CHIMACUM — Bullies waste everybody’s time — including their own, an author told an audience of 400 middle school students on Wednesday.
“Being a bully is wasting your time,” said Eric DelaBarre, who wrote Saltwater Taffy, a novel set in Port Townsend that is popular with “tweens” — readers between middle childhood and adolescence.
“You could be creating something,” DelaBarre told the kids at Chimacum Middle School.
“You could be writing something. You could be coming up with an idea for a movie.
“You could get to amazing places, but bullying gets you nowhere except the principal’s office.
“Later, guess what bullying’s called?” he asked.
“Going to jail.”
A screenwriter who spent seven years working on television’s “Law & Order,” DelaBarre is making preparations to make a film of his book Saltwater Taffy this summer in Port Townsend.
Many of the students had read the novel, but even though DelaBarre autographed several copies of Saltwater Taffy — as well as arms and cellphones — after the presentation, the book was barely mentioned during it.
Instead, he told students how important it was to make the right choices, to do what was in their hearts.
“This is the most exciting time of your lives,” he said.
“You need to learn from what other people have done, not pay attention to what other people say about you and never let anyone take you off of your dream, no matter what.”
“When someone is bullying someone else, guess who’s time is wasted? Both kids,” he said.
“The bully is wasting his own time or her own time by saying some snarky comment like ‘oh I’m so funny, I’m so cool,’ but they’re wasting the time that they could use doing some amazing things.”
He urged students to get to know the people around them.
“You can walk down the hall every day and see someone and never say hi to them, but if you could be somewhere like Disneyland, or in another state and see someone from your school, you’d say, ‘hey man, what’s happening, we go to school together,’” DelaBarre said.
“You do that there but you don’t do that here, and I don’t get that even though we used to do that when I was in high school — I was too cool to talk about people I didn’t know.”
DelaBarre summed it up by saying: “Life is about talking to people you don’t know.
“If you are not comfortable doing that now, you won’t be comfortable later.”
DelaBarre, who lives in California, did get around to talking about his book, but with an addendum.
“The world needs you and the world needs me,” DelaBarre said.
“If I wasn’t here, this room would be empty and you’d be in class, so let’s have a round of applause for Saltwater Taffy.”
The kids clapped.
“The world needs me to share what I have to share and the world needs each and every one of you,” Delabarre added.
“Imagine that one of you could be the person to cure cancer, or win that Nobel Prize, and could be the person to write something that changes a life, that went into research to stop AIDS, that went into research to stop depression.
“You have to think of the possibilities, because you, young man” — he pointed to a student in a maroon hoodie — “could be the president of the United States.”
DelaBarre then asked the kids to write their first name and initial on a scrap of paper, along with three things they loved to do, crinkle up the paper and throw it to the front of the auditorium while remaining in their seats.
Those picked would get such prizes as books, T-shirts and posters.
He picked two names from the paper and gave the students — two girls — prizes.
“You know the average is, the next one will be a boy,” he said, before opening the next scrap to reveal that the first sheet of paper was blank, with another one with writing wrapped inside.
“That was pretty smart, wrapping up two pieces so the note would carry farther, so that’s gotta be a guy,” DelaBarre said.
“I hope it’s a girl,” Principal Whitney Meissner said quietly.
Meissner got her wish. Sixth grader Bradyn Nelson claimed the prize.
After the presentation, DelaBarre said that such inspirational messages are wasted on adults.
“You have to get them when they are young,” he said.
“After they are 10, 11, or 12, their habits are already formed.”
DelaBarre urged dreaming big and never take no for an answer, advice he is following with the casting preferences for the movie version of Saltwater Taffy.
“I don’t have anything lined up, but when I was writing I pictured Anthony Hopkins as Old Man Cheesley and I’d like to see Brad Pitt play the father of the two boys,” he said.
“I mean, dream big. Why not?”
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Jefferson County Reporter Charlie Bermant can be reached at 360-385-2335 or charlie.bermant@peninsuladailynews.com.
