Guest post written by author Francisco X. Stork
Francisco X. Stork emigrated from Mexico at the age of nine with his mother and his adoptive father. He is the author of nine novels including: Marcelo in the Real World, recipient of the Schneider Family Book Award, The Last Summer of the Death Warriors, which received the Elizabeth Walden Award, The Memory of Light, recipient of the Tomás Rivera Award, Disappeared, which received the Young Adult Award from the Texas Institute of Letters and was a Walter Dean Myers Award Honor Book and Illegal, recipient of the In the Margins Award and the Young Adult Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. On the Hook published in May of 2021 received starred reviews from Booklist, Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly.
You can find Francisco on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, as well as at his website.
Sometimes it helps to have an image of a reader in mind when writing a novel. When I was writing The Memory of Light, a book about a young girl recovering from depression, I imagined a young woman on the edge of darkness. I had to make sure that what I wrote turned her in the direction of life. I knew enough about depression from my own personal experience with the illness to realize that my words had to be seen, understood and felt as real by that young woman. Clichés, greeting card aphorisms, facile solutions, simply would not work. The only way I could reach her was with characters that truthfully reflected her own pain and yet could lead her toward a hard-earned hope.
With On the Hook, my novel coming out May 18, 2021, I imagined that I was writing to a young man held in a juvenile detention center for some gang-related violence. My young man, who is not necessarily an enthusiastic reader, is in danger of getting stuck in a perpetual cycle of violence and incarceration. As I am writing the novel, I ask myself: how can I tell this story in a way that he will keep on reading? What can I say so that he sees and recognizes the pain of self-hatred hiding in his heart?
This imaginary young man helped me to keep Hector’s story real to me and hopefully real to someone imprisoned by the need for revenge. On the Hook is the story of Hector, a young man whose main goal is to graduate, go to college and become an engineer so that he can get his family out of the housing projects of El Paso. Unfortunately, Hector is noticed by Joey, the brother of the local drug dealer, and after a series of violent events Hector and Joey end up in a reformatory school in San Antonio. There they must each find a way to “unhook” themselves from the violence, hatred, and desire for revenge that consumes them—and maybe even learn the true meaning of courage.
One of the ways that I make a story believable is by connecting the emotions of the characters to my own emotions. I have visited prisons and juvenile detention centers, but I have never spent more than a few hours at a time in them. I have, however, experienced the fear of being seen as a coward and the shame of being one. I have felt the powerful pull of hatred toward violence and the obsession that comes with the desire to avenge a humiliation. I am acquainted with the debilitating effect of pretending to be someone others want me to be. I believe that a reader can sense the authenticity of the author behind the story and the characters, and that this recognition leads to a sense of trust from the reader to the author. When this trust happens, the reader knows that he is not alone, the person who wrote the book has felt what he has felt.
And yet my emotions and experiences must find words and images that will engage my imaginary young man. I want to write what will be interesting and meaningful to him. I am led by an inner radar that assures me that if what I write is interesting to me, it has a good chance of being interesting to someone else. If I am bored in writing a passage, it is highly probable that readers will find it boring as well. But with On the Hook, I need more than my usual radar. My imaginary reader is both like me and so different from me. I need to step out of myself and become someone more like him. I need to write with honesty and truth out of this new identity because my reader is very quick to detect phoniness. Sometimes I write a few pages and I hear him say: “That’s a bunch of crap. That’s not the way things happen on the street.” When I hear him say that, I delete those pages and try again.
In Bridge to Terabithia, by Katherine Paterson, Jess, the main character, decides after much thought to give his little sister a Barbie doll. “Sometimes” he says, “you need to give people something that is for them, not just something that makes you feel good giving it.” Jess’ words partially apply to my writing of On the Hook. It is a book for them, for young people like the imaginary young man that kept me company while writing. I did not write it for self-expression or to be admired. I wrote it as a gift for young people in difficult situations. It is a book where I hope they find the kind of courage that allows them to survive wherever they are. I would like the book to plant a seed of hope in them. The hope that comes from the decision to be responsible for their life and that of others.
