Some of Tim's Stories by S. E. Hinton

through, because usually people visualize my characters when they’re reading them.
    Why do you think some of your readers were frustrated with the way you ended
That Was Then, This Is Now?
    I’ve always said if you threw the book across the room at the end, you understood it. I wanted to show that there’s not a happy ending for every story. In a lot of ways, growth is betrayal. Things change, no matter how much you’d like them to stay the same.
    After the surprise success of
The Outsiders,
did the publication of
That Was Then, This Is Now
seem anticlimatic
?
    Maybe a little bit, but on the other hand it was certainly validation. The first book could have been called a fluke, but with the second, I could safely say I had a career.
    Is it true that your third novel
, Rumble Fish,
actually began as a short story
?
    Yes, I wrote it for a creative writing class, but I knew it should be a novel. After David and I got married, we went to Europe and were hippies for a while. When we came back and moved to California so he could attend graduate school at Stanford, I started thinking about writing again and pulled out
Rumble Fish
. Plot is the hardest part of writing for me; I’m good with characters and dialogue. But with
Rumble Fish
, I already had the plot and finished it in about four months.
    Didn’t you originally write it from the viewpoint of Steve
,
Rusty-James’s friend
?
    Yes, and I couldn’t stand it. Steve is a very observant, articulate, smart kid. Like Bryon and Ponyboy, he could see a lot; he could say a lot. But I’d done that before. So I rewrote the story from the viewpoint of Rusty-James, who is not observant, not intelligent, and yet he still has to convey the identity of the Motorcycle Boy, who is so complex. I’d write a sentence and be proud of it as a writer, look at it again, think Rusty-James could not say that, and cross it out. As a writer, I’m most proud of
Rumble Fish
, because it’s very straightforward; there’s no foreshadowing.
    You’ve commented in the past that Motorcycle Boy kept haunting you, goading you to tell his story. Did you ever consider telling it from his point of view
?
    I haven’t got any more clue to what that guy’s mind was like than anybody else does. He’s an enigma to me. I couldn’t tell the story from his point of view. He’s way smarter than I’ve ever been. I was involved in mythology when I wrote this book, and the Motorcycle Boy was doing his community a service by becoming a local myth. At one point he says to Rusty-James, “I’m tired of being the Pied Piper for these people. I can’t lead them. I don’t know anywhere to go.” When he does finally commit suicide by releasing the fish and liberating the pet store, so to speak, he knows he’s creating a bigger myth than if he’d just gotten killed in a rumble.
    I’ve heard that you first got the idea for Motorcycle Boy from a magazine photo
.
    That’s true. I was flipping through a magazine, cut out a picture of this guy with his motorcycle, and then put it away with the idea of writing a story one day. Years later, when I was getting ready to write the book, I looked at the picture again and saw that I had cut it so close to the edge that I couldn’t make out the name of the magazine. After
Rumble Fish
was published and I was on a publicity tour for my next book,
Tex
, I was in Washington, D.C., to appear on a television panel with some high school kids. While I was waiting for them in the studio, their teacher walked up to me and pulled out the same magazine photograph. I almost fainted. I had never mentioned the photo to anyone. The teacher explained that he’d thought it was an interesting photograph, had cut it out, then made the connection when he read
Rumble Fish
. He’d left wider borders, and I could see it came from
Saturday Review
.
    You’ve had so many interesting