Author Notes on Jumping the Scratch

I’ve been fascinated with memory for a long time. Why is it that we remember certain things and not others? Why are some people able to remember complicated equations while other people, like me for instance, are incapable of remembering their own phone numbers sometimes? I’m not sure I’m any closer to understanding the mysteries of memory now than I was before I wrote Jumping the Scratch, but I really enjoyed spending time thinking about it.

Originally the title of the book was “Visiting Arthur”, and the focus of the story was going to be about a relationship between a boy who has a secret he’s afraid to tell, and a writer who helps him find the courage and the voice to tell his story. Being an author-in-residence is something I know quite a lot about. I spend many weeks every year traveling around the country doing author visits in schools and I’ve been referred to as the “Arthur” more times than I can count. Some of the lessons that Arthur teaches at Pine Tree Elementary School are the actual lessons I have taught in classrooms myself. But in the end, the story took on a life of its own and it became less about Arthur and more about Jamie and the important friendships he has with Audrey Krouch and his favorite aunt, Sapphy.

Giving Sapphy amnesia gave me an excuse to explore that interesting quirk of memory a little. It also provided a satisfying balance between Jamie, who wants so badly to be able to forget, and Sapphy who, because of her accident at the cherry factory, can’t form new memories, and as a result is like a record with a scratch, unable to move forward. Thinking about it in that way helped me to find the title for the book – Jumping the Scratch.

I decided to set the book in Northern Michigan because that’s where I spent all my summers. I remember buying cherries at the roadside stands and my sister Jane and me rolling down the rear windows of the car so we could spit the pits out as my dad drove us home. I may have grown up in Michigan, but Jumping the Scratch is a fictional story. I’ve never known anybody personally who had amnesia, and what happened to Jamie is not something that ever happened to me. My best friend was in fact named Audrey, but she didn’t smell like onions or think that she had ESP, and her dad was not only around, he was actually my dentist!

When I was researching hypnotism for the scene where Audrey Krouch hypnotizes Jamie, I took several books out of the library. I asked my then 14 year-old son, Natty if I could try one of the exercises on him, and much to my surprise he said okay. I didn’t try anything fancy like planting a post-hypnotic suggestion or anything like that, but he said when it was over he felt incredibly relaxed. I let him try it on me, and I had a hard time not laughing – later I used that idea for Jamie in the book.

Probably the hardest part for me was writing about the incident between Old Gray and Jamie. Obviously it’s an upsetting and scary subject, but there was something else I found difficult about it as well. I know this may sound strange, but in a way I felt like I wanted to protect Jamie’s privacy. When you spend a couple of years creating the characters in a book, after a while they begin to feel like real people to you. Jamie didn’t want anybody to know what had happened to him in Old Gray’s office on Christmas Eve, so it didn’t feel right for me to tell all the details either.

I’ve written quite a few books now and one thing I’ve discovered along the way is that the process of creating characters and telling a story is completely different for me with each book. I never know where the idea is going to come from or what will catch my interest and end up becoming a theme or a character or a plot twist in a story. I have tried more than once to create an outline because I have a feeling it might be easier to write if I knew where my story was going ahead of time, but it just doesn’t seem to work for me. The minute I try to make a plan, my mind leaps over the fence and starts running like mad in another direction.

When I wrote So B. It, the idea for the story started when I discovered an abandoned house by the side of the road and started imagining a story about a girl named Heidi who would travel all the way across the country in search of the meaning of a mysterious word, soof, and end up on that very doorstep. Jumping the Scratch came more in pieces. Like for instance, one day, Audrey’s big black glasses popped into my head out of nowhere and all of a sudden I could picture this girl in my head and I wanted to know who she was – so I made her up. I loved writing the scenes between Jamie and Audrey and now that I have finished writing the book I will miss the fun I had thinking of things for them to talk about. It’s okay though, because I am already cooking up a new story to tell. As soon as I know for sure what it’s about, I’ll let you know!