‘Forward’ author: Small changes are still changes

Hyde came prepared to answer the three most frequently asked questions about her book, and then she said she wanted to hear from her readers. “It’s like a big book group,” she said of the gathering.

“Pay It Forward” tells the story of a 12-year-old boy whose simple plan to change the world is embraced after his senseless death. The plan calls for people to pay favors forward, not backward. For each favor received, three people must benefit.

Hyde said the idea of “pay it forward” came to her in 1978 when her car broke down at night in a dangerous section of Los Angeles, which also happened to be her neighborhood.

Her car stalled, the electrical system shut off and her car began to fill with smoke.

“Two strangers started running in my direction. One of them was carrying a blanket,” she said. Hyde said the idea that they might rescue her never crossed her mind.

“That’s what they were there to do,” she said.

One man popped open the hood of her car and put out the engine fire with the blanket. When the fire department arrived, firefighters told Hyde the car would have exploded had the men not intervened.

“I turned to thank them for the biggest favor anyone’s ever done for me to this day. They’d already packed up their car and were gone,” she said. “I owed them this tremendous favor.”

She realized the only thing she could do was to pay the kindness forward. Twenty years later, Hyde got the idea for the book.

The book’s ending is disturbing, and the Hollywood movie version, even more so. Hyde frequently is asked, “ ‘Why did that poor kid have to die?’ ” she said.

“I want to bring to your attention Trevor is not a real boy before we start discussing why I killed him,” she said, then admitted she is complimented that readers are so fond of the character.

Still, Hyde said, real change does not come without pain or loss.

“Where I come from, people don’t wake up on an average day and decide to make sweeping changes in their lives,” she said.

If the character Trevor had not died and the change had happened anyway, Hyde said, readers would think, “ ‘Wow, that was easy. He gets a dad in the deal. They live happily ever after.’

“I don’t (decide to make changes) on that, and I don’t think you would either.”

Discussions about the book often return to the pay-it-forward principle, Hyde said. Does it work, she’s asked. Can the principle change the world?

She said it depends on the person’s definition of change. If change means change the world so completely it’s unrecognizable or change the world the way it is changed in the book, then her answer is “frankly, no.”

But to change so that the average person notices then “we’re pretty much at that point already,” she said, and referred the audience to the Web site www.payitforwardmovement.org, where people from around the world relate ways they have put the principle to work.

“It’s time to redefine what we mean when we say change. I have no problem with small to medium world change, and I hope you don’t either,” she said.

“When I’m asked if people will pay it forward, I say, ‘I don’t know. Will you?’ ”