Rodman Philbrick
Rodman Philbrick
Rodman Philbrickis an American writer of novels for adults and children. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and currently lives in Maine and Florida. He and Lynn Harnett were married from 1980 until her death in 2012. They collaborated on scary books for young readers, including The House on Cherry Street, The Werewolf Chronicles , and Visitors, three trilogies published by Scholastic, Inc. Philbrick has also written using the pen names W. R. Philbrick, William R. Dantz, and Chris Jordan...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
CountryUnited States of America
As a writer, I'm convinced that encouraging children to write fiction, to hook into that marvelous machine called the imagination, has to be good for everyone.
What surprised me most about the Donner tragedy was that, given the terrible circumstances, how anyone survived at all.
I started writing stories in sixth grade. But writing wasn't cool, like being good at sports, or being part of the in crowd, or winning fights on the playground.
I've always known that writing plays is very difficult, because I've written three or four that have never been produced.
I vividly remember my sixth-grade classroom. I remember what it smelled like, where I sat, what I could see out the window, and how I felt about things. Peel away my decrepit middle-aged exterior, and an important part of me is still twelve years old. It helps me when I sit down to write stories for kids.
Soon after publishing a book for kids, my mailbox began to fill with letters from children all across America. Not because my novels for young readers are bestsellers - they're not by a long shot - but because today's kids love to write to authors.
I was never forced to write. At least, I was never forced or even encouraged to write fiction. Creative writing wasn't in the curriculum at my school when I was in sixth grade.
So long as you tell a story that falls within the fairly generous boundaries of the suspense novel, you're free to make the novel as good as you can. You're allowed to challenge the reader. You can experiment with voice and style.
Unfortunately, the author of a book pretty much gives up control of the story when the producers take over a book to make it into a movie.
You can't mess around with young readers - you have to cut straight to the heart of the story. The character can be complex, the plot can have some surprises, but the emotions have to be clear.
As a young, ambitious novelist, writing for kids never crossed my mind.
As a kid, books were my great escape and my salvation.
After I had written more than a dozen adult genre novels, an editor I knew in New York asked me to write a mystery for young adults.
There is no greater compliment for a writer than to have pleased a troubled child.