Christopher
Seufert: I read that you finished both the drawings and the text
for the Orb of Chatham in a week. How could that possibly be true?
Bob
Staake: You have to understand, and people who know me know that
I’m an insufferable workaholic and that I work extremely
fast, that the book was the type of thing where just a lot of
things coincided at the same time. Once I decided to do it I
didn’t rough out the book or anything. I went straight
to my final illustrations and they were working out, and I thought, "Well,
there's no real reason to go ahead and rough this thing out.
I can just take it straight to finish, and do it."
It was the
first of my forty or so books that I have done that way, where I have
just completely gone through and gotten it finished without sketches
or anything. I think some books are just like that. It was a story
that was so simple, that at the end of the day when you look at it,
it is 290 words or something, and 13 illustrations.
I
just tend to work very quickly and when I get on a project or
on a book I’m not the type of person who wants that protracted
deadline. When I’m
given that 9 months by a publisher to get an entire thing done,
I’m always waiting
until the final month because I don’t want to spread out
those illustrations over time. For me to keep a cohesiveness and
a consistency between the illustrations it works best for me to
sit down and (hand motion) do it straight up. I don’t jump
from page to page. I don’t
say “I want to do this spread," you know, like a video
director would do or the way a movie director would cut back and
forth between these scenes. I tend to have the whole thing flow
out, so no, it literally took a week. It was one of those projects
that I did over Thanksgiving of 2004. I figured I had a little
time to do it so I just hammered through.
CS: So you
just did it like that without a publisher okaying your idea or anyone
else giving you a thumbs-up?
BS:
Yeah, I’ve just done this for so long that what comes
with that is a certain level of confidence. I mean, I will tell
you that one of my concerns was that this is the first book that
I have completely done without an advance or a contract from
a publisher. But my second book, a book called the “Red
Lemon," is
coming out with Random House and it was done the same way too.
All the way through. And you sit there with these books and you
think, "Am I being delusional in
thinking that this story
actually has wings and can fly?" Because you're not showing
anyone. You're showing your friends, and your friends are all going
to say "This is
wonderful!" You know, no one is honest with you. It’s
only when you take it to that publisher and "Boom!" within
an hour, they’ve offered you a contract on it, and you
go, "Okay ,great, I’m not delusional. My head isn't
somewhere it shouldn’t be." So
then there is complete vindication, but politically, when you work
with editors and art directors and
publishers, I was certainly hyper-aware of the political ramifications
of essentially telling an editor, "Hey I don’t need
you here on this book." But, happily, that didn't turn them
off and happily the book is doing very well.
CS: Is it?
It stands out for me an is refreshing in that it asks for an active
participation on the part of the reader, whereas most books are much
more of a passive experience. But I wouldn't necessarily think
that would translate into commercial success. Of course authors like
Edward Gorey really worked that market well.
Are
most people you talk to "getting" the concept of the
mystery you've laid out, with the co-dependance of the book and
the web site?
BS: Those
people who get the book, those who read the book, and unlock the code
and go into the deeper web site and see all the stuff that’s
there, they are responding incredibly well to it. There has been
some interest in an Inside The Orb of Chatham, and in what happens
next in a follow up book, and I don’t
know. You know, one of my feelings about the book is that the reader
is the person who
creates that back story. The reader is the person who takes the
basic story and develops it in his or her mind. I mean, it is truly
an experience. What I wanted to do was to democratize the literary
experience between reader and writer and book and to really elevate
the importance of the reader, and to make the argument that no
book would exist without a reader, okay? At the end of the day
that’s
really true, but what I really wanted to do was to absolutely just
build upon that in spades. I
wanted to truly make an experience where one person’s reality
with that book is different from the next person's. They are that
causal, integral part to the entire process that completes the
picture. So the idea of doing a follow up book, the idea of doing
something else beyond that, it kind of flies in the face of what
I’ve done here with the book.
CS: Personally, I was able to unlock the code and get into the
web site, but I was pretty blown away by the depth of the web site
within. The onion layers peeled away and I don't know that I've
yet gotten a full grasp of the mystery that is presented there.
So, I went back to the book, re-read it, and my whole perspective
on the story changed again. Then, of course, back into the web
site, and this is the
way it's been going. I'm still trying to understand the actual
questions that are being asked of me as a reader of the book.
BS: Alot of people have looked at the book and they're just kind
of blown away that someone figured out a way to incorporate a literary
experience with a web site component, and kind of make it this whole
multimedia thing and I’m
flattered by that, but I have to believe someone else has done
that. I think that it’s a very ambitious web site and there
is a lot going on there, but to me it seems like a
complete natural. Certainly, for a mystery like this, it was a
case where I did not want to tell this big, elaborate story in
the book. I could have very easily done it but I really wanted
the web site to function as a.... This is what I tell people, "The
end of the book, the end of the Orb of Chatham, is truly the beginning
of the story. That’s where it begins."
So, you
set the stage, and once they unlock the code and go to the web site,
it continues on, so for me, both as a writer and as a illustrator,
it was a terrific way to experience..to continue to let the story breathe,
to just take angles and to insert incredible detail into a back-story
that just would not have worked with the printed book coming in at
290 words. I wanted it that bare. I wanted it that bare and I wanted
the illustrations to be really sparse, and then I wanted to just continue
it off of there.
CS: Was
the web site a sort of second idea, or was that always part of the
initial concept since day one?
BS:
Honestly I can’t remember. I can tell you this much. It
was essential to do the Orb of Chatham and to complete the entire
book, and to take it to a publisher, a small regional house like
Commonwealth Editions in Boston, who did a beautiful job. They
really got behind the book in a way that Viking or Simon and
Schuster or Random House would not have. But when I was considering
Random House I thought, "There is no way I can do it the
traditional way," which
is to show the cover,
show the story, and show a couple sample spreads. I mean, everyone
would look at it and say “What?!" I'm at a stage in
my career where, because of utilizing the web the way that I do,
I can pitch a book over the internet to an editor. When I call
up an editor and say, "Here’s what I have," they
can see it online. There’s no more reason to have those hard
copies flying down to New York. So, I think that as I built the
pages, showing how the book would flow, and it was very important
to show black
background on the left with gray type and illustration on the right,
it was just a natural to then develop it beyond there.
CS:
What sort of reaction do you get from those who don't "get" the
book? Are there those who don't "get" it what it
is you're asking the reader to do here? That it's not supposed
to be a traditional book?
BS:
No, I don’t think it’s a case of people not getting
it. I think there are people who will look at it and say, "Oh
no, this is going to require work," you
know. I just happen to be a puzzle person, I like stuff like
that; any sort of puzzle, any sort of thing that you have to
decode or figure out, you know. I am fascinated by things like
that. There are some people who like that and some people who
don’t,
those people who like tomatoes and some people who don’t.
This is a big juicy tomato. It never ceases to amaze me. Some
people will say, "I've been working
on it for three days to try and solve the code," and I
say, "Hey at least you're
working," and I sit there and say,"You will get it,
you will solve it." One review said
what was interesting about the code is that there is a couple
of very simple questions, and they kind of empower you to believe, "Piece
of cake, I’ll fly
right though this," but then it gets difficult and people
are going back to a couple of clues that they can’t
quite get.
CS: So
what is the proper way to approach the overall mystery and the individual
components of the book and the web site? Is the solving of the mystery
better done with logic or with the imagination?
BS:
People look at me and say, "This is a number based code," and
it’s really not. It requires numbers, but it really requires
all the senses.. a visual sense, a tactile sense in holding
the book, certainly a oral sense in terms of hearing the music,
because it’s
really creepy and it kind of sets the stage. It’s almost
a total immersion thing. One of the things that I found interesting,
and it’s one of the things that I wanted
to do in the book, was when you read the book, you form a conclusion
about the story. If you are compelled to go ahead and solve
the code and get in there, then what the web site does is to
take your original hypothesis and turn it inside out. All of
a sudden, you’ve
got a completely different view of what really happened, you
know. That’s what I wanted to create. I wanted to create
a kind of "Aha!" moment
for the reader where they think, "You know what, I really
thought this was the real story, but now I have a completely
different take."
