Freak the Mighty
Freak the Mighty
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Rodman Philbrick on Freak the Mighty
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A voice from the glove boxThe book began with two real boys Philbrick watched from his corner in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, not with any plan to write about them. He had declined an editor’s suggestion to try a mystery for kids, and was driving back to Maine when the project arrived uninvited.
this young voice suddenly comes into my head and the first thing he says is: I never had a brain until Freak came along and let me borrow his for a while, and that’s the truth, the whole truth. And even before he told me about it, I knew why the two kids called themselves Freak the Mighty.
That sentence settled everything. Because it was Max speaking, not Kevin, Philbrick knew at once he wasn’t writing a genre mystery.
Philbrick kept the real identities of both boys private at their families’ request, but he was specific about how closely the fictional Kevin tracked the boy he had known in life.
The idea for ‘Freak The Mighty’ was inspired by the personality of a real boy. Like Kevin he suffered from a disease that made him very short. Like Kevin he had a big friend who sometimes carried him around. And like Kevin the real boy was highly intelligent, and interested in both language and science. His mother, like The Fair Gwen, was and is quite beautiful. There the similarity ends — the plot of the story is pure fiction.
Only while preparing a career talk did Philbrick discover that the real origin of the book stretched back four decades. He had written a first novel at sixteen, never published, whose architecture he had entirely forgotten.
much of it came directly out of the novel I had written as a sixteen year old. That insistent kid voice in my head has helped me reinvent myself as a writer.
How he wrote it
Six weeks playing hooky from a suspense novelPhilbrick wrote the book in the summer of 1992 while technically under contract for an adult thriller. His plan each morning was five or six pages and then a fishing rod. The speed and ease of it surprised him enough that he expected rejection.
It wasn’t work -- it was playing; it was fun. When at the end of six weeks my narrator finally came up out of his cellar and said ‘the end,’ I figured I had indulged myself long enough and had better get back to work. I assumed Freak the Mighty was probably too weird and melodramatic to find a publisher.
Choosing to write in Max’s first-person voice was the structural bet the whole book depended on. At a Portsmouth Middle School visit, Philbrick described the discipline that commitment required: getting fully inside two very different boys, not just one.
Both boys have distinct personalities. If I’m writing in the first person, I have to believe these kids, put myself in their mind and know how they sound. That’s the key to it for me.
What gave Philbrick access to Max’s interior life was not research but a specific kind of autobiographical memory. His own seventh grade included playground fights, a father struggling with alcoholism, and days he was certain he had no friends. That history sharpened a principle he held about writing for young readers. [paraphrased from audio]
You can’t mess around with young readers -- you have to cut straight to the heart of the story. The character can be complex, the plot can have some surprises, but the emotions have to be clear. You have to tell the truth, or they’ll hate you.
The personal thread
The neighborhood he never stopped watchingLong before Philbrick thought of himself as a writer of children’s fiction, he was a neighbor. The friendship between the two boys registered as something worth attention years before he had any framework for turning it into a book.
Two kids from my neighborhood had an ‘outsider’ friendship whose loyalty was profound and served as the inspiration for the fictional ‘Freak the Mighty,’ my first book for young readers.
Finishing the book changed how Philbrick understood his own habits as an observer. He had never classified the two boys as source material while he was watching them, and that gap between what he saw and what he almost missed became a working principle.
I never considered these two kids people I would write a story about. I learned I really need to pay attention to people I know and everybody has an interesting story if you only listen to them. You can use that as a writer to inspire characters who are believable.
What he wants us to sit with
A cellar, a bully, and the truth about transformationPhilbrick describes Max’s arc, from hiding in the downstairs cellar at the start to narrating his own story at the end, as the book’s central argument. In the Newbery Honor interview he laid out what he believes that arc demonstrates. [paraphrased from audio]
He’s transformed from being this person who hid away in a cellar to somebody who’s sharing his story with the world. And so it’s, in addition to being about just friendship, it’s about a transformational kind of friendship that could change somebody’s life. And I firmly believe that’s possible.
The anti-bullying current in the novel is autobiographical in a specific and uncomfortable way. Philbrick was big enough in school that he was rarely targeted himself, which left him watching from the wrong side of a situation he never intervened in.
I have to plead guilty to being a message author. I witnessed a whole lot of bullying when I was a kid. Not so much for me because I was a big kid. But I was always ashamed that I never really spoke up and did anything about it because I was just as afraid of the bullies as they were. [paraphrased from audio]