At the end of sixth grade, Bruce Coville found out what creative writing was all about. “I failed at writing all year long because I always had to write the teacher’s stuff, until the end of the year when she assigned us to write a story and gave us three or four weeks to finish it. . .It was an exhilarating experience.” Time and freedom of choice made all the difference to Coville. “I loved what I was doing. This may not be the first time I knew I wanted to write, but it’s the time I remember.”
He first considered writing for children in the mid-1970’s when he received a copy of Winnie the Pooh as a gift. “I suddenly knew what I really wanted to write was children’s books—to give other children the joy I got from books when I was young. . .My writing works best when I remember [that] bookish child who adored reading and gear the work toward him. It falters when I forget him.”
Coville’s The Foolish Giant (Lippincott) made its debut in 1978, illustrated by his wife Katherine. He enjoyed modest success with his next several books, but in 1990 everything changed with the publication of My Teacher is an Alien (Minstrel). “In its first six months, it sold as many copies as my previous 20 books had sold all put together in a period of twelve years. . .I literally became an overnight success after 14 years.”
Dear Mr. Bruce Coville,
How come you write science fiction
instead of real stories?
Coville now claims a rich, varied, award-winning body of work. His interests take him from science fiction, to fantasy, to historical fiction, to Shakespeare retellings. Ideas surface as he’s reading the morning newspaper, driving his car, or staring out the window. Some ideas are taken from his research on dragon and unicorn lore. When writing Jennifer Murdley’s Toad (Harcourt, 1992) he studied toad lore; the skull in The Skull of Truth (Pocket, 1999) is based on York from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. “Ideas are the smallest and easiest part of the whole process.” Whenever Coville needs a new idea, he plucks one from his idea file—an actual file folder an inch and a half thick. Says Coville, “I put [ideas] in there when I think of them. . .If I don’t write them down, they vanish.”
Ideas also seem to occur to Coville in a thematic way; he has at least seven ongoing successful series of books, like I Was a Sixth Grade Alien, The Unicorn Chronicles, The Magic Shop, and Rod Allbright’s Alien Adventures. “I think I have more ongoing series than anybody in the field right now. It’s mostly because I really fall in love with my characters and want to go back and see what they’re up to.”
Even though many of Coville’s characters are aliens, they take on their own lives and he knows how they’ll react or respond in a given situation. Nina Tanleven, one of his non-alien characters from The Ghost in the Third Row (Bantam, 1987), The Ghost Wore Gray (Bantam, 1988), and The Ghost in the Big Brass Bed (Bantam, 1991) is one of his favorites because she’s based on his daughter, Cara. The title character of the Rod Allbright’s Alien Adventures series is based on Coville. “My wife drew the pictures in the book based on pictures of me when I was eleven years old. Rod’s house is based on my house.”
Coville is hard-pressed to choose a favorite book; different books are special for different reasons: “My Teacher is an Alien made the most money, The Ghost Who Wore Gray is the best ending I ever wrote, and Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher is a favorite because it will still be around in 25 years.”
