Green, Tim

The Crowd Goes Wild: an Interview with Tim Green

Tim Green dreamed of hitting The New York Times bestseller list. “I did not know that my journey as a writer would lead me to middle grade fiction but it was absolutely natural. I love the genre and love the way these stories entertain my kids,” says the father who always finds time to share books with his children. As he read Jerry Spinelli’s Maniac Magee, he found himself thinking, “One day, I want to do one of these.”

The book that made Tim Green a reader is not what you might expect from a best-selling author, a professional football player, or the child of a teacher who read to him every night. She came home one day with a book she had bought at a garage sale for a quarter. “It was The Lighthouse Mystery and it was the first chapter book I ever owned,” Tim recalls. It was a Hardy Boys book.

He quickly devoured as many as he could find. He also remembers the way “the librarian looked down her nose and told me ‘These are not good books.’ I thought that was a terrible thing to say because I loved those books.”Tim believes it’s important to remember to get kids to love reading even if the story is formulaic or trite, as long as it excites kids and gets them to read more. He adds that “There is plenty of time to discover Dickens and Shakespeare. Just get books into kids’ hands that they are going to get excited about and don’t ever criticize their choices.”

Tim Green has done hundreds of school visits and his message is that “if you are not a reader–someone who loves books–you are just one book away.” He adds that “For every person there is that one book that wraps you up and takes you away.”

For many kids–and especially boys–that one book that turned them into readers was a Tim Green book. Whether it’s the Football Genius of Troy or how Josh became a Baseball Great, the author’s inside knowledge of the world of sports, his respect and understanding of middle grade readers make Tim the go-to author for both kids and the adults who want them to read.

The first books by Tim Green were for an older audience. Barbara Lalicki, an editor at HarperCollins, read Green’s Exact Revenge and was struck by his mastery of suspense and crisp cliffhangers. She loved the book and when she saw that Green had kids, came up with the idea of his writing for children. “I said yes on the spot, and, as we were talking, I came up with the idea for Football Genius.” He adds, “She didn’t know that I was an NFL player.”

That ignorance of the world of sports was an asset. “I learned to describe sports so that it is understandable to everyone, but at the same time exciting and provocative for fans.” If Barbara could follow the game, all was good.

Tim’s first non-sports-oriented book is coming out in Spring 2015. Lost Boy is the story of a boy who doesn’t know who his father is. When his mother is critically injured in a car accident, Ryder sets out to find his father to ask him to help pay for the expensive operation that could save his mother’s life. His only clue is a signed baseball card and a letter. Part mystery, part coming-of-age story, Tim Green shows that he can write as well off the field as on. The publisher’s first impulse was to put a uniformed baseball-playing boy on the cover of the book but “I had to be really insistent” to not have the boy in uniform since Ryder did not play baseball.

With Baseball Great, Tim took on steroids and other supplements, an issue that is unfortunately infiltrating even middle school sports. “I never used them but I understood that pressure so I just wanted to do an examination of that issue. Josh is essentially me–when I was 13, I was playing with older kids. I was big, I was advanced.” Tim points to a revealing scene between athletic prodigy Josh and his father. “Josh reminds his dad that he said to be great you have to do anything to win, and the dad is taken aback–yeah, he did say that but he didn’t mean that,” Green paraphrases. “Lots of parents give kids that message and kids take that as unspoken acquiescence.”

Who knows how many kids have rethought the urge to take a little booster because of Baseball Great? And how many kids who said they didn’t like books found Tim Green stories that made them readers?

And the crowd goes wild.

Interviewed by Ellen Myrick, July 2014

 

 

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