Free Some of Tim's Stories by S. E. Hinton Page A

share the pillow
.”—Mr. Smithers
    JULY 18, 2006—TULSA, OKLAHOMA
    Even though I’ve learned to expect the ceramic Siamese curled up in Susie’s living room chair, it still startles me. The cat is territorial and seems to pounce on any imagination that bypasses it en route to the den, the room where Susie is most comfortable. Susie already has tumblers of wine waiting for us, and we assume the same places on the sofa that worked for us during our first interview. Ours is a relaxed conformity. We know where to plug in the tape recorder—there is an extension cord under the coffee table—but we also allow ourselves “unplugged” time in between questions to top off our glasses. Another Siamese stares at me from a portrait above the large-screen television. Like its ceramic counterpart, it flirts with the notion of being real. “That’s Mr. Smithers,” Susie says, but she is referring instead
to an actual cat that has joined us to sit rigidly atop the coffee table. Smitty, an orange tabby, looks porcelain. Susie claims as an aside that she keeps him because he matches her décor—the oranges and browns—but her affection is obvious as she explains he can disco dance on command. He isn’t in the mood, so our thoughts grudgingly turn to fiction, real life, and some fuzzy distinctions
.
    So many wonderful things came to you courtesy of
The Outsiders:
international recognition, financial security
.
    I was making about two cents a book. I’ll call it financial help in the first few years, but it certainly wasn’t security.
    During our last visit, you talked about the writer’s block you developed after
The Outsiders
when you were working on
That Was Then, This Is Now.
    In the ending of
That Was Then, This Is Now
, when Bryon says he’s emotionally drained from caring about people, he reflects my own state of mind. I was emotionally drained from having lived
The Outsiders
and then having it be over. It just wiped me out.
    You’ve said what a help your boyfriend, David, now your husband, was to you while you were writing the book. Did that strengthen your relationship
?
    It’s funny, because I got the contract on our wedding day. Before, when the contract for
The Outsiders
arrived on graduation day, I thought,
Graduation is nothing; I sold my book!
But when my contract came for
That Was Then
,
This Is Now
, I was thinking,
This is nothing; I’m getting married
.
    Many writers—Harper Lee is an example—write such successful first novels, they wonder if they can ever write at that
level again. Did you experience any of those feelings after
The Outsiders?
    I still think I can write something better than
The Outsiders
, but I’ve given up hope that I’ll do anything that’s as well loved. That doesn’t bother me. How can you top something that has touched people the way
The Outsiders
has? I don’t even worry about that.
    Was there a defining moment for you when you realized that, because of your newfound celebrity, you were going to have to establish some boundaries for yourself and your fans
?
    At first I was as accommodating as I could be about giving speeches, but I’ve learned when to say no. I can be either a writer or a speaker. I hate speaking, love writing, so the choice is obvious.
    You realized the story of
The Outsiders
so completely that readers felt as if Ponyboy, Soda, and Darry were personal friends. How much pressure did you feel to write a sequel
?
    I felt a lot of pressure to write a sequel. I still do feel a lot of pressure to write a sequel. If you go to
fanfiction.net
, there are more than two thousand Outsider stories, and a lot of them are sequels. I’m fine with
fanfiction.net
if that helps kids get the feel of writing, but to me
The Outsiders
stands where it is. I ended it at the right place. I’m not sixteen, no matter how well I remember being that age. I could not capture that