![]() He had looked over all my various books and asked me, point blank, what I really wanted to be writing. What did I want with an oddball character like him? He’s not such a good fit for a picture book.Ī few months later, I was speaking with my future editor, Neal Porter at Roaring Brook (pictured right). As for getting to know him, I had no intention of doing that. Then I put away the notebook and went back to all the picture books, nonfiction, humor, and preschool books I’d been writing for years. And I had a few surreal paragraphs written, in which my fictional bully eloquently contemplates delivering a beating as if it were an artistic experience.Īnd that’s how I discovered Tod. I had my character: he seemed to be an amalgam of several thugs and punks I encountered in my inner-city high school. So, in one five-minute epiphany, I had a location: my old high school. How is it I’m breaking this kid’s glasses? Me? Who am I? And then, without warning, Alison told us to open our eyes and write. That’s not right – I’m supposed to be the other guy. The hall was the same, the floor was the same. Then, suddenly, she sent each of us head-first into a place. A group of writers lay on the floor while Alison spoke softly about… well, I don’t exactly remember. It was an experience that bordered on mass hypnosis. Tod showed up one afternoon when my friend, the author Alison James, included me in a story-writing exercise. He arrived in my mind like a lightning bolt, and because I wasn’t a novelist, I had no use for him. The lead character in Scrawl is a tough kid named Tod Munn. How did you discover and get to know your protagonist? How about your secondary characters? Woodrow help Tod stop playing the bad guy before he actually turns into one. He can be painfully funny and he can be brutally honest. ![]() Tod’s punishment: to scrawl his story in a beat-up notebook. He doesn’t know why he’s there, but she does. Woodrow, a no-nonsense guidance counselor. Lucky Tod must spend his daily detention in a hot, empty room with Mrs. Then to make things worse, Tod and his friends get busted doing something bad. The wimps have stopped coughing up their lunch money. Mark Shulman is the first-time novelist of Scrawl (Roaring Brook/Neal Porter, 2010)( excerpt).
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