The Third Eye (25 page)

Lois:
I think I prefer the werewolf, myself, if I were choosing one to cuddle up with.

Jessica:
That would have been quite a large rewrite. Speaking of modernizing, what would you say was the biggest challenge in going through this and modernizing it?

Lois:
This book had fewer challenges than any of the others, or most of the others, anyway. The basic plot and characters held strong. The high school cliques and the fear kids have of being labeled as “different”—those are as real today as they ever were. I just updated a bit; I gave the characters cell phones and computers and DVD players, which didn’t exist when I
originally wrote the story. I didn’t really have to mess around much with the rest of it.

Heather:
Was the technology a challenge the whole way through modernizing your books? It’s such a pervasive thing now—nobody is unreachable, everyone has a cell phone. I feel like that must have been a completely different thing for you to consider when going through all of these books.

Lois:
It was much more challenging in certain books than in other books. It wasn’t quite as bad in this book, because Karen couldn’t have reached her cell phone anyway when she was all tied up on the floor in the kitchen. The crucial moments weren’t moments where Karen was desperately trying to reach somebody. In some of my books, it plays a very strong part because that is the case, but in this one that was not a biggie.

Jessica:
It must have been very gratifying to find you had written a story that didn’t rely on any of those sorts of easy outs. I feel as if so many stories now rely on mishaps involving e-mails or texting. The fact that you wrote a story that holds up regardless of what’s technologically available must have felt really good.

Lois:
Well, technology’s become a big problem for me, and I think for a lot of writers in my generation, because it’s changing so fast. I was not raised with it—I don’t even text—so I would find it very hard right now to keep up with what is
current. I even think that young writers like yourselves, who are undoubtedly very familiar with the new technology, are going to be facing this, because it takes about a year from the time you finish writing a book before it makes its way to bookstores. By then, the technology will have changed from what it was when you were writing it. I think that this is going to reduce the shelf life of a lot of today’s writers, even if their books are extremely good.

Jessica:
I think that is definitely always a problem. I know for us, we named some actual celebrities in SPOILED, and in the course of doing this, we realized you don’t want to date yourself. I think technology is similar. There is something to be said for being able to write around that stuff so that you don’t immediately date yourself.

Lois:
You also date yourself by using teenage slang, which changes so quickly. Another thing I had to change in THE THIRD EYE was that in the original version, the little boy, Bobby, and his friends own roller skates. Now they have skateboards.

Jessica:
That’s true! I also enjoyed how Anne the psychic was saved by a meat grinder in the original—but then you changed it to a coffeepot. I mean, you probably had to change the meat grinder, but it made me sad that she wasn’t still grinding her own hamburger at home. I really loved that detail.

Lois:
I also had to change people’s clothing. When Karen went to the prom, I put her into a black dress. Back in my day, when I went to the prom, I wore a fluffy yellow dress. Girls never would have considered going to a prom wearing black. Black was for funerals, not for school dances. So the clothing had to change.

Heather:
But it does seem that with this book you didn’t need to do as many updates—it seems to us to be mostly details.

Lois:
Definitely. This was a quick, easy one.

Heather:
You did update quite a few of them. For you, revisiting them, were there surprises for you? How long had it been since you reread this?

Lois:
So many years that it felt like I was reading a book written by somebody else. Over the years I’ve written fifty books, and when I complete one, I put it out of my mind and focus on the next one. I don’t go back and keep rereading the ones I’ve had published. After a while, I lose that personal communication with the book, and sometimes I can’t even remember what happens to the characters. It’s like reading a book by my new favorite author! I can’t wait to read another Lois Duncan book now—she writes so well! [Laughs.]

Heather:
I love that! I’m sure you’re reading and going, “This is great!” I’m just so excited by the idea that this is going to expose a whole new audience to your books. They were such staples of my childhood, and now it’s as if we’ve entered into a new era with the CW and ABC Family and networks that are all really keen on finding their next great series idea from a book. Have you ever considered that the next phase in the updating of the Lois Duncan catalog might be a THE THIRD EYE television series or something like that?

Lois:
I take what’s offered to me. Hollywood is a world unto itself, and authors pretty much sit back and let their film agents handle film rights. But, to date, nobody’s made an offer for THE THIRD EYE. I find that surprising, because I’ve always thought this story would make an excellent movie. I can see Karen having a TV series and solving case after case!

Heather:
You have never shied away from darker subject matter. There are even shootings and kidnappings in THE THIRD EYE. What do you make of some of the recent articles that suggest that today’s young adult books are too dark for young minds? Do you think there is any merit to that, or do you think it’s baseless?

Lois:
There is perhaps some merit to it, but I think today’s young people are exposed to such an overload of dark subject
matter on television that the ones who search out books are not going to be harmed by them. I think the visual presentation of blood and gore and the excitement and stimulation that come from that are much more damaging than anything that could be in a book. With reading matter, you process the content differently. It goes through a step between your eyes and your brain where you make a translation of what you’ve read and invent your own visual images. Violence on film just smacks you in the face, and your own thought process can’t act as a buffer.

Heather:
I agree. I actually think teens really like it when someone trusts them to make smart choices. That’s the good thing about books like yours that don’t try to protect them in ways they don’t necessarily need or want to be protected. They are seeking out the books; you can trust them to read them the right way.

Lois:
Mine also are pretty mild. I don’t like sensationalized violence, and I don’t have it in my books. Violence takes place offscreen, if it takes place at all. We didn’t even see Rob get shot.

Jessica:
I often find that makes for more suspenseful storytelling. To have someone imagine it, rather than telling them explicitly what happened, can be even scarier.

Lois:
It makes the relationship between the author and the reader more of a partnership, because in a way, the reader is creating the story with his or her own imagery.

Jessica:
Have you been reading much young adult fiction yourself lately?

Lois:
No, not as much as I used to. But now that I’ve read Spoiled, I think I’m going to start reading more of it. I really enjoyed your book.

Heather:
Well, thank you! I am curious, though—when you were writing all of these novels, were there particular young adult fiction books or series that you enjoyed reading, just to see what other people were doing, or just for fun? What were your touchstones from around the time you originally wrote these books?

Lois:
There weren’t a lot of young adult authors back then, because YA literature was just starting to be recognized as a genre. Those of us groundbreakers who did write in that genre, such as Lois Lowry, Joan Lowry Nixon, Richard Peck, Paula Danziger, and I, would constantly be running into each other at librarians’ conventions and conferences of English teachers and, having become friends, we would all read each other’s books. So that was the group whose work I was most exposed to. I am much less familiar with today’s young writers.

Heather:
That list of names alone is like the YA Hall of Fame. We love those books. Those books, and your books, are all timeless, and they deserve to be brought back and brought back and brought back. Just because a book wasn’t written in 2011 doesn’t mean it is not relevant and worth reading. Bring it on! Show the YA readers that there is more than just vampires out there.

Lois:
Well, I’m certainly excited to see them coming out with these gorgeous new covers and am eagerly waiting to see the reaction of today’s readers to these new editions. It’s fun to go back and compare the covers to the original covers, because paperback covers change so often. Whenever they are reissued, they get a different cover. So if you get a whole stack of different editions of the same novel, extending back over a twenty-year time frame, it’s almost like watching the progression of the world.

Jessica:
It’s like watching your baby grow up. Well, they look beautiful and we are very excited to see a whole new generation get to discover them. It’s been so great to talk to you. We really are huge fans and this has just been a pleasure.