He gives his students much of the credit for inspiring him. “Ironically, it was my students who taught me to be a writer, though I had been hired to teach them,” he said in a speech published in Arkansas Libraries. “They taught me that a novel must entertain first before it can be anything else. I learned that there is no such thing as a ‘grade reading level’; a young person’s ‘reading level’ and attention span will rise and fall according to his degree of interest. I learned that if you do not have a happy ending for the young, you had better do some fast talking.”