Perks of Being a Writer: Exclusive interview with Stephen Chbosky

Stephen Chbosky, writer of the novel, Perks of Being a Wallflower; the screenplay of Rent; and the TV show, Jericho recently came to Penn State to give a lecture on book censorship. A native of Pittsburgh, Happy Valley runs through his veins. Chbosky’s mother was a graduate of Penn State, and he himself almost came here, before deciding on studying screenwriting at the University of Southern California.

The Tab was lucky enough to sit down with Mr. Chbosky and ask him about his novels, his writing process, some of his favorite songs and what was behind the inspiration for his most famous works.

So is this your first time at Penn State?

Well, it’s my first time professionally, but I’ve been here four times before. The first time I came here was the summer before I went to college to visit my good friend. Later, I came for grilled stickies—I literally drove from Pittsburgh to State College with a friend for stickies and then drove straight home, and it was worth it, of course it was. And then after I wrapped Perks of Being a Wallflower, I drove past State College with my wife on our way to Jersey, and we got stickies as well.

Well we are definitely glad to have you back, thank you so much for coming. You mentioned Perks of Being a Wallflower, and I’m sure you’ve gotten so many questions about the book, but of course we have to ask too. One of the most famous lines in the novel is, “In that moment I swear we were infinite,” but what’s your favorite line from the novel?

My favorite line from the book has changed over the years. I have to say, “In that moment I swear we were infinite,” or “I feel infinite” has always been a first choice, but as I get older, the line “We accept the love we deserve” has, I think, the most lasting meaning to me.

I heard once you started writing the novel you knew you were going to turn it into a screenplay. How does your writing process differ when you go into writing a novel vs. writing a screenplay?

Well, it doesn’t really change that much. The thing is, because I trained as a screenwriter, it’s built into my DNA. When I sit down to write, I’m trained to do so as a screenwriter. However, I will say, when I wrote the third draft of Perks, the book, I put in some fun things, just because I knew I wanted to film them. For example, when Charlie says he can picture his friends running up the hill on the last day of school. I knew the hill I wanted to film, but it was covered in crops, so that it didn’t look good, so I switched it to the bleachers, but I specifically put that in because someday I wanted to film that.

I also read that you based some of the characters on people you knew in real life. Did you ever tell these people they were the inspiration behind these characters? Did they ever figure it out?

Yeah, they know. Over the years, you have to understand, this book was published over 17 years ago, you know? The person that influenced Patrick, he knows who he is. And the girl who influenced Sam, she knows who she is. And my grandfather, well he certainly knows who he is. I have to say, though, the one character that I never knew was Mary Elizabeth, and Mary Elizabeth was the most fun for me in a way to write, because I had an experience where I went to the The Rocky Horror Picture Show in San Diego, and I see this girl running the show, she was the stage manager, she was 16, she was a punk, with crazy colored hair, the spikes—everything. And she was just leaning into everybody, and I remember thinking, you know, I bet in like 10, 20 years, all this [gestures to head] will go away, and she’ll be in an office, but still doing the same thing. So Mary Elizabeth was my imagination of what this girl would have been like in the future.

Well I loved Mary Elizabeth, too. She was so dynamic.

Yeah, and Mae Whitman played her to a T.

I’ve also read that you relate to Charlie a lot.

Yes,I definitely did.

So what were you like in high school?

Well, Charlie—he’s a little bit more of what I was like in middle school than high school, but uh, you know, it’s really not as fun to watch a 12-year-old go through the tunnel, so, I tarted it up a little bit. Um, you know, I can be shy for sure, and I can be reserved for sure. I knew how to talk to people and stuff. I was never, like, a popular kid, but you know those kids in high school who basically float between the cliques? Everyone kind of likes them okay, but you don’t really have your own group? Yeah, that was me. I was a floater. So it was also helpful that even though I was an artistic person, and a sensitive person, in Pittsburgh, where I’m from, it was helpful to be athletic. You could get away with being sensitive and artistic as long as you knew how to play soccer, and I was an athlete, so I somehow got by.

Why do you think you book resonates so well with young adult audiences?

Over the years I’ve noticed certain things in common, certain things I have in common with the readers, things that they have in common with me. Whether it’s genuinely wanting to find your place, or it’s the question that plagues us all: why do people themselves get treated so badly? If you’re searching for your own identity, whatever that identity might be, I think that ultimately the reason that young people related to the book is that they know I’m being honest. And this was not exploitative. I was not trying to get away with anything, or appeal to a demographic, or any of that nonsense. I was just writing this story the best way I knew how, and I’m very moved that other people related to it. I will say, I wrote Perks for my own reasons to get through a very dark time, and people have come up to me through the ages and said, “It’s amazing—it’s like you understand me,” and I’ve said, “yes, okay, but that means that you understand me.” And to have that, to have my own experience and my own point of view validated, or I guess, given back to me, thousands and thousands of times, was a very healing and cathartic thing.

 

The book has ended up on some banned book lists, so what are your thoughts on book censorship?

I wrote the book for personal reasons, but I published it in part to end a silence for people. I think that we will understand and have personal experience in things that should not be swept under the rug, but that are. What the book, and other pieces of art, help do is end that silence and get these things out in the open. On a fundamental, personal relationship to each and every reader, I think censorship is wrong because censorship encourages silence instead of knowledge. If some parental group, or some concerned grandparent, does not want their individual child or grandchild to read my book in school, I have no problem with that. The school should not force anyone to read what they don’t want to read. But in the same spirit of fairness, and equality, I would ask that those same people show the people that do get great value from this book, the same respect.

Along that note about powerful experiences, let’s talk a little bit about Rent as well. What was the inspiration behind that?

I love musicals. I did them in high school. It was always this secret joy, because, well, you know, Pittsburgh and musicals? They don’t always go hand-in-hand. But I loved it. And I think when Rent came up, the movie-musical had not, other than Evita, there hadn’t really been one. I mean, aside from the Disney stuff, but other than Evita there hadn’t really been a live-action musical in almost a decade. Jonathan Larson’s music is inspired, and the story is incredibly moving.

The other thing that drew me to Rent was being from Pittsburgh, and having a blue-collar sensibility, I did notice that when I saw the show in New York City, the young people were all, when they, well spoiler alert, when Angel dies, all the young people and the wives in the audience were crying, and I looked at some of the guys, some of the husbands, and they were just like this [crosses arms, face impassive]. And I thought, if I could just win some of these guys over, some of these husbands over, by simply acknowledging that most people pay their rents, by having a little more of a balanced approach it might do some good for the larger cause of the show, and that’s all I wanted to do. Look, Rent is Jonathan Larson’s, I’m only proud to have helped bring it to a larger audience.

Do you have a favorite musical number from it?

Wow! Wow. Hello first new question. Do you understand how hard it is to get a new question?

Well, that was definitely one of our goals!

That is the greatest question I’ve been asked forever. What is my favorite musical number from Rent? Well, I’m going to give you the real stuff….You know, I have to say, either “Life Support”—actually, not “Life Support,” I’m sorry, it’s actually “Will I?”  Most musicals, they just stick to the main characters, they don’t take the time to say, “Let’s take this moment over here…” He [Jonathan Larson] could have given this song to Angel, he could have given this song to Tom Collins, he could have given this song to anybody. But instead, he just creates this other character to talk about how large the problem was at the time, and to in just two minutes, perfectly articulate the emotional struggle at the time.

“Will I Lose My Dignity” happened because he went to a life support group and he heard a young man say, “Will I lose my dignity?” and it changed him forever. He went home and wrote that song, and that’s my favorite musical number. He is absolutely brilliant.

How about for Perks of Being a Wallflower? Do you have a particular song that inspired the idea of feeling “infinite?”

I had so many songs back then that it would be hard to say just one. But, some things on the short list: “Vapour Trail” by Ride, I loved “Hunger Strike” by Temple of the Dog. I loved “Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town” by Pearl Jam, I think I got that right. It’s such a long name. I actually met the guitarist, such a nice guy, and he gave me all these signed things, like “here’s for the tunnel.” It was great. Um, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana, like I had to tell you that. “MLK” by U2.

I think if you made a playlist on Spotify that it would be the most popular.

Oh yeah I’m not on Spotify, but I’ll have to try it out.

Yeah and then tweet it out.

And you know what’s great, you asked earlier about young adult literature, what is so amazing is, well I don’t believe that adolescence will ever change, but it is amazing to see how much the culture of adolescence has changed because of things like Spotify, and Twitter, and just the internet in general. It is a remarkable time.

So are you a fan of social media?

Um, yeah, I’m a fan of social media because, I think that, once again, fundamentally, it ends a silence. The access that people have to understanding their own selves is so much bigger now, because of this. I’ll put it this way, with my own experience, the internet really came to prominence in my circle around, let’s say, ’95. Before that, you know, when I went to high school, when I went to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, it was remarkable. It was like, “who are all these people that I love? Where do they come from?” It was other schools, other towns, but that was the epicenter. There wasn’t the coffee culture. There were other things. So, you were much more isolated then. Now, if you love “xyz,” whether it’s Rocky Horror or David Bowie, whatever you love artistically, or culturally, or whatever you’re into in terms of your gender or sexual identity, now, at the touch of a button, you know there are millions of people exactly like you in these fundamental ways. And it is much harder to, at least academically, know you’re alone. The sad thing is that sometimes you feel more alone because it is through a screen. That’s the only downside. And of course, haters are gonna hate, and there are a lot of them. That’s the one necessary evil in this, but I do believe that ultimately the good outweighs the bad.

How about for TV? I know you worked on Jericho. Would you ever consider going back to TV writing?

For the right show, and the right idea, absolutely. Television is having a renaissance. It’s in it’s golden age, and there is so much good material out there that if I found a story that I felt needed the long form, I would return in a heartbeat.

Do you have a favorite TV show right now?

The Walking Dead. It’s a great show. You know, when I look at The Walking Dead what I love about it is it perfectly—I’ve never seen a show since Lost understand and execute a premise at such a high level. If we had had seven seasons of Jericho, I could have only hoped to be half as good as The Walking Dead.

And lastly, of course, for aspiring writers, was there ever a course in college, or a professor, that you felt was really integral to your development as a writer?

Absolutely, first of all though, tell all of these aspiring writers to stop using the word “aspiring.” Here’s why: if you write, you are a writer. The noun comes from the verb. It is not up to an agent or a publisher, or a studio executive or producer, or anyone else other than the person behind the keyboard, to say that. The reason I say that is because I had a draft of The Perks of Being a Wallflower in the summer of 1997, and I could not get an agent, and I could not get a publisher. But a year later, because of somebody I knew, I ended up getting a publishing deal, with the exact same manuscript. I would not say that in 1997 I was an “aspiring writer” and in 1998 I was a “real writer.” That’s number one.

Number two is, well, there was a course that completely changed me, but it was not so much a course as a person. His name was Stewart Stern, and he was my hero mentor since around the time I was nineteen. I originally met him when I visited The University of Southern California, and his seminar, much like the one I’m doing right now, is the reason I chose that school over the other two that I got into—NYU and Penn State. And he, with his kindness, his reading, his advice, and his example, with his seminal screenplays, changed my life forever. To put Stewart in a nutshell would be nearly impossible, but I will share this one story about him. Stewart, from the time he was a little boy, was obsessed with Peter Pan, and his uncle was a huge figure in Hollywood back then, during the silent era. So he’s been collecting memorabilia his entire life. He’s 80 years old, and he’s living in Seattle and a local production came to do a musical. They heard about Stewart, came over and looked at his stuff, and said, “Mr. Stern, we would love to use your material to make your program, but we don’t really have a lot of money, since we’re a local theater. Is there anything we can do? What do you want?” And he said, “I want five minutes of air time.” So this 80 year old man got put on the cable and flown around the sage for half an hour. That’s the kind of person Stewart Stern was. When he passed away last February, I was devastated.

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Later, during Mr. Chbosky’s lecture about book censorship, he also spoke about the possibility of a Perks of Being a Wallflower sequel, stating: “I didn’t ever think I would do a sequel until I did the movie, and I loved working with the cast so much…If I were to do a sequel, it would be set years later, but I’m glad to know people would want to see the story continue.”

So, who knows? Maybe one day….regardless, Stephen Chbosky certainly has a lot going on in the future for him and The Tab can’t wait to see what that entails.