These days, I spend a lot of my time sitting in a small shed about seventy feet from my back door at our home in Massachusetts. I’ve learned that I need time and a quiet place to think and write. And it had the eventual effect of turning me into a full-time writer. Frindle became popular, more popular than any of my books before or since-at least so far. That book eventually became my first novel, Frindle, published in 1996, and you can read the whole story of how it developed on another web site,. In 1990 I began trying to write a story about a boy who makes up a new word.

I’d built a number of the projects featured in the book, and I was listed as one of the “craftspeople”on the acknowlegements page, in tiny, tiny type. The book in which my name first appeared in print is called A Country Christmas Treasury. I worked for a small publisher who specialized in how-to books, the kind of books that have photos with informative captions below each one. Writing felt like hard work-something that’s still true today.Īfter the songwriting came my first job in publishing. I learned to play guitar and began writing songs, but again, only when I felt like it. But I didn’t write much on my own-just some poetry now and then. That praise sent me off to Northwestern University feeling like I was a pretty good writer, and occasionally professors there also encouraged me and complimented the essays I was required to write as a literature major. And she’d also written in large, scrawly red writing, “Andrew-this poem is so funny. First, I’d gotten an A-a rare event in this teacher’s class. Two things were amazing about that paper. I know those quiet summers helped me begin to think like a writer.ĭuring my senior year at Springfield High School my English teacher handed back a poem I’d written. All day there was time to swim and fish and mess around outside, and every night, there was time to read. There was no TV there, no phone, no doorbell-and email wasn’t even invented. I don't know a single writer who wasn’t a reader first.īefore moving to Illinois, and even afterwards, our family spent summers at a cabin on a lake in Maine.

I'm certain there's a link between reading good books and becoming a writer. I didn’t think about being a writer at all back then, but I did love to read.

My parents were avid readers and they gave that love of books and reading to me and to all my brothers and sisters. I was born in Camden, New Jersey in 1949 and lived in Oaklyn and Cherry Hill until the middle of sixth grade.

Lunch Money by Brian Selznick