Good Morning America
Chris Colfer, known for his role in "Glee," now out with his third book, "A Grimm Warning."
NEWS & MEDIA
Chris Colfer, known for his role in "Glee," now out with his third book, "A Grimm Warning."
Jimmy and Glee-star Chris Colfer face-off against Halle Berry and Steve Higgins in a game of charades
MARVEL PODCAST
"Glee" star, author and diehard X-Men fan Chris Colfer dropped by Marvel to speak with Blake about why he digs Jean Grey, his new book "The Land of Stories: A Grimm Warning" and lots more!
Starring on “Glee” means 16-hour workdays, so Chris Colfer says he writes his novels “at night, in between scenes, during setups and the entire weekend.” His fourth and latest book is “A Grimm Warning,” a Y.A. revival of classic fairy tales. The strangest writing spot he found was underneath the stage at the O2 Arena in London, where he retreated during a “Glee” tour event. One challenge: “It was difficult when there were 15,000 screaming 14-year-old girls two feet away.”
Kurt Hummel, the character that actor Chris Colfer plays on Glee, escapes from bullying at the TV show’s fictional high school by excelling as a show choir and music theater diva. The show mirrored Colfer’s real-life experience with bullying as a child, which became so brutal during middle school that his parents had to home-school him.
But long before Colfer, 24, became famous, he escaped from trauma into a literary world of make-believe. As a child, he was an avid reader of traditional fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm, as well as children’s fantasies like Peter Pan, The Chronicles of Narnia, Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Ozand the Harry Potter series. (He says he cried when he finished the series and spent months sleeping with a signed photo from J.K. Rowling under his pillow.)
“I hoped and prayed that a fairy godmother or magic book or wardrobe would take me off to a magic place where I could express my full potential,” Colfer says. “I loved, loved, loved fairy tales. I wanted desperately to fall into the book and meet those characters.”
“Glee” star Chris Colfer has been writing his novel, “The Land of Stories: The Wishing Spell,” since he was 10. That means he’s been writing it for over a decade. It didn’t all actually come together until more recently, but he can still recall characters and phrases he penned on that early draft of his novel, out Tuesday (July 17).
“I was obsessed with fairytales, and I was a very, very inquisitive kid, and I would ask my mom all kinds of questions. It all kind of formed a story in my head, and I really wanted to be a published author when I was 10, but I had a hard time writing a novel when I was 10,” Colfer told MTV News. “So I decided to wait until I was little bit older and then get it done.