D.J. Schwenk can milk a cow, catch a football pass, and win the heart of her rival high school’s quarterback – and she’ll win the hearts of readers, young and old, when talented newcomer Catherine Gilbert Murdock’s debut, Dairy Queen, hits shelves this May. Children’s Advance recently caught up with Murdock for the following e-mail Q&A:
Can you tell us a little about your early screenwriting career leading up to your first novel, Dairy Queen?
“Career” – that’s very funny. It was more of a very expensive hobby. I took every screenwriting class I could for years, and paid for lots of consultation work. But I have to say that screenwriting is a phenomenal way to learn the craft of story-telling. With a screenplay, you don’t have limitless space to explore a conversation; you have one page, maybe. So that conversation has to be as clean and effective as possible. The same with descriptions – my favorite part of screenwriting was reducing three lines of description to one line. Everything gets tighter, and you have to develop a distinctive voice, whatever it is, to provide as much color as possible.
My enthusiasm aside, screenwriting as a profession is really tough – I used to say that it’s very easy to write a screenplay but almost impossible to write a good one. I never came close to selling anything.
What inspired the idea of this book?
Because I was tired of screenplay rejections! Dairy Queen came to me – I’ve said this so many times, and every time I cringe, but it is true – in a dream, about a girl playing a football game and looking across the players to this boy she loves on the opposite team. And so I developed the entire story – 28 chapters of build-up – in order to explain as rationally and compellingly as possible that one moment, when their eyes meet and she has to decide where her loyalties lie. Originally, of course, I was going to write it as a screenplay, and the book is still in classic three-act format because that’s the only structure I know. But I decided to take an enormous leap and attempt a novel, even though I’d never tried fiction writing and it intimidated the heck of out me. I decided that the least I could do was to write the book I wanted to read. Here it is.
You were raised on a small farm with goats and honeybees, right? What led you to set D.J.’s story on a dairy farm?
Wow, good question. As I recall, in developing the story I needed to contrive a way for football enemies to come in contact with each other over the summer, and become incongruous friends. I don’t know which came first, the location of the story (rural Wisconsin) or the dairy farm, but I do remember how neatly these components started fitting together as I wrote. Brian is forced to work on the farm, he gets to know D.J. who he would never meet otherwise . . . ta da.
The goats and honeybees had nothing to do with it, except that every time I wrote about D.J. going out to milk, I’d cringe, because I was the exact opposite of her, and considered milking pure torture. Sorry, folks.
Football is almost a religion in many small towns like Red Bend and Hawley. Did you grow up in such a town, and are you a big fan?
No, and yes, now. My high school didn’t even have a football team – this was rural Connecticut, most small schools didn’t – and my college (Bryn Mawr) certainly had nothing. I began writing not even having read Friday Night Lights, which is probably for the best because the football culture in that book is much more intense than what I envision in Red Bend. I have family in northern Wisconsin, and basketball and ice hockey are as big there as football.
I knew virtually nothing about football before starting this book – I’m not even sure I knew that a football team has separate offense and defense teams. So I did a great deal of research on it, but I still flinch whenever anyone describes it as a “football story” because I’m afraid they’re going to ask me a question about the sport. But I truly don’t believe that my lack of expertise damaged the story. It might even have made it stronger, because I could see (I hope) the gist of the game without getting too strangled by details. After all, I wrote my dissertation on Prohibition and I could NEVER write a novel about the 1920s – I’d be hedging every statement with alternate probabilities, and generally paralyzing myself. Instead with football I can marvel at the strategy without getting too pedantic.
D.J.’s voice rings very true. How did you channel this character, and were you like her as a teen?
I WISH I were D.J.– in high school I’d have killed to be D.J. So, no, whoever I was channeling, it wasn’t me. When I was a Y.A. reader, the classic narrator was a bookish introvert, and I know that voice so well – I am that voice – that I decided first thing to challenge it, and to develop a narrator who can’t write, who isn’t educated or intellectual, and who has no connection to or interest in that world. That was a lot of fun, actually, discovering this wonderful person, and I did channel some aspects of adolescence that I now know to be fairly universal: the belief that you have no abilities; disparagement of your appearance; the feeling that everyone else has an amazing social life from which you alone are excluded. I didn’t mean to make her funny, but there’s a dry Midwestern wit that you really can’t avoid – or I can’t avoid, I guess – and I tapped into that to make her narration a little more entertaining.
Communication—or lack of communication—between D.J., her family, and even her friend Amber is a theme in the book. What do you hope readers take away from this thread?
That you MUST learn to communicate your feelings, and to understand other people’s feelings, in order to survive. For the record, that sentiment is not how the story began – heaven help the novel that starts life as a moral – but it’s certainly its most important message. The most important message that I see, anyway. It was a great pleasure, actually, to play around with the gender roles in the story, so that the big tough quarterback guy teaches D.J. how to express herself. And even though Amber has a small role, it’s critical to the story. I hope she can help some folks.
The book has generated lots of early buzz, and many booksellers have commented on its refreshing qualities, even calling D.J. a “new teen role model.” Did you feel a certain sense of responsibility in writing for teenagers?
Wow. Um, first of all, let me clarify that I didn’t set out to write a book “for teenagers.” I set out to write a book that I would enjoy reading – which means, I suppose, that I have the mentality of a thirteen-year-old. Which is not terribly surprising given that I read every single YA novel I could at that age, and that I haven’t read much “adult” fiction since then. (Grad school is the best method I know for destroying any love of reading.) Also, through screenwriting I learned – or had beaten into my thick skull – that storytelling isn’t about audience age, or helicopters, or three-act structure. It’s about developing sympathetic characters who through adversity become better people. This rule applies to every story, from Goldilocks to Pride and Prejudice. When I wrote Dairy Queen, I was really striving, as much as I ever have in my life, to create believable characters with whom readers of all ages and backgrounds would empathize.
That said, I really do feel an obligation to teen readers. I don’t want to endorse behavior that I cannot support, be that materialism or arrogance or bigotry. People – teens included – have a tendency to say, “well, that person doesn’t suffer like I do because they are ____.” Which is very entitling and exclusionary, no matter what you fill that blank in with, and I hope that people reading my book recognize that suffering comes in all shapes and sizes. And that happiness does, too.
Are you planning a sequel? If so, can you share any details?
Yes, I am very much in the middle of a sequel, although I am naturally secretive and also not completely sure how it will turn out. But I can say – at this point – that it begins on Labor Day and ends with the big Thanksgiving Day game.
In the last couple of weeks I’ve met many advance readers who have such passion for D.J., and such strong views of how she will turn out – in a way they’ve written their own sequels. I wish I could add a disclaimer to the front of the sequel saying, “Don’t read this if your story’s better!” I’m not Disney Corporation. If three thousand teens decided to write, and publish, their own versions of D.J.’s future, I could not be happier.
Why young adult for your first foray into fiction? Any YA authors or books that have influenced your own writing?
I heard once – doubtless from my sister – that YA is an easier market to break into than, say, children’s books, or screenwriting. But I’m not sure what “Young Adult” means, actually, other than the age of the protagonists, and the inevitable coming-of-age thing, whatever that is. I’m still coming of age – I keep waiting to become a grownup and stop screwing up so much. Maybe when I turn forty. . . That may be, in fact, why the story appeals to so many adults, because while D.J. does mature a great deal in the story, she doesn’t emerge a full-fledged grown-up. I wasn’t writing down to anyone’s level – I felt it essential to add as much emotional depth to it as I could.
In terms of YA authors – Anne McCafferty and the Pern books. Joan Aiken. C.S. Lewis. I was probably the biggest Anglophile in Connecticut, which is saying something. Although I also loved Robert Cormier, and a book by Robert Westall – Devil on the Road – that stays with me to this day. Which, like all these other titles, has absolutely NOTHING to do with dairy-farming, football-playing Midwesterners. But perhaps the plotting, the building of revelation and suspense, had a role.
I have to say, one genre in which I never had any interest was “All I want is a boyfriend” books. Which is a bit incongruous given D.J.’s interest in Brian, but not that incongruous. Yes, D.J. wants Brian, but she also wants to play football, and resolve her myriad family crises, and figure out her future – she has all those goals more or less equally divided.
I bet Dairy Queen will be a popular summer reading choice. What books are on your summer reading list?
I have a ten-year-old son who loves all forms of military history, preferably American, preferably Union, so I’ll probably be immersed in whatever I can find of that. And my seven-year-old girl is just starting out on her reading, which means lots and lots of Junie B. Jones. Barbara Parks is one of my favorite authors – my husband and I fight over who gets to read her aloud. I have to confess that I’m not much of a READER – I have so little time for that, when we were on vacation over Christmas I put my daughter and her friend in the tub for two hours so I could read a YA novel. They ran out of hot water, and I had to boil water on the stove to keep them warm, and they were pretty much dissolved by the end, but I finished the book and couldn’t have been happier. I don’t care how old you are – disappearing into a book is a unique and unparalleled luxury.
I’m also hoping to return, again, to Pride and Prejudice, if I can make the time.
What will you do to promote the book this summer?
Well, I’ll milk a cow if I have to – I actually know how to do that, however painful the forearm cramping. I’m still at the Cinderella stage, frankly – the fact that people want my autograph, and want to LINE UP to tell me how much they like my book, bowls me over. So I’d go just about anywhere.
I’d be delighted to speak with any English class, provided the students read it first so that the questions extend beyond “You really wrote a book?” That’s more of a fall/winter/spring undertaking, however; not many English classes in the summer.
I interviewed your sister, Elizabeth Gilbert, recently for her newest book Eat, Pray, Love, and she was very enthusiastic about your book. What’s it like sharing a career with a sibling?
It’s like Christmas every day. Liz could not be more supportive. For years she’s said, “You should try YA, you’ve got the voice, you love that stuff” – this when I was composing grumpy letters to the editor about fuel efficiency, and churning through $150 million war-epic screenplays. I wrote Dairy Queen in secret while Liz was living in Bali writing Eat, Pray, Love, and then finally I emailed her a confession: I’ve got this thing I’m working on, do you want to read it maybe. . . She said yes, I FedExed it to Indonesia, she read it on the plane back and called me from New York to say she loved it. I mean, what’s better than that?
I don’t know what it’s like for other siblings. There’s a lot of history with us, like old married couples where one word tells a story. She’s the best aunt in the world to my kids, and my closest friend, probably. I wouldn’t say we share a career. It’s more like she’s a professional baker and I’m pointing to one pastry and saying how good it looks.
Anything else you’d like to add?
Only if I get to pontificate. . . I had this dream for years, when I thought I’d succeed at screenwriting, that someday I’d actually get to teach screenwriting, and then I’d tell my students not to write scripts they thought they could sell, but to write stories they loved. I still believe that. When I sold Dairy Queen, there was talk on the Internet about how the price would trigger a bunch of YA fiction. For the record, I never intended to write a lucrative novel. I would have PAID Houghton Mifflin to publish it. (This information probably shouldn’t get back to them.) Even as I was sending it out, all I could think was that this was a story I loved, and if it ended up in a shoebox in my bottom drawer for the rest of my life, it would still always make me happy.
And that might be where the rest of my stories end up, in a shoebox! But, at this point at least, I don’t care. Life is too short to worry about market.
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