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Louis Sachar: the 51-year-old Austin author on the long-awaited sequel to Holes, ideas that don't go anywhere, knowing what kids like, and writing for Hollywood.

Article Excerpt
Small Steps, the sequel to Holes, took nearly eight years to come out. Did you always know you had another book in you? Oh, not at all. Who knows where my thoughts come from? I was very much involved in working on the movie [version of Holes, which was released in 2003]. That's one reason why I haven't written anything sooner--the turmoil of that whole experience. Although in the end I was re ally happy with the movie, there were times when I was exasperated with everyone. When I was writing the script, [the producers] gave me all kinds of notes. They would say, "Why don't you try writing it this way?. Why don't you have the characters do this?" Unlike writing a book, when you write a screenplay, you take orders from other people. So there was a moment when I was feeling really down about the movie, and I remember coming up with this idea in my head for a book about Armpit and X-Ray [two characters from Holes]--about the real X-Ray taiking the real Armpit into going to Hollywood because they didn't get compensated for the movie.

Kind of a metasequel, You know, they were going to demand payment, plus they didn't like the way their characters were portrayed. I was toying with that. But I ended up liking the movie, so instead I thought I would just write a story about them--about X-Ray talking Armpit into investing all his hard-earned money in a ticket-scalping scheme.

Were they always going to be the focus of any sequel? Yeah, I was done with Stanley and Zero [the main characters from Holes]. I never thought I wanted to write about them anymore. They had reached a good place.

At what point did you know that you had enough of an idea to sit down and write the new book? My process is to start with something even if I don't know if it's enough of an idea. I start a lot of books that don't really go anywhere. Well, I wouldn't even really call them books. I sit down and think, "This might be an interesting situation," and then I start writing. If it's not going anywhere,...

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