“Rules for a Knight”

by Ethan Hawke, with illustrations by Ryan Hawke (Knopf, 192 pages, $18)

San Francisco — For Ethan Hawke, creativity isn’t confined by boundaries. The accomplished actor, writer and director sees his various artistic pursuits as chattering away with each other.

“I come at writing completely as an actor,” Hawke, 45, said before a signing at the Booksmith on Haight Street for his new young-adult book, “Rules for a Knight.” “I learned about writing through acting, and I’ve never really looked at them as different. It’s all storytelling. The film work I’ve done with (director) Richard Linklater is largely improvisations, and this book in particular is like an extended improv.”

“Rules for a Knight,’” Hawke’s third book after 1996’s “The Hottest State” and 2002’s “Ash Wednesday,” hits shelves at the end of a busy year for Hawke. He was nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actor in Linklater’s “Boyhood” (he was previously nominated in that category in 2001 for “Training Day” and was twice nominated for best adapted screenplay for Linklater’s “Before Sunrise” and “Before Sunset”) and also released his debut documentary, “Seymour: An Introduction.”

These projects about growing up and personal passions pair well with the new novel, which is written as a medieval knight’s last testament to his children, in which he hopes to impart the lessons he learned on and off the battlefield. Hawke said the book started as a gift to his four children, Maya, Levon, Clementine and Indiana. Each chapter is themed around one of 20 rules and includes an illustration of a bird by Hawke’s wife, Ryan. Hawke had the idea for an avian representation of the book’s themes because of what he sees as “noble, genderless” qualities of birds when they are flying.

‘Great excuse’

“There’s a great thing that happened the second my daughter was born,” Hawke said of how parenthood led him to explore these themes. “You kind of make eye contact (with the newborn), and I had this immediate thing like, ‘Don’t look at me. I don’t know anything.’ This book in a lot of ways was a great excuse for me to read on these subjects,” like humility, gratitude, justice and courage.

‘Loved parables’

“I’ve always loved parables because they don’t dictate to you what to think,” Hawke said of the story structure, with chapters that read easily as stand-alone lessons. “They all spin around something that interests me, something I’m trying to learn.”

He mentioned the chapter on jealously as being a story that was particularly informed by his own experience.

“The whole idea of that little bit was centered around what happened to me in my friendship with River Phoenix and how much I cared about him, but how consumed with jealousy I was.” After Phoenix’s death in 1993, Hawke saw “how we can waste so much time with friends and the ones we love being jealous or having those smaller emotions.”

While many books that discuss personal morality use religion to answer these questions, for Hawke the challenge was asking himself, “How do you present ethics to people without doing it under the guise of God? What do you believe in, particularly if you’re not someone that goes to church every Sunday?” But in spite of the discomfort around discussions of faith, “we still have a yearning to figure out why we were born, why we die and what we’re here for,” he said.

In another example of creative cross-pollination, Hawke’s interest in knighthood originally came to him through the theater. “I’ve been in a lot of Shakespeare plays,” he said, “My first play was ‘Saint Joan’ by George Bernard Shaw. I played Dunois’ page, and I had on all this knight regalia, chain-mail and armor.” After watching his son and daughters’ fascination with his costume, it occurred to him that using the character of a knight might make discussing value systems more accessible.

“Living a virtuous life seems kind of square, and knights make it cool,” Hawke said. “There’s something about the idea of knighthood that makes pursuing the noblest aspects of yourself not seem like Dudley Do-Right.”

In spite of the title, Hawke warns not to expect any literal translations of chivalric codes or other historic honor systems.

‘Real hodgepodge’

“A lot of them are filled with misogyny and violence,” Hawke pointed out. “I tended to prefer to make up my own, one that matched my personal code. This thing is a real hodgepodge. There’s stuff from the ‘Bhagavad Gita,’ Martin Luther King — he is a knight and so is Bob Dylan, so is Emily Dickinson or Eleanor Roosevelt.” By Hawke’s definition, knights are people “whose lives were lived with substantive purpose.”

In another gender twist, in the book’s original conception the central character was to be a princess, but Hawke abandoned that idea when he realized that young girls’ interest in fairy tale royalty was usually passing. “My son definitely didn’t want to follow ‘Rules for a Princess.’” Hawke joked. “Thankfully, they all liked ‘Rules for a Knight.’”

As the father of three daughters (Maya with his ex-wife, Uma Thurman, and Clementine and Indiana with Ryan), Hawke calls himself “an aspiring feminist,” and wanted to be sure his story was relatable to both young men and women.

Female knights

“It’s really interesting to grow up as a young man and then have a 17-year-old daughter and see the world through her eyes,” Hawke said. “I identify with her, and it’s been a wonderful experience for me that’s made my life broader.” Hawke also said that historically, “there have always been female knights. It’s just that in certain times they were called by less flattering names.”

Next year is shaping up to be just as busy and diverse a professional year for Hawke as 2015. He’s acting in a remake of “The Magnificent Seven,” directed by Antoine Fuqua, and his first graphic novel, “Indeh,” about the life of Geronimo (illustrated by Greg Ruth), is also due for release.

“There’s a great line that I like: To be a master at one profession you have to apprentice three,” he said. “They all speak to each other. It’s all about expression, whether it’s dance or music or acting, especially when it’s done well.”