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Neal Shusterman, author, and script writer of the Animorphs T.V. show had some time to answer some of my questions. I asked him some interesting questions about his life as a writer, you might enjoy. |
| Plexer: | What made you want to make a living as a writer? |
| Neal: | I've always enjoyed writing, since I was a kid. It was in college, when I wrote a popular humor column for my college newspaper. It was that column that made me think I might be able to actually make a living writing. |
| Plexer: | What motivated you to write your first story? |
| Neal: | The first story I remember writing was in eighth grade after I saw "Jaws." I decided, at 13, that I wanted to be Just like Steven Spielberg. |
| Plexer: | How long have you been writing books? |
| Neal: | I've published 21 books -- most for teenagers and young-adults. My favorites are "The Shadow Club," "Speeding Bullet," "What Daddy Did," "The Eyes of Kid Midas," "MindQuakes," "MindStorms," "Scorpion Shards," and "The Dark Side of Nowhere." |
| Plexer: | What would your advice to young writers be? |
| Neal: | Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. Until you master the skill of reworking your own material, you can't call yourself a writer. |
| Plexer: | How long have you been writeing storys before you started getting them published? |
| Neal: | Well, since 8th grade. I never got a short story published, until after I became a successful novelist. Then several publishers came to me asking me to write short story collections! I didn't use any of my old short stories, though. I wrote all new ones. |
| Plexer: | Which of your many books is your favorite? |
| Neal: | I like all of my books, it's hard to pick a favorite... but if I had to I would say "Downsiders," which is being published in April of 1999. |
| Plexer: | Did you write new ones because you had very new ideas for storys? Or did they just seem non-interesting? |
| Neal: | I was a much better writer by the time I wrote the short story books, and the old stories didn't interest me anymore. |
| Plexer: | When you were young, and you wrote your short stories, did they have no titles? And what were they about? |
| Neal: | They had titles... Lets see... There was "The Correction Fluid Factory," about a writer who got confused about what characters were real, and which ones were in his book, and began "killing" people by whiting them out on the page. There was a story called "The Fall of the Game," about a guy who played chess with the devil on the last day of the world... There was a story called "The Peter Pan Solution," about |
| Neal: | ...about a couple who cloned their kids, so they could be babies again, and killed them when they reached 13, only to clone them again, because they just didn't like those rebellious teenage years. |
| Neal: | There were many more... |
| Plexer: | How rewarding is it to know your books are read by millions of kids and have been winning awards every year since 1992? |
| Neal: | Sure, friends, my parents, teachers. I got them published in high school and college publications, but never sold them to real magazines. So I stopped writing short stories, and began writing books and screenplays instead. |
| Plexer: | In middle school has anyone ever discouraged you in anyway when you wrote the stories? Or said it was a faze? |
| Neal: | No one ever discouraged me, but my parents always wanted me to have "something to fall back on," in case I didn't succeed on the creative field. |
| Plexer: | Have you ever experienced writers block? Or has it been really easy for you to come up with ideas? |
| Neal: | All writers get writer's block. It's something you have to work through. All writers block means is that you haven't put enough time and thought into what you're writing... or you're not really enjoying what you're writing. |
| Neal: | No one ever discouraged me, but my parents always wanted me to have "something to fall back on," in case I didn't succeed on the creative field. |
| Plexer: | Is that what started you into writing stories for shows? |
| Neal: | When I was first starting, I wrote books, screenplays, stageplays, TV episodes -- anything to try to break in. |
| Plexer: | Is that what started you into writing stories for shows? |
| Neal: | When I was first starting, I wrote books, screenplays, stageplays, TV episodes -- anything to try to break in. |
| Plexer: | Well thanks for your time. |
| Neal: | You're Welcome, bye |
