Sleeping Freshmen Never Lie
Sleeping Freshmen Never Lie
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summaries & Analyses
Author Insights
Quizzes
NEWReading Tools
David Lubar on Sleeping Freshmen Never Lie
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A first chapter that outlived the shotgunAsked directly what sparked the book, Lubar led with the joke before he got to the truth. The joke is worth taking seriously: his entire comic enterprise depends on the belief that funny writing earns its place alongside serious literary ambition, and he performs that belief even when answering an interview question.
Fear of poverty. I knew that if I could write a really funny book, I’d win all sorts of major prizes and get taken to lunch every day for the rest of my life by really cool librarians.
Behind the joke was a genuinely modest origin. Lubar writes what he calls ‘tons of first chapters’ using a shotgun approach, most of which never develop further. This one arrived without a thesis or a theme attached, just a structural curiosity about who might be on the receiving end of a teenager’s private writing.
I was just playing around with the idea of a kid writing a journal to his unborn sibling.
He showed the chapter to his editor after finishing his previous novel, Dunk, and her response was the only green light he needed. The book existed because a single chapter survived long enough to be seen.
How he wrote it
Joyce, a spreadsheet, and a hybrid he didn’t planThe version Lubar first delivered bore almost no resemblance to the published novel’s structure. His editor, after moving from Clarion to Dutton and taking the manuscript with her, pressed him to reconsider. Her concern was that a pure journal voice creates distance rather than intimacy, and she wanted the reader closer to the main character, Scott. He experimented with mixing conventional narrative into the journal form and found he preferred the result.
The first draft was completely in journal form. Actually, it would be more accurate to call it epistolary, since the journal is written directly to the unborn sibling.
Once he committed to the hybrid structure, the form itself became a craft problem: the two modes had to feel genuinely different on the page, or the alternation would be meaningless. The solution he reached for came from an unlikely corner of his philosophy-major past.
Some of the literary aspects were inspired by James Joyce’s Ulysses. (I knew all those college English courses would come in handy some day.) In there, each chapter plays with a different form of rhetoric. I didn’t exactly do that, but instead had the rhetoric play with the form of some of the chapters.
He singles out one chapter in particular as the payoff for all that structural thinking, calling himself ‘sickeningly proud of the point-of-view chapter.’ The pride is not incidental. He wants readers to notice the architecture, not just the jokes.
A large cast spread across a school year creates a logistics problem that no amount of structural elegance solves on its own. Lubar treated it as an engineering task, the same instinct he had carried from years of programming video games before he returned to books in 1994.
I made a chart that marked the appearance of characters in each chapter, just to make sure I didn’t let anyone stay off stage for too long.
His research method was less deliberate than his structural work, and he was candid about why. Two circumstances gave him direct access to teenage life without any formal effort: he was doing regular school visits, and his daughter was in high school while he was writing. The rest he handled with a writer’s useful shamelessness.
This is fiction, so I just make up facts when I need them. I’m pretty sure nobody will notice that the mother is pregnant for thirteen months, or that the Delaware River now flows to Ohio.
The writing came easily; the publication did not. The planned title was scrapped after months of preparation, the release date shifted from March to July, and his editor left the imprint entirely before the book came out, leaving him without an advocate for the second time on the same manuscript. Despite all of it, he refused to frame the process as suffering.
The writing process involved a lot of moments of giddiness and joy. I had fun, and I’m not about to apologize for failing to suffer for my art.
The personal thread
Books don’t freeze and hangBefore he was a novelist Lubar spent years programming video games, a career he walked away from in 1994. The reason he gives is not about creative fulfillment in the abstract. It is a comparison that only someone who has shipped buggy software would make, and it reveals what he values most about the form he returned to.
I always wanted to write again, and I kept writing, but in 1994 I made the decision to stop programming games and get back to books because books don’t have bugs. Books don’t freeze and hang. Books are eternal. [paraphrased from audio]
His sense of humor is not a personality trait he happens to channel into fiction. He describes it as the organizing principle of his ambition as a writer, and the metaphor he reaches for to explain it comes from mechanical engineering rather than literary theory.
I love humor in almost all its forms, and this spills into my writing. I want to make people laugh. I want to delight my readers with wordplay, unexpected connections, and the prose equivalent of Rube Goldberg machines, where actions and events generate explosive endings.
On what’s at stake
Comedy as a serious argumentLubar’s defense of comedy in children’s and young adult literature is not a casual preference. He treats the dismissal of humor as a category error with real consequences for readers, and he makes the argument without hedging.
The world is far too serious a place, especially for kids. Some people act as if laughter doesn’t belong in education. That’s dead wrong.
He locates the source of that dismissal in a wider cultural hierarchy, and he pushes back at the level of art history rather than just pedagogy.
Humor is looked down upon in many of the arts, though many of our greatest artists understood joy, play, and delight.
When he describes how a joke actually works, he is also describing what he believes fiction should do: force the mind to close a gap between two things it did not expect to belong together. The cognitive experience of humor, in his account, is structurally identical to the experience of creative discovery.
Humor is one of the extreme edges of creativity. You’re putting together connections that, at first, don’t seem to belong. Then, click, the mind sees the leap, and you laugh. A joke is a miniature invention.
What he wants us to sit with
Funny and real at the same timeLubar names his central ambition for the book as a balance, and the word ‘challenge’ signals that he did not take the balance for granted. Keeping the comedy from tipping into unreality was the problem he set himself, and he remained uncertain about at least one corner of it even after publication.
The ultimate challenge was to make the book as funny as possible, while still keeping it real.
His one stated worry was that ‘the parents are probably way too nice,’ a concern pitched at the level of character truth rather than darkness or danger. That is where his standard of realism sits: not in crisis, but in whether the people on the page feel earned.
The structural ambitions he built into the book, the Joyce-inflected rhetoric, the hybrid form, the point-of-view chapter he singles out with such evident satisfaction, are not invisible to him as a final gift to a careful reader. He closes interviews on this book by saying what he hopes for, and it is attention rather than emotion.
I really hope people notice that there’s some very cool stuff going on here at many different levels. I’m sickeningly proud of the point-of-view chapter.