Richard Peck Hears Voices, Falls in Love
Richard Peck likes to fall in love. If you have ever wondered how the Newbery Award-winning author is able to so believably recreate a bygone time, now you know. "I always begin with love--love of the era that you can't get into anywhere except in a book," he confides. "I began early because my father ran a filling station," Peck recalls. The young boy would listen to the old men tell stories of the good old days. But it was more than that. "What I didn't understand was that the past was better than the present to them because they had been young then," he explains. “I just thought the past was better."
"And in fact I still do," he adds. One of those elders had ridden the great Ferris Wheel at the Exposition of 1893. The young boy listened, and the seed of a story took root until it blossomed decades later with Fair Weather. "I am led by research and other people's stories," he comments. He knows he had far more access to the stories of his elders than kids today.
Richard Peck urges young people to get to know their family stories, to ask where their grandparents were during World War II, to find out how their family came to live where they did and why. Peck confesses that "I am still haunted by what I didn't hear or what I didn't process and what I have forgotten--fiction is the attempt to finish the stories you half remember being told."
Peck feels a particular affinity with the history of America and Great Britain. When contemplating a new novel, he first looks for the voice. "The one voice my books never need is mine," he states. "In my newest book, the voice belongs to a boy looking for his personal identity entirely within the grounds of Buckingham Palace." The Mouse With the Question Mark Tail will be coming out in July. Peck had always wanted to see the garden behind Buckingham Palace and once he saw it, he came out with the setting for his book, as well as an understanding of who could be telling the story: "Viewpoint is more important than truth."
The other crucial element for a Richard Peck book is setting. "I need a setting where I can put my feet." He can't live in the time of the Civil War but he can put his foot in Antietam and Gettysburg. "I've tried to write about places I've never been but it doesn't work for me--I detonate my own book.”
Sometimes, the book asks for a different narrator. "I wrote my first novel three times, from the viewpoint of the girl, from the boy, and then the younger sister before I found the right person to tell the story," he remembers. Other times, the book requires a different cadence. "Each era has a different rhythm--you can't write Civil War dialog and dialect in a 1920s voice." A close reading of Peck's works reveals a comfort with dialog in period settings that looks deceptively easy but is the result of immense research and immersion in the time. The self-deprecating author responds that "The reason the dialog feels real is that I keep myself off the page."
His advice to writers? "Research must never be confused with Wikipedia. Wikipedia will give you a voice but it's lying to you." Peck knows whereof he speaks--his own entry has stated that he is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin. "I've never been near the place!" said the author, who, in fact, went to college in Indiana.
To Peck, research often means hitting the stacks. He discovered a cache of Civil War soldiers' letters at his library and "sat in the stacks for months as I copied them and wept." The River Between Us was the result.
Earlier in Peck's life, the voices that inundated him were not those of the characters he had created but students in his classroom: "I was always wondering what they were going to say next." Now he has that same experience with his characters and he revels when he is able to "get his characters talking." Richard Peck used to get letters from kids in schools but that does not happen as much anymore. He does do occasional school visits but remarks that they only work if the students have read one of his books. "Now, teachers will say that they are sure the students will want to read your books after your visit," the author comments disapprovingly. Reading the book in advance makes all the difference for both students and author.
Creating a desire to read in her child was not a problem for Richard Peck's mother. "She read to me before I could read myself--I wanted to be a writer before I could read." Even then, the young Richard Peck was falling in love with a place and a voice that only existed in books. Some things never change.
-- Interviewed by Ellen Myrick, March 2013
