Myers, Walter Dean
Walter Dean Myers is more than an award-winning author. He is more than the beloved creator of dozens of unforgettable characters. He transcends the genre pigeonholes that would beleaguer a lesser artist. Walter Dean Myers is a versatile virtuoso of the written word.
Myers has never taken the easy way. He makes that fact clear in his memoir Bad Boy. Physically large but with an initially debilitating speech impediment, the young Walter loved two things: “I wanted to emphasize the two parts of me.”
“I loved playing ball, and there’s this extremely bookish side of me that I, as a young person, virtually hid. It wasn’t acceptable. But I wanted to show that these things could co-exist.”
An overarching theme of Myers’ work is that tension between action and thought, doing and being. Perhaps this is most evident in the upcoming Sunrise Over Fallujah as the young protagonist volunteers for an elite unit with a mission of mercy in the midst of the chaos.
Myers realized that the kids fighting this war were the same ones who read Fallen Angels years ago. “They no longer believe in the glory aspect—they don’t believe nobody gets hurt and that if you’re brave enough you’ll be okay.” Myers discovered a wealth of source material in blogs and in documents known as “after action reports.” Some of his findings shocked him, such as the fact that “very often, the people who plant the bombs have nothing against the Americans–they just want the dollars.”
That ability to put himself into another’s shoes has served Walter Dean Myers well. One of his most innovative recent books is Monster, where he enters the head of a young man on trial for murder. “I was in upstate New York in a maximum security prison and interviewing a murderer and he was telling me about his life using the first person,” recalls Myers. “He was trying to mirror his life with mine and he was a very well-spoken man.
“I asked how he got to jail. He switched to third person when he started talking about the crime,” the author noticed. “He’s creating a distance between himself and his crime. I assumed this was a natural concept. At first, I thought no one wants to be an evil person and then I thought this gives a distance that allows him to do this in the first place.” Thus, Monster was conceived and came to life as a screenplay-within-a-novel.
Could Walter Dean Myers have become the person on the other side of the glass wall in that prison? He remembers a moment in high school. “One teacher knew I was going to drop out of high school. She told me, ‘Whatever you do, don’t stop writing.’ At a low point, you look for things like that–a word of praise that you hook on to.” So what influence did that teacher have on the young Walter Dean Myers, future author of more than fifty books? “At that moment, I started writing again.”
– Interviewed by Ellen Myrick, December 2007
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