“One teacher knew I was going to drop out of high school.

At first, I thought no one wants to be an evil person and then I thought this gives a distance that allows him to do this in the first place.” Thus, Monster was conceived and came to life as a screenplay-within-a-novel.Ĭould Walter Dean Myers have become the person on the other side of the glass wall in that prison? He remembers a moment in high school.

“He’s creating a distance between himself and his crime.

He switched to third person when he started talking about the crime,” the author noticed. “He was trying to mirror his life with mine and he was a very well-spoken man. “I was in upstate New York in a maximum security prison and interviewing a murderer and he was telling me about his life using the first person,” recalls Myers. One of his most innovative recent books is Monster, where he enters the head of a young man on trial for murder. That ability to put himself into another’s shoes has served Walter Dean Myers well. “They no longer believe in the glory aspect-they don’t believe nobody gets hurt and that if you’re brave enough you’ll be okay.” Myers discovered a wealth of source material in blogs and in documents known as “after action reports.” Some of his findings shocked him, such as the fact that “very often, the people who plant the bombs have nothing against the Americans–they just want the dollars.” Myers realized that the kids fighting this war were the same ones who read Fallen Angels years ago. Perhaps this is most evident in the upcoming Sunrise Over Fallujah as the young protagonist volunteers for an elite unit with a mission of mercy in the midst of the chaos. But I wanted to show that these things could co-exist.”Īn overarching theme of Myers’ work is that tension between action and thought, doing and being. “I loved playing ball, and there’s this extremely bookish side of me that I, as a young person, virtually hid. Physically large but with an initially debilitating speech impediment, the young Walter loved two things: “I wanted to emphasize the two parts of me.”

He makes that fact clear in his memoir Bad Boy. Walter Dean Myers is a versatile virtuoso of the written word. He transcends the genre pigeonholes that would beleaguer a lesser artist. He is more than the beloved creator of dozens of unforgettable characters. Walter Dean Myers is more than an award-winning author.

The Get Over by Walter Dean Myers