Saturday, June 13, 2009
THE ORIGINS OF "DESTROY ALL CARS" (from The Oregonian)


A common question novelists get is, "Where do you get your ideas?" This is a scary question for me, as generally I don't know where they come from, and the best ones come from such unlikely places it's easy to imagine that a genuinely good idea may never occur to me again.

Or if it does I will be busy doing the dishes and will forget to write it down.

My first novel, "Girl," came from having a few too many beers one night and wondering what would happen if Bernice from F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" was a punk rocker. The answer was pretty obvious: "Bernice Shaves Her Head."

I wrote a 10-page story around this scenario, laughing throughout and making brutal fun of the dumb mall girls I was using as side characters. I had no intention of pursuing it or even rereading it. And then, of course, after a month of trying to write a more serious novel, I came to realize there was a certain charm to my dumb mall girls and their bald-headed friend.

Thus "Girl" was born.

Katherine Dunn has said that her famous "Geek Love" started as a joke. Jay McInerney's "Bright Lights, Big City" was just a funny "cocaine story" he wrote while taking a break from his epic first novel about an American student in Japan. The "cocaine story" defined a generation, while the epic first novel is unreadable. William Golding's "Lord of the Flies" was born when he became disgusted with a dull adventure novel he was reading to his kids and decided to write what would really happen if a bunch of boys got lost on an island.

And so it goes. A joke. A side project. A bad mood. From such things, great work occasionally appears.

And so it was for me. A couple summers back, I found myself stuck in a traffic jam, coming home from Washington Square mall. I'd been living in New York for several years and wasn't used to traffic jams. I looked around and was struck by the other cars around me. They were huge. GMC Denalis. Ford Explorers. Every variety of "luxury pickup." Behind the wheels of these enormous vehicles were mostly women (coming out the mall). And except for the drivers, the vehicles were mostly empty.

This happened to be a year or two after Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" was released. Never mind the money these cars were wasting, they were also generating an outrageous amount of pollutants. Did none of these people understand what they were doing? And why was a 40-year-old mother driving a car the size of tank anyway? Did nobody see the absurdity of this situation?

When I got home, having nothing better to do, I found myself writing a nasty little paragraph attacking the brainlessness of soccer moms, and their husbands, and their children, and everyone else who lived in suburbs like Beaverton and drove around in automobiles that were the car equivalent of supertankers.

(This was two years ago, at the height of the economic indulgence we are now recovering from.)

Writing this rant was so much fun I kept going. My paragraph became a page. My page became several pages. I remembered how much I love to make fun of people. I especially love to make fun of Beavertonians; in some ways, they seem designed specifically for that purpose. I had a field day.

Once finished, I did what I usually do with my crazier ideas. I filed those pages away and forgot about them.

Eventually though, after months of slogging through various attempts at a "commercial novel," I found myself revisiting my anti-suburban rant.

These three pages were funnier, sharper and more interesting than anything else I had. But how to use them, how to shape something like this into a novel?

And then a light went off: A manifesto. A 17-year-old kid (from Beaverton). He looks out into the world and sees all this laziness, greed and waste. And he attacks! He goes off! He unleashes all those thoughts that every teenager with a brain has; mainly, could our society be more full of it?

I had it. It would be smart, it would be funny, and it would make valid points about our society that I genuinely believed.

I wish I could say that from that moment on my novel, now called "Destroy All Cars," went sailing ahead.

In its original form it was a straight manifesto: one teenager, one pen, one notebook and 200 pages of teen angst.

At first, publishers were not impressed. They didn't get it. It wasn't "Gossip Girl" or Harry Potter.

My agent was skeptical. She didn't really understand the "manifesto" concept. (To demonstrate to her what an actual manifesto looked like I sent her a file of the Unibomber Manifesto. She was afraid to open it, lest she get into trouble with Homeland Security.)

But I didn't give up. I loved my book. I loved my angry teenager. And I especially loved making fun of clueless Beavertonians driving around like robots, oblivious to the fact that their credit cards could not keep them in $50,000 gas-guzzling Denalis forever.

After a frustrating year of rewrites, I finally found a way to break up the rants. This left more room for the love story. Suddenly the book worked. My agent came around. The publishers liked it so much there was an actual bidding war. (My first bidding war, though it was my 10th book.) Overnight my eco-sensitive teenager was a hot property.

Now, as the economy has turned, some of my novel's main points are completely obvious. Some seem more important than ever. And, of course, dark and funny teenagers never go out of style.

And so I thank the writing gods for another book that came from a completely random and unplanned source. And what if I hadn't been caught in that traffic jam? I don't like to think about that.


Sunday, May 31, 2009
"ESSENTIAL SUMMER READING: DESTROY ALL CARS"


Enjoyed this funny review from TEEN VOGUE of my new book DESTROY ALL CARS. It's fun to see which parts different reviewers pick out to quote. The "rioting strip mall goers" is one of my favorite parts.

"Some of the best lines in Blake Nelson's newly-released novel Destroy All Cars are descriptions of the gas-guzzling vehicles his seventeen-year-old narrator, James, so fervently hates: A friend's mother's SUV "has a huge metal battering ram on the front in case you need to punch through any walls . . . on the way home from the bowling alley" and "little metal grates around the signal lights, in case rioting strip-mall goers decide to attack you with baseball bats while you're signaling a left turn." But as much as I liked the humor, I thought that the real heart of the story was pseudo-nihilistic James's ongoing affection for his idealistic ex-girlfriend, Sadie. When she asks him to help save a local pond, he puts aside his default pessimism and pitches in--will James and Sadie get back together, or will James just get over it? I'm not telling, but I will say that you should definitely check out this book, from the author who wrote the source material for Gus Van Sant's 2007 indie Paranoid Park."


Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Publisher's Weekly Review


First book review, compliments of PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.


Publishers Weekly, May 25, 2009

Destroy All Cars Blake Nelson. Scholastic Press, $17.99 (224p) ISBN 978-0-545-10474-6
High school student James Hoff is a passionate writer who rants about everything from sheeplike “Consumer Americans” to the destruction of the environment. He also writes about his ex-girlfriend Sadie, who he feels is a lightweight when it comes to saving the world. While Sadie is involved in positive initiatives like community food drives, James prefers a more radical approach (“The automobile is the foundation upon which our unsustainable lifestyle is based. They must be DESTROYED. All of them. Even the cute ones”). His pugnacious determination is admirable, but even he admits uninspired (“The problem is I don't believe in anything”). James comes to realize that his nihilism, both personal and political, is ultimately alienating him from others and preventing him from reaching his potential. James's journal entries and the combative essays that he writes (and rewrites) for his English teacher make up the brunt of the narrative and demonstrate his eventual growth. Nelson (Paranoid Park) offers an elegant and bittersweet story of a teenager who is finding his voice and trying to make meaning in a world he often finds hopeless. Ages 15–up. (May)


Tuesday, May 19, 2009
MY TOP TEN


I know that each person is different and there's no use defining people by types. But say you could. Who would be your favorite ten types of people? Here are mine.

1. Girls who knit in public

2. Physicists

3. Girls who wear dresses on bikes

4. Smiling people who work at fast food restaurants

5. Solo travelers in airports.

6. Rich old ladies.

7. People on subways

8. Nerdy dudes who rap (rob roy)

9. Girls with the latest haircut

10. Christian tourists from the Midwest wandering around in bad-assed places like Syria


Sunday, May 17, 2009
STANFORD: the legend


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Spent the weekend in Palo Alto. I usually spend a little time biking around the Stanford Campus while I am there. I find Stanford fascinating. The power, the money, the intellect, the dorkiness.

Nobody is cool at Stanford. Nobody is wearing anything interesting or has an electro haircut or is good looking in a way that makes you double take.

But that makes sense.

Still I always think there must be ONE hipster hiding somewhere. Like in the physics department, or studying weird languages in a basement somewhere. One guy you would actually want to talk to, if you met them in an airport or at a random party.

Instead all I ever see is Nike clad power nerds. Blonde robot girls in running clothes, maintaining a perfect muscle fat ratio. Or exotic geniuses from foreign countries who are probably the sons and daughters of their countries ruling elite--and yet, are still dorks, despite being a Prince or whatever.

And when I say dorks, I don't mean that they're pale and skinny and acne ridden. They are quite the opposite. They are perfect in every way. Perfectly fit. Perfectly buff. Perfect teeth. Perfect resumes, etc. (which to me is still a dork)

Cruising around Stanford you notice strange things. Like the "Bechtel Building" (Bechtel sells drinking water to poor people). Or the cuteness of locating the Hewlet Hall next to the Packart Student Center.

On this trip, I stopped to watch a big fraternity party being set up. The party theme was "Cowabunga". There were pictures of chicks in bikinis everywhere. I think that's who was supposed to come to the party.

There was also a building sized Bud Lite sign out front.

They had a lame reggae/dance/jimmy buffet band doing a sound check. (omg it was so lame it gives me chills to write this.) They had some fake nautical crap around. Some nets and a gang plank that i'm sure frat boys would be falling off later in the night. Lots of beer. BUD LIGHT. The low-level frat boys were all in matching T shirts, doing their chores, carrying shit around for their senior "brothers".

I feel weirdly sad when I hang around colleges. I was too cool for college and I kinda wish I wasn't. I wish I'd been dumb enough to engage with it a little more. There was a cool "art house" at my college called "Eclectic" that I could never reconcile myself to and never joined. And then I bailed out of that school altogether and ended up at NYU which was just my speed, no school spirit, no school anything, genuine insane geniuses jumping out their windows, people shooting up in the stairwells. Now that was cool. Or so I thought at the time.

So I ride around Stanford and watch the people. They will run our country. They will have all the money. They will wield all the power. Maybe it is good they are robotic dorks. I don't know why exactly. But it seems right.


Friday, May 08, 2009
GREETINGS FROM LA


I know I should be blogging more because I find myself driving around in my car telling my impressions of LA to myself and thus losing this brilliance forever!

Just kidding. I don't have much brilliance to share about LA. It's like New York except it's sunny and people talk about themselves in a slightly different way.

So I like it I guess. This SPACELAND is a club up in Silverlake which is the cool neighborhood which everyone told me to move to, but I resisted and moved to Venice which is full of homeless people and hippies and beach people. The air is better. I spend all day slathering on sunblock and riding my bike the beach to see how the surf is.

And it's fun driving home on the Santa Monice freeway at midnight with the windows down and INTERPOL on full blast.


Tuesday, April 14, 2009
GETTING TO BE ABOUT THAT TIME


It's getting to be about that time. DESTROY ALL CARS day is May 1st. Very exciting.


Saturday, April 04, 2009
NYC TEEN AUTHOR FESTIVAL


So at the end of March I went to New York for the NY TEEN AUTHOR FESTIVAL. This was awesome, though I was not able to blog about it right away as i am moving to California at the moment.

But here are some quick pictures, mostly stolen from other people's face book pages.

This is Siobhan Vivian, who I had been hearing about for years. You know how you hear about people and just by the way people talk about them you know you're going to like them? Well, Siobhan was one of those for me. She has a cool new book called SAME DIFFERENCE.



The Main Man


My awesome editor David Levithan, who ran the whole TEEN FESTIVAL. I don't know how he does so much stuff. He and Rachel Cohn also read from NICK AND NORAH'S INFINITE PLAYLIST in German at one of the functions. That was awesome. It was like: "garble garble garble Death Cab For Cutie garble garble garble. . . ""

He is styling too. Now that I am in California, I miss New York Style. You know, like NOT having a daggers and skull tattoo. And like wearing a shirt.



TIGER BEAT


This is the awesome TIGER BEAT. If you are a lit person, you might remember THE REMAINDERS, Stephan King and Amy Tan's band that used to jam at various book conventions.

Now we Teen Authors have our own TIGER BEAT, who rock out at our functions, and they do ROCK OUT. They were FANTASTIC. That is LIBBA BRAY on the right, singer, and the rest of the band, DANIEL EHRENHAFT, with glasses and NATALIE STANDIFORD who played bass and the drummer, who's name is MILES, I think. They played cool songs. Libba was awesome singing. Daniel was amazing guitarist. And Natalie was ice cool, and every so slightly Weymouth-esque on bass.