ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, January 2, 1997 TAG: 9701020004
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: SHAWSVILLE
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
"I got this idea from this guy named Dennis," said Spencer McCrumb who, at age 9, is a professionally published author.
"Mom wrote it, but me and Laura came up with some ideas," he said, referring to his 8-year-old sister and their mother, award-winning writer Sharyn McCrumb.
Their collaboration appears in "Great Writers and Kids Write Mystery Stories" (Random House, $12.99 in trade paperback), along with others by Jonathan Kellerman and Scott Turow with their daughters, Max Allan Collins, Ed Gorman and their sons, Joan Lowery Nixon and her granddaughter, and seven other authors writing with young people. The McCrumb collaboration is the only threesome.
Actually, it should include David and Sharyn McCrumb's oldest daughter, Betsy, as well. Although she is away in her second year at Virginia Commonwealth University, Dennis - the young man who supplied the original story idea - was her boyfriend at one time.
Like the 12-year-old narrator of the story, "Typewriter Man," he worked at a nursing home on such tasks as delivering meal trays to those living there. One of the occupants constantly typed on a typewriter in his room, but nobody knew what he typed because there was never any paper in the machine.
The boy in the story, Spencer explained, "got tricky and put some paper in the typewriter. ... He only did once sentence, over and over, for somebody to come back." That somebody turns out to be the man's sister, who had been missing since they were children.
Their story takes off from there, as the young narrator becomes intrigued and tries to solve the mystery of her long-ago disappearance. Besides its detective qualities, the story also has some ghostly overtones including another resident of the home who converses with her husband and insists that he get a meal tray along with her, even though he died a decade ago. She was based on another Dennis-disclosed character.
Spencer can shoot off story ideas like sparks. "He has an imagination that won't quit," Sharyn McCrumb said, and has also proved adept with electronic games and other technologies. "He could work the VCR when he was 18 months old," she said.
He sometimes plays around with writing his own version of R.L. Stine's "Goosebumps" stories only "I put 'R.L. Spencer,'" he said. His mother said she would have to talk to him about copyright provisions.
"I'd rather be a singer," Laura said, but she has been writing for years. She keeps a journal, "which is what I did at her age," her mother said.
McCrumb recalls Spencer saying at age 4 what he wanted to be when he grew up: "A fireman who could arrest people."
At that time, Laura thought she wanted to be a ballerina.
"A ballerina with a gun!" declared Spencer.
But she has changed her mind now. "I don't like guns and I don't like ballerinas," she said.
It took them about two weeks to complete their story. "We thought about it for a while," Sharyn McCrumb said. "I'd write with them and we'd sit down and we'd read it out loud, because the narrator's a little boy about Spencer's age so he had to sound like Spencer."
"Laura came up with the sister and I came up with the rest," Spencer said.
"Which means I came up with most of the story, because the sister is in most of the story," Laura added.
Because of the time lapse between the time a book manuscript is completed and when it gets published, Spencer's and Laura's ages are listed as 7 and 6 years in the table of contents, two years younger than their current ages.
The book is a follow-up to "Great Writers and Kids Write Spooky Stories," published by Random House in 1995 with a different set of authors and kids.
Sharyn McCrumb has published 14 novels, the most recent being "The Rosewood Casket" for which she also did an abridged audio-book recording. "At least I knew all the names were pronounced correctly," she said.
Spencer and Laura had to work at their cursive writing for book-signings with their mother at stores in Roanoke, Wytheville and Christiansburg in recent weeks. However, the younger authors found autographing a lot less exciting than working on their story.
LENGTH: Medium: 81 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: PAUL DELLINGER/Staff. Author Sharyn McCrumb withby CNBcollaborators and children Spencer, 9 (left), and Laura, 8. They are
holding a copy of "Great Writers and Kids Write Mystery Stories" in
which their story appears. color.