For English teacher Alan Brooks, the quest to bring author Ernest Cline to Akins High School was a marathon, not a sprint. After six years of persistence and communication efforts, Brooks finally succeeded in bringing the Ready Player One author to campus.
Cline recently visited to speak with students who had read his debut novel in Brooks’ classes, answering questions about creating the virtual universe of the Oasis, the Steven Spielberg film adaptation, and his advice for young writers.
Here are highlights from the Q&A session with The Eagle’s Eye.
The Eagle’s Eye (EE): Do you draft scenes visually, like a movie, or verbally, like dialogue first?
Ernest Cline (EC): I’ll do an outline. We just have like plot points, but not really dialogue. Sometimes I have an idea, and I’ll write that down for a bit of dialogue, but I don’t map it out in advance. Just kind of do an outline and then work from there.
EE: What’s your biggest inspiration overall, and specifically for Ready Player One?
EC: Man, the writer Kurt Vonnegut. [I’m a] big fan of his. [For Ready Player One specifically], Neuromancer by William Gibson and Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. Those are two big cyberpunk books that are inspiring.
EE: I’m an aspiring filmmaker… and I’ve just lately been very stuck—just writer’s block, really. I was wondering how you overcome that when you’re writing?
EC: I watch a lot of movies or listen to music to get inspired. If I try to write a certain kind of movie or story, I’ll watch a bunch of those to get ideas. All the best writers steal from other people. So just watch a bunch of stuff to steal from.
EE: What was the single greatest challenge in creating a world as vast and complex as the Oasis?
EC: Just writing it all down. It was easy to imagine it, but articulating and writing it down was the hardest part. The idea of websites being planets that you could visit, as opposed to when you go to visit a website… was one of the first ideas. And the idea that, if you die, you lose all your stuff, and you have to start over.
EE: IOI represents a large corporation trying to commercialize and monetize art and culture. Is that a theme you feel is still relevant to the internet today?
EC: Yeah, definitely. Well, corporations have total control over the internet, and now they’re like, flooding it with their crappy AI. It’s easy to imagine… the commodification and commercialization of the internet was already happening.
EE: The Oasis feels both like a perfect escape and a dystopian trap. Which of these two concepts is more important for you to explore when writing the book?
EC: I wanted to explore both of them, because it’s like the internet. The internet can be a trap, and you can spend way too much time on [it], and it can poison your mind and your mood, but you can also get amazing stuff done and do amazing research, and it gives you access to the whole world. So it’s like all forms of technology. I try to show there’s a good side and a bad side, and it all depends on how you use it.
EE: Did you have influences from modern video games when creating the Oasis?
EC: Yeah, I’m a huge Valve fan, and I played the hell out of Half-Life. I’m still waiting for Half-Life 3… But also all the games, Atari and Adventure. Adventure was the big one, because that had the very first Easter egg.
EE: What surprised you most about seeing Steven Spielberg’s version of your story?
EC: Just how lost I got in my own story, seeing his version of it. Just like any other Steven Spielberg movie, I got swept away by it. So it was weird to have that happen with a story that I had written. But yeah, the whole process surprised me. It’s the weirdest thing ever happened to me.
EE: What advice would you give to a high school student who has a big, imaginative idea but struggles with the commitment needed to write a full novel?
EC: Try writing screenplays first or short films and work your way up to writing a novel. That’s what I did. I started out screenwriting… It was easier to write a novel than it was to make a movie, you know, in some ways… But just write what you know and write about what you love. If you’re not having fun with what you’re writing, no one’s gonna have fun reading it.
EE: Why specifically did you choose to come to Akins today?
EC: His teacher [Alan Brooks] stalked me, and I guess he’d been trying for six years to get a hold of me, and he finally got a hold of me. Teachers have a big effect on me and my writing career, and they inspire me. I had some great teachers… So if I can ever help out schools in Austin, I always want to help out. So when he got hold of me, I’m like, “Yes, I will do that.” Especially since he had made you guys all read my book.
