Interview+with+Will+Hobbs


 * Mr. Hobbs visited our school on April 19, 2007. Here are some of the questions we asked:**


 * David**: After reading the Maze I think one of the biggest questions I had was where you got the inspiration for Rick. And did you make him up or did you know someone like Rick? Listen: [[file:Rick.mp3]]


 * Mr. Hobbs:** Well, Rick is quite a bit made up. But as a teacher in Durango, Colorado of course I worked with kids who come from a lot of different backgrounds and some of them are dealing with quite a bit adversity. And with Rick I really pumped it up – where he had been raised by his grandmother, if I remember correctly, it’s been a while since I wrote it. But she died when he was around 10 and then he was in foster homes and group homes and then it gets even harder when he was sent to juvenile detention. As I mentioned to everyone at assembly, I learned about the juvenile detention center, not by personal experience but interviewing a librarian who actually worked at one and a lot of the detail came from that. Sometimes I write novels with kids who don’t have to deal with so much and sometimes I do. One of my early books “Bearstone” was about a boy who was sent to a group home when the grandmother who was raising him wasn’t making him go to school. He hasn’t been in school for four years and he is sent away to another state and he is lonely and he’s homesick and he’s embarrassed that he can’t read. And I think that sometimes you want to have a character who really has a lot tougher problems than maybe you do because all of us identify with characters who have problems because all of us to some degree have problems. In reading you can imagine being that other person and I think that’s really good, it builds empathy and I think it helps you to deal with things that may come up in the future with your life. But I think the heart of a good story is is a character who has a problem. So with Rick it makes it more intense in the Maze because he has a major problem. He got all this anger and resentment to deal with because of how he has been sent from pillar to post. He’s really not a bad guy but things keep going from bad to worse. So that’s why he thinks of his life as a maze with all these dead ends. I thought the story is going to move in a direction where he can think of his life in a different way where maybe there is a way out of the maze.


 * Whit:** I was wondering if it was hard for you as a kid to move around so much and did you loose any really good friends in the process. Listen: [[file:Moving.mp3]]


 * Mr. Hobbs:** It was hard because you know you are suddenly in a whole different place like moving up to Alaska or down in California and every single person at school is new. So like when I went off to college for me that was nothing new because I had been doing that my whole life. But the upside of it was that it drew my family really close together. I have three brothers and a sister and you really depend on each other. So we’re still really close, we live scattered around the country we still see each other all the time we make sure that that happens. That was hard for me but it was also good for me. The things that are hard can make you stronger, I guess.

Megan: In chapter 15 of Jackie’s Wild Seattle, why did you make the harbor seal die after all the hard work that Shannon went through to save it? Listen:

Mr. Hobbs: Wow, what a great question – why did I make the seal die. People know if you’re the writer you could have had it turn out differently. Like, “Why did YOU make that seal die?” that seal could have lived you realize cause that person, the author could have written it all differently. Here’s what I thought, after learning so much about the real wild life center, Sarvey Wildlife, you hear from the people who rescue the animals and rehab the animals that it is really hard sometimes because they don’t always make it. Sometime they’re too badly injured and they can’t make it. You have these really happy ending stories within the wildlife center about the eagle with no will to live, who on the very last day decides to go for it. And I thought if you have a whole novel full of that is that going to be very realistic? Is the reader going to think that a wildlife center would actually be like that or that life is like that? It wouldn’t be real! I think you have to have just enough, like I knew before I started, I didn’t know it would be the harbor seal, but I knew there was going to be some really hard stuff if you’re really gonna write about a wildlife center it breaks those people’s hearts because obviously they get attached to the animals but they do loose some of them. The wonderful thing is they release more than 4,000 animals a year, including the birds. That lady you saw there, I think I mentioned this morning, is the biggest raptor rehaber in the state of Washington. Year in and year out, she probably rehabs more than 18 bald eagles just bald eagles. So there’s all these success stories but then to be realistic you find out of course all the animals don’t make it. So, that harbor seal I had not make it. It was too bad bitten by that dog. Also it was for dramatic purposes, because I knew that the eagle was going to stand up that day, Liberty. When she went off to do that rescue that day with the harbor seal, it was weighing on their mind all day that that was the day Liberty was going to be put down, was going to be euphonized. SO I thought this will make it more dramatic when they get back to the wildlife center and the eagle is standing up and decided to live, if they have gone through this trauma of loosing the harbor seal so you’re devastated, the reader is going to be devastated. But then this sudden good news, where you go from the tragedy to this victory where Uncle Neal has cared so much about Liberty, and Liberty has finally listened and I just thought the contrast would be dramatic. You need tension to make a good story. The harbor seal dying is part of the tension that keeps Jackie’s Wild Seattle on track, I think.