Nathan Gelder, is still closest to me because I invested so much of myself in him – not that I’m anything like the character. I also made the poor guy miserable and, strange to say, this makes me feel he is in some sense a part of my flesh.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received as a writer?
There are two pieces of advice I’ve received. First, a writer must be consistently writing or thinking about writing, no matter how many distractions s/he is faced with on a daily basis. To be sure, we have families to raise and jobs to attend to – and we cannot fail others because of our writing obsessions – but some slice of the day should be devoted to our writing. Second, one is writing even as s/he thinks about a story or novel. I used to think I was writing only when I was seated before a piece of paper or a computer screen. It took me a long time to realize that the best strategy to follow when the words/ideas refuse to come is to stand away from the desk and take a walk or involve myself in something else, to provide myself with ‘distance’ from the problem.

Who did you read as a young adult?
Until grade four I read comic books – I preferred Marvel to DC. Then my teacher (Ms. Daniels) read the myth of Echo and Narcissus to the class and I was permanently hooked on Greek mythology (to such a degree I wound up writing a doctorate on Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey). On our household’s shelves was a huge collection of classic children’s books – Little Men, Little Women, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and the like – which I read from the first volume to the last. We also had a collection of books on world history for children, and the Time Life series on ancient history. For a long time these were my favourite books as well.

© 2009 Defining Canada.