How do you write a convincing kid? How do you write a character who sounds believable set in 1958?

One obvious answer is to see how other writers have handled the situation. What did kids talk like in 1958? I could tell you how they talked when I was a kid. I had Star Wars and Bugs Bunny, Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen. But what was it like to be a kid in 1958. Mr parents grew up among working class people. So I started looking for literature that dealt with working class people. The Catcher in the Rye was too East Coast. High balls? I don't think so. Farrell is at least in the Midwest. Of course, being an Irish Catholic is important to him. This made me wonder how much I could actually draw from him, but what I did discover is that the youth of Studs Lonigan was in many ways similar to that of a lot of guys I knew. If we weren't doing the things Studs did, we had at least heard of them. This told me that I probably knew more about what it was like to live in 1958 than I had realized.

Now, my hero in The Merry Life of Charles Parker is a twelve-year-old paperboy. I have a twelve-year-old son but I figured the times have changed a lot. I didn't want to rely solely on how my son talks and thinks, and how his friends talk and think. I wanted to get inside a mind that has in some sense vanished. I was greatly encouraged to find in Studs Lonigan a world that was not at all foreign to me. His Chicago seemed much closer to me than the world of Tom Sawyer, for instance.

I can imagine someone who has read my novel reading this blog post and thinking, How is The Merry Life anything like Studs Lonigan? There are a lot of differences, it's true. But without having read Farrell, I might not have ever finished my novel. I might have felt like I had never solved the riddle of the squeaky clean Fifties. It wasn't all Leave It To Beaver. Some of it was beaver, though. Maybe it was all those phallic rockets overhead that made the era so sexually straight-laced. But the sex was there, throbbing, just below the surface. My character Stevie Groll with his collection of magazines helped me to express some of that contradiction.