[ Music ] >> In memory of Dick Robinson and sponsored by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. [ Music ] >> Dan Gutman: Well, hi everybody. My name is Dan Gutman. I write books for kids and this is my newest book, Houdini and Me, which I guess I'm talking about today, and I wanted to say it's great to be at the National Book Festival. Thanks a lot for having me. You know each book starts with an idea, okay. And the idea for this book came about because I have a hobby. My hobby is I like to collect addresses of famous people. Like I think it's cool to be standing in front of a building where some really famous person lived or some really famous event took place. And I live in New York City were lots of famous people have lived and live. So there's like plaques on the wall outside buildings showing the famous people who lived there, and I could walk from my house and, you know, take a look at this. A few blocks away from where I lived was Babe Ruth's apartment, which I thought was really cool, you know. In another direction, I can go to the hardware store and look at this Edgar Allan Poe lived in my neighborhood. And when I go to the supermarket, just a few more examples, George Gershwin wrote his famous Rhapsody in Blue just a few blocks from where I live today. And just one more I'll show you the famous actor Humphrey Bogart. He Iived the first four years of his life just right in my neighborhood. And, you know, none of these people like inspired a book by me. I never thought about going to write about Humphrey Bogart, but then one day I was walking down the street, okay, eight blocks from where I live today and I saw this on the wall. Yeah, Harry Houdini lived eight blocks from where I live today, and I thought, gee, you know, maybe I could do something about Houdini because I like to write historical fiction. I like to blend fact and fiction together. So, you know, I didn't know much about Houdini at the time. I just know he was a famous magician and he was a famous escape artist. Like they could lock him up in handcuffs, you know, and shackles and straitjackets, and he would find a way to escape. But I learned that there's one thing that Houdini could not escape from and that was his own death. He died in 1926 and so I thought, wow, pow, I could write a story about a kid who lives in Harry Houdini's house eight block from where I live today and the kid somehow finds a way to communicate with the spirit of Harry Houdini by text message. That was the kernel or the idea for my book. So I basically started researching everything to do with Harry Houdini, you know, I read every book ever written about the guy and there's dozens of them. And then I went on YouTube and I just searched for Harry Houdini and there's lots of videos I could watch, which was really fun. And I, you know, Googled his name, and I learned everything I could learn about Houdini, and I learned a lot, of course. And, you know, I think most authors when they start working on a book they kind of sit at their computers and just start typing into a blank screen. They must be geniuses, okay. I can't write like that. I've got to plan my whole story out from start to finish and that's what I do with these file cards. Plain old file cards. I start jotting down ideas. Anything that pops into my head, you know, a piece of dialogue, a description of a character, some trivial fact, whatever it is I write it down and here I'll show you the first card that I had. This is what I wrote my first idea for this book was I was born in Harry Houdini's house and as it turned out that became the first sentence of my book. So I just throw the ideas on the screen, all these ideas, sometimes hundreds of them and, you know, I don't care if the spelling is wrong or the grammar is wrong, whatever, it doesn't matter to me because I can fix it later. I can make changes, corrections, you know, I'll punch it up, I'll smooth it out until eventually, you know, every day I'll sit at my computer and I'll look at what I wrote the day before and I'll change it, I'll make it better. And eventually I reach the point where I'm looking at what I wrote, and I can't find any more changes to make and that's how I know my book is finished and it's time to turn it into the editor. And I'll tell you, you know, my goal, my goal in this book and all my books, I'm not trying to teach lessons here, you know, I'm not trying to make kids smarter. All I want to do is create a story that's so captivating that a kid will, you know, look at it and maybe open up, open up the book and an hour later look up and feel like, wow, that didn't even feel like reading it was so effortless. I felt like I was watching a movie in my head. That's what I try to accomplish in this book and in all my books really and if I could just say one more thing about Houdini. I don't want to give the whole story away or anything, but one of Houdini's most famous tricks was called metamorphosis where he would switch places with another person, usually his wife, Bess. He'd best switch places, and I thought, okay, what if Houdini were to switch places with this kid who lives in Houdini's house in the current day and Houdini comes into the 21st Century escaping his death to live there temporarily and the kid goes back to the 1920s finds himself hanging upside down from a building while he's in a straitjacket and he has to escape. So the idea was that Houdini loves escaping from his own death and he wants to live in the 21st Century and he's going to make that permanent whether the kid likes it or not, and I don't want to tell you what happens but the kid doesn't feel too happy about that and that's basically the gist of my story if I were to sum it up quickly. So I hope you guys are going to read it because it's really fun. If you're going to write and if you're going to incorporate things in the real world into your writing, you have to learn about things and you have to like be wanting to absorb everything around you so you have things to write about. So, you know, a lot of my research is reading other books that other authors have written like for my book Houdini and Me, you know, there is like a dozen adult biographies of Harry Houdini. So I read every single one line by line and every time I found something that was interesting to me I would make a note of it on my file cards, of course. So for other books sometimes I just make stuff up, of course, but for like my series, The Genius Files, if any of you have read that series, like when there was an important scene I went there, you know, I went to San Francisco to go to the Golden Gate Bridge so I could write this scene because I knew it was really important. And I went to Wrigley Field in Chicago, and I went to the Spy Museum in Washington DC, and I went to a bunch of places to do my research, which is fun. It's fun to go to places and do stuff like that. So I like to learn new stuff especially like trivial facts and for me research is fun and it could be fun for you too as long as you pick a topic to write about that really interest you. If it doesn't interest you, the research isn't going to interest you either. Interestingly, when I was a kid, I hated to read, okay. I was not a reader as a child. I thought reading was boring and hard to do, you know, and my mother was worried about me and she used to buy me comic books and MAD magazines hoping it would get me interested in reading. Didn't really work and it wasn't until I was in about fourth grade or so that I suddenly became a big sports fan. Actually I have a picture, here's a picture of me, a picture of me in my Little League uniform when I was 12 years old. And I became big sports fan and suddenly I wanted to know everything about sports and, you know, when I was a kid there was no Internet, you couldn't just Google baseball or whatever, you had to go to the library and learn stuff. So I started reading books about my favorite athletes and there was a series I think it might still be in print, there's a series called Childhoods of Famous Americans. and I remember reading their Babe Ruth book and their Lou Gehrig book to learn about those players and that kind of a little bit got me into reading. And just as a side note as an adult professional writer, I wrote two of those Childhoods of Famous Americans books. I wrote their Jackie Robinson book and I wrote their Joe DiMaggio book. I used a pen name actually. It's the only time I've ever used a pen name. I used the name Herb Dunn, who was one of my old college buddies and I used to sneak his name into my books to force him to read them, but anyway, that's a different story. I started getting into sports and that got me into reading a little bit, but honestly it wasn't until I was in high school that I really became a reader and there were two, there were two authors that really inspired me in general and that was, one was Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. I started reading his stuff in high school and I liked it and it was the first time I felt like I was reading something where the author was speaking to me, you know. All the books we used to read in high school they were very beautifully written with beautiful sentences and great word pictures and all that stuff, but I found them boring. I didn't feel like the author was speaking to me. Vonnegut did that and even more than Vonnegut around the time I was in high school. I read the famous baseball book Ball Four by Jim Bouton, who is not even a writer, he was just a baseball player, and he wrote it in diary format. And I felt, oh, this author is having a conversation with me and it resonated with me and now in my books I try to have a conversation with my reader, and I think because I was not a big reader as a kid I think that's why I relate really well to kids who are reluctant readers today. Especially for kids who will get bored easily, you know, like I'm just going to say that you know how some authors will go on for page after page describing like the weather or somebody's face or a room? And as a former reluctant reader I know that's the stuff that bores kids. They just want to get to something happening and that's what I try to do with my books. Well, if you're a kid out there and you want to, and you like writing and you want to get better at it, I have one big suggestion for you, okay, it's really important. You ready for this? You've got to read this book, My Weird Writing Tips. It's not some boring writing book it's a my weird schoolbook so it's funny and silly and crazy, but it will help you with your writing. And I'll give you just one tip from the book, which is something that I have discovered and I never went to school to learn how to write. So I don't know the rules, but I kind of picked this up on my own and here's the trick. When you're writing something, okay, write your first draft and read it out loud, okay. And while you're reading it out loud here's the trick pretend to be somebody else. Pretend to be your best friend or your teacher or a complete stranger and while you're reading what you wrote almost through somebody else's eyes you can see the mistakes that you made and you could see how your writing could be smoother, better. And that's something that I do in my writing. I pretend that I'm somebody else, and I think it would work for anybody. So give that a shot if you if you like to write. Harry Houdini was a fascinating man. I never realized how famous he was. You know, back in the days before television, even before radio he was working and, you know, back in those days, you couldn't just go on Twitter and post something outrageous and have it go viral. You had to do amazing things to get people to pay attention to you and what he would do is he would like have himself handcuffed, okay, shackled, stuffed into a big wooden trunk, okay. The trunk is locked and sealed. Then they would take the trunk and throw it in a river, all right, and it would sink below the surface where thousands of people would be on hand just to watch and a minute would go by, two minutes will go by and everybody starting to freak out and think, oh, God, Houdini is about to die and then suddenly his head would pop up to the surface. He didn't have the shackles on him, the box was still locked and sealed and nobody could figure out how we could get out. It was just one of the truly amazing things that he used to do, and I think that was the most startling for me. I'm not a big magician or anything like that. I don't really do magic tricks, but to research my Houdini book I thought it would be cool in the first chapter to do a little magic trick or show you kids out there how to do a simple magic trick. So I found this one trick, which is pretty simple. Okay, you only need three things. You need a raw egg, okay, you need a little salt, and you need a smooth level surface, okay. So what you do is you tell your friends, hey, can you balance an egg on its end all by itself? And your friends will take the egg and they'll put it on the table and they'll try to balance it and the egg will topple over because it's really, really hard to do. And I say, well, you know, you couldn't do that but I can do it. And you kind of wave your arm in the air, you know, abracadabra or hocus pocus or some other kind of misdirection so they're watching, watching your hand and while you're doing that you take your other hand, all right, and you take a little salt, just a just a few grains of salt, and you put it on the table and you punch it together so that it forms a little base sort of like a T holds up a football for a kickoff, you know? And you very carefully put the egg down on the base of salt that you made and your friends can't see the salt and then you stand up the egg and you very quietly blow away the extra salt and the egg stands up by itself. And I stuck that in the first chapter of my book so that you kids out there would have a cool magic trick to do. Not quite Houdini quality magic, but still something cool to amaze your friends. I want to thank all the kids in the world out there for reading my books. It really means a lot to me. Hey, if you didn't read my books, I'd have to get a real job and who needs that? And I wanted to thank all the parents and teachers and librarians and grown-ups who share my books with the kids out there. And also just that if you want to find out more about me or about my books, you can go to my website which is just www.dangutman.com and read lots of books this year, but especially mine, okay. [ Music ]