Peters 4-6 Library - October- RL Stine

Click here for more fun at the official R.L. Stine website

Meet R.L. Stine

Robert Lawrence Stine was born on October 8, 1943 in Columbus, Ohio. When he was nine he found an old typewriter in his attic and decided to write jokes for all of his friends. Thus began his writing career. When he went off to college at Ohio State University he continued to write humor and even edited the school's humor magazine, The Sundial. After graduating he moved to New York City. While there, Stine worked as a writer and editor. He eventually landed a position at Scholastic, Inc., working on children's magazines. He created a humor magazine for kids, Bananas, in the mid-1970s, and later launched Maniac magazine for the company. Outside of his day job, Stine wrote humorous books for kids under the name "Jovial Bob Stine."

Why Did He Start Writing Horror?

Stine always thought of himself as a very fearful child and credits his mother for giving him a good scare when he was young by reading him the original Pinocchio. "The original Pinocchio is terrifying ... He goes to sleep with his feet on the stove and burns his feet off!", he once said in an interview. After losing his job at Scholastic he began to write full time. He was approached by an editor about tapping into an under represented genre, children's horror. He wrote Blind Date in 1986, Twisted in 1987, and The Baby-Sitter in 1989. Soon after, he launched his series Fear Street about the dark misadventures of students at Shadyside High School. Fear Street grew to include roughly 100 novels, eventually selling more than 80 million copies.

Goosebumps

In 1992, Stine started taking younger readers on their own thrill ride with the Goosebumps series. The first title, Welcome to Dead House, was quickly followed by more novels. At one point, Stine was writing one or two books each month. Each title featured the trademark elements of the series: Page-turning plots and daring cliffhangers at the end of each chapter. Goosebumps is now one of the best-selling children’s series of all-time—with more than 350 million English language books in print, plus an additional 50+ million international copies in print in 24 languages.

His Writing Style

“When I write, I always like to know the title first,” says Stine. “Then, I have to know the ending, because when I write it, I can figure out how to fool or surprise the reader.” Stine continued, “I just walk along and a title pops into my head. Like I'll think, ‘Little Shop of Hamsters’...hmmm… What could I do about hamsters?” He makes an outline of the entire book, chapter by chapter, before he really starts to write. When he’s done with the book, he gives the manuscript to his wife, who is an editor, to read. Some book ideas come from Stine’s real life. He explains, “One Halloween, my son, Matt, put on a green rubber Frankenstein mask and then had trouble pulling it off. That gave me the idea for The Haunted Mask.” Stine also says that although he does not base his characters on people he knows, he does sometimes use their names.

Author R.L. Stine talks about how the Goosebumps series began and how he switched his focus from writing humor to writing horror.

This video examines just how popular the Goosebumps series was its heyday and how it has made a triumphant return.