01:17 PM EDT on Tuesday, September 28, 2004

BY RICK MASSIMO
Journal Kidsbeat Editor

Reading the Sky - Chapter 13

Reading the Sky - Chapter 12

Reading the Sky - Chapter 11

Reading the Sky - Chapter 10

Reading the Sky - Chapter 9

Reading the Sky - Chapter 8

Reading the Sky - Chapter 7

Reading the Sky - Chapter 6

Reading the Sky - Chapter 5

Reading the Sky - Chapter 4

Reading the Sky - Chapter 3

Reading the Sky - Chapter 2

Reading the Sky - Chapter 1

Avi shapes his good ideas with words of understanding

13-part story begins today

Avi grew up in New York, and when he was a kid he read serial fiction (long stories broken up into parts) in a newspaper called the New York Herald-Tribune. Now he's writing it.

Avi started wanting to be a writer in school, and he's been writing books since 1970. Last year, he won the Newbery Medal, one of the biggest awards there is for children's writers, for the book Crispin: The Cross of Lead.

He's written serials before Reading the Sky, and he says the hard part is keeping the story in people's minds for a week. "When you read a book, you just say 'Oh well, let me see what happens' and you turn the page. But here, you have an interval, so you have to energize your reader to make them want to come back and search you out."

Avi lives in Denver now, but he used to live in Providence (from 1985 to 1994), and some of his books are set there. "It's one of the most beautiful cities in the country," he says on the phone. "It's like a museum of American architecture. It has wonderful houses." He liked that there were lots of colleges in Providence, as well as "good restaurants, good bookstores, good theater, good movies -- it all makes for a good city."

He says he's written "57 books -- all misspelled."

Avi lives in Denver now, but he lived in Providence from 1985 to 1994, and some of his books take place in Rhode Island.

Avi has a problem similar to Jamie's dyslexia. It's called "symptoms of dyslexia," and he says it's not as bad as dyslexia, but it's "the kind of thing that your teachers despair of: 'Why are you so sloppy? I've pointed this out to you a hundred times.' . . .

"To make it worse, I had a twin sister who didn't have this. My parents knew (about Avi's problem) and they didn't tell me. They were embarrassed by it. We're more sympathetic [nowadays]; we have programs and so forth. In those days, they hid it. From everyone, including my teachers."

It was really frustrating, Avi says. "I didn't know I had it. I was just being told I was sloppy and I lacked initiative and I was lazy. And I just wanted to be a writer."

When he started writing books, his symptoms of dyslexia made it tough.

"I didn't see it. I would work on something and submit it, and the editor would say 'Look, if you want to be a writer you've got to learn to spell.' And I wouldn't know what they were talking about, and then I would look [at the story I'd written] and then I'd see it.

He had friends proofread his writing, and "I began to develop systems for noticing this stuff. For example, reading out loud, for some reason, I was able to pick up stuff."

When he started writing on a computer, that helped a lot. "Changing the font, changing the margins, changing the color of the paper -- things to trick the eyes. Coping stuff. And then it becomes not so much a problem anymore.

"But I still do it. Manuscripts still come back with editors' comments and I look and say 'There it is again.' "

Nowadays, "if you're driving with me, and I'm at the wheel and you say suddenly, 'make a right -- quick!' well, I might. I might go to the left, and I might go straight forward. . . . It's a kind of irritation and annoyance in my life -- at a different stage, more so. You learn to live with it."

I asked him whether Reading the Sky has a message for kids with dyslexia. He said, "well, I don't try to write it with a message. I like to think that if it's a good story, to the extent that [readers] develop some sympathy for the kid or some understanding of what this is, because it is all around them, if you want to call that a message, that's good enough for me. But it's cops and robbers, and it makes for a good story."

On Avi's Web site (www.avi-writer.com), someone asks him where he gets his ideas. He replies, "Everybody has ideas. The vital question is, what do you do with them? My rock musician sons shape their ideas into music. My sister takes her ideas and fashions them into poems. My brother uses his ideas to help him understand science. I take my ideas and turn them into stories. Now, what do you think you'll do with your ideas?"