S P O T L I G H T O N - S H A R O N C R E E C H (cont.) What is your advice to aspiring authors? My advice is simple: read a lot and write what gives you pleasure. Through reading, you learn how stories are told; you learn what you like and what you don’t; you learn about other people and places. When you’re writing, experiment. Write short things. Not everything has to be a story, but when you do try a story, you don’t need to know the story before you begin writing. I never do. Most of my ideas come while I am writing. Did you have any concerns allowing a different writer to adapt your novel into a play? No. I was intrigued to see what might emerge! I accept that the play will be its own art form, different from the original novel. Many of your novels deal with pre-teens dealing with the death of a loved one. Why is this theme so prevalent in your writing? This theme is more prevalent in the earlier books than in later ones, and there is both a simple and a complex explanation for that. I began writing novels shortly after my father died, and I suppose my grief found its way into my work. But also: I was about twelve when I first experienced the death of a relative. It shifted my world and made me pay more attention to the people and the world around me. I adopted humor to balance the serious things in life, and you’ll find that in my writing, too. Where there is sorrow, there is also humor; where there is humor, there is also sorrow. Is there anything in particular you would like your audience to remember or take away from reading or watching Walk Two Moons? I suppose I’d like for the audience to feel ultimately hopeful, that while we may face difficult things, there is always something beautiful to balance those difficulties. Have you ever considered adapting one of your own novels for the stage? Although I wrote short plays before I wrote novels, and I take short scenes from each novel and recast them as Readers Theatre, to use with students when I’m on book tours, I’ve never thought about adapting a whole novel for the stage. It seems rather daunting. I wonder if I’m too close to the work to be able to cut it and redraft it as drama. Then again, maybe I ought to try it once . . .
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