Gordon Korman: It's very hard for a young writer to get started. It's hard to find a publisher, and even worse to find an agent. They want you to have an established body of work beforehand. You need a portfolio. And actually, it's probably easier today to publish a novel than a short story, because there's just no market for short stories. I'm hooked up with a society of children's book writers, and probably two thirds of the members are trying to get published.

YCV: Did you run into problems yourself?

GK: My story was really lucky. I don't know if you remember, it was 20 years ago, I had a grade seven writing project. The teacher was a track and field coach. He was a great guy, but he didn't have any experience teaching English, so he more or less gave us carte blanche to do what we liked for the period all year. So I wrote this story, and sent it off to a publisher. What do you know about publishers in grade seven? I sent it to Scholastic Canada, who send those advertising flyers out to the schools, Arrow and Tab. I actually sent it to the address on the back of the flyer. And they liked it. I started publishing with Scholastic in Canada, exporting to the United States, and then a few years ago I switched to the parent company in the U.S., and now the books are imported into Canada. That was a big symbolic difference, because now I'm there with their company instead of someone they picked up from a distributor. They take more of an interest in you that way. I'm very happy with the promotion they've given me.

For instance, this year is the twentieth anniversary of Bruno and Boots. The first book was This Can't Be Happening at Macdonald Hall. The new book, Something Fishy at Macdonald Hall, was coming out, so we had a contest. Most of the contest was fairly easy triviaÑit wasn't like how many buttons are on Elmer Drimsdale's shirt; you know how some fans can recall the most obscure minutiae. This was easy stuff. But the tie-breaker was, you had to invent a new character for Bruno and Boots. Anyhow, the point is, I was very lucky to get hooked up. Most writers wouldn't be fortunate enough to have that sort of relationship with a publisher.

Have you ever worked with grade seven kids? Their first question is always, "How much money do you make?" Which is legitimate. With the Blue Jays' new pitcher, Joe Slobotnik, his salary's on the sports page. But with writers, kids don't know. Children's books are a really good market. Right now the best-selling writer in the world is R.L. Stine, who does the Goosebumps series. He sells more than Stephen King, Tom Clancy and John Grisham put together. A lot of people call him a sell-out, because he writes a lotÑa dozen books a yearÑand he started out writing serious books. I can't do that. I can only do one book a year, maybe one and a half. But you've got to understand that to make a decent living at $4000 a book, as a full-time writer, he had to train himself to write a lot.

YCV: What's the reaction in the publishing world to electronic forms of publishingÑthe Internet, web pages, that sort of thing?

GK: There's interest in that direction, but they're also scared. Electronic forms of publishing are much easier to copy. Publishers have been lucky in that they haven't had to go through growing pains like other industries. Record companies had to deal with the fact that you can make nearly perfect copies of CDs. Same thing in the software industry. Up to now, though, it's been cheaper to buy a book than to photocopy it.

In picture books they've tried a lot of interactive things, but they're really likeÑdo you remember the old Choose Your Own Adventure books? That kind of thing. Click on a picture of a dog, and it says woof. Click on a picture of a cat, and it says meow. That might be great for a two-year-old, but I haven't seen it done well with a novel yet.

Mary Pope Osborne, the president of the Authors Guild, lived in my apartment building when I was in New York. Electronic forms of writing are very important to her. Mostly the Authors Guild has just been about freedom of expression, you know, "You can't take the word Ôshit' out of that book." But Osborne is looking at that kind of thing. I think the big breakthrough will probably come from someone who isn't a novelist, because to really take advantage of what a computer can do, you need a different kind of creativity.

My own computer is just an old IBM PC, but my fiancee MichelleÑshe's a third grade teacher in Long IslandÑhas a Macintosh Performa. She's always saying stuff like, "Do want a little graphic up there?" Which is amazing, but the publisher has its own graphics department, and they don't care if you have a picture of a bird in the corner or not.

YCV: What writers influenced you when you started writing your early school stories? Had you read, say, Kipling's Stalky & Co.?

GK: No, not really. I'd read some of the British boarding school books. My favourite series, though, was John D. Fitzgerald's Great Brain books. But I was very influenced by movies and TV, because it was so visual. Disney movies, with Don Knotts dangling on a rope from a flagpole. That sort of thing. It's pretty stupid looking back on it now, but as a kid it was great stuff. So when I started writing Macdonald Hall, I saw it as a movie in my head.

YCV: Do you still do that?

GK: No. I'm still very visual, but I don't construct it as a movie. I've been doing this a long time now, so I've learned a few techniques. Still, I'd do it all in dialogue if I could.

YCV: Did you concentrate on English all through high school?

GK: I obviously must have had some sort of knack or talent for writing, but if you look at my grade thirteen courses, I took Functions and Relations, Calculus and Algebra, and only one English course. I was a big math-head. Not a huge math-head, maybe, but I did well in math contests and that sort of thing. Math was always my strength. And I get a lot of letters from readers who are good at math and in the chess club and so on, and I think the connection is there. These are young kids who are into math, chess, and fantasy and science fiction. They've read all of Terry Brooks by grade eleven, and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Lord of the Rings in the fourth grade. There is a huge connection there, but people still tend to classify you either as a literary type or a math type.

YCV: Had you decided by grade thirteen that you were going to be a writer?

GK: Yes, I knew, because I had a few books out by then; three, probably four, and another in contract. The money was marginal, but I knew that was what I wanted to do. I actually went to college for a year and a half; I was in film school at NYU.

YCV: The Tisch School of Arts.

GK: Yes. It actually took me a year and a half to figure out that I can't hold a camera steady. But that's how I got into "dramatic writing." I was lucky to be there at a period, 1983-84, when there were a lot of creative people who later became famous. Spike Lee, for instance. And not just writers and directors, actors too.

YCV: So you've thought about going into film?

GK: Well, yesÉI've had a few of my novels optioned, but the film industry is so weird. When I was a teenager and I got my first film option I thought, "Yes! Now I'm set!" And I was very disappointed when nothing ever appeared. Students always ask me if there will be movies of my books, and I always used to say that one would be out before they had their first-born male child. But by now, several of them probably already have kids.

One thing I learned at NYU is that writing for the screen is fundamentally different from writing novels. There are people who are good at both, but it's a different kind of talent. I can actually watch a movie and tell if a novelist wrote it. A novelist's script has too many scenes, in a way. It's very episodic.

YCV: How about trying a different style of novel?

GK: A different genre, or an adult novel?

YCV: Sure.

GK: I've thought of writing science fiction or fantasy for a long time. I'm not sure how good I'd be at it, thoughÑcreating an entire world can be daunting. I do plan on writing an adult book somedayÑwhen I have an adult idea!Ñbut I don't have a specific agenda. The adult book business is a little unforgiving. Children's books have time to sit around and find an audience. An adult book comes out, gets maybe three reviews, and then either it sells or it's gone. People who write stuff, even if it's fluffy and light, you live that book for six months while you're writing it. When my dad talks about an old car, I think, That was back around Son of Interflux or No Coins, Please. It's like the way some people associate a particular song with some year, like 1977. It's very depressing if a book comes out, is around for four months, and then it's gone.

YCV: With your latest novels, though, there's been a bigger emphasis on social and environmental issues.

GK: Well, yes, maybe, but I've never been a big issue guy. To me, entertaining is more important than enlightening. I don't have a problem with issues, but it's gotten a little out of hand. We've become very high concept in the kids' book business. You know, you have the book where a kid's brother gets leukaemia. Or sometimes his parents get divorced. It's like they say, if aliens came to Earth and evaluated us by our kids' books, they'd go away thinking that the most traumatic thing that could possibly happen to anyone is having your dog die. Would I ever write a book about having your dog die? Maybe, but the story would have to drive the book, not the issue.

I've thought about it, though, and I think there is an underlying theme in every one of my booksÉ I had it down to a nicely-worded sentence, and I can't remember it now, but anyhow I think the theme underlying all of my books is individuality. For want of a better word, there is a coolness in individuality. And even a glamour. And a nobility. Did you ever have a friend that nobody else could stand? I wrote a book once, A Semester in the Life of a Garbage Bag, about that sort of relationship, a guy kind of like George on Seinfeld. My guy's name was Raymond. He's the sort of guy, if you described him to a friend, he'd say, "You hang out with him?" He's really annoying, but you can see something about him that's almost noble, definitely cool. There's not so much of that in the Bruno and Boots books, but there's still an emphasis on kids taking charge of their own destiny. Child power. I have a book called The Twinkie Squad, about the kids in what's called a "special discussion group" at high school. And as you know, any kids who get the word "special" attached to them like that become a target for the other kids, and this group gets called the Twinkie Squad. But the kids in it manage to turn that around, and it goes from being a joke to the coolest secret society, and everyone's trying to join it. That's really my thematic focus right now, but again the emphasis is on the story rather than the issue.