Ned Vizzini began writing for NEW YORK
PRESS at the age of fifteen. At seventeen he was asked
to write a piece for THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE,
which led to the publication of TEEN ANGST? NAAAH...,
a memoir of his years at Stuyvesant High School. Now
twenty-two, Ned lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Ned Vizzini is the author of TEEN ANGST?
NAAAH... and BE MORE CHILL.
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BE MORE
CHILL is the story of Jeremy Heere – your average high
school dork – who gets a “squip.” A supercomputer in pill
form, the squip communicates directly with your brain to
make you cool. By instructing Jeremy on what to wear, how to
talk, and who to ignore, the squip transforms him from a
complete into a member of the social elite. Soon he is
friends with his former tormentors, has the attention of the
Hottest Girls in School, and is working on getting the
beautiful Christine – the girl of his dreams – to go out
with him. But Jeremy discovers that there is a dark side to
handing over control of your life – and it can have
disastrous consequences.
Set to be released on June
1, 2004, BE MORE CHILL is an intelligent and
hilarious novel that has the potential to be a crossover
success. It has already received rave advance reviews from
the likes of PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, as well as from
authors such as David Benioff (THE 25th HOUR, the
movie TROY), Megan McCafferty (SLOPPY FIRSTS
and SECOND HELPINGS), and Jonathan Ames (WHAT’S
NOT TO LOVE? and THE EXTRA MAN). The Weitz
Brothers – who wrote and directed AMERICAN PIE – have
signed on to develop BE MORE CHILL with Steve Pink
(HIGH FIDELITY) into a movie.
I sat down with
Ned to talk about his new novel, the squip phenomenon,
SPACEBALLS, Nintendo, and a whole lot more.
THE BOOK...
SCOTT NEUMYER: How
did the publication of BE MORE CHILL come about?
After the success of TEEN ANGST? NAAAH... were you
contacted by Miramax/Hyperion to do a novel or did you
already have BE MORE CHILL finished and decide to
shop it around?
NED VIZZINI: BE MORE
CHILL was published in a standard Cinderella way. I had
this first book, TEEN ANGST? NAAAH..., that was doing
well around the country, that had what book companies like
to call a "cult following" which basically means it didn't
suck. Then I got drunk at a wedding and started talking to a
guy about TEEN ANGST? NAAAH...--the guy turned out to
work for William Morris. I went into William Morris a month
later (I remember sneaking around, hurriedly photocopying my
articles on their machines) and got hooked up with my agent
there, who is still my agent. He told me, when I told him
the BE MORE CHILL idea, that I should write it myself
and then shop it around. So that's what we did. We went with
Miramax/Hyperion a day after meeting them.
SN:
I assumed your background in computer science laid the
groundwork for your creation of the "squip," but where did
the general idea for BE MORE CHILL come
from?
NV:BE MORE CHILL and the squip
came out of my studies at Hunter College, where I was
getting a computer science degree in the early 00's and also
taking English classes. I drafted the concept in a short
story class. The spark, though, was a song by an indie band
called Drunk Horse. They have a tune called "AM/FM Shoes"
about a guy whose life is terrible, but he has special shoes
that play the radio. When he plugs into his AM/FM shoes, all
the ladies love him. Well, I thought: what if there really
was a device that made you cool? How much would American
Mega Media Enterprises make off it? It would be the ultimate
product. And I went from there.
SN: Clearly
the biggest theme running through the book is that of
autonomy and being true to oneself (also the inevitable
failure of technology). How much of an emphasis did you
place on this particular idea as you were writing the novel?
NV: I didn't try to give BE MORE CHILL
any particular theme when I was writing it. Themes emerge in
editing. I just tried to keep it funny. I think when you try
and have a theme from the beginning, that's how you end up
with a cookbook.
SN: After reading TEEN
ANGST? NAAAH... and BE MORE CHILL, it's pretty
clear that there's probably a little bit of you in Jeremy
Heere (hell, there's probably a little bit of every guy who
isn't the typical jock/star-high-school-quarterback). How
much of your own experience did you put into Jeremy's
character?
NV: There are parts of jocks in
Jeremy Heere--his problems are pretty universal. As for me,
The part of BE MORE CHILL where Jeremy Heere has a
make-out session interrupted by a girl's infected nipple
ring... that happened to me. In my first kiss ever. The part
where he takes ecstacy and gets violent, that happened to
me, although I just listened to heavy music; I didn't fight
with anyone. I'd say about 65% of him is me.
SN: You know Metuchen, NJ is right near my
neck of the woods. It's literally about 15 minutes from
where I live in Spotswood. Why New Jersey? You grew up in
Brooklyn, so why choose to place the novel in suburban,
central New Jersey? And you seem to know quite a lot about
it. How did you manage to research the area?
NV: Suburbia seemed like the right place for
the novel. I've always kind of liked the suburbs, been able
to enjoy them in a way that only city kids can. One side of
my family is from Trenton and for years I visited my
girlfriend at college in suburban Philadelphia so that
provided the familiarity. It was a challenge to write
something non-New York centric and I tried to step up to
that challenge.
SN: How hard was it for you
to go from writing the memoir-ish creative non-fiction in
TEEN ANGST? NAAAH... to writing the fiction in BE
MORE CHILL? Which, do you think, comes easier to you and
which, if either, do you prefer?
NV: Fiction
is harder to write than memoir, for sure. That's the party
line but it happens to be true. I prefer fiction, however,
because the possibilities are endless and the rewards are
greater. When you write about your own life--and I've seen
this happen to other writers--you start out fine but trap
yourself into having to do interesting things just to write
about them. And then they end up seeming fake. When you
write fiction, you end up with something that is applicable
to more people--you aim higher. I want to write fables.
SN: BE MORE CHILL is clearly a book
that can be entertaining and fun enough for a Young Adult
audience, but is also substantial enough that it can branch
out into the masses and find a more adult audience. I know
you have two different divisions working on marketing (one
for YA and one for adult), but did you have a clear sense,
as you were writing it, that you wanted it to appeal to
everyone? Or did you set out to write the novel saying 'This
is going to be a YA novel' or 'This is going to be an adult
novel'?
NV: Thanks for saying that BE MORE
CHILL can be a crossover success. Of course, the $200m
question (uh, that's what J.K. Rowling earned last year) is
whether BE MORE CHILL is YA or adult or both. I don't
really care: I wrote it for myself when I was 20/21, right
at the cusp of the two classifications, and I didn't put it
into any box. I don't draw distinctions between YA and
literature. HATCHET by Gary Paulsen is better than
99.9% of adult literature. Meanwhile, THE GREAT
GATSBY is read exclusively by 7th graders. Where's the
line?
SN: If
it's good writing, is there really a difference between the
two? Should there be?
NV: The great joke of
great literature is that it ends up getting read by
children. People in the literary world don't understand
that. And education in Shakespeare, for most people, begins
and ends with high school. AP English classes teach
ULYSSES. There's a lot more maturity in what high
schoolers read than in a lot of what gets published in the
adult market. And there's a nice thing about having young
readers--they take longer to die.
SN: The one
thing about BE MORE CHILL that irked me as I first
read through it was the way the F_ _ k _ _ _ curses were
presented most of the time. It bothered me, especially when
it's in Jeremy's narration and not the dialogue. Then I
finished the book and realized why you'd done it and now it
doesn't bother me so much. It works as part of the narrative
of the novel. I do, however, still have a nagging suspicion
that it was done after the fact. That originally you'd wrote
the book with all the curses in there. Was this a result of
Miramax asking you to clean up the book a bit for the YA
audience?
NV: About the cursing in BE MORE
CHILL, I defer to St. Kurt, who toned down In
Utero to get it into Wal-Mart. When confronted about it
in interviews, he said "There are a lot of places in this
country where you can't get a CD except in Wal-Mart." I feel
that way about schools. There are a lot of places in this
country where the idea of going into a bookstore is off the
scale of social undesirability, or there aren't any
bookstores. So it's important to me that my books are
available in schools. With that in mind, I thought, what can
I do with the curses, so I did the same thing that MTV
does--I bleeped them out in such a way that it's
completely clear what's being said. (I think the
whole bleeping thing is really ridiculous. Is "uck" such a
powerful syllable?) Once I started using the dashes, I found
a lot of humor in the _ _ _ k _ _ g things; some of my
favorite parts of the book utilize them. The narrative
explanation for them came later; I didn't have that planned
from the beginning. The _ _ _ ks were in the book when I
handed it in to Miramax.
SN: Was there ever
any pressure from Miramax/Hyperion to tame the novel down a
bit for that audience? I mean, there is some fairly explicit
high school sex in there, but it's never over the top and it
always seems to work.
NV: The editorial
process was a constant give-and-take on what could be in the
book and what couldn't. But I think that's typical. I picked
my battles, fought hard, and I'm really happy with the
result. I also made some changes in editing that made me see
the book in a whole new light. My editor was
fantastic.
SN: The ending of book is both
surprising and well done, but it's definitely a bit
open-ended. Do you ever see yourself writing a sequel to
BE MORE CHILL or at least carrying on these
characters stories in some way?
NV: I never
intended to write a sequel to BE MORE CHILL, but here
we are, more than a month away from pub date, and I've
already gotten several letters (one from Germany) asking
about a sequel. That's going to be hard to ignore.
THE MOVIE...
SN: The Weitz
Brothers (AMERICAN PIE) have signed on to develop the
book and Steve Pink (HIGH FIDELITY) is working on the
screenplay. We all know how these things work in Hollywood.
Reading the novel, it became clear to me that it could
fairly easily be translated to the screen. It could
definitely work as a film. Do you think it has a good chance
of making into theaters?
NV: The key to
making the BE MORE CHILL movie is that the people
involved (Steve Pink and the Weitz Brothers) are really
committed to it. They have stayed committed to it as we went
into pitch meetings and dealt with the fact that Hollywood
is VERY edgy right now about making a teen movie with a pill
("that's drugs") and a teen movie with R content (which a
lot of the book is). The personal commitment of the people
involved makes me confident that the movie will get made.
SN: I know you're working with Steve Pink on
the screenplay, but how much input are you ultimately going
to have on the film?
NV: I have a fair,
friendly amount of input on the BE MORE CHILL movie.
People listen to me and take what I have to say into
account; then they do whatever they have to do to get the
movie made.
SN: There are, however, a few
things that would, of course, have to be changed for
Hollywood. Is there anything that you'd really hate to have
to change?
NV: I write books--not movies.
(Not yet.) Therefore I'm not really concerned about changing
things in the BE MORE CHILL movie. Of course if they
wanted to make the squip a giant banana that levitated
behind you... No, see, that would be pretty cool.
SN: Do you have anyone in particular in your
head right now that you'd like to cast in BE MORE
CHILL? Who do you think would make the perfect Jeremy
and Christine?
NV: I'm friendly with Danny
Franzese who was in BULLY and MEAN GIRLS, so
let's say he gets the Jeremy role. For Christine, let's put
in my girlfriend Naomi because she's pretty.
SN: You joked on your website about getting
paid in SPACEBALLS DVDs. How sick are you of that
movie now?
NV: I love SPACEBALLS! I
watched it again with my friends recently. Probably Mel
Brook's finest hour-and-a-half. A lot of the jokes that I
didn't get when I was eight are really hilarious now.
THE WRITER...
SN: How long did
it take you to write BE MORE CHILL, from idea to
finished product?
NV: It took
me nine months and nine days to write BE MORE CHILL.
Factor in some original preliminary ideas and figuring stuff
out at the beginning, and maybe a year.
SN:
Do you have a set writing schedule or ritual that you adhere
to?
NV: I write based on guilt. When I feel
guilty for not writing, I write. That ends up being every
day.
SN: Judging by your website, the
internet is clearly an important promotion and marketing
tool for you (and for many other writers). Do you see it
becoming even more important in this way? In what ways can
it be used even more effectively than it already is?
NV: My website is an essential part of what I
do as a writer, because it allows people who like my book to
email me. That sounds simple but it's an incredibly
effective way to give people something extra. For BE MORE
CHILL, I am launching "The Squip Phenomenon" which is an
unprecedented interconnected array of sites about the squip.
It's still under construction, but you can get into it at http://www.squipnews.com/.
SN: You have a take a very DIY approach to
your publicity. You host readings, hand out fliers for your
books, run contests on your website, etc. Why do you work so
hard? And do you think a lot of other writers don't do
enough to promote their books?
NV: I work
hard to promote because I have to and because I always have.
Playing in bands around New York has taught me how important
DIY promo is. Not only do you send the right message to your
book company, you end up meeting very, very interesting and
talented people. As for other writers, shhh... let's
let them keep doing exactly what they're doing now.
SN: In 2002, GQ selected you as a young
author to watch for in 2003. You've sold tons of copies of
TEEN ANGST? NAAAH... and you've gotten great advance
blurbs on BE MORE CHILL from the likes of David
Benioff, Megan McCafferty, John Strausbaugh, Zoe Trope,
Melvin Burgess, and Neal Pollack. Are starting to feel at
least a little bit like a rock star now?
NV:
I'm pretty far from being a rock star. I got slammed in
taxes this year and since then I haven't been going out as
much. I'm in work mode about this book, doing everything I
can to get it out there in the right way. Plus rock stars
get lots of girls, which definitely used to get a goal of
mine, but these days, like a lot of people in my generation,
I'm just really just happy to have one girl. I don't feel
famous at all. I am in danger of feeling successful.
SN: What's next for you? I know you're
working on something now. Could you tell us a little bit
about it or do you like to keep these things close to the
vest until you've worked them out completely?
NV: I am working on a new book. It's not a
sequel to BE MORE CHILL. It's good, though! It's very
funny and it builds on what I've done already.
SN: Do you see yourself writing more novels
that are YA friendly or do you plan to steer away from that?
NV: I plan to move into full-on adult
literature. But high school is such an arena for drama--it's
tough to ignore. High school looks to be the setting (or a
partial setting) for the next couple of books I do.
SN: Any advice for the aspiring writers out
there?
NV: I have lots of tips for aspiring
writers on my website: www.nedvizzini.com/faq/
SOME
ODDS AND ENDS...
SN: I noticed how
cleverly you slipped the CONTRA 30-man code into the
novel. What's your favorite original Nintendo game?
NV: My favorite original Nintendo game is the
original FINAL FANTASY--incredibly challenging and
involving. Plus the game always crapped out on me and lost
my saved file when I got towards the end--an additional
level of challenge. The "CONTRA" code in BE MORE
CHILL is actually the Konami code and has been commented
on by lots of people.
SN: Would Naomi (your
girlfriend and “sometimes fan”) still be with you if your
squip was no longer functioning? I know my girlfriend
wouldn't.
NV: If I didn't have a squip, Naomi
would drop me and end up with one of those army guys that
she likes me to resemble. Sniff.
SN: Who is
the first celebrity you'd make a beeline for if you actually
had a squip?
NV: I think Rachel Leigh Cook is
pretty hot. But if I had a squip, I'd have to use it to get
an extra $800,000 before I could hit on anyone in Hollywood.
SN: You kill a very famous hip-hop star in
BE MORE CHILL. Did you decide to kill him because
he's the person who would have the biggest effect on the age
group of your characters or just because you've wanted to
kill him for a long time?
NV: I decided to
kill a very famous hip-hop star in BE MORE CHILL
because it was funny. And because I think he should die to
preserve his artistic integrity.
SN: What
have you read recently (or are currently reading) that's
just blown you away?
NV: I have been blown
away by a lot of contemporary literature, much of which I
read because of my DIY promotion principles--I figured if I
was going to go to a reading to give out flyers, I had
better read the guy's book! Recently I enjoyed Kyle Smith's
LOVE MONKEY--there's a book that'll teach you to hold
onto your girlfriend. Kinda like "SWINGERS."
SN: And because I know fellow Word Riot
Interviewer (and author of NAUGHTY SWEET BOY) Ryan
Robert Mullen would be upset if I didn't ask: What's your
favorite office supply?
NV: My favorite
office supply is the paper clip, because you can turn it
into little shapes. I'm a big fidgeter. My legs are shaking
all the time (i.e. right now).
SN: Anything
else you'd like to add?
NV: Visit http://www.nedvizzini.com/!
SN:
Thanks so much for doing the interview, Ned. Best of luck
with BE MORE CHILL.
About the
author:Â Â
Scott Neumyer lives and writes
in New Jersey. He has written reviews and commentary for DVD
Angle. His fiction has appeared in 3AM Magazine, Burning
Word, the-phone-book, Word Riot, Hobart, Pindeldyboz,
McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and Snow Monkey. He can be
reached at http://scottwrites.blogspot.com/
©Â 2004Â Scott
Neumyer
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