Most high school boys seem to think they are funny enough to write for TV, yet the likelihood is that most will just click channels, like the rest of the world. One of those who defied the odds, Larry Doyle, recently returned to his alma mater, Buffalo Grove High School, on his book tour, where, he says, the students’ reaction was “underwhelmed.” Tribune literary editor Elizabeth Taylor caught up with Doyle in the midst of his book tour for his hilarious first novel, “I Love You, Beth Cooper,” which is set in a high school and should appeal to anyone who had a lousy time in high school:
Q: Did students from Buffalo Grove seem different from other people you’ve met on the book tour?
A: These were kids who were there for their English class, but they seemed pretty bored, and their reaction was not overwhelming. I can be pretty amusing in short spurts.
Q: Did you really try to write this as a movie but couldn’t sell it? Or is that just a rumor?
A: I had the idea and worked it up as a movie idea. I sort of put together about 100 pages of script and outline. They have a lovely word for this in Hollywood, a “scripment,” which basically means uncompleted screenplay — a screenplay where you don’t bother to finish some of the scenes. Showed it to my agent and a couple of producers that I’d worked with and everyone’s response was kind of the same, you know, “This is really funny, we really like this, but we don’t see how we can motivate Hollywood to make it.”
What they want to make is a movie they can make for $12 million with Will Ferrell in it.
So it got a cool reception. And at the same time, I had this book agent in New York who I’d met with and called me back about when I was going to send her sample pages of this other novel I was thinking of writing. And I told her I’d been doing this other thing and she asked to read it.
“Sure, why not?” I thought. “We will give it an audience of five now.” She said, “I think this is a book, and I think you can sell it.” And so I wrote up the first 100 pages of the novel, which was probably only about 15 pages of my scripment. And publishers liked it. And it sold really fast.
Q: So, a 10-year-old I know saw the cover and grabbed it . . .
A: I wouldn’t want a 10-year-old to read this book.
Q: So, who should read this book?
A: I’m not really good at that part of the job. I don’t really think about the audience very much. I just write for myself. I had been writing for about 30 years, and I realized a while back that I have a writing style, whether I liked it or not, and this is what I was going to write.
And now, it is whatever it is. It is this giant mix of a bunch of influences, but it is not likely to change into something else. I might get better at some things technically, but this is my vocabulary and this is the rhythm of the way I write.
I actually noticed something about my own writing that I can’t stop myself from doing.
Q: What?
A: I have an assonance problem, the vowel equivalent of alliteration. You see it a lot in poetry, and, for some reason, I seem to like those kind of sentences. You might not even notice unless you tried to read them out loud.
It is sort of a rhythmic use of words with similar vowel sounds, and it tends to come off sort of a little musical. If you do it right, which sometimes I do, it adds a nice, lyrical quality. If you do it wrong, it gets annoying. This time I got a lot of those things out.
Q. So you don’t really think of audience …
A: Who do I think is the audience now that I’ve written it? I feel like it could certainly be enjoyed by a teenager or anyone who was a teenager. There is a quality about it that is purposeful — [I tried] to create a kind of timelessness to the high school experience. And one of the reasons I used all these allusions to teen movies and stuff was to kind of create the idea that certain things can change, but some things never change.
Q: How did you get from Buffalo Grove to Hollywood?
A: Over the big wire fence — that keeps everyone in and down.
When someone asks me how I got to write for “The Simpsons,” they want a description — where there is an answer, or some sort of door, where if you turn the knob three times in succession or two times, then you’ll write for that show.
