Patrick Carman

My job as an author is to tell the story in the best way possible, to make it flow seamlessly and get the reader to keep turning the page.

There are so many ways to tell a story. With multiplatform books, we are reimagining what literacy can be.

I travel to a lot of schools, and I see firsthand that while we do still have a lot of traditional readers, we don't have as many as we used to. And we're missing an awful lot of kids entirely... Do I want to get rid of the Internet? Obviously, I don't want that because of all the amazing things it brings.

For kids, multitasking electronically is common. But they are totally focused. You can tell a good story, and they listen.

I'm a relic, and things were a lot different when I was fifteen and sixteen. There were no cell phones, no laptops... I learned to type on an actual typewriter.

I wasn't really conscious about 'The 39 Clues' movie when I wrote 'The Black Circle.'

I'm a visual thinker, thrill seeker, and I'm easily distracted. I see everything I'm writing, and I think it naturally affects the pace of things.

There's something really fun about being scared, and I guess that was at least part of why I wanted to film certain scenes from my new book, 'Skeleton Creek.'

Getting to the point where I was ready to write a book has been about a 20-year journey of being, really honestly, too afraid to try - which I think is pretty common for people who are trying to write a large piece of fiction.

Don't get me wrong - I love books! I just think a video has a bigger bang when it comes to a good, old-fashioned adrenaline rush.

When I was a kid, I used to love it when one of my friends would jump out from behind a door and try to scare me. I always did the same thing in response.

I remember all the way back in high school thinking about writing books. And, in fact, I've written a lot of stories. I've got dozens of stories I've written that no one's ever seen.