The accidental novel: Mark Goldblatt’s Twerp lands Random House rep pick
Writing never felt like a second job for Mark Goldblatt until Harper Collins wanted an extra 35,000 words for a paperback.
Mark Goldblatt
Initially, Bumper Sticker Liberalism was going to be only an ebook and then Harper Collins sweetened the deal with a paperback, said Goldblatt. A tenure professor at The Fashion Institute of Technology of the State University of New York, Goldblatt had two months to make up the word count.
He knew that if he left that chair, it would be hard to go back to writing, so he escaped through crafting a completely different story, Twerp (Random House, May 2013). It began with anecdotes based on his childhood growing up in Queens during the 60s.
Twelve-year-old Julian Twerski has returned to school after a week-long suspension and his teacher offers a proposition: write about what happened to be excused from a report on Shakespeare. Julian slowly tells pieces of the story through anecdotes, but doesn’t have the courage to tell his teacher the encounter that caused his dismissal.
Each story Julian writes is a puzzle that makes up the whole, beginning with throwing a rock at a bird, Goldblatt said. “It’s an account of his distractions.” Some of them are funny and others are gut-wrenching revelations.
Twerp is the first book Goldblatt has written wherein a character has a slight resemblance to him, he said. This was both difficult and easy at the same time. “You want the character to be consistent. I had to make sure the anecdotes all added up to a true picture of a 12-year-old. What works psychologically may not work on the page.”
Goldblatt didn’t want the reader to work hard to make sense of Julian and believing his character’s actions; he is a meticulous artist. “I’m an anal-retentive writer. I have to know the first and last line of the story.”
He originally wrote the book for adults, but fellow author Charles Salzberg convinced him to market it for the young adult audience. He sold the novel to an editor when he attended the New York Writers Workshop Pitch Conference in late 2011. Now Twerp, written to escape another project, is Random House’s rep pick for its 2013 summer catalogue, scheduled to release on May 13. The book will be marketed to middle school children, and there might be a sequel, he said.
“I’ve never had a book with this kind of push behind it,” Goldblatt said. Random House has already begun interviewing actors for Twerp on tape.
Goldblatt, a journalist and theologian, teaches writing and religious history at FIT. His political columns have appeared in multiple publications including American Spectator, The Daily Caller, National Review, The New York Post, Newsday, and USA Today.