BIO

Richard Peck, the first children's author ever to receive a National Humanities Medal, has won nearly every children's book award, including the Newbery Medal for A YEAR DOWN YONDER. He lives in New York City.

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AUTHOR TALK

August 2008

Children's authors Avi, Susan Cooper, Sharon Creech, Patricia MacLachlan, Katherine Paterson and Richard Peck have collaborated to produce ACTING OUT--- a collection of unrelated one-act plays, connected only by the six random words each writer has chosen to be included in every piece. In this interview, the playwrights share their varied backgrounds in writing and/or watching plays, and discuss the similarities and differences in their writing processes. They also reveal how they picked their random words and share advice on how to use this collection in the classroom.

Question: Did you read plays when you were young? Did you write plays? Perform in them?

Susan Cooper: My parents said they first took me to the theater when I was three, and when the curtain went down I sat there and howled loudly because it was over. They were very embarrassed. When I was eight, I was doing puppet plays with the boy next door; he built the theater and I wrote the plays, and we both performed them to our captive parental audiences. I loved listening to BBC radio plays (we had no TV till I was fifteen), reading plays, and going to the theater, and by the time I was eighteen I got the lead in the school play. I was awful. I looked okay, but I mumbled, and nobody could hear me past the fourth row. So I went on writing plays but not acting in them.

Q: Each of you chose a word at random that had to be used in every play. How did you pick your word, and was there any special significance to your choice?

Katherine Paterson: I was desperate. I closed my eyes, opened the dictionary, and poked my finger and took the word pointed at when I opened them.

Richard Peck: I've told this before, and I don't think the editor wants to hear it again. My word was "justice," left on his voice mail. He heard it as "Justin" --- his own name. The rest is history.

Q: Did you collaborate at all with the other authors?

Patricia MacLachlan: None of the writers, as far as I know, collaborated on any of our plays. We did take some jabs at word choices, trying to figure out who chose what words!

Sharon Creech: No. Was that an option? Haha.

Q: Have you written plays before? If yes, how was writing this play different, and if no, how was it writing a play for the first time?

Susan Cooper: I've written plays for radio and screenplays for TV and film, and with the actor Hume Cronyn I wrote a play called Foxfire. We did it at the Stratford Festival in Canada, then at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, and then it ran for eight months on Broadway. Later, I adapted it for television. You can still find it on DVD, and another one I wrote called To Dance with the White Dog. Hume was in both of them.

Sharon Creech: Yes, I've written plays before. One was produced Off-Off Broadway in the early 1990s. The difference this time was that it had to be more compact (one act) and had to have at least one young character.

Avi: I haven't written a play in forty years!

Q: Is the process of writing a play different from writing a novel?

Richard Peck: Writing a one-act play turns out to be far more like writing a short story than a novel. It must have the tight shape, that compression of time, and timing. And it must be a canny combination of word and deed.

Q: What is your process when you sit down to start a new writing project?

Patricia MacLachlan: My process of sitting down to begin a new project means a lot of sighing, complaining, and playing hundreds of games of solitaire on my computer before I actually begin. Then, when I ACTUALLY begin, I become very happy and engaged with my writing.

Susan Cooper: With a novel, I know the main characters and the beginning and the end, and I discover the middle as I go along. With a play or screenplay, I know the beginning and the end and the high points. For instance, if you're writing a two-act play, there has to be something at the end of Act One that makes the audience want to come back for Act Two.

Q: What advice do you have for teachers planning to use plays, or playwriting, in the classroom?

Sharon Creech: Keep it simple and have fun. Let students try all aspects of theater: writing, directing, staging, and acting. Some will be better at, or more interested in, one area than another. That's okay!

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