Tag Archives: True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle

Readers Theater

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ART

Author Readers Theater with (l to r) Avi, Sarah Weeks, Pam Muñoz Ryan, and Richard Peck, one cast among our revolving players.

Have you considered doing Readers Theater in your classroom or assembly performance? It’s a fun and instructional way to get inside of a book, involving students firsthand in dialogue, action, and plot. Here’s an article about readers theater I wrote for School Library Journal a few years ago: “Have You Heard the Word? For a low-budget way to get kids wild about reading, try readers theater.“

As I wrote in the article, my “experiences led me to create Authors Readers Theatre (ART) in 2006 with fellow writers Sharon Creech, Walter Dean Myers, and Sarah Weeks. Functioning as a kind of repertory theater group with an evolving core of author-performers, we have been performing readers theater all over the country…”

Authors Readers Theater is still going strong. For information about the troupe, please visit Sarah Weeks’ website.

There are two free readers theater scripts on my website: one is for Ereth’s Birthday and the other is for The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle. They may be just the spark you need to involve more students in the joys of reading. I encourage you to give readers theater a try, if you haven’t already.

Starting out

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dark and stormy nightContemporary readers raised on TV, film, and video game narration don’t give the writer much slack in the opening of a novel. The impact of those other forms of storytelling has been enormous. Compare today’s fiction to virtually any Victorian, or even early 20th century fiction, and you will be struck by how different is the pacing of a book’s first pages. I used to joke that my youngest son (now 23), raised with the modern mix of narration, thought the perfect plot was three explosions connected by a chase. 

I believe it was Madeline L’Engle who referred to the first words of a novel as “an opening door.” I’ve also heard those words called “the hook.“ Years ago I read the memoir of a man who (in the 1930s) was a contract writer of a popular book series, when a series numbered fifty volumes. Virtually all plots of the books were pre-formatted, but he still spent a huge amount of time on the opening page. “If I couldn’t hold them on the first page, I’d never hold them.” Then, there’s always “It was a dark and stormy night,” the opening words of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s (1830) novel, Paul Clifford. 

One of my readers wrote to me, “I read your book, True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle.  It was boring at first, but by the second page it got good.” 

Whew!

When I get the first copy of a new book …

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Sophia's WarFrom the time I first contemplated the story that would become Sophia’s War, and the moment when the published volume came into my hands, it has been more than three years. By contract, I get some copies of the book, which usually arrive about one month prior to the official publication date. 

What do I do when I get the first copy in my hands? I look at it. This is to say I get a sense of the physical book, the binding, the paper, the cover, the printing. (There is good printing and bad printing.) Does the book open flat enough? Is the gutter wide enough? How is the font? What does the book look like under the dust jacket? In this case I looked at the maps, because I had not seen them in place before.

(Once I discovered a huge printing mistake in my first copies of The Man Who was Poe, so bad the whole print run had to be called back, and redone!)

Then, what I always do is take that first copy of the book, sign the title page, add the date I received it. It then it goes on shelves of similarly signed books—and it just sits there.

Charlotte Doyle signed 90In all probability—unless there is a particular reason to do so—I won’t read the whole book again. I have, after all, read it a few thousands of times. Yes, I may be called upon to read excerpts at various occasions—as I just did in NYC—and I enjoy that. But now, the book belongs to readers.

Besides, I’m working on something new.

Will there be a sequel?

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True Confessions of Charlotte DoyleIsabelle, from Harper Woods, MI, writes, “I was wondering if you’re going to make a sequel to The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle?”

In the years since the book was published I have been asked that question many times, even before sequels became popular. 

It seems to me that Charlotte’s story, among a number of things, is about her gaining the power and courage to make choices for herself—to decide what she wishes to do with her life. Of course, in the story, her biggest decision, her biggest choice, is what to do after the events on the Seahawk, after she returns home to Providence, RI. Since I feel Charlotte’s achievement is the ability to make choices for herself, to tell the reader what that choice might be would diminish the book’s power. That openness is what, I think the book is about. I am a strong believer that a book, once written, belongs to the reader, not to the writer. Since I have no idea what Charlotte might do, I want every reader to make that choice on their own, even as I want every reader to have that power in their own lives. We all have the power to write our own sequels. The sequel I won’t write is one for The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle. Isabelle, you are going to have to do that on your own.

Is it real? Is it fiction?

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Megan of Pompano Beach wrote me and asked, “Do you incorporate real events into your writing?”

Sophia's WarThe answer is, yes and no. The about to be published Sophia’s War is full of things that really happened during the American Revolution, but the main character, Sophia Calderwood, is fictional. Yet, I tell the story as if she had a great deal to do with what happened. Hard Gold and Iron Thunder were written much the same way. True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle is a complete fiction, but I sure tried to get my facts about ships and sailing right. The Poppy books are tales about animals, but they are full of things that happened in my own family life—not that you would know it. Seer of Shadows, a ghost story, uses what I knew from my days as an amateur photographer. But the emotions and relationships I depict in my books are most often based on things out of my own experience, lived or observed. The facts—particularly for the historical fiction—comes from research. I suspect all fiction is created this way. No matter how fantastic the tale, there is some real connection to the writer.

City of Orphans in Spanish

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Ciudad de HuérfanosIn the mail today came the Spanish edition of City of Orphans, with the translated title, Ciudad de Huérfanos. [Editorial Bambú--Spain] My knowledge of languages other than English is woefully ( sadly) deficient. I cannot therefore, speak to the translation, but it is a handsome hardbound edition, truly stitched, complete with headband, a bound-in, green ribbon page marker (something I love) and an unusually fine illustration for the cover art. Many of my books have been translated (True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle is in some twenty languages.). The Korean Crispin: The Cross of Lead, which is fully illustrated, is very beautiful. These translated editions fascinate me, in part by the way they depict the story. They also allow me to wonder how young people in different cultures respond to my stories. Now and again, I get letters from these kids, and they are always delightful. Once, in Denmark, a girl told me how Bright Shadow was her favorite book. There is something very special about reaching across the globe in this way. Deeply rewarding.