Holes
Holes
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Louis Sachar on Holes
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A Texas summer as the first sentenceThe book began not with a character or a plot but with a physical sensation Sachar could not shake after returning from a vacation in Maine to Austin’s July heat. The contrast between those two climates gave him the book’s central image before he had any idea who would inhabit it.
I suppose the initial inspiration for writing about the camp came from the heat of summers in Texas. At the time I began the book, we had just returned from the relative coolness of a vacation in Maine to the Texas summer. Anybody who has ever tried to do yard work in Texas in July can easily imagine Hell to be a place where you are required to dig a hole five feet deep and five feet across day after day under the brutal Texas sun.
The heat alone might have produced any number of stories. What turned it toward a juvenile correctional camp was Texas’s broader cultural atmosphere, which Sachar absorbed as a recent transplant still orienting himself to the state.
I had just moved to Texas and was miserable in the hot Texas sun. Texas has this reputation of being a strong law and order type state. I thought it would be interesting to write about a juvenile correctional camp. I decided to set the book in a boot camp for kids, but make it kind of fun for kids to read about.
In every book before this one, Sachar had started with a person. With Holes, the sequence reversed entirely, and that reversal turned out to matter to how he understood what the book was fundamentally about.
While every other story I’d written had begun with the characters, to me this story has always been about a place — Camp Green Lake. The story began with the place, and the characters and plot grew out of it.
The act of digging that anchors the whole novel could easily have read as straight punishment. Sachar was alert to that risk from the start, and he settled on the activity for a specific tonal reason rather than a thematic one.
I came up with the idea of the boys digging holes because I liked the irony, not because it was harsh. While they were ostensibly digging to build character, the camp warden actually had hidden and dishonorable reasons for demanding this chore. I wanted Holes to be fun and adventurous.
That insistence on fun over grimness would become a recurring pressure he had to maintain all the way through revision, against a plot that kept threatening to turn bleak.
How he wrote it
Eighteen months of silence and surpriseSachar’s usual practice was to talk through a work in progress. With Holes he did the opposite, and the secrecy became structural to how the book got written at all.
It took me a year and a half to write Holes, and nobody knew anything about it, not even my wife or my daughter... By not permitting myself to talk about Holes, I was forced to write it. The story was growing inside me for a year and a half, and I had no other way to let it out.
Kate Barlow, the outlaw schoolteacher whose history intersects with the Yelnats family curse, arrived in the manuscript as a flat antagonist. The moment Sachar started actually constructing her past, she overturned the plan he had for her, and that required him to restructure the entire time-crossing plot.
Kate Barlow’s story became a real surprise to me because when I first made her up, I didn’t think she was going to be sympathetic. I initially thought that she was going to be the great-grandmother of the warden and that maybe she used poison lipstick, just like the warden uses poison nail polish. It wasn’t until the point when I started making up her story that she suddenly became this very likeable character.
Repetition was the structural problem he had not anticipated when he conceived a book centered on a single repeated action. The interwoven timeline, which readers often praise as the novel’s cleverest feature, was in origin a solution to a practical narrative trap.
I wanted the reader to feel what a long, miserable experience this is, digging those 5’ by 5’ holes. But how many times can you say, ‘He dug his shovel back into the dirt and lifted out another shovelful?’ My solution was to interweave two stories, bringing more variety to the tale.
Planning, for Sachar, was not the engine of the book’s complexity. He was reflecting on how the novel’s famously interlocking storylines actually came together when he described his method to Texas Monthly.
Any idea you can think up and plan out isn’t going to be that good. There’s no way I could have thought up all of Holes beforehand, not with all of those interconnected stories. You start writing, encounter problems, and ask yourself how you’re going to solve those problems, and then new ideas spring up that are better than what you started with.
The draft process split into two very different modes of attention. He described this division in an Author Fan Face-off video, distinguishing what early drafts demanded from what the final pass required.
The first two or three drafts of a book is figuring out the characters and the story and the structure and then it’s just the language after that — I can’t see the big picture. [paraphrased from audio]
By the time he submitted the manuscript, he had been through five full rewrites. Stanley Yelnats’s sentence at Camp Green Lake is eighteen months. So is the time Sachar spent writing the book, a coincidence he says he cannot explain.
The personal thread
Severe doubts and a daughter’s fearBefore the Newbery Medal arrived, Sachar’s private assessment of the book’s viability was not cautious optimism. It was something closer to dread, rooted in the two features that now make the novel distinctive.
I had severe doubts about it. It’s about a kid who digs holes — that’s all he does — and there’s all this traveling around in time, which people were going to find confusing. Was it going to make any sense at all to anyone?
His daughter was in fourth grade when Holes was published. Her reaction to the Warden’s most violent scene arrived as a genuine surprise, because the tonal register he thought he was working in was not the one she experienced.
I had never really thought of the warden as scary or that the scene as especially disturbing. Rattlesnake venom, well, it’s almost cartoonish. It’s like a situation from that campy old TV show, Batman. It was never my intention to write a grim story, and I don’t think it is.
What he wants us to sit with
A pathetic kid who lifts himself upSachar’s stated hierarchy of goals places pleasure at the top, above any moral the book might carry. He has held this position consistently across interviews, and it shapes how he thinks about the function of children’s literature generally.
My books are written to make reading enjoyable. That’s my first goal with all my books, to make reading fun. I want kids to think that reading can be just as much fun, or more so, than TV or video games or whatever else they do. I think any other kind of message or moral that I might teach is secondary to first just enjoying the book.
Stanley Yelnats was built to be someone readers recognize from the inside rather than admire from the outside. Sachar was precise about what kind of identification he was engineering, and what arc he wanted readers to travel alongside the character.
Stanley isn’t a hero-type. He’s a kind of pathetic kid who feels like he has no friends, feels like his life is cursed. And I think everyone can identify with that in one way or another. And then there’s the fact that here he is, a kid who isn’t a hero, but he lifts himself up and becomes one. I think readers can imagine themselves rising with Stanley.
Sachar’s self-assessment of Holes is unambiguous, and it carries the weight of someone who went through five rewrites and nearly a year and a half of silence to get there.
I consider Holes to be my greatest accomplishment. It was the most challenging to write, and I feel like I met that challenge.