Dan Gutman
Children’s Author
Join us for a chat with Dan Gutman, author of My Weird School series and The Genius Files. In total, he has written 165 books. Dan will share with us how he started on his author journey, tips he shares with kids about their own writing, and why being persistent is so important in writing.
Dan’s website www.dangutman.com
Facebook page www.facebook.com/pages/Dan-Gutman/60020139122?ref=ts
Dan was born in New York City and grew up in New Jersey where he graduated from Rutgers University with a degree in psychology. After spending a few unhappy years in graduate school, he decided that psychology was not for him and what he really wanted to do was to be a writer. This revelation led him to New York where he began writing humorous essays. He also wrote magazine articles and a few screenplays.
In 1982, Dan started a video games magazine called Video Games Player. A few years later the magazine went out of business, and he decided to take a gamble and become a full-time freelance writer. At first he wrote about computers, but gradually started tackling other topics. Eventually his writing appeared in Esquire, Newsweek, Science Digest, Writer’s Digest, USA Today, and the Village Voice. He was gaining confidence as a writer, but still hadn’t found the type of writing he really wanted to do.
In 1987, Dan decided to try writing about sports. This led to an article in Discover magazine and then to his first adult baseball book (“It Ain’t Cheatin’ If You Don’t Get Caught”). It sold pretty well, and he wrote several more books for adults. None of them were big sellers, but it was a lot more fun than writing about computers.
In 1992, when his son was two years old, he decided to try writing for children. Dan wrote a few non-fiction baseball books, then branched out to other sports. In 1994, I decided to give fiction a try. He sold the first novel he wrote (“They Came From Centerfield”), and after fifteen years, Dan figured out what his career should be – writing fiction for kids. For the first time, he felt he was doing something he was good at, something that was fun, creatively rewarding, and appreciated by an audience.
“I want reading my books to feel effortless. I’m trying to write stories that are so captivating that kids will look up after an hour and feel like they’d been watching a movie in their head.” –Dan Gutman
This Zoom session is planned to last 1 hour. You will be sent the Zoom link in the registration confirmation.
