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
What surprised me most about the Donner tragedy was that, given the terrible circumstances, how anyone survived at all.
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.
My parents were avid readers. Both had ambitions to write that had been abandoned early in life in order to get on with life.
There is no greater compliment for a writer than to have pleased a troubled child.
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.
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.
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.
I'm not a playwright; I'm a writer who loves theater.
I have vivid memories of junior high school. I didn't quite know how to deal with kids and make friends and all of that. If you talked to people who knew me at the time, they'd think I was a popular kid in school. But boy, I didn't feel that.
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 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.
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.