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Matt de la Pena

Matt de la Pena Books

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“When I'm following what a character does in a book I don't have to think about my own life. Where I am. Why I'm here. My moms and my brother and my old man. I can just think about the character's life and try and figure out what's gonna happen. Plus when you're in a group home you pretty much can't go anywhere, right? But when you read books you almost feel like you're out there in the world. Like you're going on this adventure right with the main character. At least, that's the way I do it. It's actually not that bad. Even if it is mad nerdy.”

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“When I was in school, I was very much into just sports, mostly basketball, and didn't really see myself as much of a student. But once I got into college, I figured I wasn't going to be play beyond college. I started to think what was I going to do, since I wouldn't be able to make a living with basketball. There were a couple of things I liked to do. I wrote poetry, spoken word mostly.”

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“I always thought books were just the canon, things I couldn't identify with. And then I was introduced to really amazing multicultural literature - it was all things I was trying to do unsuccessfully in my poetry. It really just changed everything. I was introduced to authors like Sandra Cisneros, Gabriel García Márquez, Junot Díaz, and a lot of African American literature, as well.”

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“The Color Purple really floored me. That book was just incredible because I loved the language. The biggest deal of that book was that I loved the poetry of broken English. Broken English and vernacular. It just floored me that you can actually capture the way people really talked. And I also really connected to the social class element.”

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“The second book, which was probably more from a professional standpoint - when I read Junot Díaz's Drown, I was like, Oh my god, you can write these stories and people will actually read them beyond your own little community. This guy's book is blowing up and it seems like [he's writing about] the neighborhood that I grew up in. That was a big deal. I read that in graduate school, so that's when I was really taking writing seriously, but I didn't know you could do it. I didn't know you can actually be an author. It was a weird epiphany.”

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“The whole guilt thing of not feeling Mexican enough was a big deal, too. On the one hand, you have your grandmother who is anointing you as a chosen one because you are light, but then you feel like you're less because you are lighter than your cousins, who are more down on the streets. You know? So that confusion was all I wrote about.”

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“A lot of people think that they are really cool because they don't outline. In my writing group, they would say, "I will never outline. I let the characters take me." C'mon, man - I outline the story, but it's only like one page. It's a list of possible reversals in the story, like things where everything will just change because of this certain reveal or this certain action. Then I start really digging into the character because, to me, I don't care what the story is.”

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“When you first quit your regular job and you become a full-time writer, you are paralyzed with free time. You have so much free time. When you are at home, you have a guitar. There's a cat. You got to find ways to create an environment when writing is like going to work. Be efficient with the hours you put into the book. So I go there the same time, every day - like 7:30 am - and I leave around 2 pm, or longer, if I have a deadline.”

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“This is me putting it simply; the politicians are one demographic and they see that Arizona is changing. I feel like the only instinct to retain power is to have education favor you. You have this Mexican American program that helps kids take ownership of their race and their power. It threatens the political powers that are in place.”

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“I only know what it's like to be an author with social media. I can't compare. I do think we lose the mystery of the author. Today, I get tons of e-mails and Facebook messages from readers, and my goal with Twitter and Facebook is, if someone reaches out to me, I'm going to respond to them. I don't want to be an elitist author who is untouchable. I'm just a regular person, too. I will always respond to everybody.”

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“My fear is you have to be careful as a writer to not get caught up in social media and blogging, because it can start to feed into your writing time. When you are writing a book, it's such a long journey where the payoff is way at the end, sometimes years away. The payoff of the blog post is today. You get the reinforcement, comments or "likes" immediately. It's appealing. You have to be patient with the book.”

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“Cormac McCarthy is my favorite author in the world. I love him so much. There's one book that informs me more than The Road - it's called Suttree. That book is a huge influence on me. I'm not smart enough to emulate him, but he inspires me. He never infiltrates my writing directly. He writes incredibly intelligently about people that are marginalized.”

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“I think we all try to figure out ways to ignore the fact that life is about suffering. In the modern world, that's what we're surrounded with. We have all these little tools, such as phones and the Internet, to help us forget about suffering. Whenever you are tired, you don't have to really sit in the abyss of what it means to be alive. We always find ways to avoid it. When a ship sinks, you are sitting in it. There is no way to avoid.”

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“But mostly I remember every morning before school. How she'd say "Hey, honey!" just I was walking out the apartment door. And me stopping and turning around and saying "What?" And her saying "I love you." And me rolling my eyes like I just wanted to hurry up so I didn't miss the bus. I'd start going again and she'd say "Hey, honey!" and I'd pretend I was so annoyed 'cause she was wasting time and I had to go catch the bus. And how secretly it was my favorite part of every day.”

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