“Early Works” was a series in Esopus whose purpose was to make periodic incursions into the purest source of creativity: the unbridled sensibilities of a child. The goal was to feature examples of youthful work that represented the first glimmers of creativity from well-known artists and writers. We inaugurated the series with a contribution from acclaimed playwright and filmmaker Kenneth Lonergan, who shared a collection of science-fiction books he began writing and illustrating as a young boy. Coming from the creator of such keenly observed plays as This is Our Youth and Lobby Hero and the nuanced, character-driven films You Can Count on Me, Margaret, and Manchester by the Sea, their subject matter comes as something of a surprise.

Tod Lippy: When did you write these books?

Kenneth Lonergan: I think I started writing them when I was in fifth grade, so I guess I was about 9 or 10 years old.

What attracted you to science fiction?

I just liked it. It was my favorite thing. I liked Star Trek, which I remember watching on Channel 4 in prime time. I liked Planet of the Apes. And I liked comic books—Superboy, the Legion of Super-Heroes. I was brought up in the space age: astronauts, space guns—all of that stuff was very, very popular in toys. My brother Peter and I loved to play with the Outer Space Men action figures—I used some of them for the characters in The Wonderful World of Pluto. I still like science fiction. I don’t think there’s enough of it—or enough of it that’s any good.

Have you thought about writing it now?

I have, but I’ve never been able to come up with a story I thought I could pull off. I wrote a play in college called A Space Play, which was kind of a good idea but it was basically juvenilia. I’ve thought of revisiting it from time to time, but I haven’t, at least not yet. I’ve never seen a play that took place in outer space, and I think it could be a good theatrical setting. At this point, I think I like watching science fiction more than I like writing it. I spent so much time on it when I was a kid: I really didn’t write anything else from the moment I knew I wanted to be a writer in fifth grade until ninth or tenth grade.

Where did you get the ideas? Was each of these stories inspired by a specific source?

A lot of them were. Rulers of the Earth was stolen—or let’s just say it derived very heavily from—the Tripods Trilogy, a series of books by John Christopher. It’s about these very large, unpleasant space creatures living in tripods that have taken over the earth. The Planet of the Furs is obviously from Planet of the Apes. It was based on our Irish setter, Mandy, whom we called Fur Dog. It is a very grim story, as was Planet of the Apes—nothing good ever happened in that series. I just sort of copied the narrative directly, except I replaced the apes with Irish setters. Wild Space is an outer-space version of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, interspersed with different sci-fi stuff. It’s partly a novel, but then every other chapter features a different science-fiction story that I had written elsewhere and decided to stick in between the narrative. There’s also some Planet of the Apes influence in The Wonderful World of Pluto, but that one is fairly original to me.

Pluto seems like the most ambitious story you worked on: It features not only typewritten text but a number of elaborate illustrations. How many pages is it in total?

I think it’s nearly 200 pages. I remember I was so happy when I got to 100 pages that I wrote 100 in red letters. My mother said that I was “writing by the pound.”

How long did Pluto take you to write?

I want to say two years. I remember that by the time I got to the end of it, my writing had improved enough that I felt like the whole thing needed to be rewritten from the beginning, which was too much work. That happened all the time. I would write only the first volumes of three- or four-volume books. I wrote the first chapter of a book about Lucifer after I’d seen the Frank Langella play about Dracula and then read the Bram Stoker novel. I would usually write about 100 pages of the introductory section and then when I finally got to the main plot I would dry up and move on. I used to show these to a great teacher I had in seventh grade named Jo Anne Kraus. She actually wrote me a very nice letter recently, and told me she remembered me turning in “page after page” of these science-fiction stories.

It almost sounds like she was your first editor, or dramaturge...

Well, no, but I remember I kept in touch with her for a few years after she left—she was only at my school for one year. I finally told her I was writing something other than science fiction and she said, “Oh, thank God.” [Laughs.] I really like science fiction, but the truth is, at least two-thirds of it is explanation.

It’s funny you mention that: All of these stories include extremely detailed descriptions. In Pluto, at one point you even interrupt the narrative with the declaration, “I think that an explanation is due.” This runs for several paragraphs—and an illustration—and then you write, “Explanations are now at an end, and the story continues.”

Well, if you read real science fiction it does contain a lot of description—you know, all of the talk about the spaceship, the guns, the  planet’s atmosphere. I read a lot of Isaac Asimov at the time, and Robert A. Heinlein, and well, I was 10 or 11 years old—so I think was very self-aware about all of this.

Your treatment of typos in Pluto is fascinating. For instance, in the first chapter you mention that there are 3,000,000 people on earth—

Right, I was going down the list of how many inhabitants there are in all of the planets and I accidentally typed 3,000,000—I missed the last three zeros, because at the time there were 3,000,000,000 people on earth. So then I “fixed” the typo by explaining later on in the book that the entire rest of the population had been wiped out by Martians.

You actually say, “By the way, earlier in the book, I said that there were 3,000,000 Earthlings. I made no mistake.”

Well, there was no Liquid Paper, and this was all done on my mother’s Olivetti manual typewriter. I think I rubbed some things out with an eraser in Pluto. But I was very concerned about the appearance of the page. In Wild Space, I became very obsessive about the margins...

You’re saying you actually manually justified the right margins of every one of these pages?

Yes.

That’s incredible.

It’s a little bit reminiscent of the writing Jack Nicholson does in The Shining. [Laughs.] I don’t know what to say. I wanted it to look like a real book, so I would twist the sentences around, and put in parentheses or dashes—do anything—to get it to have a right-side justification. Later I switched to an electric typewriter—the kind where you put in the different cartridges. I got it for one of my birthdays in high school, and I used that for the next 10 or 15 years, until computers and word processing really came into being.

In Pluto, there is a marked concern on your part with grammar, which often manifests in dialogue. For instance, Electroyed-E mentions to a visiting Jovian he’s just met that he has a friend who might be able to share “their apartment,” and the Jovian responds with “Their apartment. You said a friend of yours.”

All of the editing in that book was done in the text. It’s just corrected on the go.

But what’s particularly fascinating is that you’re not editing yourself; it’s one of your characters editing the other.

Right, it’s like that typo about the earth’s population: I incorporated it into the story, because if I made a mistake I didn’t want to go back and have to retype or rewrite it. I would just either explain the mistake as something deliberate or I would correct it in the narration. [flipping through Pluto] Look at this one, on page 14. I typed “Yes it does” with two d’s by mistake. I now recall deliberately adding two s’s at the end of it so that it was spelled ddoess. And then somehow I justified this in the following line, where it says “Plutonians always pronounce does as doaz.” Here’s another one: I mistyped general and then immediately followed it up with “Plutonians spell it, ‘genarle,’ not ‘general.’” I don’t what this says about me, but it’s certainly odd.

Your “colleagues” in Rulers of the Earth are parenthetically referred to as your best friends; were these stand-ins for your actual friends?

No, no. Not at all, they were all made-up. Anything autobiographical in these is certainly unintentional—or psychological. I think the book that it was based on had three main characters that were all friends.

Your illustrations play a major part in all of these books. You mentioned to me that at this point in your life you were trying to decide whether to become an artist or a writer.

Well, I was primarily interested in drawing until I was in fifth grade, and then I wrote this short story called “A Voyage to Titan” in a composition notebook that was four pages long. I was so excited that I’d managed to write a story that was four pages long that I decided then that I wanted to be a writer. I also had this vague awareness that there was no career in being an artist. I mean, I didn’t exactly want to be a great painter or anything, but I liked drawing so much.

Were there any particular artists you were inspired by?

Not really. As I said, I read a lot of comic books: Thor, Captain America, Ironman—all the superheroes. They were my main influence; in fact, they may have been my only influence. I don’t think I had yet started looking at paintings at that point. The first drawings I ever did are these poster-size images of all of the superheroes. I drew them with Magic Marker on a big roll of shiny paper my parents gave me. They didn’t have arms or legs; their appendages were just rounded off. I still have four or five boxes of comic books, and I tend to reread them in those periods when I’m having trouble focusing on anything else.

You’re known as such a humanist in both your plays and your films, yet you were, and it seems still are, drawn to these genres that are traditionally more schematic.

Yeah, I don’t know that’s about. I guess what you like and what you end up doing aren’t always the same thing. I really like action movies—if they aren’t insultingly stupid—but I don’t think I could ever write one; I don’t think I have a gift for that. I mean, I have occasionally worked on these types of scripts, but I always tend to think in terms of people talking to each other, which is sort of a limitation in filmmaking.

In Rulers of the Earth, you write, “Jimmy had a hard life. He had somehow gotten stuck with a racist for a roommate.” Where did that come from?

I probably didn’t even know what a racist was. There were no Black kids in my class. I’d obviously heard a lot about racism without realizing that I was growing up among classic liberal racists—and I was one of them. There’s my social consciousness at age 9. But that’s okay, it has to start somewhere.
   You know, there’s a sort of theme running through these books that the earth is bad. I think this is actually a reflection of the Upper West Side liberal household I grew up in this period: There was the Vietnam War, and the opposition to the civil rights movement, which my parents—and everyone I knew—were horrified by. They really considered America to be a “bad country.” So I didn’t grow up thinking the country was such a great place, and that somehow translated into always making earth the villain in the stories.

Speaking of your parents, they are prominently listed in the acknowledgments page of every book; can you talk a bit about their influence on your writing in this period?

They were very supportive. My mother read everything I wrote, but she always complained that there were too many explosions. I gave her chapters of The Wonderful World of Pluto as I was writing it, and at some point she said, “Someone gets blown up on every page!” So my conscience pricked me and I wrote a chapter at the end of the book—which was somewhat insincere—in which the main character wanders around, feeling glad that there’s “no more violence.” [Laughs.]   
   And my father praised my dialogue, which actually helped point me toward the theater and playwriting. He said something I’ll never forget: James Joyce was the master of masters when it came to dialogue—no one made their characters sound as distinct and different from each other as he did. When I later read James Joyce I came to agree with him. Whenever anyone compliments me on my dialogue, I immediately take it to heart. When it’s something that I think I’m actually good at, I’m more motivated to do it.