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
I am an avid fisherman, and my daily schedule is to write in the morning and then go fishing in the afternoon. In Maine, I fish mostly for stripers, and in the Florida Keys, I go after all kinds of game fish.
You ever notice how long it takes for things to happen when you know they're supposed to happen? My fake Walkman has a built-in alarm, and I set it for two in the morning and wear the headphones to bed, but before you can wake up you have to fall asleep, and I never DO fall asleep because I keep waiting for the alarm to go off.
I'm not a playwright; I'm a writer who loves theater.
I wanted to make the world of 'The Last Book in the Universe' as real as possible, so I spent a lot of time thinking about it. I decided the world would be a very different place, but people would be pretty much the same.
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.
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.
As a young, ambitious novelist, writing for kids never crossed my mind.
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.
As a kid, books were my great escape and my salvation.
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.
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.