In Febrary, 2010, I offered up a manuscript critique as an auction item for a local fundraiser. I specified “contemporary realism”, citing not bias but a greater confidence level when it came to giving feedback. Soon I received an email from a guy named Mike Martin wondering if he could bid on the auction even though his book wasn’t exactly contemporary realism. I knew this Mike person a little bit from Facebook, back then, and from messages we’d exchanged about Story of a Girl. So, though I was skeptical of my ability to critique something more like “genre” fiction, I asked him about his book. He answered. It sounded great. I said, go ahead and bid, and he won the auction.
It’s tempting now to relive the 22 months of friendship-building since then for you all, but I will restrain myself. I think this sums it up: Mike’s wife, Sarah, made Mike and me matching friendship bracelets. Yeah, it’s like that. And if there’s anything better than having a BFF who really gets the “knowing and being known” thing that makes life so rich, it’s seeing that friend’s dream come true. Which is what happened recently for Mike, announced thusly in PW:
Donna Bray of HarperCollins’s Balzer + Bray imprint bought two novels by screenwriter T. Michael Martin, including his debut The End Games, about two brothers braving the apocalypse in the wilderness of West Virginia, pitched as The Stand meets John Green. Martin’s screenplays have been developed at Kopelson Entertainment, Phoenix Pictures, and Valhalla Motion Pictures. The first of the two is due out in 2013. Joanna Volpe of Nancy Coffey Literary was the agent.
Was that the book that Mike first emailed me about two Februarys ago? Indeed it was. And I have sense memory of reading the first chapter. Emotional sizzle. Heart-in-my-throat action. The experience of reading the final, revised draft was similar. The End Games thrilled me and moved me, stirred up my admiration and envy, captured my imagination wholly. And I’m so happy and proud now to be the one who gets to introduce to you all a great new writer, an awesome person, one of the hardest working writers I know, and my dear friend: T. Michael “Mike” Martin.
SZ: You started out your creative life as a screenwriter. What was the path that led you to writing a YA novel?
TMM: R.L. Stine. That’s the easy way to answer, and probably the most honest. I’ve always had an equal love of films and books; I’ve always wanted to create both. Film taught me the importance of wonder and structure; books honed my appreciation of poetry and resonant theme. It’s just different tools for doing the thing I love the most, which is: telling huge, scary, thrilling, hilarious, ultimately human stories (with monsters). So! It wasn’t really a matter of diverging from a path to write YA; it was just another aspect of the same thing. Even though I wrote my first feature-length screenplay in eighth grade, I’ve actually been writing prose stories since the first Goosebumps came out. (That first screenplay, by the way, was titled Wrong Answer: Night of the Calls. Read it? No? Good for you.)
SZ: Considering how often we talk and how much we’ve talked about The End Games, specifically, I don’t know if I’ve ever asked what initially sparked that idea. Tell us a bit about that.
TMM: Okay, so not to risk my ultra-manly persona, Sara — not sound too gooey about this — but: I wrote the book for my little brother. Back in 2008, my little bro, Patrick, and I got into zombies sorta. But in that sentence, “sorta” means “just ridiculously obsessively.” Patrick and I watched zombie movies; read zombie and survival books; even traveled to the mall where they filmed the original Dawn of the Dead. But the activity that most directly led to The End Games was the discussions (lengthy and detailed) that Patrick and I had about what we would do to survive an undead apocalypse.
Patrick called these discussions, by the way, “The Z Games.”
I’ve always felt protective of Patrick, who is ten years younger than I am. So I didn’t think just about how I would keep myself alive in the apocalypse; I also thought — mostly thought — about how I’d protect, in body and spirit, this little kid I loved so much. (In fairness, I also wondered a lot about how I could use live electrical lines and nailguns to destroy human brains.)
So all that was simmering in the background when I was laying in bed in September 2008 and the first line of a YA thriller boomed into my head: a thriller about two brothers who aren’t fighting zombies. . . but something far worse.
SZ: Not to drag a sob story out of you, but a lot of readers of this blog are aspiring writers themselves. I remember in my pre-published days, it could feel, whenever a new book deal was announced, that everyone but me was getting overnight success. But virtually all the stories behind those deals involve hard work and struggle, and it’s good for all of us to hear those stories, I think. Can you share a little bit about some of the trials and tribulations, as well as the good moments you’ve been through to get here?
TMM: Oh, how I can relate to that feeling…. You’ve been around for some of the lows and highs, Sara. The highlights are pretty obvious, and pretty wonderful. I had a screenplay optioned when I was twenty-two; I became best friends with one of my favorite-ever writers; said writer read and loved my book; I got an offer from an incredible literary agent two days after querying with The End Games. And maybe the highest high of came a month ago, when I sat on the couch next to my wife and received a phone call telling me that I had just won the cosmic lottery, because Balzer + Bray wanted to buy my book.
I have to say, though, that that the main reason those highs are meaningful is because of the sadness — the outright misery — of the lowlights. Of which there were, let’s say, legion.
Losing a film manager; receiving over a hundred rejections from film and literary agents; watching my high school friends go on to great success while I worked a series of frustrating minimum-wage jobs; being rejected from Creative Writing MFA programs. (Twice! Once with a recommendation letter from Sara Zarr!) All of these things, more than once, drop-kicked me down the flights of despair. It was depressing. Sometimes desperately so. But that pain drove the character of my writing and of my self deeper than I’d thought possible.
I’ve recently thought a lot about how depression is really the opposite of creativity. If it is anything, creativity is the continual process of choice-making. Depression, meanwhile, is perhaps most defined by a terrible sense of a diminishing ability to have choice. So although writing isn’t life, for me writing can often be a metaphor for life. And here’s the lesson the metaphor has taught me, over and over and over: You must please keep going. If Choice A doesn’t work, try Choice B. Or C, or H, or Z. You will fail, more than you’d dream; but over time, you will fail better. And eventually, you will fail well enough to break into new worlds. And while you’re at it: Lighten up a little.
“…although writing isn’t life, for me writing can often be a metaphor for life.”
SZ: Big yes to the keep going. I like the “lighten up” advice, especially and I’m working on that myself. So, you have a varied palette of influences, which I think shows in the great mix of action-packed thrills and true human emotion in your work. Can you speak a little about some of those influences?
TMM: Like a lot of people my age, I’m a kid of Spielberg and King. Those guys have a common sense of delight and poetry and verve that I think is pretty dang rad. At their best, they’re also incredible at balancing the micro and macro, the spectacular and the quiet.
Stylistically, I love Cormac McCarthy, and William Goldman, a man who is certainly most famous for his screenwriting work, but who also wrote some novels that read like lightning storms.
As for YA, I admire far far far too many to name. Probably the ones I aspire to be most like, though, are John Green and (am I allowed to say this?) Sara Zarr. [Survey says yes, you're allowed.]
SZ: How about a peek into a Day In the Life of Mike–what does an ideal working day look like for you?
TMM: The ideal happens about 60% of the time. But since you asked…. Up at 4:30 AM. Go to gym for 40 minutes to run or lift weights. Get back at 6 and do meditation exercises for 30 minutes. Read a bit. Wake up wife at 7:00 and eat breakfast with her. Read and write from 8 ’til 1, then eat lunch and go for a walk. In the afternoon, catch up on email/business-y stuff. (Also, play Smash Bros.) Have dinner with wife and watch a movie in the evening. In bed by 8:30.
SZ: That anyone’s ideal day involves getting up at 4:30 a.m. fills me with sadness. Going to bed before 9, that I can endorse. Okay, also, because I’m a big process nerd, and also a fan of old-school writing supplies, I’d love to hear about the various roles that pen, paper, typewriter, and computer have in your process.
TMM: Most of The End Games was written either by hand (on graph-paper legal pads), or on an electric typewriter (the Brother SX-4000). There’s something about seeing actual words accumulating on actual paper that makes me feel particularly Like A Writer. And the rush of hearing words being snapped out often makes me feel like a guy on a runner’s high. Then I usually transcribe my typewritten pages into the MacBook, realize what a mess I’ve wrought, and revise almost-every sentence 10-20 (or more) times.
SZ: Writing is revising! It is, people. It is.
(Confession to the world about my suggestibility. When I learned of Mike’s Brother SX-4000, I had to get one, too, to add to my already prodigious typewriter collection.)
Well, dear reader, boy am I excited for The End Games to be out in the world. It’s a special book, like nothing you’ve read before. I’ll have Mike back around release time, if not before, to talk more specifically about it. Meanwhile, go read The Stand and Looking for Alaska in alternating chapters to prepare yourself.
Comments are on, and Mike will be around to answer any questions you might have about his journey and process.
Mike on Twitter :: Mike on Facebook :: Mike’s website in progress
A Zarr-Martin Production
