Q: Skiff has a very distinctive voice. Do people from Maine really talk like that?
A: To my ear, many do. Skiff’s way of talking is somewhat modified — the real residents of “Spinney Cove” tend to drop the letter r even more.
Q: There is a great deal of detailed information about trapping lobsters and boatbuilding. Did you have to do a lot of research to write about those subjects?
A: Before I was a published author, I was a boatbuilder for a number of years, and therefore I know quite a lot about boats and boat repair. For information about traps and lobster fishing, I consulted my friend Paul Brown, a lobsterman in Kittery, Maine.
Q: When you travel on your boat, what’s your favorite destination?
A: I have two favorite destinations, one north and one south. When we’re in Maine my favorite destination is the Isles of Shoals, a group of islands seven miles offshore. When we’re in the Florida Keys, my wife, Lynn, and I sometimes take a twenty-eight-mile run across Florida Bay and explore the windswept beaches at Cape Sable, which is part of the Everglades.
Q: Do you enjoy fishing?
A: I’m an avid fisherman, and I practice the fine art of angling as frequently as possible. In Maine I fish mostly for striped bass and bluefish. In the Florida Keys I fish for a variety of species, including the giant tarpon. Except when I’m going to cook fish for supper, I always practice “hook and release.”
Q: Are you working on a new book right now? What can you tell us about it?
A: I’m always working on a book. That’s what I do — besides fishing, I mean. At the moment, I’m writing a novel with the working title “The True Adventures of Homer Figg.” It’s about a boy from Maine who runs away from home and follows his older brother into battle during the Civil War.
Rod’s Writing Tips
Rodman Philbrick began writing when he was in the sixth grade. At first, he kept his stories a secret because writing didn’t seem “cool” or “normal,” but when he turned sixteen, he decided to send his first novel — about a boy who admires his best friend, a genius who eventually dies tragically — to several publishers. Although the novel was rejected, Rod didn’t give up. When he was twenty-eight, his career as a writer took off with the publication of a suspense novel for adults. Here, Rod shares some of his tips for writers of all ages.
1. Getting started is easier than you think. You can begin by telling a story to yourself — one that you don’t have to share with anyone else — either by writing in a journal or typing at your computer.
2. Even when you’re writing fiction, you have to tell the truth. This doesn’t mean you have to write about real people or even your own life, but you can make your readers believe in the characters you’re creating if their emotions are clear. Joy makes you feel capable of flight. Anger puts murder in your heart. An insult physically hurts. These are feelings we can all relate to.
3. A good memory helps. Again, even if you’re not writing about your own past or present experiences, the characters and situations you’re writing about need to feel real. Think about your bedroom. Where do you sit when you’re in there? What can you see from the windows? What does it smell like outside? These concrete details can help you shape a world that your readers will recognize — even if you’re writing about life on another planet.
4. Play the “what if” game. Ask yourself a question, and find out where the answer leads you. You could start with a question about your own life: What if you found out you had a twin brother or sister that no one had told you about? What if you wanted to meet your twin, but your parents said it wasn’t a good idea? What would you do? Or perhaps you could start with a question about the world in general: What if kids never had to go to school? What if they never learned to read or write? What would they do instead? What would their lives be like?
5. Listen to the voices in your head. Sometimes when you’re thinking about nothing in particular, a word or phrase or even a full sentence enters your brain. One day, I was on a long drive from New York to Maine when I heard a voice say, “I never had a brain until Freak came along and let me borrow his for a while, and that’s the truth, the whole truth.” Maybe you’re just daydreaming, or maybe it’s the beginning of your next story.
Rodman Philbrick,
Age 17
A Sneak Peek at Freak the Mighty
Rodman Philbrick’s first novel for young readers, Freak the Mighty, was published in 1993 to rave reviews. It has since sold more than one million copies in the United States alone, and it has been published in German, Chinese, and Italian, among other languages. Here’s a special preview of the intriguing first chapter.
I never had a brain until Freak came along and let me borrow his for a while, and that’s the truth, the whole truth. The unvanquished truth, is how Freak would say it, and for a long time it was him who did the talking. Except I had a way of saying things with my fists and my feet even before we became Freak the Mighty, slaying dragons and fools and walking high above the world.
Called me Kicker for a time — this was day care, the year Gram and Grim took me over — and I had a thing about booting anyone who dared to touch me. Because they were always trying to throw a hug on me, like it was a medicine I needed.
Gram and Grim, bless their pointed little heads, they’re my mother’s people, her parents, and they figured whoa! better put this little critter with other little critters his own age, maybe it will improve his temper.
Yeah, right! Instead, what happened, I invented games like kick-boxing and kick-knees and kick-faces and kick-teachers, and kick-the-other-little-day-care-critters, because I knew what a rotten lie that hug stuff was. Oh, I knew.
That’s when I got my first look at Freak, that year of the phony hugs. He didn’t look so different back then, we were all of us pretty small, right? But he wasn’t in the playroom with us every day, just now and then he’d show up. Looking sort of fierce, is how I remember him. Except later it was Freak himself who taught me that remembering is a great invention of the mind, and if you try hard enough you can remember anything, whether it really happened or not.
So maybe he wasn’t really all that fierce in day care, except I’m pretty sure he did hit a kid with his crutch once, whacked the little brat pretty good. And for some reason little Kicker never got around to kicking little Freak.
Maybe it was those crutches kept me from lashing out at him, man those crutches were cool. I wanted a pair for myself. And when little Freak showed up one day with these shiny braces strapped to his crooked legs, metal tubes right up to his hips, why those were even more cool than crutches.
“I’m Robot Man,” little Freak would go, making these weird robot noises as he humped himself around the playground. Rrrr … rrrr … rrrr … like he had robot motors inside his legs, going rrrrr … rrrr … rrrr, and this look, like don’t mess with me, man, maybe I got a laser cannon hidden inside these leg braces, smoke a hole right through you. No question, Freak was hooked on robots even back then, this little guy two feet tall, and already he knew what he wanted.
Then for a long time I never saw Freak anymore, one day he just never came back to day care, and the next thing I remember I’m like in the third grade or something and I catch a glimpse of this yellow-haired kid scowling at me from one of those cripple vans. Man, they were death-ray eyes, and I think, hey, that’s him, the robot boy, and it was like whoa! because I’d forgotten all about him, day care was a blank place in my head, and nobody had called me Kicker for a long time.
Mad Max they were calling me, or Max Factor, or this one butthead in L.D. class called me Maxi Pad, until I persuaded him otherwise. Gram and Grim always called me Maxwell, though, which is supposed to bemy real name, and sometimes I hated that worst of all. Maxwell, ugh.
Grim out in the kitchen one night, after supper whispering to Gram had she noticed how much Maxwell was getting to look like Him? Which is the way he always talked about my father, who had married his dear departed daughter and produced, eek
eek, Maxwell. Grim never says my father’s name, just Him, like his name is too scary to say.
It’s more than just the way Maxwell resembles him, Grim says that night in the kitchen, the boy is like him, we’d better watch out, you never know what he might do while we’re sleeping. Like his father did. And Gram right away shushes him and says don’t ever say that, because little pictures have big ears, which makes me run to the mirror to see if it is my big ears made me look like Him.
What a butthead, huh?
Well, I was a butthead, because like I said, I never had a brain until Freak moved down the street. The summer before eighth grade, right? That’s the summer I grew so fast that Grim said we’d best let the boy go barefoot, he’s exploding out of his shoes. That barefoot summer when I fell down a lot, and the weirdo robot boy with his white-yellow hair and his weird fierce eyes moved into the duplex down the block with his beautiful brown-haired mom, the Fair Gwen of Air.
Only a falling-down goon would think that was her real name, right?
Like I said.
Are you paying attention here? Because you don’t even know yet how we got to be Freak the Mighty. Which was pretty cool, even if I do say so myself.
Excerpt text copyright © 1993 by Rodman Philbrick.
ALSO BY RODMAN PHILBRICK
Freak the Mighty
Max the Mighty
The Fire Pony
REM World
The Last Book in the Universe
This book was originally published by the Blue Sky Press in 2004.
Copyright © 2004 by Rodman Philbrick.
All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc.
SCHOLASTIC and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
First Scholastic paperback printing, March 2005
Cover art by David Shannon
e-ISBN 978-0-545-60030-9
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.
Rodman Philbrick, The Young Man and the Sea
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