Boys are People Too

By Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch

I’ve been writing war fiction constantly for the past several years, and while I’m actively writing, I avoid reading novels with a similar theme or era as my own because I have a deep fear of unconsciously absorbing aspects of someone else’s story. Just as I was rounding up the end of my writing binge, an intriguing novel was released, Graffiti Knight by Karen Bass (Pajama Press). As soon as I wrote The End on my own, I cracked open this novel as a reward. And rewarding it was.

Graffiti Knight is an unsentimental young adult novel set two years after World War II. It is told from the perspective of sixteen-year-old Wilm who lives in Soviet-occupied Leipzig in Eastern Germany. Wilm’s father is an angry drunk with crippling war injuries and his sister has been gang raped by Soviet soldiers. Wilm’s world is controlled by bullies on all sides – the Soviet occupiers intent on punishing every German, the East German police who buy better treatment for themselves by doing the will of the Soviets, and the civilian collaborators who go along with the unjust system to keep the peace.

Wilm is consumed with the need to fight back and his petty acts of vandalism threaten the very people he cares about the most. What I love about this novel is that is feels so real. Sixteen-year-olds do act before they think. The world wasn’t rosy then and it isn’t rosy now.

Karen Bass kindly agreed to answer a few questions about the writing of this novel.

I finished Graffiti Knight in bed this morning. Well done. Love the nuanced story and characters.

I’m glad you liked the story. And isn’t the book gorgeous? I could pet it all day.

The cover and design do your novel justice, that’s for sure! How long did this story live in your head?

For a long time I only had a general sense that a friend’s father’s experiences would make a good story. But in 2009, Wilm started taking form in my thoughts. Over a number of months, his story grew in my mind but I didn’t start writing anything down until I’d thought through all the major plot points. Outlining of a sort, which was unusual for me (I am a “pantser” in the purest form).

How did you do your research?

Much of my World War II research is an accumulation of years of reading about it. For Graffiti Knight, the first step in my research was that initial day-long interview with my friend’s father. As Wilm’s story took shape in my mind, I started searching for books about the era, only to find that they are in short supply. Leipzig was in the post-WWII Soviet Zone and the Soviets didn’t allow much information to be released.

Eventually I did track down a few texts from reliable sources, but I knew it wasn’t enough, so I made plans to visit Leipzig in the summer of 2009. My husband’s niece teaches English in Germany and arranged for me to interview one of the curators at the City of Leipzig museum, and went to the interview with me in case the curator’s English and my very limited German both failed us. He graciously answered pages of questions, showed us some things from the archives, and pointed me toward several German books loaded with pictures from during and after the war. I also explored the city during that visit, and some rural locations I knew would come into play in the story. For me, exploring the city where the story is set is crucial because I want that sense of place to come through for the readers.

Graffiti Knight is a departure from your other novels, which all have a contemporary aspect to them. Was this book harder to write than your others?

Writing something purely historical was actually easier for me than having contemporary elements. Probably the hardest book for me to write was Drummer Girl, which was wholly contemporary. Teens are wonderfully honest readers, and I don’t want to misrepresent them in my contemporary characters. For whatever reason, it’s relatively easy for me to slip into that WWII era in my mind and figure out how people might think or act.

What was your inspiration for writing this novel?

As with many of my stories, Graffiti Knight‘s general inspiration was my long-standing interest in most aspects of WWII. Specifically, though, the seed for the story came from my friend’s father, who was a teenager in Leipzig, Germany when the war ended. She convinced him to let me interview him (and many of the stories he told that day were ones she had never heard before). Though he gave me the background and a few incidents that I wove into the story, Wilm’s storyline is pure invention.

What were your challenges in writing this book?

My biggest challenges were getting the setting right and making sure my “bad guy” wasn’t a stereotype.

Karen, you succeeded in upending stereotypes. Can you share your thought process about this?

In the early 2000s I became friends online with some German women, and I later went on to phone, then visit them. It got me thinking about stereotypes of Germans, especially regarding WWII. Our society painted all Germans with the Nazi brush, and often still does in Hollywood movies. I knew not everyone actually believed the Nazi dogma, so I started wondering what it was like for Germans who weren’t Nazi and were desperately trying (like so many Europeans) to survive a terrible time.

Ultimately, people seem to like the world to be black-and-white, good and evil, right and wrong. I see a world painted in of shades of grey.

In Graffiti Knight, which takes place in post-WWII Germany, I hope people will wonder if how the civilians were treated was fair, and if we (today) are treating people fairly when they are the “losers” in a conflict situation.

You do a superb job of building your male characters — female too — but you are female. Tell me how you go about building a nuanced male character.

As for writing characters of the opposite sex, I think the key is empathy, a critically important skill for writers. For me this involves a lot of thinking and daydreaming, imagining the setting and what it would be like to live there, what my concerns would be, what my life would be like. This process isn’t different for male or female characters. With male characters specifically, it helped that I had two teenaged sons, and that I’ve read countless stories with male characters written by men.

I love what George R.R. Martin said when asked how he managed to write such good female characters: “I’ve always considered women to be people.” And a writer I always strive to portray any character as a person, complicated, many-faceted, rarely clichéd — just like we are.

I like how you show even the negative characters like Ernst with his unique set of challenges and problems. You avoided clichés entirely, showing the humanity from all sides. Tell me about that.

Again it comes back to empathy, working to see their world through their eyes, and what is driving them as people. But sometimes we need outside help to do that. Confession time: in earlier drafts, Ernst was pretty much a cliché, but a great editor called me on it and made me think more about his attitudes and motivations. It’s something that is hard to show in a first-person narrative. Wilm has a very negative, possibly clichéd view of Ernst, but he ended up reporting things that he didn’t believe hinted at deeper motivations on Ernst’s part, but that told the reader those motivations existed.

How early on in the creative process of you novel did you decide on Wilm as the main character? Had you ever considered telling it from Annelise’s point of view? If not, why not?

You are officially the hardest interviewer. Seriously.

I decided on Wilm as the main character soon after the setting and time period nudged me as being a good one for a story. I didn’t consider telling it from his sister’s POV, mostly because I suspect that my inner child is a sixteen-year-old guy (yes I was a tomboy) and it felt like the natural voice for someone who was such a risk-taker. Not that girls can’t be risk-takers but it would have changed the tone of the story, and would have possibly shifted it to a story of healing after a brutal attack, which wasn’t the story I wanted to write as that has been handled well by other authors. I was also conscious of the fact that boys seemed unfortunately conditioned to mostly avoid books about girls and I wanted both sexes to think about the aftermath of war.

I especially like the vivid relationship you developed between Wilm and his father and that you did not sugar-coat it. Tell me about that.

When I started writing, I knew Wilm and his father would be at odds. I wanted that tension in their home life. Their relationship became a subplot very organically and without my planning, though I did enhance it on subsequent revisions. I grew up in a non-communicative family so I drew on that and made it worse with miscommunication and misunderstanding. Would Wilm have wanted to strike out against society’s authority figures if he’d had a positive relationship with his family’s authority figure? I don’t think so.

But I also hope their abrasive relationship stopped later developments in the story from becoming melodramatic. But that’s storytelling stuff, on a more basic level I didn’t want to sugar-coat their relationship, because families are messy and sometimes that includes dysfunctional parent-child relationships. Also, they’re a very clear example of how war doesn’t just mangle societies: it devastates survivors and their families.

Do you have any advice for people who have written their first story and would love to see it published?

Revise your stories. And when you’re done, get an editor to edit them, preferably a professional one. A good editor can make a decent story great — and isn’t that what we all want to give our readers?