A Writing Teacher Takes on the ‘Tweens

by Fran Ianacone

June 29, 2005

Christopher Klim left a successful and lucrative career as a space program physicist with top secret clearance to pursue a writing career. The result: Firecracker Jones, a teenage detective who makes his debut in “Firecracker Jones Is on the Case,” published by Hopewell Publications. Klim will appear at B. Dalton’s Books in Quakerbridge Mall on July 4, from noon to 3 p.m. to sign and read from his book, designed for readers 8 to 13 years old.

Says Klim: “I created the Firecracker Jones series because of the incredible lack of age-appropriate literature for kids. I’m appalled at the stuff they are exposing kids to in middle school. The material is way too mature, and I don’t think we have to expose them to that so soon.”

Klim created Firecracker out of information he gathered from his visits to area grade schools. “Firecracker is a ninth grade detective, kind of cool and smart-alecky. The books contain little drawings that I scribbled while writing, and the publisher decided to use them in the space breaks.”

Klim is not shy about having Firecracker deal with some of the real emotions of middle schoolers. In 2006, Firecracker Jones will get mad and deal with his anger. And in 2007, he’ll have the blues over a disconnect with his father.

Klim, a Hopewell resident, worked for the space program in the civilian sector for NASA, on long and short-term observation satellites, a possible foreshadowing of his writing career. “I worked with engineers who were brilliant in their areas, but they couldn’t write a report. That’s how I got started teaching. We would hold an after-hours ‘writing group’ for engineers. They thought they were being taught to be creative but they were really being taught how to write concisely and coherently.”

Klim has also moonlighted as a bartender, freelance photographer, an assistant to a master chef, even a tow truck operator. “I would get beeped in the middle of the night. People were always glad to see me — like Batman flying in.”

The image of being a hero runs through his patter. One August, while he was managing a WaWa in Hightstown, the electricity went out. The board of health came in and instructed him to throw all of the candy away. So he threw it out the front door — soon there were loads of children scrambling for the goodies. “I was a hero in that town for one day,” says Klim.

In 1995, when his son, Zachary, now 9, was born, Klim and his wife, Karen, who is in sales, decided they didn’t want to leave their baby with a stranger, so Klim started working from his Hopewell home. Daughter Hannah was born three years later. Klim grew up in the Trenton/Hamilton area with three sisters, where his father, Eugene, was in chemical sales. Margaret, his mother, taught English. He holds a masters in science and physics from Rutgers, and in 1988, he earned a masters in computer science from New Jersey Institute of Technology.

He now works as a freelance columnist, author, writing teacher, manuscript editor, and senior editor of Writers Notes Magazine. In addition to Firecracker Jones, Klim has published three books: “Everything Burns,” “Jesus Lives in Trenton,” and a guide to fiction and memoir writing, “Write to Publish.”

With regards to his publishing success, Klim says, “I gave myself five years to get a contract, and I did it five days short of my goal.”

“The Winners Circle,” his next novel due out this fall, is a comedy and drama about the highs and lows of millionaire lottery winners. (Klim shares that within five years, nearly 60 to 70 percent of lottery winners end up living on less money than before they won.) Based on the title of an actual therapy group for lottery winners, the protagonist gets laid off from a General Motors plant and can’t find a job. He is shoveling manure for an organic farm to make a buck. He lives on a farm in Hopewell with his wife, and though he doesn’t really care about money he plays the lottery, trying to make the love of his life happy and loses her in the process.

“I got part of that story from my father-in-law, who shoveled manure during the Depression and hit a nest of rattlesnakes. My stories are mysteries in a sense but I show you who did it up front. The motive of the crime unravels as the story goes along.”

In “Everything Burns,” Klim exposes the world of a pyromaniac. What his research turned up is truly eye-opening: juvenile arson is on the rise. Arsonists act out of anger and usually start torturing animals when they are young. If not caught early, they become unreachable. Prescription drugs make a tremendous difference in their behavior, if they take them. Pyromania is the height of compulsive disorder. Pyromaniacs are often compulsive gamblers, and alcohol plays its part; fires start after the bars close for the night. Detectives take pictures of the crowds surrounding a fire because the arsonist tends to stick around to watch his work. And, scariest of all, one-half of all intentional arsons are set by children 15 years of age or younger.

“Everything Burns” is based on a true story that took place in Brooklyn and features reporter reluctantly turned detective Boots Mean, who tracks a kid who one time saved his family from a house fire, but later sets one to regain his hero status, which ends in fatalities.

With the arrival of these books, Klim has had to scale back his teaching duties to one masters writing class at Mercer County College night school. “Teaching writing is a constant reminder—even elemental reminders—of what I should do. I teach the five tools of writing: character, setting, plot, point of view, and structure. I have so much respect for that class because the people at Mercer want to be there; they’re trying really hard.”

Klim also does freelance editing for the big publishing houses. “What I noticed is, when a author puts out a book every three months, they are not writing them. They have a team of people who mimic the style. It’s a dirty little secret of the business but those books are kind of like commodities.”

He has plenty of advice to share with prospective writers. “I tell them that they (the publishing industry) don’t nurture authors. They are not there to help you. They want to sell books like hot dogs and toothpaste. And I tell them that there are many authors but not too many of them out there are living on their royalties. So I tell them to keep your day job. So few of us make a full-time job out of this.”

He was thrilled at the opportunity last spring to meet John Irving, when he spoke in Trenton. “It was like talking to the Pope, I was so nervous,” Klim says. Irving is the critically acclaimed novelist who wrote “The World According to Garp,” “Cider House Rules,” and “A Widow for One Year,” all of which were optioned into major movies. “My first novel outsold his first three novels,” says Klim. “Irving said he didn’t think his first three books would have sold today. That shows you the sad state of the industry.”

Klim uses a story Irving told him to teach his writing class basic facts. Both Irving’s father and grandfather were OB/GYNs. And he grew up on an apple orchard in Maine. Both these topics are major factors in “Cider House Rules.” Irving says he leaned heavily on the elders for the medical parts of the book, because he is not a doctor. After revising it a few times, he passed it around to them and the news came back that, while he had relayed the medical details accurately, he had gotten the orchard facts all wrong. “This story teaches you,” says Klim, “that memory is unreliable. You have to go back and reread your notes and recheck your facts about things you think you know.”

Klim offers this sound advice for aspiring writers. “You either have talent or you don’t. If you’re not an avid reader, go home, because nobody is going to want to read what you write. Read what you’d like to write, and write what you’d like to read. Tell a story, engage, entertain, and inform.”

Oh, and one more bit of hard-won wisdom: don’t write for your family. Everyone has an opinion and you’ll never get it right!

U.S. 1 Newspaper, June 29, 2005