Children’s Authors: On Writing

In the second grade, I wrote a 21 page story, and this was not for a class assignment. This was just me at home writing this, I believe over the weekend. And then I show up to school and I’m showing it to my teacher, and she’s so graciously read the story. And I always joke about, my goodness, 21 pages of second grade handwriting probably was so hard to get through, but she read the story, gave me feedback, and said, wow, Renee, I think maybe you’re going to be a writer one day. And she was the first person who got me a notebook it just a regular spiral notebook and said, this is a journal. I want you to write your poems and your stories in here. If there’s anything you want to share with me, you can share with me, but you don’t have to. And so I started writing in journals in the second grade and wrote in journals since, and was always sharing my stories with my mom. 

I remember sitting on the kitchen floor reading out of my journal to her while she was cooking dinner. And so that was a teacher who I’m so thankful that she just kind of started to plant the seed in me that this is something I could maybe do. And then through middle school, I had a teacher who saw the gift in me Too and was like, you know, wrote a really good play for, I think it was for an assignment. And so he suggested that my play would be the spring production, that we would actually cast it and that I could be like co-director and put on this show for the whole community. And that was a turning point for me too, that, oh, my writing isn’t just for me. Up until then, I was really writing for myself and my journal didn’t share it a whole lot, but middle school was when I started speaking up and sharing my voice a little bit more and directing the play was so cool, and having his leadership to do that. 

And then by high school, it was a wrap. I completely identified as a writer, I often sing the praises of my high school teacher, Linda Christensen, who just was the best teacher that I’ve had. She really saw me. She was always encouraging me to push beyond my natural gift, but to actually think about craft and to make choices in my writing, not just do the easy thing. So when I was a senior in high school, she would have me do the lesson that she was teaching the freshman class, and then go to the freshman class and share and help her co-teach workshops. And so that was my first time thinking about poetry, teaching my voice, working with other folks. All of that was I think the groundwork of what became my career, which was for so many years I was writing and being a teaching artist and going into schools, working with young people and teaching them poetry. 

So I am very, very grateful that I had so many teachers that saw a gift in me, fan, the flame nurtured, the seed, watered, it kept me going. And there’s still a lot of them are still in my life to this day. I’ve been able to go back and thank them and give them signed books or visit the schools that they’re still teaching at. So I feel very fortunate that I’ve had not just my family support, but that I’ve had teachers who really saw a gift and taught outside of their curriculum. So even if it wasn’t something they were planning to teach, they saw something in me and they were willing to go above and beyond as educators. And I real, I’m so grateful for that. 

Okay. Well, I never really thought about the writing stuff that much. It was always drawing and illustrating. That was what I really enjoyed doing, but I never really thought about it as a career. It was just something that I did in all of my free time. And so I was a real academic kid. I wanted to make straight A’s. I made straight A’s. And art was just sort of a break from that.

So I don’t really think I started to see it as a career until I went to college, and I met my husband there. He wasn’t my husband then, but, you know, when we met, he was an art major. And that has been — of course it’s Tom Angleberger, also a writer. And but he was an art major, and I was an English major. And I was a miserable English major. And he was a very happy art major.

And so for a long time I worked as a freelance illustrator. And I started to send illustrations out to publishers, kind of hoping that I could illustrate other people’s work, and nobody would hire me for a job because, you know, I’m a good illustrator, but I’m not the greatest illustrator you’ve ever seen by a long shot. So, that was kind of disheartening, but then I read in a book somewhere that said you are more likely to be published if you both write and illustrate picture books.

So I thought okay, and that was in the back of my mind. And eventually I did get that big idea, my first big idea for a good picture book, which ended up being my first book, Sock Monkey Goes to Hollywood. And that was what got me into writing. It was almost more of a, you know, a necessity. If I’m going to be in this world, then I’m going to have to do both.

I sort of see the story that way, but it was sort of a long curvy path in some ways to get to that point.

History now is my passion. History makes me whole, I think it makes everyone whole. But when I was a kid, I hated history, it was called social studies. It was, it was dry and boring and it was flashcard history. And it used to be people like me would say I hated history because there was no one in the history books who looked like me. While that was true, I also think had there been people in the history who didn’t look like me who were interesting, I would have been interested in history.

You know no one connected the dots. No one, it was like you must learn this, it was in the past and that was the past. But no one ever helped me understand why the past was relevant in my present. And then you know now I’m always reminding kids that MLK said we are made by history and Baldwin said history is literally present in all that we do.

What changed for me was writing history. I came into publishing as a writer for hire, doing projects that other people wanted and I did this project and that project and after I did Mom I Want to Sing, turning Vy Higginsen’s gospel musical into a young adult novel, that editor Anne Wright said I’d like to do another book with you. And I said why, what should I do?  And she said well you know Jim Haskins did a book on One More River to Cross, biographies of I think ten or twelve black Americans.

She said why don’t you a book of profiles of black women and you know Jim Haskins was huge back then and I said why don’t you want Jim Haskins to do it and she said because you’re a woman, you’re a Black woman. And I did that book which turned out to be And Not Afraid to Dare. And that was a real turning point for me because I wrote about Bethune, Charlotte Forten Grimké, Mary Fields, Leontyne Price, Mother Hale. And everything I wrote about I learned in the writing, in the researching, in the doing.

And it was like an epiphany when I said my god, history is fascinating. Now I had a hint of that a few years earlier when I was doing book reviews for Black Enterprise Magazine. They only reviewed non-fiction. I’m reading about Adam Clayton Powell, I’m reading about the Civil War you know by these great historians who could also write very well. And I said oh my god, history is fascinating and it’s complicated and there are things that happened in history that if someone wrote into fiction you would say oh come on, that’s not realistic.

And so reading good non-fiction as an adult opened my eyes to how necessary history is and what it did was it inspired me to want to give to young people what I never had which is history coming alive. History engaging, history that not only gives you information but also hopefully leaves you with questions. Asking questions and wanting to know more and wondering about more.

One of the first things I remember is getting in trouble for taking a fistful of crayons and just drawing all over the walls and I think those crayon marks were there until I probably got back from college. So when did I first want to be a writer, I don’t know.

I loved comic books growing up and I think I really learned to draw by really copying comic books and I think… you know, I think that that’s the best training that there is, taking something that you like and copying it, whether it’s for art or for stories and then as you do that you can begin to add your own things to it and eventually it’ll become your own.

I think my encouragement to be able to write and to draw definitely came from my mom and my grandmother, I actually never knew my grandfather. But for them they knew that… they knew that this was… that writing and drawing could be a career and a very fulfilling career.

So they were really able to help me in that direction. I think I was lucky that throughout my school years, especially when I was young, I had teachers who really encouraged me, especially with the writing. That was really my favorite thing, creative writing.

And I think the best thing that you can do is to encourage and also not just to encourage things to be right or wrong, but just pure encouragement. I remember being… I remember writing a story in second or third grade or whatever, however old I was and I used the verb “to muck” in it.

I grew up actually on a horse farm and we used to muck out the stalls. And “muck” to me was as real a word as you could possibly have and the teacher said that, marked it wrong and said “muck” was not a word. And I remember taking that kind of hard and being a little bit, you know, I don’t know if it was mortified by it, but now thinking back on it, I don’t think there should be anything wrong with somebody inventing a word.

I think that that’s really a wonderful thing. So I think that the best kind of encouragement is really the purest form of encouragement to have somebody go their own way.

I think the moment that I felt like perhaps writing and illustrating could be a profession for me was when I was in college and I had a teacher who took me aside one day and she said, “Dave, you are a very good writer and I love all the cartoons in your notebooks.”  I was supposed to be taking notes, but I was drawing cartoons instead. But she said, you know, “Have you ever thought about writing children’s books?”  And I had never thought of that up until that very moment, but that sent me on the course that has led me to here.

My first book was called World War Won. Won was spelled W-O-N so it was not a historical book; it was fiction, but it was the very first children’s book that I had written. And I sent it into a contest. Many years ago there was a national contest for students, and if you won the contest, they would publish your book and so that was my introduction into publishing. At the age of 19 I won the contest for my age category and they published my book.

Having my book published at such an early age was an incredible boost to my self-esteem. And I was very lucky because I got to go and be sort of a traveling author and I got to go all over the state of Ohio where I grew up and speak at schools and talk to children.  And so I talked about my experience sitting out in the hallway as a child. And I talked about some of the comic book characters I created when I was a kid.

And I would always mention Captain Underpants, and it always brought the house down. And so at the end of all my speeches all the kids would raise their hand and they’d be like, “Are you ever going to make a book about Captain Underpants?” And so I was like hmm, maybe I should do that.

After that I made a few more picture books and then I started to try to get Captain Underpants published. And I made a dummy for the book and I sent it out. It got lots and lots of rejections, but finally it found a home at Scholastic.

I used to be a paperboy myself and so that was kind of a — sort of a meditation or almost a reflection on being a child and being very independent and having a job at the age of 12 and being on your own and riding your bike through the neighborhood when it’s all quiet.  It was a nice vision to explore.

Some of my books are serious. Most of them are funny. But I do have a serious side as well. And I did a lot of serious books, a lot of serious picture books — well, actually three or four — before Captain Underpants came along. But I remember one time I was doing a book signing and some children came up and they were — I was signing a book that I had done called God Bless the Gargoyles.

And the children said oh, we love this book because every time my mommy reads it, she cries. And I was like oh, I felt so bad. I was like oh, maybe I should start focusing on funny books because there are plenty of things in this world that make people cry. Maybe I’ll focus on funny books from now on.

Oh, this is a story that I wrote in the third grade and I illustrated it too and I still have it in my little treasure chest. And it was a horror story where horrible things happened to this little girl, but the big climactic moment came at the end where she would scream “Ahhhh!” And it was so funny because the teachers encouraged me to go to all the other classrooms and tell the story. I read my story and I was so hooked on being an author. I was so hooked on having that combination of me sharing something that I had written with an audience.

But, unfortunately, because I had never read any books written about people of color or by people of color, I didn’t actually know that it was a career. So, I quickly forgot about it and it wasn’t until I was a junior in college when I saw a book by Gayl Jones called Corregidora that I went, “Black women write books!” And I switched my major the very next day to English and began in earnest to become a writer and to fulfill the promise of The Last Scream.

For the longest time, I knew that I wanted to write children’s books. When I graduated from undergrad when people asked me what I wanted to do my answer was, ‘I want to work in a small-town library and write children’s books.’ Even though I knew that, I didn’t have the courage to embrace that dream for myself, and every time I would bring it up I would kind of dismiss it and laugh it, laugh it off right away with those questions of like, who am I to write a children’s book? And all of that. 

But one day I was driving around with my wife and she said, ‘You know, you act as if you failed at publishing a children’s book, but you’ve never actually finished an idea and sent it out in the world to even give yourself the opportunity to fail.’ 

So that was kind of the kick in the pants I needed because I was notorious for having stacks and stacks of like notebooks in my home with like half-baked ideas. That gave me the motivation I needed to finally pick an idea that felt closest to the finish line and just take it as far as I could. 

And at that time the idea for Let Me Finish was the one that felt the most complete. So, I was going to pick this one out of the pile and just see how far I could take it. 

It’s a book about a child who’s trying to find a quiet place to finish a book and these animals comes, and they keep spoiling the story. I think there was like maybe Harry Potter, the newest one was out and I was just like there’s something very beautiful about that communal experience of a book or a story where the danger is that people love it too much, and that they can’t hold, hold in their love of that story and they end up spoiling it for other people. 

It felt like a really fun entry point into the world of books, one that’s both fun to read with kids and also one that shows, in a fun way, reading and stories as a thing of value, right? That you are cherishing and that you want to carve out time and space for. So, fortunately when I was sent it out for consideration, I had had enough of a name within the industry from reviewing and writing about children’s books that people at least had a sense of who I was and saw some of my other writing, and that definitely, that definitely helped me get through the door.

I teach at Vermont College of Fine Arts and that’s actually also where I got my Master’s degree and so I really rely on that community for support, for intellectual engagement, for craft, you know, learning and growth. And it’s a really important part of my writing life to have people not just from VCFA but from across the children’s literature community as my friends.

When I meet with young writers I often am more focused on what they’re doing on the page, I talk to them about the importance of sticking with your writing, the importance of continuing and definitely the importance of believing in your own voice regardless of what other people might have to say about your work and that, you know, to try to recognize the difference between somebody who just wants to cut you down or wants to change what you’re trying to say versus somebody who is being critical of your work to try to help you improve, to try to help you grow, to try to help those very valuable things that you have that you want to express to the world to help you find ways to make that clearer to a reader.

So when I was nine or ten years old, I started reading the comics in the newspaper, and then started creating my own. And it was the same time in my life where I was starting to go through puberty and starting to, you know, develop like, some of my mental health issues. I became a really anxious kid, and one of the ways that I coped with that was to write in my diary. And I remember trying to sort of establish the writing voice in my diary, similar to what Ann M. Martin did in the Babysitters Club, where she would describe all of her friends, and she would talk about the sort of interplay between them, and how long that they had all known each other.

And so I tried to write my diary like that. Like I really was a writer who was describing everything. And that quickly fell by the wayside when I started illustrating my diary entries. And so I have almost a perfect record of my life illustrated between sixth grade and the end of my college years. I would go home every day after school, after work, after anything, and I would need to write it down, and I would need to draw pictures and illustrate it.

And a lot of times there were word balloons coming out of the characters mouths, and you know. So but I never considered myself a writer because I was like, “Well, nobody wants to read about someone’s real life. That’s not writing. That’s not storytelling.” I didn’t know. I thought, “I don’t have a very big imagination so there’s no way I will ever be a writer.” And I thought at the time, “Maybe if somebody else would write comics for me, I’ll be able to do this for a living.” But as you know, there also just kind of weren’t graphic novels back then.

It was not a format that was available to me, so I just kept sort of doing what I was doing, and eventually I figured out how to make it work as my job.

It was a great way to manage my anxiety and to process everything that had happened to me during the day. And it was almost like I couldn’t move on until I had written it down. An then I was able to close that page, and say, “Okay. That’s done. That’s what happened.” And it was also useful to refer back to couple of years later. I had a habit of re-reading my diaries, and oftentimes I would go back and go, “Oh, that’s what I was dealing with right now.”

I just didn’t realize it at the time. Or, “Oh, I didn’t know that this was something that was gonna change, or that I felt like I was stuck in that friend group forever, or that I was always gonna have this terrible teacher,” or whatever. But I don’t know. I gave myself the benefit of like, a rear view pretty early on in my life. And so I think that was something I was practicing again to aid me in my career in the future. And I still have those diaries. I still have access to them. They will never see the light of day, but they’re there for me, and I think that’s really valuable.

I started writing very young. I was probably about eight years old. And, you know, I was reading probably Judy Blume, one of those books, and I realized that books were words on paper and I had a lot to say, even at that age. Even though I was pretty quiet and introspective, but I still had, you know, obviously thoughts, feeling that I wanted to express.

And so I got paper, I got pencil and I started writing my own stories. And I was really overcome with this idea of being able to create something from nothing that was uniquely mine where anything could happen. And that still motivates me to this day. And even now I start my first drafts of my books on paper with pen and paper, just like I did when I was a kid. So I’ve been writing since I was about eight years old.

I shared mostly with my family, you know, my parents and my friends. I also did my own illustrations and I was convinced that, you know, one day one of the publishers would just call me and I would get all my books published just like Judy Blume, even though they were maybe like 20 pages on loose-leaf paper and stapled, you know.

And I would get cardboard and put cardboard on either side so it would be like a hard cover and I would tape the edges. So, yeah, it’s always been a part of who I am.

My experience in elementary school was not a very positive one. I was diagnosed very early with what they now call ADHD. Back in my day they called it extreme hyperactivity, but I was not fitting in very well in the classroom.  I was misbehaving a lot.  I was the class clown.  I was also diagnosed with dyslexia. So I had a lot of challenges growing up in school. I felt very alone in a lot of ways.

The experience of having all these challenges in the second grade was very isolating. In fact, literally isolating sometimes because my teacher would just, you know, point to the classroom door and say, “Mr. Pilkey, out,” and I’d have to go sit out in the hallway usually for several hours every day where I was separated from the classroom.

And so I didn’t want to be known as the kid who was always out in the hall, and I didn’t want to be known as the kid who couldn’t read very well.

So I focused on my drawing. That was one of the things I was very good at.  And I drew a lot of pictures and I eventually started making up my own stories and characters and pretty soon I was making comics.  And so I kind of became known as the storyteller in my classroom.

Socially in school I did pretty well.  I think most of the kids liked me, and I liked them as well.  I really — it was very difficult being sent out in the hallway, especially for me being isolated from my classmates so often. But I think being a friendly kid and being able to draw was kind of an icebreaker for me.

Wow. You know, what led me to become a poet and a writer? There’s a big story there in the sense that my parents are writers. My father wrote 16 books, these huge educational tomes that I just loathed having to read as a kid. My mother was an English teacher too — and they both studied children’s literature in grad school. And so from the time that I can remember, I was immersed in Eric Carle and Lucille Clifton and Eloise Greenfield and Shel Silverstein and Lee Bennett Hopkins and Nikki Giovanni and Langston Hughes and the list goes on and on.

And so I knew poetry like the back of my hand. And so what’s funny to me is that, you know, when I got to Virginia Tech and I ended up studying with Nikki Giovanni and having three, you know, dynamic, tense, incredibly academically challenging years with her, I knew I wanted to be a writer. In particular I knew I wanted to write poetry now. She was sort of my model for how to live, how to be a poet.

And so I come home after college and tell my dad and my mom, who were writers, that I want to be a poet. That’s going to be my job. And of course my dad laughed. He said that will never work. And my mother was very supportive, as mothers are. And I think that, you know, my father tells me now that he only said that to see if I was really serious, if I was really going to stick to it. And of course I did. And so I think if you can be trained or nurtured or natured or groomed to be a poet, I think I was. I think it was my parents.

I wanted to be a writer since I was seven, but I didn’t grow up in family where there were writers, I’m trying to write things, I want to grow up and be homeless. My family said you’re never going to make any money, are you crazy, this isn’t what we do, you need to get a job.

Okay that’s a nice hobby, what are you going to do to make some money and eventually get out of house? I wouldn’t tell the truth, I would say, I’m going to be a teacher, I’m going to be a lawyer, I’m going to be a hairdresser, whatever. But I knew I was going to be a writer.

I wrote all the time and I had teachers who encourage it. I had teachers who saw that brilliance is passionately recognized, that if someone has something they’re really passionate at, that’s their brilliance, and how do we grow that or help them to grow that?

I wrote all the time, I copied writers. I remember finding a collection of poems, American Negro poetry anthology and I read it through, I memorized all these poems. I started to write like Vaughn McKay and Arthur Lloyd and Langston Hughes, of course.

I just knew that I wanted to be a writer, and when my family realized I was serious, I would walk into the room, they would get quiet because they’re thinking, she’s going to write all about us and she’s writing and I’m thinking, you guys are not that interesting.

I couldn’t say that, I would get in trouble. I wanted to write about my community because I wanted to put the world I knew on the page. I had never read books about Brooklyn, I had never read books about people going from Brooklyn to South Carolina and back again until I read Zeely by Virginia Hamilton.

That was one of the first books that I thought, wow, not only is this person writing about stuff that I know but it’s a black woman writing about it. Black women do write books and it was a moment that turned me around, just like the moment with John Steptoe and reading Stevie.

I started discovering other writers like James Baldwin and Alex Walker and reading all these stories that were so populated with people who were familiar to me, really just made the fire to write burn even hotter.

I wrote all the time and the first novel was Last Summer with Maizon which is about two girls growing up in Brooklyn and one gets accepted to a predominantly white boarding school and what that means to leave your community and come back to your community.

What does it mean to the people who you’ve left? Then as I got braver as a writer, I started moving out of my community and feel in the first book, The Notebooks of Melon and Son was the first time I wrote from the point of view of a guy. I’d written all these books from the point of view of girls and I said, I know can do that.

Let me try this other thing and it took forever, it took about two and a half years and I just struggled and I couldn’t get his voice on the page. I asked my brothers and they didn’t remember what it was like to be that age. I watched guys on the playground and that wasn’t what I was going for.

I just did this thing where I said, if I had a son what would he do right? What would I want to be like? If I had a best friend that was a boy, what would he be like? If three boys were in a room, what would they talk about and just ask myself all these questions and finally started forming this kid.

The more I wrote him, the more I liked him and the more I tried to make them real. From there, I went on to write I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This, which was the first time I wrote from the point of view of a poor white girl, and then If You Come Softly and Miracle Boys with all guys in it, trying to write a book that didn’t have any girls in it.

My name is Deborah Hopkinson. I live near Portland, Oregon. I grew up in Massachusetts. And when I speak to students in schools, I always talk about how I started out at a reader. And I think it’s important for young people to get the sense that reading is important, and that’s what makes writers.

When I was little I loved to read. I always tell the story of how I would have those big textbooks — the history or the geography books — and I would have the novel I was reading hidden behind it. So that was what I wanted to do. And I either wanted to be a writer or a doctor, but my math skills weren’t quite there for science, although I love science now. I love to write about it.

Okay. Well, I never really thought about the writing stuff that much. It was always drawing and illustrating. That was what I really enjoyed doing, but I never really thought about it as a career. It was just something that I did in all of my free time. And so I was a real academic kid. I wanted to make straight A’s. I made straight A’s. And art was just sort of a break from that.

So I don’t really think I started to see it as a career until I went to college, and I met my husband there. He wasn’t my husband then, but, you know, when we met, he was an art major. And that has been — of course it’s Tom Angleberger, also a writer. And but he was an art major, and I was an English major. And I was a miserable English major. And he was a very happy art major.

And so for a long time I worked as a freelance illustrator. And I started to send illustrations out to publishers, kind of hoping that I could illustrate other people’s work, and nobody would hire me for a job because, you know, I’m a good illustrator, but I’m not the greatest illustrator you’ve ever seen by a long shot. So, that was kind of disheartening, but then I read in a book somewhere that said you are more likely to be published if you both write and illustrate picture books.

So I thought okay, and that was in the back of my mind. And eventually I did get that big idea, my first big idea for a good picture book, which ended up being my first book, Sock Monkey Goes to Hollywood. And that was what got me into writing. It was almost more of a, you know, a necessity. If I’m going to be in this world, then I’m going to have to do both.

I sort of see the story that way, but it was sort of a long curvy path in some ways to get to that point.

I grew up with just my mom most of the time, and my mom bought me all of my books at yard sales. It was very important that we have books, but we didn’t have a lot of money, and of course I didn’t care. I was just happy to have these books. And it ended up being fantastic for me, because I ended sort of with the previous generation or two’s picture books, which was like the best time for picture books.

So my childhood for all my clothes were from yard sales, too. You look back at like pictures of me. I look like a child of the mid-century. Like I’ve got pictures of me in sailor suits and saddle shoes. It’s absolutely ridiculous. I grew up in the eighties and early nineties, and due to budgetary constraints, was stuck in the past.

But it was really great. I had the best of kids’ books at my fingertips. And I grew up reading those books. She never took them off the bookshelf. I always returned to them. I always cared about that form. And I love storytelling. In school, any assignment, I would sort of warp into a writing assignment, so if we had to write a sentence for each spelling word, I would, you know, somehow choose to complicate it.

I would try to make all the sentences converge into a story, or I tried to write one complete sentence with all 20 words that was grammatically perfect with dependent clause upon dependent clause. I loved writing, creating stories and creating sentences.

But it wasn’t until seventh grade. I had a teacher, Ms. Knox, who told my parents at a parent-teacher conference that she thought I was going to be a writer and a liberal arts guy, and I had no idea what that even meant, the liberal arts guy part. But the writer part, I did. I had always wanted to be a writer, but my mom was a nurse. My dad was a doctor.

No writers in my family. Not even, really, I would say, a real passion for books in my family. But for me, it was there from the start. And I think confusing to everybody around me. So that was sort of the first time I heard somebody else say this thing, that I had kind of in my brain but buried pretty deep – I think the things you want most are oftentimes the things you are afraid to say.

So hearing somebody else who knew me really well say, I think he’s going to become a writer – you know, I was afraid that wasn’t even a real job, and if it was a real job, I definitely didn’t think I could get there. And I will never forget that. It was the first time that I said, okay, maybe I can work toward making this real.

I grew up in Illinois, in a small town, and when I was in elementary school, I was a really anxious kid. I was afraid of a lot of things, and writing really made me nervous because I was afraid of making mistakes, and I felt as if every time I wrote, I was going to be making mistakes. I also felt as if I just didn’t have an imagination, so when it was time to write, I would get very nervous.

My mom noticed that I was having trouble, and so she really encouraged me. She got me a little notebook, and she told me to keep a record of the things that we saw when we were going on vacation, and that seemed like a really simple kind of task. So I was able to do it, and what I found was that I really enjoyed recording the things that I saw.

That little experience of keeping that notebook made me then want to write a little more, so my mother gave me a diary, and that diary really encouraged me to write down the things that happened to me in my life. And even though I was making mistakes in that diary, what I was writing was meaningful to me, so it was really motivating.

Writing in those little journals absolutely changed my life, and I didn’t think at the time that I would become a writer because I had never met a writer. I lived in a small town that didn’t even have a bookstore, so becoming a writer wasn’t an attainable goal in my mind. However, I always wrote when I needed to, so whenever I felt something big, whether it was sad or happy, I wanted to write it — about it.

I wanted to record it, and I think that that motivation never left. So as I grew older, in high school, I used my journal to process all the crazy things that were happening to me emotionally, and as an adult, I still keep a journal.

Patricia: We get our ideas for our books from many different places — from childhood experiences…when our children were growing up, we have incidents that happened that have given us ideas for books like Messy Bessie. We have the idea that comes out of history — our own lived history plus the history of the past.

So we get them from just comments sometimes, just overhear a comment and say, “Oh, wow! That sounds like a good book.” You know, tell the truth no matter how much it hurts other people and out of that came the honest to goodness truth, so books come from all kinds of places.

Frederick: I guess we have said over and over that ideas are two different natures. One is the instant idea that just seems to come to you and it really doesn’t take any time whatsoever. And the other type of idea is one that you work on and work on and work on.

Patricia: We’ve even named them — the Athenian idea that kind of pops right into your head like the birth of Athena, and the mustard seed idea that kind of grows slowly over time and over a period. So, out of our ideas has even come stories.

Patricia: The reason why I will write a historical fiction piece is because I can’t put all of the facts together to make the story non-fiction, so I’ll fictionalize that part that I’m unable to make all the hinges fit.

I’ll use Runaway Home as an example of how I used non-fiction material to create a fictional book and why it is realistic. We believe, in our family, that an ancestor of ours is an Apache Indian. The part of Alabama that my family lived in is right at Pensacola, where Alabama and Florida and Georgia come together. The train tracks went right through there.

The Crossley’s found and raised an Indian, they said, and his name was Abraham. They never said who or where he came from, but that he was found — this is the story. Well, I have visited all over everywhere trying to… find out if there’s any documentation where he might have come from.

We were unable to find anything, but in the process, I learned an awful lot about the Apache Indians. So I wrote a non-fiction book about the Apaches in the True Book Series. And then I wrote a historical fiction book about my ancestor and I called it Runaway Home and I used all the information that I had learned about the removal of the Apaches from the Southwest into Pensacola, Florida, and how they did put the kids… Some of the kids would runaway from the train when they would stop to allow the men and women to relieve themselves.

I think there’s a lot of power in sharing your own story because all of our stories are slightly different. They’re unique to us. They’re all real and true, but sometimes we don’t remember that. Sometimes we think, “Well, you’re so different than me, and you see the world differently than I do.”  But I always come back to this, that the more personal your stories are, the more universal they end up being. It’Figuris a total paradox, but I get so specific in my stories.

And then people come up to me and they say, “This is exactly like my life.” When I wrote Sisters, my mom expressed a little bit of concern that readers would think our family was strange and that we were weirdo’s. And I was like, “Mom, they’re not gonna see you. They’re not gonna see me. They’re not gonna see your siblings. All they’re gonna see is themselves.” And I’ve never heard any feedback to the contrary.

It’s just, “You understand. Somehow you captured my relationship with my sister on the page,” and, “I’m more like Amara, and this one’s more like Raina.” It’s incredible. So when kids share their stories with each other it just opens that conversation. It opens that door, and I encourage it, and I love seeing it, and I love those like, little private whispered conversations that I get to have with my readers. “Me too, you know. I am just like this.” It’s really touching when that happens.

So my writing process is, I have a very busy life, I have kids and a job, and I write books. So what I do is I carry a notebook with me at all times and I write down everything in my notebook that comes to me, every idea that I have that I think might be something I write it in the book. I have a writing rule which is a rule I take from my dog, which is that my dog, I have to back up and now explain this.

My dog was one of those dogs that anytime something fell on the floor, she would eat it first and figure out what it was later. So my writing rule is write it down first, figure out if you’re going to use it later. Because if you edit yourself or you say to yourself, “That’s not a good idea,” then you don’t end with any material. Anytime someone says something funny or something strikes me funny or interesting, I put it in the notebook and then later I flip through and I see what I have there.

And sometimes I’ll find little crumbs that I can maybe do something with. And then I’ll go to my computer and start to write.

One of the most frequently asked questions of an author is where you get ideas. I used to think maybe you could get them in the Yellow Pages, I tried that, though they’re not there. That’s really not the problem for professional writers that it seems to be, ideas are simply anywhere.

The problem is figuring what to do with the idea after you get it, that’s where the trouble begins. I will sometimes get an idea for a book and it will take me years to find a way to deal with it. For example, “The Whipping Boy” which is a short novel that won the Newbery, I spent 10 years off on the wrong track.

I had the idea but I had the wrong concept for it and it just wouldn’t go, wouldn’t work with what I was doing. And I tried it over and over again for 10 years and finally… I should mention here that if you’re not persistent as a writer, if you don’t keep trying, you’ll never get anything finished because there are always problems.

I just felt this was a problem that I would eventually solve, which is true. So I had to go Europe and I made up my mind when I came back, I would try it once more time and if it didn’t work out, I would burn every manuscript to get it out of my system.

But this time I just let the story write itself instead of trying to impose myself on the story, let it write itself. And out came The Whipping Boy that those of you who have read it, read. That’s pretty much the story of ideas. Some ideas just don’t work and some do.

I never get a good idea when I’m sitting at my desk, and I always tell that to students when I visit schools because there they are, sitting at their desks every day, expected to come up with great ideas. I get ideas when I’m in the world. I carry my writer’s notebook with me everywhere I go, to the grocery store, to the movies, to the park, to my friend’s house. I would never leave home without my writer’s notebook.

And I’m constantly finding things that interest me, that surprise me, that move me, and I do not wait to come home to write. I stop and write those things down because by the time you come home you will be thinking about all kinds of things. So I show students my writer’s notebook. I make sure to read from my writer’s notebook, the kinds of things that I’m writing down, show them a rough draft of a poem that I’ve put in that writer’s notebook, and then how I’ve made it into something different.

With stories, I get a lot of ideas in the library. I read a lot in the library, and reading other books will give me an idea for a book. So, many of my story ideas have come from the world around me, and not my own imagination, and I think that’s an important message to students too because they often think that a writer is just born with all of these great ideas ready to go, and that’s just not true. You need constant inspiration.

You do need to be out looking, and you need to be thinking like a writer, and that’s one of the fun things about it, to carry that little notebook in your pocket and act like a spy and imagine that you’re out there trying to discover the next great idea. It’s a really fun way of being in the world. You can never be bored while you’re looking for something exciting to happen.

I think if you’re getting a negative or a disinterested response from a student because they don’t want to do research on something, they haven’t found the topic that they’re interested in. Because kids are natural truth seekers, natural information seekers. They want to learn. They are sponges. That is what they are here for. Kids ask questions.

I think if you’re getting sort of a hesitant response, it’s just because they haven’t hit on what they really want to learn about. So what I would do is ask them what their topic is and sort of gauge what they’re interested in-what their interest is in that and then ask them to name a few other things that they’ve always wanted to learn about.

What are you really curious about? What have you always wanted to know about? Pick a different topic if this one isn’t doing it for you. So, again, it’s giving them the opportunity to express themselves and listening, and not to be too stuck in the confines of, well, we have to get this assignment done, and we don’t have time for you to change your mind.

Because in the long run it’s going to take a lot less time if they’re really jazzed about something that they want to learn about. And maybe the first thing that they said out of their mouth when it was time for everyone to pick a topic wasn’t something that they really wanted to learn about. I think the first thing to do if they’re stuck or acting bored or they don’t want to do it is to say, “Well, okay, if you could change your topic, then what do you really want to learn about instead?”

Well, another way I like to describe it is maybe you remember the science experiment that kids sometimes do in elementary school where you make a solution and you tie a string to a pencil and you dip it in the solution and crystals form around it. For me most stories start with a couple little ideas and I’m not clear at all about how those ideas will go together.

But once you put them there, your brain starts thinking about them and ideas start to form around them. I know that it’s important I guess for kids to learn how to do outlines. But I never do outlines, I just start accumulating stuff and then after I’ve accumulated it starts to take a shape and I start taking away things that don’t need to be there and it’s not really like a straightforward outline process at all, it’s much more organic kind of thing.

But it seems to me that whatever you put in your mind, your mind starts collecting things that are related to that.

It wasn’t until I was grown and had children of my own that I realized, “Oh, there’s probably just a treasure trove of stories in my own family that I’ve never looked into.”

Some young people may come to that much sooner than I did, and they may well be interested in, “Grandma,” or, “Grandpa, tell me about when you were young.” “How was it different in whatever country you lived in?” And if that’s the case, wonderful. Write them down. Oftentimes, it’s grandma and grandpa, or even your parents who can’t write in English, or can’t speak in English, and can’t share those stories in the way that you can. You can help, even if it’s only writing down a story or two of your grandparents that you then just show to the rest of your family.

First of all, let me say that I keep a name book, in fact I have more then one. And anytime I find an interesting name I put it in my name book because when you’re writing, you need to name a lot of characters and names resonate, you have to get the right name.

I was writing a book called Chauncey and the Grand Rascal, a novel. And I had a liar’s contest in the story. And originally McBroom was about three-quarters of the page long. I thought, that’s a big waste, that’s too good an idea. I ripped it out of that novel, put it aside.

I finished the novel, then I went back and to see what I could do with this idea, this very rich farm, a one acre farm that was 88 acres deep. And I had a story of about 15 pages, so that was the first McBroom and the question is, where did I get the name?

McBroom, a farmer, McBroom was the right name. It was in my name book otherwise I would never have found it. Now I’ve heard there are families named McBroom’s, there are enough of them that they have their own little mini-convention every so often. I often will hear from McBroom’s, they’re pleased as can be to be immortalized in those 10 McBroom stories.

I would have to say all of my books are probably based on family stories. But remember, I was raised in a household where the old members of my family lived with us. And there was something wonderful about sitting at their knee and listening to how things were. And now it’s interesting — that’s what I’ve become in my family. I’m the one who now tells them how things were. It gave us a sense of our place. It gave us a sense of our birth order. It gave us a sense that we were loved long before we were ever born.

When I wake up in the morning I try to make myself idea hungry. I tell myself to watch. Idea hungry means that all around you there’s something that’s happening. In my external world there’s interesting things happening. Being here in this chair with Don, being here is an interesting — it’s something that’s an idea. So later on I’ll write it down on a little piece of paper. It could be a napkin. I usually travel with a notebook, a little tiny notebook and a little tiny sketchbook.

So at the end of the day — well I also pay attention to what’s going on internally because it’s not all just external. It’s also internal, internal meaning whatever it is that makes me feel something like happy or sad or interested, I know that those are seeds for ideas or seeds for stories and so I’ll just take a quick note, you know? I won’t write a long journal about it but I’ll take a quick note.

And then when I get home I tear out my little notes and my drawings and I throw them in the idea box.

And then how does the idea box work?

Okay, well first of all, it’s really important for you to know that these are not full grown, blown stories. They’re just bits and pieces of information and so what I do, I believe in playing, playing, you know, just letting my imagination run so I’ll take out all these pieces of paper. I like to work — I don’t have a desk. I work in a bed. I love to lie down in a bed with my feet up and just put all the little pieces of paper around me and I have my little things, you know?

Usually there’s a dog at the end or a bird. You know, I have little friends that are with me and then I just relax and I just forget about what I’m picking up. I’ll look at it and there will be something on there like the napping house. That was — I wrote that down one time because it was what I called my mother’s house when I took our son over to take a nap there so I had just thrown that in.

You know, that is interesting. I’m going to keep that and so I’ll be cross referencing all these things and I’m not saying that right then and there a story comes up but what it does, it shows me what interests me and I begin the think and contemplate that, you know? And then as the days go by and the weeks and the months and the years, you know, the stories come. They come.

And I do suggest that children do this because, you know, there’s so much structure. You’ve got to do your grammar correctly and you have to be able to spell and by the way, write a story and so I’m always telling children forget about the spelling and grammar right now. Just get the story down first and you can come back and — that’s where your teachers really help you, you know, to help you get to the mechanics of writing.

Generally, I get most of my ideas when I’m taking walks, and I sort through a lot of — usually my emotional anxiety and stuff. I sort through all that and then I start thinking about books and I start thinking about ideas and stuff. And occasionally I’ll get a good idea, and when I get back home, I put it on a piece of paper so that I don’t forget it because you do forget good ideas all the time.

You think this is the greatest idea ever. How could I possibly forget this? And then a day later it’s gone. So I write them down and I put them in a drawer. And so when I’m having these periods of not feeling very creative, but I’m ready to start a new project, I just open up that drawer and I start shoving stuff together. Maybe three ideas get smooshed together.

For example, in my book Bee-Wigged I had two slips of paper. One slip of paper said giant bee trying to make friends. Another slip of paper said wig or wiglet. I knew I wanted to [unint.] — I wanted to do a book about wigs or small wigs. I put those two together and ta-da. So, that’s kind of how I get started. Once I’ve got the idea, it’s all about getting the story perfect first.

I think sometimes the tricky thing about being a writer, at least for me, is not coming up with ideas, but, first of all, knowing when something is an idea, you know, knowing that that twinge or that bit of excitement that can be momentary is actually, oh, that’s the feeling of an idea. I think a lot of us get ideas all the time and we just don’t realize that they’re ideas.

And then the other thing is to know which ideas are good enough to spend time on. And that can be a tricky thing and an important thing for a writer to figure out. I spend a lot of time thinking about the idea for a story before I begin writing it, so I’ll be mulling it over for weeks, sometimes months, sometimes years before I start setting things down.

I’ll be writing actual sentences in my head and working them over and over, and I have a pretty good memory. Sometimes I’ll write them down or I’ll record myself speaking it. But a lot of times I’ll just be working it in my head. I keep a notebook with observations, things I hear, little things, but a sentence that could be part of a story, I can hold on to that, and it sort of tumbles around in my brain until it becomes the thing I want it to be.

And when I get enough of those sentences, it’s time to sit down and start writing, and that can be a very long time after the origin of that idea.

So, I do write in many different genres and for many different ages. And I don’t know what I’m going to do next because it’s not the genre or the age or the form that drives me; it’s the story. So if I find a story that has grabbed hold of me and I find engaging and I want to spend a lot of time with, that sort of steers who is the story for. Who wants to know about this in addition to me? Is it a story for younger kids, is it a story for older kids?

I don’t really worry about who the audience is before I know what the story is. So that’s why I don’t know if the next idea will be a picture book or a teen novel or a long form non-fiction because I might not know what the story is yet. It’s always about the story. Always. It’s never about form and function and structure for me.

I usually choose my topics as sort or a mysterious combination of serendipity, instinct, and conscious thought. I think it all sort of works together. I’m always listening to the world around me and trying to just pick up on things. I find that so often in my life — I don’t use the word coincidence anymore, because so often in my life someone will say something or I will then see something in successions of three and four and five times within the course of a couple of weeks that will be pointing me clearly in one direction.

It’s like the universe is speaking. It’s that same kind of phenomenon when you learn a new word and then you hear it all the time. That’s what happens with me and stories. I’ll come across something or I’ll hear someone mention something or I’ll have a thought, and then it’ll repeat itself over the next span of some kind of time.

I’ll think, okay, well, then that’s the next thing I need to be thinking about. And the genre often changes. So Almost Astronauts started out as a picture book and became long form non-fiction. And the book that I’m working on right now called Courage Has No Color started out as a picture book and is now becoming a longer form non-fiction like Almost Astronauts because the story demanded it.

Well, I do varying amounts of research depending on the story and what’s required of it. But I do take my responsibility to young readers very seriously. If I’m writing a true story, I need to be as wholly accurate as humanly possible.

That’s a tricky thing to do because I tell kids all the time — don’t forget, anytime you read anything, whether it’s a newspaper article or you hear a news report from an anchor person or your read it in a book or an encyclopedia, every single thing that you read has been written by a human being, and human beings see the world through their own unique set of eyes and set of thoughts.

So, my responsibility is sort of a mixture of recognizing that I’m a human being and I see the world through my own eyes, and then being as careful as I can possibly be to make sure that I do the best research that I can and document everything, and lay all of that fact matter out in the back of the book so that kids and teachers and librarians can go and read something further if they want and maybe add their own sense of what happened in a story or what happened to a person by extending the reading experience, seeing what I looked at and having some thoughts about it for themselves.

So, the research process for me is pretty deep and extensive. Anytime I can do primary source research I do, especially when I’m writing about people who are alive. That’s fascinating, because then you’re also getting their sense of what their life was like, which isn’t factual either. So you have to sort of factor it all in and you really get to know a person and you learn how they walk and talk and what they smell like and what their face looks like when they’re happy. All of those things inform your writing in a way that if you were just researching them on paper you wouldn’t get to know, you wouldn’t get to learn about.

So when I visit schools, I always give kids the advice to write things down, whether that’s in a diary, whether that’s an essay, a play, a song, anything at all. Just find a way to get your feelings out, your ideas out onto the page, or onto a recorded format. It doesn’t matter. But that’s so useful, and you’ll have access to it in the future. And, you know, I know a lot of anxious kids, and I know that sometimes people are waiting for permission to do something like that. 

They don’t know if it’s okay. They don’t know if like, that’s what they should do with their spare time, but why not? You know, all it takes is a paper and pencil in order to do that.

I’m not as prolific a writer as I am an illustrator, but when I write my own stories, it happens the same way. Pictures come into my head, and the pictures dictate the words, rather than the other way around. And when I’m illustrating a story by another author, of course, the author’s words put the pictures in my head. So, it’s all the same process. It just gets jumbled around a little bit, whether or not you do pictures first or the words first. When I write, it’s actually a combination of the two. I usually do some drawings first to get my word thoughts going. And then I put the words to it.

Most of the stories that I write come out of experiences that I’ve had with my husband Ted – we’ve traveled all over the world. We usually go to places where there’s wildlife, because that’s our main interest. And so What’s the Matter, Habibi? is a story about a camel and a camel driver. That came from my experiences with camels and camel drivers in Morocco and Egypt. And a book called Chubbo’s Pool is about a selfish hippopotamus that won’t share his pool with anybody else, and that was a real hippopotamus that lived in the river outside a camp we stayed at in Africa, who would not share his pool with any of the other animals, and he wouldn’t share it with us, either. And so that’s where my stories usually come from.

Cat Count and Animal Snackers came out of the blue. Like Doreen says, “click, clack, moo,” were just three words that popped into her head. I am really inarticulate when it comes to talking about where this ability comes from or where these ideas come from. I truly believe it is simply the way you’re wired. You don’t have any choice – it’s not up to you. You just do it, because it’s what you do. I think most artists and writers would agree with me on that.

I’m never without a notebook. I have one here. I wear cargo pants a lot, so it’s easier for me to slip a notebook in. I always carry a notebook and at least two pens, in case one runs out of ink. I’m a compulsive note taker.

As it happens, last night I couldn’t sleep. I woke up at 3:15, and I went into the bathroom of our hotel room so as not to wake my wife. I turned on the light and put the seat down on the toilet, sat down, and I wrote a poem of three verses that’s for New Kid Number Five> that I’m working on right now - a book that has no other title yet. It’s about two dragons a little too macho for their own good. What happens when dragons meet and neither of them likes the other? I wrote that last night between three and five in the morning. So, I’m always writing.

I do most of my finish work at home. I’ve learned to write everywhere. I write in hotels. I write in restaurants. I write on airplanes. But sooner or later, I have to get it down so it’s legible and do the fine work, the tweaking. I do that at home. I work on a computer, so I have to do that.

But I have taken so many notes over the years. I have a stack of notebooks now that, if you piled them up, they would probably go way past the ceiling. I’ve been doing it for about 40 years, and I have a couple of drawers in a fire-resistant safe filled with them. I have this fear that I’ll lose them, and I still haven’t culled them. There are ideas I haven’t touched yet from 30 or 40 years ago. I’m going to have to cull them to do this next book, because I’m running out of new ideas.

Day one of us writing, very important to Lin is to have the outline buttoned down. And so we talk through the possibilities. And if a story is good, the ideas come like, like a volcano. If the idea is not good, you are stumped and then we throw it out. I mean literally just crumple it and throw it in the garbage.

We get an outline, we read every day what the outline is, where we’re going to do go that day in that chapter or in that section. What I have found most surprising thing, is you can have the most detail in an outline and the book will take you where it wants to go.

And I am, I never know when it’s going to happen, just we’re off to the left of the story.

So you get a phrase like let’s put a pin in that one for a minute, have you ever heard me say that? Or just let’s just hold off on that one and explore some other ideas. You know there are ideas, one thing you can do is go down the path of the bad idea and you see where it takes you which is usually nowhere or somewhere you don’t want to go.

Or if you can feel it coming you don’t have to say that is the worst idea I’ve ever heard and what were you thinking? You just say hold that for a minute and let’s explore some other ideas, I think we do that a lot with each other.

We do that a lot. And an individual word sometimes, snorting instead of sniffling, instead of whimpering. To find the word that actually cradles the emotion that alien is having at the moment is extraordinary. I mean you know it, as soon as you hear it, it clicks into place like a puzzle.

One thing we do also is we start every writing session by going back to what we wrote the day before.

And I’m just going to jump in, Lin reads out loud the first, the last half chapter that we have written to get into the flow, what’s happening, where it’s going. I love it. You never outgrow the need to be read to, let me just say that.

And you hear it out loud, you hear it out loud so, and that’s when you can do the fine tuning where you, where you know in that first draft when you’re kind of, if I can use the word barfing, can I use the word barfing?

If you want to.

Barfing, you’re kind of barfing up the story. And so you’re not really worried so much about individual word choice. Once you have the scene down and you know where the action is and where the emotions are then the next day you can go back and polish up the word choice a little bit.

Everything happens through my ear. My whole life, I learn through my ears, I am affected through my ear more than my eye. I can’t always visualize things but I can, I hear it and it, it couples up with whatever is happening at the moment so nicely. Just you hear that, it’s attached.

My writing process always starts with a character and usually I’ll get a thought of a character or an idea of a character in my head. So in Hello Universe I had an image of a little boy named Virgil who was very quiet and shy and sensitive and I knew it was important to me to write a boy character who has those traits because we’re seeing a lot more very vocal and present girl characters, which is important, but it’s also important on the flipside to see sensitive boys.

He kind of came to me fully formed and I will usually see the character in a situation and I’ll start wondering why are they in that situation? What got them there?  And in Virgil’s case I saw this boy who was trapped in a dark place and he’s calling for help and then there’s a girl who is above ground and she’s not helping him.

So then I have to say why isn’t she helping him?  She seems perfectly nice. And then I realize it’s because she can’t hear him and that’s how Valencia came to be. And everything grows out from there. And then once I feel like I have kind of like a three-dimensional idea, I spend a lot of time in my head thinking about it, before I ever write it down.

And once I feel like I have that idea I get a notebook and I write it down and put pen to paper. And it kind of builds out from there. I’ll do a summary and then I’ll do a synopsis and then I’ll do a very fluid chapter outline that I follow and then I’ll just you know start writing.

So I usually have a road map, but sometimes it changes. But that’s my process. I also do a lot of doodling and you know I’ll use different colored pens. I feel like it’s important for me. I feel strongly about writing long hand because I feel like the more tactile senses are involved, kind of the more invested you are.

So I’ll use different colored pens so I have the tactile than I have the visual, I have the smell of the notebook and the smell of the ink and I love that whole process. And then once that’s done, I sit down and that’s whenever I type it up in a word doc and then send it off to my editor and then that starts the editorial process.

I love to write and I want kids to have that joy and passion. I used to go to schools and we’d talk about writing and I realized that kids did not know where to begin. I understand that. It’s a difficult process, especially when you’re learning about things like capitalization and punctuation and paragraph breaks and the conventions.

That’s something that is really emphasized in school, as it should be. What happens is that I’ve discovered that young writers get tangled up in the conventions and they forget about that pure joy of writing — that imaginative process that it doesn’t matter if you make a mistake. Let’s go back and fix it. It’s messy and it’s fun.

I have come up with a workshop that I use successfully. It’s always so great. I actually tell the kids that it’s my super-secret, splendiferous formula. You try to say that three times fast. It’s good.

Nothing like a bunch of fourth graders going “super-secret splendiferous formula.” It’s pretty funny. It’s basically the word “claps.” C-L-A-P-S. Every letter in the word claps stands for something. Every story, your story mind, the library, if it’s fiction, absolutely has to have…

“C” of course is character, and that’s the main character. I always ask myself when I use “claps,” and I ask kids when they use “claps,” two questions about the main character. One, of course, you need a name, but then the first question I ask is, “What does your character look like?”

Something extraordinary. If your character is a duck, don’t tell me that it has webbed feet and a bill. We know that. Tell me something different. Is it pink? Does it wear a boa? Those sorts of things. Tell me something extraordinary, noteworthy about your character — one or two things.

The second question I ask about “claps,” about the letter “C” is, “How does your character act most of the time?” Everyone has a predominate characteristic. “How does your character act? Are they shy? Are they silly? Are they funny?” Second graders usually tell me that they’re silly, which I love. Makes for a good character.

Now you’ve got “C.” You move on to “L.” “L” stands for location. Just another word for setting. Where does our story take place? I also ask my young reader, or my young writers, to keep that place small. It just makes it easier for them.

Instead of telling me that a story takes place in New York City — make it smaller. Find me a place in New York City — the Empire State Building or Statue of Liberty. Think about what that place looks like and think about how that place sounds and what you would smell. Bring in all those senses.

The letter “A” stands for action. I think it’s the most difficult letter in that “claps” formula. “A” stands for action and what it means is, “What is your character doing at the beginning of the story?” You and I know that when you open up a book, that first page, that first paragraph, the first chapter you see the character doing something typical, ordinary — from their ordinary, everyday life. It’s not exciting yet.

I ask them, “What is our duck doing at the Statue of Liberty?” Something simple. Visiting, vacationing, taking photographs. That’s the sort of answer I’m looking for. Then you move to “P” and “P,” of course, is the problem. Now something comes along to change the character’s day or their life — something that interrupts their photo-taking at the Statue of Liberty.

I also remind kids to give me a problem that my character can solve. They always love this and, “It’s a great problem,” I will say. They go, “Well, T-Rex comes along and steps on the duck.” You go, “Well, that’s really great. It’s a problem. It’s also the end of the story. So I need something that you can solve.”

Then we move on to “S.” With the “S,” I put a one, two and three because writers actually call this “the magic of three.” What you want, your character to do is try to solve his problem at least three times.

The first time he doesn’t succeed; he has to try harder. The second time he doesn’t succeed; he has to try harder. The third time he can succeed or fail. That’s entirely up to the writer. I do that not only because the struggle is what’s important to the story, but I’ve discovered that young writers will try one time and that’s it.

I also remind them that they gave their character some characteristics at the beginning — how they looked and how they act most of the time — and those are the characteristics that they have to use to solve their problem. If they did not make their duck a magical duck with the magic wand, they cannot pull out a magic wand to solve their problem because it’s cheating.

Additionally, they have to solve the problem themselves. Young readers always want Mom to come and solve the problem or a principal. I do, too. I actually want my Mom to come and solve my problems, but I have to remind them that they can’t. Sometimes they get a little surprised by that.

“What do you mean you can’t call your Mom and have her come and save the day?” I say, “You know, if you’ve read Harry Potter, you’ve read all those books, you’ve read all those thousands of pages, you waited all those years, then it’s that big scene. It’s Harry versus Voldemort.”

“You know, as a reader you just can’t wait. It’s the epic battle. And then Harry pulls out his cell phone and he calls the British Army to save the day. It’s just wrong. It’s a cheat.” Your character has to solve their own problem. It always works. It’s amazing. They always have so much fun.

The best thing about “claps” is it shows young writers, and I think maybe they hadn’t — it’s so simple and they hadn’t quite realized it — is that all those pieces of a story fit together like a puzzle. So every piece leads naturally to the next piece.

I am amazed by the stories that it produces consistently and I’m also amazed at how fun they find just filling out that little “claps” formula is because they don’t do sentences. I mean, eventually they’re gonna have to write the story, but first they’re planning it and it saves them just so much worry and agony and fear and just opens up that imagination. So it’s great. It’s a great, great way to teach writing, I think.

I think the best way to help kids with writing, especially when they’re stuck, has less to do with actual writing skills and tools than it does with remembering that they’re trying to express themselves, as we all are. They’re trying to get what’s in their heart or in their brain onto a piece of paper.

Rather than trying to correct their grammar or their sentence structure during that phase of writing, I think it’s much more important to listen to them and ask them, “What are you trying to say,” and to say to them, “Ask yourself what is important to you about this story? Who is the character that you’re talking about? What does he or she want? How is he or she going to try to get it?”

Just ask them that and let them answer it. Let them talk and let them explore what the answers to those questions mean, and then just let them write and don’t correct it yet. Just let them write. Give them permission to write a bad first draft, because the point is to express yourself and to get what’s in here onto the page.

I’m just going to say this, I could never have, I wouldn’t be here in this interview, I would never have been able to write a chapter, let alone 35 novels without Lin. Lin taught me the rules, they still frustrate me. We’re writing in the first person, I want to write in the first and third person.

Simultaneously.

I don’t see why you can’t do that. And we, I’m telling you, it’s a miracle because Lin sits at the computer and has a thought and types and I have a thought and talk and then Lin types, and then sometimes she just types and I wait, and then she reads it back to me and then we argue over every word.

And it works. But it is, like…it had to have been meant to be that we would get along this way.

We work really very much as a team and Henry’s instincts are great. Maybe the word-smithing a little bit, you know the fussing around. But in general we do everything together and we see eye to eye on things and it’s a very important part of our collaboration that we are mutually respectful and seek each other’s opinion.

And are satisfied at the end of the process. We go that’s the book we wanted to write. That’s how we wanted it to sound.

And you see that acted out sometimes when we’re discussing, debating, arguing, whatever verb you want to put it. It’s good natured so it’s not exactly arguing but we’ll hang in there with a discussion about a particular word until, ad nauseum sometimes because that represents what we’re doing together which is we want what’s on the page to be what we created together.

Which comes first, the word or the picture?

Well the story always comes first at least with us. I know there are other people who have different ways about going about it, but we have to be thrilled with the story, both of us as illustrators, so that we will want to take the time to illustrate it, you know? And the story is what creates the whole world, you know, really even though the art is a marriage between, you know, the story and the — yeah, the pictures, you still couldn’t -

There are books that will tell a story just using pictures and I appreciate those.

But the story probably still came first.

But the story — exactly. It was in someone’s mind. It was a progression of events, you know, that happened otherwise it’s just a bunch of pretty pictures that are right next to each other.

The art follows.

The art follows, yes.

Simply stated, the art follows.

Yes, the art follows for us.

I don’t think about the pictures at all. I don’t think about the medium. I don’t think about anything but the story because I really believe that if you have two books and one book has a great story but the pictures are so-so and there’s another book that has beautiful pictures but the story isn’t very good, the book that has the better story and the so-so pictures is better always.

That’s how I feel. The better story always wins. I’ve got a bunch of books at home that I actually buy or have kept to prove that, you know. This story is so good, and these pictures help, but it’s not about the pictures for me. The story is more important. So I spend a lot of time messing with the story. When I finally get that in a place that I like, then I start just with the basic storyboard, all the pictures or all the pages on one piece of paper and you kind of go back and forth between text and pictures and try to figure out what can I take out of the words.

And I like taking out as many words as I can and letting the pictures do it. So there’s a lot of back and forth and then you just keep — the pictures get bigger and bigger and bigger. You add more details as you go and fine-tune it. That’s basically what happens. But when I write a story, I never think oh, this story has too many cars in it, and I don’t like to draw cars so I’m not going to do it.

I don’t think about that. I just hope that I can draw cars by the time I get around to illustrating it. So that’s kind of how I operate. The story first always.

Once I knew I wanted to tell stories for kids, I went back to college, and there was a great writer teaching at my school. His name was David Foster Wallace, and he was a fantastic novelist.

And I took a fiction course and a nonfiction course with him, and when I was applying for the fiction course, I said I wanted to write for kids, and he said, “I have no idea how to write for kids. I don’t know if this class is going to help you.” I said, “No, you know what, like I know how to talk to kids. That part is fine. I just want to know how to write.”

Because I do think that art for kids is the same as art for adults in terms of the standards it should be held to. There’s a difference in terms of the experience our audience has. But the underlying rules – they’re the same. You just want to know how to write. You want to know how to get to the truth of the matter. And a child’s truth is going to be different from an adult’s truth, but it’s not a lesser truth.

And the techniques that you can use to convey that truth are the same as the ones you can use in adult literature. You just have to – you just have to speak to a kid’s experience. And to me, being with kids and talking to them has been the most important kind of piece of my writing philosophy.

I teach at Vermont College of Fine Arts and that’s actually also where I got my Master’s degree and so I really rely on that community for support, for intellectual engagement, for craft, you know, learning and growth. And it’s a really important part of my writing life to have people not just from VCFA but from across the children’s literature community as my friends.

When I meet with young writers I often am more focused on what they’re doing on the page, I talk to them about the importance of sticking with your writing, the importance of continuing and definitely the importance of believing in your own voice regardless of what other people might have to say about your work and that, you know, to try to recognize the difference between somebody who just wants to cut you down or wants to change what you’re trying to say versus somebody who is being critical of your work to try to help you improve, to try to help you grow, to try to help those very valuable things that you have that you want to express to the world to help you find ways to make that clearer to a reader.

I’m a very haphazard writer. In our writing circles we talk about people who plot their work really carefully in advance, and then people who fly by the seat of their pants and create in chaos. And I’m definitely more of a chaos type of writer. So, you know, I often write scenes out of order, I write whatever comes to mind. I just start putting things on the page that I know are part of a particular story and I just keep adding and adding and adding, up until the point when I don’t know what to add anymore, I feel like I have some material, I get confused and stuck, and then I print it all out and try to put it all together where it ends up being sort of like a jigsaw puzzle. 

I have all this material, I know it’s part of this story, but I have to find the order that it goes in. I have to find a way to make it make sense to someone else. It always makes sense in my mind. But I need it to make sense to someone else. And so a lot of the work that I put into revision is around plotting and structure and the flow of the piece. And I spend a lot less time early in the book worrying about the line edit aspect of things and how things are line by line on the page.

I think that my line-by-line writing is actually fairly organically smooth, which I’m fortunate to be in that position. And so a lot of what I am working on, a lot of what I struggle with is the bigger picture things and knitting all of the pieces together. That’s actually why I write in vignettes often, because it’s how the work comes to me in these chunks and then I enjoy weaving some of those gaps for the reader to fill in and jumping from what’s important to what else is important as opposed to deliberately looking to fill in every single hole.

Two things that I think I do intuitively well — and I know there are a number of things I don’t do well and I could list those too if you want — but two things I think I do well are pacing and also transitions. And the two things are connected, I think. Anyway, pacing, how can we describe that? It has to do with the way a story moves along and the flow of the narrative and I can sense when it’s time to back off, switch scenes, or move into a slower paced mode for a while before revving it up again. In order to do that, one has to make those changes not abrupt and uncomfortable.

And that’s what I think I do pretty well. And I mention that only because every now and then, of course, an editor gets involved and makes suggestions. And sometimes I say, but if I take that out, I’ll lose that beautiful transition I made, which the editor won’t have noticed. Of course it’s good if it’s not noticed because you don’t want one to notice it, you are supposed to feel that it’s smooth.

But in cases it’s so smooth that that he doesn’t realize that it will throw it off if I lose that. So I’ll have to get back and re-transition. But those things I think come intuitively to me when I’m working. And I just sort of know when to slow down, when to speed up. Maybe it’s like driving a car, maybe one could make even that analogy that you know that there’s a curve and so you slow down, otherwise you might smash. And I think the same thing could be said of writing. You know that you’re coming to a difficult point and you need to slow down rather than just throw it all into a collision.

Authors always you know have something coming, because books are not just born. Well, occasionally they are. Patricia McKissack, god bless her, she used to say that some just gestate forever and some are like Athena that is born fully formed out of Zeus’s head. And that was the best to me ever metaphor for the writing process.

You know it’s the wonderful thing about writing for children is really do have a license to do many different types or forms of writing. I’ve never felt with any of my publishing companies that I had to write a certain kind of book. So I’ve loved the freedom to explore different forms.

You’ve asked about the writing process, I try to do a little creative writing sometimes more, sometimes less every day. And I usually write longhand and then make changes and type it into the computer. But I find that writing long hand seems to slow me down and also put me… keep me better connected with the natural rhythms of the human body, natural rhythms of speech. And I know every writer has a different process but I just found that that seems to work best for me.

And let’s see, with different types of writing, you know it’s so interesting, with a poem or a picture book I feel like I can keep it in mind and as I go about my errands during the day I think about it and in my head I’m kind of revising it. For me, a novel is a much more laborious process in that I need vast amounts of time to sit at a desk. I find it much more difficult to revise in my head.

So when I’m working on a novel I really try to make sure that I have enough space to give it the attention that it really does need.

I think I just get hit with an idea, people say you know you sort of fall in love with a character, you’re very curious about a character. Or with a poem, you fall in love with a certain rhythm or a certain phrase and you want to explore it a little more.

So all of my ideas sort of hit in a way that it’s just a glimmer and I’m curious and I want to follow where it leads. And sometimes it actually leads into something that moves on into a book. And sometimes it turns out just to be an exercise. So I never know but I try to be open to that process of discovery and just awake to that, that feeling of curiosity.

Because my books are expository nonfiction rather than narrative nonfiction. Text structure is a critical factor. There is no built-in story. If you were writing a biography about a person’s life or if you’re writing about a historical event or a historical period, there’s a built-in story and narrative nonfiction works really well, but when you’re just sharing facts, it’s a whole different kettle of fish. And a narrative writing style really doesn’t work. So expository nonfiction is really the way to go. 

And with narrative nonfiction, you have a sequence text structure, you’re following the events or the person’s life. But with expository nonfiction, you can have any tech structure that you can think of. And so there are five main text structures that students are learning in schools. But the truth is that’s really just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many more they can be book specific and there are also some that are common, but don’t happen to be in those five text structures that kids are learning. 

So for my book, Thank You, Moon, this has a compare and contrast text structure. And then within the compare and contrast text structure, it’s important to understand how the information is going to be arranged, how it’s going to be organized. So this is what’s called a list book, which is basically talking about an animal behavior or a phenomenon, and then how it affects various different animals. And then so we’re comparing the way that the different animals respond to moonlight. For some it helps them to find food, some it helps them avoid enemies, some it helps them migrate, some it helps them with their reproductive cycle. And within that, I’m pairing different animals by the kinds of things that they do under the moon. I’ll just read you a little tiny snippet.

Thank you, moon, for being Earth’s constant companion in space and making life on our planet possible. And you can see this stunning art here by Jessica Lannan, who is just so talented. Thank you for guiding tiny turtles to the sea, and dung beetles to their burrows. Thank you, moon, for giving lions a chance to feed their families, and gazelles a chance to eat in peace. And then there’s one plant in the book. This is a joint pine. It’s when it releases its pollen so that the moss can come and pollinate it. 

And so you can see how those pairs actually help with the flow of the text within this compare and contrast text structure. 

So I have edited an anthology called Nonfiction Writers Dig Deep, and the subtitle of this book is “50 Award-Winning Children’s Book Authors Share the Secret of Engaging Writing.” And so this is 50 top authors in the nonfiction world, children’s nonfiction world, who are writing about their writing process and the things that are critical to the way that they write, how their passions, their fears, fuel their writing, how they choose their topics, how they focus their topics, how they make their writing their own, how they bring a piece of themselves to their writing. 

So there could be five biographies of a certain person, but each one is different because the person creating it is different and they’re each bringing their own sensibility and their own life experience, their own lived experience to that book. And I think when children have an opportunity to do that too, I think so many times children will do their research and then they’ll just dive into writing. 

But there’s a critical step in between where they need to synthesize. They need to assimilate their research and make their own personal meaning. What I always tell students in writing workshops is to read through your research and put it through your body to think about it with your mind and think about it with your heart and what is it that resonates with you? What about this person is specifically exciting to you? What about this topic? Are you dying to share with other people? And then focus in on that and that will make writing more engaging. 

I outline my books and I always have a notion of what the ending is going to be. It’s usually very cinematic in my brain ending. I can see it unfolding and I’m just trying to get there, but there’s a lot that happens when you’re just in it and your mind is just coming up with stuff, and that’s kind of the magic, the fun stuff is when something pops up, a character or an idea or something about the world that you’re just like, oh yes! You have no idea where it came from, and your mind just created it like that. I just think your brain is so cool. I talked about my writing schedule now where I have the whole morning to write, but I really did get trained to be very disciplined because when I started writing, seriously trying to get published, it was when my first daughter was born.

She was a newborn and I could only write when she was napping, and so I just had to learn to, okay, if you may have 15 minutes, you may have an hour. You don’t know, and you just have to switch your brain into that mode and start going, and I really feel like that was a great training. Being a parent of a newborn was good training for being an author, I think. You really learn like that if you just spend a little bit of time every day, even if you only get 15 minutes, sometimes you only have 15 minutes. You can write a whole book that way if you keep doing it regularly.

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So my primary mission is to remind kids that writing has power, and that writing is something that they can do, and the way that kids can get at this in a more natural and fun way is to get away from the page, and that sounds a little odd because we think of writing as putting words on a page, but really, writing is about having ideas, about having an idea in your head, in fact, that is so exciting that you want to share it with the entire world.

And so one of the things that I do is I teach kids this very simple process of making up a story. Not yet writing a story, but making it up, and I call it the WOW, and it’s very simple. There is a character in the beginning who wants something, so there is a want in the beginning of the story. That’s the first W of WOW.

If the character gets what he or she wants too easily, it’s not an exciting story, and so there has to be an obstacle, so that is the O of the WOW. But if the story ends with the obstacle getting in the way, it’s not a satisfying story, so the character has to win in the end in order to make the story feel like the kind of story that we all know. This is the classic story.

This is what Aristotle told us thousands of years ago about what makes a story great, and I’ve just made up the simple way for kids to remember it, W for want, O for obstacle, W for win. So I will encourage kids to think of these kinds of stories, to act them out. I’ll do it with them on the spot, and what they find is that they are not having to come up with the story all at once.

They’re just taking it step by step. So as soon as you think of a character who wants something, a cat who wants a saucer of milk, then it’s pretty easy to think of an obstacle. You could think of ten different obstacles. So there’s a mean dog that gets in the way, and then as soon as you think of that obstacle, you can start to imagine how could the cat get around the dog? And there are lots of different ways.

So I’ll ask kids to give me five different ways, and then we’ll choose one. We’ll act it out first, and acting it out is a great way for kids to understand that writing is not just about putting words on paper. Writing is about making something so fun and so lively that it is entertainment. And so then, after it’s all over, what I find is that kids will often be eager to write that story down.

They love it so much they want to write it. They want to write it because they understand that writing it is the way of both remembering the story, being able to read the story and enjoy the story again, and being able to share it with other people.

I think the hardest part of writing is the middle, just as with a climb, a journey, a rafting trip … When you’re starting, it’s very exciting. There’s a lot of energy. You don’t know exactly what’s gonna happen. When you’re ending, you get to put all the finishing touches on. When you’re in the middle, you’re trying to make it all fit, and you don’t necessarily see the end yet.

So the middle is when it’s the most grueling, and when you also can lose faith, writing takes a huge amount of confidence, and so you just have to trust that you’re gonna make it to the end. So that writing, figuring out the climax of the book, figuring out how everything fits together is the hardest.

I teach the WOW concept in large school assemblies with 200 kids at once, as well as in small classroom workshops with 20 kids at once. It works both ways, and I do ask for volunteers from the audience, so I’ll get one child to come up and be the main character. I will ask for ideas from the audience about who could this character be, and what could the character want?

Every hand in the room will go up with ideas. It’s very easy to come up with ideas when you’re not looking at a blank page. It’s very hard to come up with ideas when you’re staring at a blank page, so the students will get ideas. We will decide on an idea. Then we’ll bring up an obstacle character, and that obstacle character will have some reason to get in the way.

I will be the writer of the story, so I will say the story as it’s going along. We’ll have dialogue. The characters themselves will have personalities. Children are amazing at acting. They love it, and so they will begin to act it out and just naturally give their characters personalities.

When they talk, they are using voice. Many teachers wonder how do you teach voice? How do you get at that concept of voice in writing?

So if you give a child a character, let’s say that child is a grandfather, and the grandfather is really frustrated and wants to get an ice cream cone, it can be something really simple like that, that child will start to talk like a frustrated old man. It’s amazing. They will use a different voice. They’ll use different word choice than they would ordinarily.

They’re illustrating all of the things that a writing teacher wants to see, and it’s coming very naturally, again, because they’re not looking at the page. So when the story goes along, we have this wonderful flow because they remember that there is an arc to the story. There’s the want, there’s the obstacle, and there’s the win. They don’t have to wonder what’s coming next because  they know that there’s this formula. So it’s not a recipe, necessarily, or a strict rule, but that W-O-W is more like a guide that helps students through that process to keep it from being scary and to allow them to have fun with all those extra things that they add to it, like word choice, like character traits.

And by the end of the story then they have something that is both familiar because it’s like the stories that they’ve read, and yet it’s brand new because we just made it up on the spot.

Writing is a lot like sports, and being a writer is a lot like being an athlete, and I love to make that comparison. Kids know how much it takes to be good at playing baseball or basketball or ice skating. Any kind of activity that requires some skill is going to require a lot of effort, and so I make the connection that doing exercises and learning those skills are not necessarily the fun part.

The fun part is playing the game, and the skills and the exercises help you to get to the point where you are gonna play a great game. Kids understand that. What they haven’t always thought about is how that’s similar to the writing process, so all the things that you learn about writing are — the skills and the exercises that you’re doing, when it comes time to actually writing something like a story or a poem or a song, that’s like playing the game.

And so what you need to bring to that is all of your energy. So I make the connection that it’s great to get yourself psyched up before you’re about to write, so I have kids do this exercise where we stand up, and we imagine that we’re Olympic athletes about to do a big trick, a big event, maybe going down the ski slope or diving into a swimming pool.

And you know that athlete is getting ready right before that, so you can see the athlete psyching himself up, psyching herself up, talking it through, getting the muscles and the energy going in the body. So I’ll do that with students. We’ll stand up, we’ll get the energy going in our bodies, and I have them actually say to themselves out loud, “Come on, baby! Dig deep! Go big or go home!”

And we say it with all of this energy. There might be 20 of us if it’s a classroom. There might be 200 of us if it’s an assembly, and then I ask them to stop and to check in and to feel how they feel on the inside, and it’s amazing because their bodies are tingling. Their minds are alive. They feel so energized.

And I say that’s what you need to bring to your writing so that when you write, you have as much energy as when you’re about to play that basketball game, and it really gets kids excited. I would love it if teachers would bring that into the classroom and have kids stand up before they write and really get psyched up so that when it comes time to write, they actually have that energy inside of them.

Reluctant writers or kids who really have a lot of trouble writing are kids that need to understand how meaningful and how fun writing can be. None of us want to work at something that is difficult, and so it has to be fun for them, and I think that a lot of times, if they’re given the chance to write something that might, to an adult, seem to be silly, if they’re given that chance, they will want to write about it.

So that’s one thing, is allowing students to write about what they want to write about. A boy might want to write a story about Superman having an adventure, and instead of saying, “No, that’s already been done,” or “No, that’s — try to think of a different story,” allowing that student to write about Superman can be the best gift to that student because he already has the motivation.

So I try to really meet kids at their own interest level and figure out what it is that they’re really passionate about and can we write about that. That’s one thing. Another thing is to encourage kids who really can’t write to make up stories and tell them to someone else and see if that dictated story can be a jumping off point. As soon as they discover that writing has meaning, that making up something and passing it on so that it can be shared, as soon as they discover that then they’re going to want to practice those skills.

The hardest thing is if you’re asking them to practice skills without any context for why that can be a fun or meaningful thing.

When I go to the page to start a story, I’m always thinking about how can I make this character nuanced and layered, and how can she surprise the reader? So if she starts off one way, I’m always thinking about turning the moment at some point in the story where if she’s such a goody, goody girl, we see her mess up or we see her have to kind of falter and figure something out. And vice versa, if she’s kind of a mess in the beginning, we see moments where she is strong and is figuring out who she is. So I just think that that’s good writing because it’s also who we really are as humans. So when I’m writing, I’m trying to just reflect reality on the page. And reality is we are messy and complicated, and sometimes we get it right, and sometimes we really, really don’t. 

And we’re full of questions and we think we know the answer. We think we know what we want. And sometimes that changes. So I’m always asking my character, what do you want? And what’s in the way of what you want? Who loves you? Who do you love back? Who do you miss? When is the last time you cried? And by asking my character these questions, I get to know her and I get to create obstacles for her that get in the way of what she wants, or we realize maybe you don’t really want what you thought you wanted and that’s the journey. So I think that is why my characters feel real and feel like friends or people that, because I am trying to just replicate the amazing, brilliant, complicated, messy women and girls that I know in real life, and I think those are the best stories where I can actually relate to what’s happening on the page. 

Yes, I want to write characters that young people can aspire to, but I think that there’s a danger in writing the perfect character and someone who always gets it right and never makes a mistake. And I also think there’s a danger in writing the character that is so flawed that there’s never a moment where we really see their humanity and see them as a person who can change. So I want a young person to read a book and feel if they are the person who maybe is really flawed and having a lot of challenges, that there is a chance for them to be better and do better. And when they see that that character has that moment, I think that speaks to them. And for the characters who are the people who are perfectionists and always aiming and striving to do things just right, I want them to see that there’s grace for mistakes and that there is forgiveness and that you can get up and try again. So I’m trying to create nuanced, layered characters because I think that we are nuanced people. 

One of the challenges I face as a writer is because a lot of my characters are quiet, shy, introspective. I struggle with how to depict them interacting with their environment, because when you are quiet and shy oftentimes you’re very interior and it can be difficult and exhausting for a writer and reader to write interiority without an actual interaction with the external world.

So I think a lot about that and sometimes I’ll change the point of view. In Hello Universe one of the characters, Valencia, I use first person because she’s interacting with the reader. And with Virgil, he has a very important person in his life that he interacts with.

But it can be a challenge. And one of the things I love about writing long hand is that it allows me to cross things off and put new thoughts in thought bubbles and write little notes to myself. And those are things you can’t really do on a computer. So I feel like that experience even makes it more textured and three-dimensional of bringing a story forward and working through some of those challenges.

So I think kids are drawn to comics a lot of times because they’re funny. It’s a great way to connect to readers is to make them laugh. But, you know, there’s also personal storytelling, there’s visuals on the page, and there’s some magic that happens with that combination. It’s not quite first person, and it’s not quite second person storytelling. It’s like you are in the characters shoes.

You’re seeing what the character sees. And then you’re reading their words coming out of their mouths in word balloons. It’s just this like fascinating combination of being an observer, but also a participant. And I think that’s kind of true when you watch movies, but you’re still watching an actor who’s not you playing a character.

You’re still hearing the voice of an animated character giving that person life. It is still not you. But when you read a comic, you’re experiencing all of these things simultaneously, and there’s empathy. There is empathy for a character, and it doesn’t matter what they look like. It doesn’t matter what shape they are, or what their life experience is like. You get to live their story.

The way I write, is I sort of figure out, you know, what’s going to happen and then I figure out, well, what’s going to happen to Quavondo, what’s going to happen to him in this book. And it might take me a couple months to figure out what’s going to happen to each character in the book. And then I just sit down and I try to like think like Quavondo and once I start, I know what Quavondo going to do, or I know what Tommy is going say.

And one of the characters, the most fun to write is Harvey. You just think what’s Harvey going to say, how’s he going to be a jerk in this situation. Because the poor guy, you know, a lot of kids think Harvey is the bad guy, he’s not exactly the bad guy, he’s, he wants to be a good guy, he just doesn’t know how. And you just know that Harvey is going to say something that he thinks is funny and everybody else is going to think it’s obnoxious.

And so he’s actually one of the most fun character’s to write. Like there’s a whole chapter in the new book and it’s nothing but Harvey going, “I was right. I was right. I was right. I was right. I was right.” You know, I personally wouldn’t necessarily think to write that but once I sit down and I’m like, how does Harvey respond to the situation, I just know what Harvey is going to do and then I know what Tommy is going to do and what Quavondo is going to do.

And you know, and Sarah, I — Sarah is this character who, you know, she started out as just, she was going to be this girl that Tommy was crazy about but now she’s her own character and I know what her response is going to be. I know what she is going to say. And so that’s why it was fun to let her be the star of the Fortune Wookie book, because Sarah had a lot of her own stuff she had to say and if Tommy had been the star of that book she wouldn’t have had a chance to say it. The characters they just take over.

Yeah, I like Sarah, I’ve written a new Sarah chapter for a feature book and you know, I just, she’s the one who sometimes has to take charge. Because she’s actually — Origami Yoda is very wise of course but sometimes you need, sometimes you need a little girl power wisdom.

Sometimes Sarah’s the one who has to step in and say, “Okay, guys here’s how it’s going to have to be.”

But Sarah’s got her own problems too. You know, Sarah, her best Rhondela, Rhondela’s getting interested in boys and clothes and different stuff from Sarah and it’s tough times for Sarah ahead. Because she’s got to deal with maybe losing her best friend.

Today I’m going to read from When Life Gives You O.J. When Life Gives You O.J. is the story of Zelly Fried who is about to turn 11 and she has a problem, she really wants a dog. Wants a dog so bad she’ll do anything or so she thinks. Enter her grandfather who goes by the nickname Ace. He has a plan, he thinks he’s found a way for how she can convince her parents that she’s ready for a dog. Unfortunately, well you’ll see.

“ ‘Kid,’ said Ace. ‘Meet your new dog.’

I stood there holding the jug and staring at it. I knew crazy people sometimes heard people in their heads or saw things that other people couldn’t see. Did Ace think there was a dog in the room with us?

‘Um, where?’ I asked. Ace reached out and thumped the orange juice jug with his hand.
‘Right there! You’re holding him!’
‘I… This?’ I held out the jug with both hands to make sure that I understood what he was saying. ‘You think that this is a dog?’
‘No, for crying out loud! What kind of a meshuggener do you think I am?’

Meshuggener is the Yiddish word for a ‘crazy person.’ Ace says it a lot when he reads the New York Times. Also when he watches the news on TV. According to him most politicians are meshuggeners. He also thinks Captain Kirk acts like a meshuggener, especially when he gets himself beamed onto other planets without checking them out first.

‘No, Grandpa, I just… I’m sorry I don’t understand.’

‘Enough with the sorry. Vey iz mir, kid.’

Ace shook his head. Clearly he was disappointed in me. Ace lapses into extra Yiddish when he wants to make a point which is often. He’ll say Oy vey! or Vey iz mir!, which is sort of like an Oy vey! and then some. He pointed to the jug and spoke slowly.

‘This,’ he said, ‘is not a dog. Okay?’Okay I said.
‘It’s not a dog, so what is it he demanded?’
‘Um, it’s an orange juice jug.’
‘Wrong!’ yelled Ace. ‘This is not an orange juice jug. This is your new practice dog. This is what you use to show your parents that you are responsible enough to get a real dog.’
‘Practice dog?’ I asked.
‘Right! Everything you do for a real dog, you do for the practice dog.’
‘Yeah, but Grandpa, you can’t do dog things with an orange juice jug.’
‘It’s not an orange juice jug. Don’t call it an orange juice jug. I told you, it’s a practice.’
‘Okay, well, how do you walk a practice dog? It doesn’t have any legs.’

Ace smiled like he had been waiting for this question. He went over to his bedside table and opened the drawer. Out of it he brought a long nylon leash with a metal ring on one end. He threaded it through the handle of the jug and put the nylon hand loop at one end through the ring out the other. He then pulled the leash tight and let go.

‘What do you do with a dog that has no legs?’
‘Sorry?’
‘I told you kid, enough with the sorry! What you do with a dog that has no legs is, you take him out for a drag.’
‘You what?’
‘It’s a joke, but with your practice dog, that’s what you do. Two, maybe three times a day, you put on his leash and take him for a walk.’
‘Outside?’
‘Of course outside. Unless you want him to do his business in the house.’
‘His business? An orange juice jug can’t—’
‘Look, kid. This is not going to work if you keep saying orange juice jug. Practice. Dog.’
‘A practice dog can’t go to the bathroom.’

Ace smiled again, he went back to his bedside table and opened a drawer. He returned carrying a dog of bag food.

‘Wanna bet?’ He said.”

To find out more about Zelly and Ace, read the book.

One of the best compliments that I ever received was from a reader, a parent, who asked if the students’ work in my collaborative journal novels was really the work of students. In other words, she felt as if it sounded so real, I couldn’t have made it up. I loved that compliment. I try to get into character when I write, just the way an actor does, so I spend a lot of time pretending that I am a third grader or a first grader or a fifth grader.

And I can do that because I am able to really imagine things from the inside out. The way that I develop that was by thinking like a writer, so whenever I am in the world, I see someone, and I am trying to imagine myself as that person. It becomes a habit of being to allow yourself to become someone else and to feel the world from that person’s point of view.

Children understand this on Halloween, and they have a fantastic time putting on a costume and putting on a persona and being that other character. We need to give them much, much more time and many more opportunities to have that experience, and writing is a great way to do it.

Well, when I started Nuts to You, my original thought was in terms of the format that the left page would tell the story in comic book format and the right page would tell the story in words and I just, I think I was thinking of reluctant readers and how that would encourage kids like, because they would be able to tell what was going on and then they could read the story and find their way through it.

And it’s not so much that I decided not to do that but it just kind of evolved into not being so rigid like left side, right side. I still did lots of drawings. But that’s where I started with it. And I also, so I was kind of interested also, I didn’t want to draw, I was thinking of it as not a picture book, I didn’t want them to be animals with outfits on.

So I was trying to think how do I differentiate one squirrel from another because they, you know to an outsider they look a lot alike. And so I was playing with the drawings and different head shapes and maybe, so it’s the one character has a mole on her cheek and she’s sort of more beautiful than the male characters.

And then I decided that one character could have an acorn beret and I cut this picture out of a field guide and it was a squirrel peeking around the corner and I painted a little acorn hat on him and I thought wow, he looks so familiar. And I looked at him, I realized he looks just like Che Guevara. So for a while I was writing this story and I was calling him Che.

And I thought I don’t really want this element in my story, this political element. But what that got me thinking about was maybe their names should sound like, sounds that squirrels actually make so I changed his name to Chai, and the character whose name is Tutsa, because that sounds like something, and if you do it the squirrel way it’s more like [noise]. So that was the fun part of the story then was coming up with squirrel names.

There are four main ways that I do research, and a lot of these are the same ways that students do research too. I will read other books on the topic. I will also read scientific articles and magazine articles. I will use the internet, although very carefully, because you don’t really know what you’re going to get. You can’t always trust it. You always have to verify it. I go out and make observations, and so that can be near my home or it can be when I travel to various parts of the world. 

And then the last way that I get information is by talking to experts. And this is critical, especially when you’re writing science, because science is changing all the time. There are new discoveries every day. And to get the most specific new, exciting discoveries, scientists are on the ground doing the work. And they can really help you not only to talk to you about the topics that you’re writing about and their expertise in that area, but also to help you understand what has happened in that maybe three-ish year period of time between when scientists are publishing their papers, their academic papers, and what they’re actually doing right now. And so that allows me to have kind of up to the minute information in my books. 

Every time I do a school visit, I ask kids to tell me what are good sources of information on the Internet and what are not so good sources of information on the Internet. For the most, part they don’t know. It could be because no one taught it to them, but it’s more likely that someone taught it to them in the beginning of the year and they forgot.

They’re on the computer so much that I think they need to be reminded continuously so that they start to have patterned behavior of how to use the computer for research. Studies show that behavior doesn’t change until you do something the same way eight times, on an average. So you can’t tell kids what websites are good and what websites are bad at the beginning of the year and then not remind them all the time.

I tell them about .edu and .gov and go to a historical society, go to a museum, go to a university. And then I ask them what shouldn’t you go to? So once we start talking about it and I start giving them examples and it’s back and forth, then they start to get it. So in the beginning of me saying what would be a good source of information, a child might say, “Well, you know, a fifth grade book report on Jane Adams.”

I’ll say, “Well, why do you think that that’s a good source of information, or why don’t you think that’s a good source of information,” and then they’ll start to see for themselves that you can’t necessarily trust that as a source of information. So it’s all about what source can you trust. And, you know, we like to believe that we can trust historical societies and museums and universities.

And, also, the big part of using the internet for a resource. I’ll say, “Well, how much research do you think I did on Almost Astronauts and where do you think I got the information,” and they’ll say, “The internet.” And I’ll say, “Well, where on the internet,” and they’ll say, “Google.” And I’ll say, “But Google is a search engine, so what do you think I needed to put in in Google to find that?”

And, so on it goes. And what we eventually get to in the conversation is that the internet is a collection of bits and pieces of information. You cannot find context on the internet. Context is the key to all of this. So if they find out one piece of information over here and one piece of information over there, how do they then tie it all together?

So we talk about what other forms of research do they have at their disposal to use. So we talk about books and they can find books in their library, or they can go on Amazon and find books about a topic that maybe their library can get for them. We talked about using periodicals, to find newspaper articles and then how you interview someone and what does that look like.

You can videotape an interview with someone, you can audiotape it and how do you start to use as much as you can. So, I talk to them basically about thinking outside the box and thinking about all their senses. So, can you read it, hear it, see it, smell it? What are the various different things that we can bring in so that you can get as much of a multi-sensory experience of what you’re researching as possible.

Once Animal Dads was a success, I started thinking about other ways to do this, so I wrote books like Beaks about bird beaks. I wrote a book called Animals Asleep about all the different ways animals sleep. My two new books, Teeth and Wings, are also those kind of whimsical books.

If you read through those, they’re really just collections of interesting critters I’ve seen on my travels or doing research for other books. I still do a lot of travel — I travel to other places as well to do research — and it’s just kind of become a routine for me. And one that’s very satisfying because being out in the field not only gives you a real gut impression for what things are like that helps you write, as you know.

It also gives you unique information that you can’t find anywhere else. I mean, slogging through a tropical rain forest with a scientist, or going in a deep-sea submersible to the ocean bottom with a scientist you’re going to get perspectives from not only the environment but the scientist that you just won’t get.

Often the scientists’ human sides really come out when they’re out in that field because every scientist I know is much happier in the field than they are back in the lab, but most of them have to spend most of their lives in the lab. Once they’re out in the field, it’s like ecological release and they’re happier and they’re telling stories and they’re showing you all kinds of really cool stuff that they might not think about just sitting in their office.

So, each one of these books takes so much research. And I’m jealous of authors because they can just research and then type. They can say the soldiers went to war and they had helmets and boots on. Done. But if you’re the artist, if you’re showing all of this stuff, well you can type that out, but you also have to show the boots, you have to show the helmets. So I’m double research because not only do I have to find all of the written research, which is very rigorously checked by our fact checker at Abrams, who really gives me a difficult time, very good at their job, catches single thing, makes me fix everything. But then I have to find all of the visual elements.

And some of those things are harder than others. Revolutionary War is not the hardest because those uniforms were kind of mismatched and all over the place, people were piecing stuff together. We don’t have photos, we have some oil paintings, we have some etchings, but you get a little bit of freebie on getting things exactly right on the uniforms and the weapons. Now the Civil War, that’s another story, and you get children whose parents are re-enactors, and they are there counting the sergeant stripes on sleeves, and things, and saying, “Oh wait, no, no, no. This Illinois Regiment did not have those pants.” So it’s a lot of careful, careful research.

And I’ve made a game out of the research for the readers because I know things will always change. We’re always going to get things wrong. History – they’re always making new discoveries. So, in order to make the research, really, more part of the fun of the book, I made up a fictional team of researchers. So when you get to the back of the book you see the bibliography, and it said this — “Everything in this book was researched by babies.” I did this as a joke in the first book, just thinking, what’s something that people — If they’re writing a review online, and they say “This research is terrible.” And they say, “Well, it’s done by babies.”

And the kids who read that first book really liked those cute little babies, they’re crawling all around in the bibliography, they’re complaining. So it’s a little team of babies that do the research. I draw them in the back. They’re called the research babies and they’ve kind of become a character in their own right.

And there’s also a Corrections Baby, who runs the Corrections Department, and if you find something that’s wrong I’ve got an email right there, and you can send the Correction Baby that information, and then hopefully in future editions we’ll fix that. For example, in my most recent “Lafayette” book we transposed, we turned — we swapped 1780 for 1870, just, you know, a little something that the proofreader didn’t catch, and a million kids were so excited. They’re like “We found it!”

There’s a lot of very detail-oriented kids that really want things to be right, but I think that they like knowing, hey, well, if I found something that’s wrong that’s exciting, let’s fix it, and they send it in. So, yeah, the books are researched by babies. And I make the research part of the book. The bibliography, in a lot of cases, is a comic. So you’re seeing the books as little comic drawn things.

I think it’s an important part of the whole book to show all of that research. And then of course behind the Research Babies we have lots of bibliography — or lots of photos of the, of the events, and people from the book. I think a lot of kids actually jump in, as he’s reading it, just thinking it’s going to be a fun, wacky adventure, and they get to those final pages, and go, “This was real? I don’t believe it!” And I think — hopefully for them it’s an exciting moment of realizing how exciting the history and the research is.

Research is an important, I mean, the most important part of writing non-fiction and you have to be very careful with what you choose to include. I only work or I try only to work with primary sources. That’s those very original documents, the things that were written at the time.

If I’m gonna do a biography of Abraham Lincoln, my favorite sources are those that come from the actual time — some speeches from Lincoln, things that he’s written, letters, things that friends have written about Abraham Lincoln, or enemies, which are always more interesting.

Enemies, things people wrote about Lincoln who may not have liked him. There were a lot of people that didn’t. Newspaper articles from the time. Those are the things that I look at first. If I find it in a secondary source, that means that some other author wrote and said it was true.

My rule of thumb is that I need to find it three other places before I can assume that what that particular author told me is absolutely true, which is a shame because sometimes we find really great anecdotes — a great story, and you realize that you’ve only found it once. If you can’t verify it, you can’t use it.

For me, I love it. Research really is an adventure. It’s a discovery process. I’m always digging in. I never known what great little nugget, little gem I’m gonna uncover. It can be sometimes frustrating.

I like to actually go to the library, so when I was working on Eleanor Roosevelt, I went to the FDR library in Hyde Park. When I was working on The Lincolns, I spent a lot of time at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and other small archives.

There’s the Library of Congress that has all of the Lincoln papers. They’ve digitized them now and this is a beautiful source for students and young readers, young writers because you can see the primary source. You can see that primary document right online now.

You no longer have to take another author’s word for it or read a book about it. You can actually go right to the source on the Library of Congress and read it in Lincoln’s hand. If you’re having trouble reading that faded document, you can always read the transcribed version, as well. It’s just a fabulous resource.

That said, when you use resources on the internet, you have to be very careful about which ones you’re using. It’s hard. Even I have a hard time telling the difference between what’s accurate and true and what is not.

‘The real writing comes from revision.’

And there’s not just one revision, it’s multiple revisions. I’m going to get feedback from a lot of people. 

Not only is the page marked up for like the copy-editing stuff, right? Periods, commas, the wrong tense, but then you have all these notes in the column about larger questions you’ve got to answer. You have all those markings. Many people talk about how they might glance through it, and some of them don’t open it for several days. I always open it, read through it, and then I just set it aside for several days and then I’ll come back to it because I need to let my subconscious like work on it. 

And so I have to step back from it and then a few days later I can come back and say, ‘No, we don’t really need to explain this. Who is centered in this story knows this information and everyone else can get enough of a context. I’m not going to spell this out.’ But then other times I do need to spell something out because I have assumed too much for the age of who the book is designed to reach.

So I will often read a little bit of a rough draft and, on the spot, show kids what I don’t like about it. What did I not quite get the way I want to get it? And I think that what happens with kids is they judge themselves really harshly for not getting something right the first time, and they think that revision is a way of proving that they did it wrong.

So if they need to revise something, it must mean that they did a poor job, and what I try to show them by giving them examples of my own rough drafts and my own revision is that it is a process that actually can be fun if you think of it as a way of making your work better. So one of the things that I do is an improvisation game.

So I will ask students to think of a story that we all know, let’s say a story of the — little Miss Muffet sitting on the tuffet eating her curds and whey, and we’ll act it out first the way it normally exists, and then I’ll say, “So, you know, in Hollywood, they never expect to get things right on the first try. It’s always take one, cut. Let’s do this again and see if we can make it even more dramatic or more humorous or more suspenseful, and then we’ll do a take two.”

And as soon as they’ve done a take two on acting that out again, they see that they made it better, and then they think of other things that they wanna make better, so we’ll do a take three, and they’ve learned through that process that that is a revision, and thinking of it instead of as work or as a correction, instead of thinking it in those terms, they’re thinking of it as an opportunity to make it better.

So kids relate to that because they love movies. They love Hollywood, and so I will say that revision is like a take. You’re not gonna get it right on take one. You’re gonna wanna do a take two, and then you’re going to work a little harder and figure out how to make it even better, and that’s a take three, and I’ll show them my revisions and how it’s not just one or two revisions that go into a book.

It’s 12 or 20 revisions that go into a book, and they start to understand that that’s just part of the process.

When I do school visits and teachers ask me about process and I say for example that when my editor gets a first draft that’s probably my fifth draft and the kid’s eyes go wide and I say writing is rewriting and they look around at their teachers like oh, you haven’t been lying to me. And I say it’s rewriting, it’s rewriting because you want to get the flow of it down first.

And I tell them I say when I’m writing I’m not thinking about subject-verb agreement, parallelism, or spelling even. I said, in part, because when I was younger I paid attention and I did what my teachers told me to do and I listened to, when I was younger I was also taught grammar. And I had teachers who marked off, who didn’t give you an A for a good idea. Who took points off if your grammar and your spelling were in trouble.

And so I said so a lot of times I don’t consciously think about subject-verb agreement. I say, “but there are times I know there are words like concurrent, I’m like two C’s, two R’s, I don’t know but I’ll figure that out later.”  So first of all, you want to get your soul, your passion out on paper. And then it’s like sculpting. Then you refine it and you say oh this is repetitive or I need a stronger transition. I think the great thing for writers is “TK”.

You know it’s a symbol they use for “to come” for some reason, they say it’s because the only consonant cluster that doesn’t appear in an English word. So if I mapped writing a first paragraph and I know where I want to go to a second one but I don’t have the transition I put “TK transition” and I move on. Some writers have to get everything perfect as they go, I’m the type of writer that can go through and say okay this is fuzzy, TK it, move on, it’ll come to you later.

I ask the young people to try to take writing and put it in the same compartment in their head where sports and music lives, to say, “Oh, yeah. Of course. In order to improve at writing, I’m going to have to repeat, or write the same thing again, and try to improve it each time.” I ask them to try to take it for granted that writing belongs in that same kind of category so that they don’t say, “Oh, no. I have to rewrite this,” but, rather, they say, “Oh, well, duh. Of course have to rewrite it. It’s not gonna be good the first time.” So, I ask them to try to think about writing in a little bit different way.

So my writing process is, I have a very busy life, I have kids and a job, and I write books. So what I do is I carry a notebook with me at all times and I write down everything in my notebook that comes to me, every idea that I have that I think might be something I write it in the book. I have a writing rule which is a rule I take from my dog, which is that my dog, I have to back up and now explain this.

My dog was one of those dogs that anytime something fell on the floor, she would eat it first and figure out what it was later. So my writing rule is write it down first, figure out if you’re going to use it later. Because if you edit yourself or you say to yourself, “That’s not a good idea,” then you don’t end with any material. Anytime someone says something funny or something strikes me funny or interesting, I put it in the notebook and then later I flip through and I see what I have there.

And sometimes I’ll find little crumbs that I can maybe do something with. And then I’ll go to my computer and start to write.

How do reading and writing relate to one another? It really does feel you can’t be a writer unless you’re reader, in a way what would be the impetus to write unless you love to read? I teach writing classes and I always suggest to people that if you want to write, read widely and read as much as possible. Because you can learn so much almost from osmosis from what fine writers ahead of have done.

And looking at it in a slightly different way, kids that like to write often like to read. And if they’re strong readers they ask questions about the writing process. For example I can always tell how much kids are reading and how focused they are by the questions they ask. And kids will ask questions about ellipses like why are those three dots there? But the fact that they even notice them shows me how attune they are to writing.

And they want to take that information, you know the answers that you give as a visiting author in the schools, they want to take that knowledge back to their own writing. In other words, “Mary Quattlebaum used ellipses to give a pause there. I want to give a pause in my writing so I’m going to use ellipses too.”

So I love to go into the schools and I love to hear the questions that kids ask because I think that they want, they’re hungry to know how you do it so they can go back to their own writing and they can write with a greater awareness.

You can’t create the art unless you know the nuts and bolts, it’s almost like a carpenter saying well I have this great idea for a house and it’s going to be beautiful I see it in my mind and then not knowing how to use a hammer and nails, and not knowing how to saw boards. The house can only stay in his head as a vision and not become something real if he doesn’t know how to use the tools of his trade.

Yes. The role of revision in our work is very time consuming. These books are 300 words long. You only have 300 words. It makes a telegram seem like an essay. You have to be — it’s a poem is what it is. It’s absolutely condensed and so how many versions do you think you went through with the new book?

Oh, you mean the writing?

Yeah, 20?

Oh, easily.

How many had been? How many dummies?

And different -

Five, six, seven and then sketches and then after you finish the sketches you start painting and everything changes from drawing to fully formed paintings and you revise again and then you do some of the paintings over. A year and a half.

And for me, the revisions are very important and I love revisions. I have more fun with revising than anything else I think. I like to take a story or sometimes my stories are longer than 300 words, but -

That’s true. There have been a few.

The ones that we’ve done together are usually 300 words, 350 words, but I like to see all the different ways that I can take a story, particularly the ending. It’s very important to me that it has a strong beginning and the middle just keeps — very exciting and then the end is powerful so I’ll maybe write 15 different endings before I’m finished.

And then we write and then we revise and what I find in working with young people is nobody wants to revise but I find that working with middle aged people to.  I don’t want to revise.  It’s annoying, you know?  So then we go into editing, that you have to actually have – and I’m kind of a stickler for this, that you actually have to have correct grammar and correct punctuation and it’s — 

I think for a first draft it’s great to sort of do best guess writing, you know?  But I think in the end, if you want to be writing, then you’re a professional and you have to adhere to the standards, so we go back and we edit both for content in terms of what’s clear and what isn’t clear, what makes sense and doesn’t make sense, what needs more development and what doesn’t.

And we edit for actual English language diction, for what makes sense.  And then they have to do it again and sometimes they even have to do it a third time to understand that writing gets better as you spend more time with it.  It doesn’t get worse.  It gets better.  And so teaching children the patience to sort of produce a first draft and get to the end and then once you’ve done that you kind of know what you have, that there’s a lot of joy in re—writing.

There’s a lot of pleasure in it.  It’s not just like oh, the teacher made me do that but that’s when you turn it into something that’s polished.  So part of the teaching is not just what makes sense as writing but what the standards are, what the professional standards are because when you turn in something, whether you’re turning it in to your teacher or to your school newspaper or to a contest or to your publisher, you’re saying this is my best work and that’s a hard thing for all of us to learn, especially for kids.

You can say well there I did it, you know?  When my sons were growing up, they always had to write a paragraph.  That was sort of the unit of commerce, write a paragraph about and every one of my sons and this I thought was maybe typical of them would say can one sentence be a paragraph.  I would say yeah, it can be, but is it your best work, you know, and they said well who cares, we just have to write a paragraph. 

So I think getting kids beyond that, beyond what the assignment is into being invested in it, that this is a little PCU that you’re putting out in the world and that you want it to represent the best of you is – I mean if you can teach that, then you’re really teaching writing.  It’s hard because kids don’t want to do it but I think that the pride that they feel from going over something once or twice or three times and then having something that can go up on the bulletin board like my poem did or can be sent home or can be put in a magazine that your class publishes, I think that those – the pride in that moment lasts forever.

I’m a living example of that.  You know, my poem in the first grade was put up on the bulletin board and here it is 50 years later and I’m still writing and loving it because I keep hoping it’ll get up on another bulletin board somewhere.

All of the great writers of the world have been rewriters. Shakespeare, Milton, Homer, they’re all rewriters, everybody who writes for a living is a rewriter. Maybe Shelley’s Ozymandias was written once, but that’s the exception that proves the rule.

And I know the story about Frost writing Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening and his pen almost never left the page, well that’s wonderful but that’s a counterpoint to the way writing really happens. It just doesn’t happen that way, every poem I write I write twenty to thirty times.

You tell me you want to be a writer, I say to a third grader, I stand first in line to applaud you, the next words out of your mouth should be but I promise I will be a rewriter.

Well, you definitely need to be a reader to be any kind of writer, illustrator, or anything. Actually I think if you’re making books, whether you’re an illustrator or a writer, I think you need to read a tremendous amount, and you need to focus, you need to be a writer, even if you’re not doing, not the one who’s primarily doing the writing, because it’s all about storytelling.

And I just look at the illustration as another tool in the arsenal for storytelling. I also did graphic design for many years, and I just, I still approach kind of our comics, and our books in the same way, like what elements do I need to use visually and textually and everything else to tell this story, to get this information across.

But, to do any particular genre or format you need to know that format, you need to know that genre, you need to read and read and read to the point that you don’t even have to think about what the forms, how it’s done, you just know, it just comes out, just like people that are going to be film directors they watch thousands and thousands of hours of movies, so that they know instinctively what kind of shots to cut into and everything.

And so, same thing with comics, I don’t have to think about, now where do I put the speech balloon? It’s just automatic, obviously it would go there, and obviously this is the kind of reaction that a character would have, and it would convey that kind of emotion.

And so, I of course still read comics, I’m, I don’t have that much time to read things anymore, unfortunately I’m so busy making stuff. I try to keep on top of the other children’s comics creators right now, which is a big task because there’s so many of us now, which is amazing, you know I just read “Sisters” by Raina Telgemeier, and I read “Boxers and Saints” by Gene Yang.

I just, the other day read Bryan Lee O’Malley’s “Seconds”, that comic, not for kids, but still great. And then the rest of my time is either spent reading science stuff, I’m really interested in anthropology and that sort of stuff, I don’t know, I’m like, I’m interested in human origins, and just where things come from and happen.

And I also read a lot of science fiction. So, I’m a big nerd, and I’m dying for the next Game of Thrones to come out, you know, so.

Kids do ask me for writing advice. And when it comes to The Tryout and memoir, I usually tell them that … I definitely encourage them to keep a journal because there were years when I kept journals and then I wouldn’t do it, and I stopped. And I mean, I just wish that I had those journals. They’re just gold. So I think one thing, I think there’s two things about writing about your own life when you’re young. One is that you’re not going to realize how much story you have in your own life, probably until you’re older. Most of my life I was like, my life is boring. I live in this little town. I don’t go anywhere. I don’t do anything. There’s not even a mall here. And then it’s not until 30 years later when I reflect back on it and I’m like, oh my gosh, I had the most interesting childhood.

Look at all these incredible things that happened to me. I had to try out for cheerleader in front of the whole school. At the time, that didn’t seem like a story. Traveling to Europe felt like a story. So I … just collect the things that are happening to you, even if you think it’s not worthy of telling a story. You need to be able to remember those things. But then the other thing too is that I think writing about your own life can also be painful. It can be hard to talk about things when you’re so close to them. So I think journaling helps because nobody’s going to read it and you can get out your feelings. I mean, you need to have some outlet, some way to talk about your feelings when you’re going through something hard. So I think for some people that’s journaling.

And for some people it’s making up fictional stories where you can work things out where it’s not you, because maybe that’s just a little too close. So you really have to, I think time helps you tell your own story. There is no way I could have written The Tryout as a 25 year old. I think I was still too close to it. I think it’s taken all this time for me to be able to see it for what it was, and for some of the things that were painful to not be painful anymore, for me to tackle them.

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 What I would say to a kid who’s a struggling reader or defines themselves as a reluctant reader, I would just say, you just have to follow your curiosity. So for me, I started to read biographies about basketball players because that’s sort of like how I viewed myself, right? If you love videogames, you read Ready Player One, you read books about videogames. If you love dancing, then you find books about dancers and sort of their life. So, follow your intellectual curiosity and you’re going to be more likely to enjoy the reading experience. 

But then, I always tell young readers that are maybe not experienced readers, give every book you read 50 pages, and here’s why. What you don’t know when you’re an inexperienced reader is that some of the best books you will ever read start off feeling uncomfortable. Maybe this writer has an interesting style or the syntax of their sentences is slightly uncomfortable for you at first, or it doesn’t make sense. 

Well, by page 50 you’re either going to fall into it and it’s going to feel like breathing to read those sentences, or the book didn’t work for you. So, I always say, give a book 50 pages. Experienced readers, what we know, is that you know we’re probably eventually going to figure out the rhythm of that book and then we’re going to see if it’s good or not.  Inexperienced readers don’t know that that could happen, that you could get over that hump in a book. And so that’s what I often say, is like, you know, give it a chance and then you’ll find out if it’s worth your time or not. 

If you want to write, you should read — a lot. And not only in a certain genre, but outside of what you’re interested in. If you like realistic fiction, you should read fantasy. You should just read across the board. And if you want to write, you should write, which seems kinda like a no-brainer, but it took me about ten years to figure it out. That means making some kind of commitment to doing the work of writing, even if it’s two pages a day; if it’s a page a day; if it’s, you know, just some kind of goal that you set for yourself that’s reachable.

If you want to write, you should pay attention to people — everybody has a story — and listen to people when they talk. Not because you want to steal their story, but because almost everybody’s interesting if you give them a chance and if you ask them the right questions.

So, that’s it. Listen. Write. Read. Pretty simple.

For all the kids out there who’re looking to learn how to become a writer, or be a better writer, I would say the best thing I can tell you to do is just to read, read, read. If you go to the library and borrow books, or go to the bookstore, read during the summer, when you’re not in school — anything you can do to just keep reading.

Find the books that you really love, and read them over and over. I’ve read Harriet the Spy millions of times, and The Great Gilly Hopkins and all of my favorites. You’ll start to notice that you just begin to kind of internalize story, and just from reading you’ll learn about beginnings, middles and ends and some of the things that you’re also learning about in school. That will all come naturally if you just keep reading books.

You know, I hate to give advice because my life has been so odd that almost nothing that’s happened to me can apply.

But if you really love to write and you really love to tell stories and you really love to draw, you just have to keep doing it no matter what anybody says. I sent my stories off to publishers for five years and got a good jillion rejection slips — and for all these different reasons: “you can’t do books about boogers,” “you can’t do books about dinosaurs,” “you can’t do books about this.” And you know, it all turned out to be wrong.

If you really want to tell stories, do it and don’t be dissuaded.

The best piece of advice that I was given, you know, and I was given this by my parents over the years, for any writer that is looking to capture their experiences, their imagination and put it down on the page, I would say three things. I’d say, one, read. Read everything you can get your hands on. Don’t just read in the genre that you’re writing in. Read.

Inform yourself. Enhance your worldview. The second thing I would say, and you’re probably not going to like hearing this, I would say read. I would say read, you know, read something fun. You know, I’d say read something that you’re interested in. Go to the bookstore. Go to the library, you know. Check out a great book, you know. You may not like the first book you read, but there’s so many more. And the last piece of advice — I’ve never shared this with anyone. Read. You want to be a better writer? Read.

One is often asked about advice for young people who want to become writers and generally the advice I hear others writers give, is well you have to do a lot of reading, well that’s obvious cause you develop a certain word sense.

But that’s not the advice I give, mine is just as… really more bad news than good news because I have to use the word practice, who wants to practice? Let’s stop for a minute and think, if you want to be an artist, you know you have to draw all the time, that’s practice.

If you’re going to play the violin, you know you’ve got to practice the scales if you’re going to be any good. If you want to be average, don’t practice. And so it’s the same with writing, if you want to be a writer, it’s one of the arts, you have to practice writing.

That means trying writing stories, it doesn’t matter if they’re good or not, they’re finger exercises at that point. Write in a diary just to become accustomed to writing good sentences, write letters, do any sort of writing because it has to be practiced, that’s the advice I’d give.

I teach at Vermont College of Fine Arts and that’s actually also where I got my Master’s degree and so I really rely on that community for support, for intellectual engagement, for craft, you know, learning and growth. And it’s a really important part of my writing life to have people not just from VCFA but from across the children’s literature community as my friends.

When I meet with young writers I often am more focused on what they’re doing on the page, I talk to them about the importance of sticking with your writing, the importance of continuing and definitely the importance of believing in your own voice regardless of what other people might have to say about your work and that, you know, to try to recognize the difference between somebody who just wants to cut you down or wants to change what you’re trying to say versus somebody who is being critical of your work to try to help you improve, to try to help you grow, to try to help those very valuable things that you have that you want to express to the world to help you find ways to make that clearer to a reader.

When I taught writing, I taught writing at a nonprofit I used to run called 826LA, and it’s a writing center. It was in Los Angeles. There are branches across the country. And everything that we did was project-based, and I love project-based learning, project-based teaching. The key was that it would culminate not only in a book or a music magazine full of reviews or a newspaper with a food section, and kids could review candy.

Not only would we have that finished product, but we also always asked kids to read their work out loud. That always changed everything. I think writing, art, books – it’s just a conversation. It’s a conversation between me, the writer, and an audience.

And that can get strange, because this job is a lonely one. It’s sitting alone in a house, or you don’t feel like you’re talking to anybody when you’re there and you have 30 minutes and you’re at your desk in a classroom. But everything that we teach, clarity, sensory detail, the rules of grammar, the rules of usage – these are all things to make communication easier.

And they can seem like abstractions, but once you realize that you’re going to be up in front of people, that you’re actually writing for an audience, that your audience isn’t just somebody with a pen who’ll be marking the things that are wrong with it but actually that you are trying to create an experience, convey a feeling or convince a person.

And you are on the spot having to do it. That changes everything. It can be easy to get sort of distance from the fact that there’s somebody else on the other end of your writing. But I never trust writers who say, like, oh, I just write things for myself. Because there’s always somebody on the other end of a good piece of art.

And I think, you know, making projects and encouraging kids to read their work out loud – that hits home. Oh, this is why I should write this way.

The best thing that I always say to kids is “If you want to be a writer you have to be a reader.” And that’s very, very important. The thing that always kind of drives me crazy is when an adult comes to me and says “Oh I want to write a children’s book.” And I’ll be like “Oh what are your favorite children’s books?” And they’ll be like “Oh I don’t read them.” Well how can you write a children’s book without reading them? And I think that’s very, very important. I think you need to read books and you need to love books.

I think, to me, I feel like if the author doesn’t love what they wrote, if the author doesn’t love their own book, then the reader is never going to either. So I think the best advice other than to read a lot is to love what you’re writing. Of course you’re going to have, there’s love hate when you write it. But to, but in the end, to love what you’re writing because you have to love it before anyone else does.

So when I visit schools, I always give kids the advice to write things down, whether that’s in a diary, whether that’s an essay, a play, a song, anything at all. Just find a way to get your feelings out, your ideas out onto the page, or onto a recorded format. It doesn’t matter. But that’s so useful, and you’ll have access to it in the future. And, you know, I know a lot of anxious kids, and I know that sometimes people are waiting for permission to do something like that. 

They don’t know if it’s okay. They don’t know if like, that’s what they should do with their spare time, but why not? You know, all it takes is a paper and pencil in order to do that.

Children who are interested in either writing or illustrating – the parents should tell their child that they should draw or write what really interests them. It has to be something that they’re excited about. It’s the same for them as it is for me. And that’s what I always tell the parents. I always tell them, and I tell teachers this, too, because a lot of times when I’m at schools, teachers sometimes will actually tell a group of kids over here to write about such and such a topic. “And then these four kids will write about such and such a topic.” They’ll assign topics. And I keep on telling them, “Never do that.” Tell the child to write what they find exciting and interesting in their lives, or something that they’re really curious about themselves. If they don’t follow that route, they’re going to write a very boring thing. If they write about something that is very exciting and means a lot to them, they are going to write something interesting and exciting to others. So, that’s what I always stress.

I think writing and reading are completely synergistic; not necessarily in that one has to be a good reader to be a good writer or vice versa, but that they so inform each other. I mean, reading obviously so enriches our vocabulary, broadens our perspective, gives us ideas, awakens our mind and our compassion and our awareness and so forth, all of which I think informs our writing, for those of us who are writers.

I think I personally, as a writer, read differently knowing how tough it is to write, knowing how challenging it is to articulate it, to express clearly and economically and with focus and with purpose. I become so much more of an admirer and a fan of other people’s writing when it really works and sings. I think that children who read are better writers, and children who tell stories appreciate books.

Reading and hearing stories, those two things are completely intertwined. In fact, statistically we know that children who do read and read well and read as a preferred activity, which is different than just know how to read, are much more likely to be better writers, be more successful academically at school, and also engage in other creative pursuits such as participate in the performing arts, attend cultural events later in life. Reading has a direct impact on the degree to which children and then the adults they grow into become engaged citizens.

Yeah, once, sometimes when I do school visits I’ll bring in drafts of my work and you’ll see markup, my markup, my editor’s markup. And one time a child said you made all those mistakes?  And that’s when I explained it’s a process because you’ve got to deal with so many things in writing. You’ve got to get the information down; you’ve got to present it in an engaging way.

As I said, Toni Morrison said “I don’t have color, I don’t have music, I have to use words to make color, to make music.”  You’ve got to look at sentence structure and do you have the same sentence structure; oh we have to mix that up. You have to know, and one thing I tell children is that the reason that you need to really pay attention to what your teachers are teaching you about grammar and transitions and all of that, the mechanics so that you get, you know them so well then you can break the rules.

I say so now I can use sentence fragments and it’s effective and no one is going to ding me for it because I know how to use it. And of course there’s the famous analogy with classical music and jazz. Many jazz artists started out as classical musicians. So you know when children also ask me is writing hard work?  And I say well I don’t think that anything worth achieving in life is easy.

And I also told them that compared to chopping cotton in the Delta or sugar cane in the Delta, writing is not difficult.

But when you do what you love you, you don’t mind, I mean sometimes yes I do get frustrated and it’s like I want to be out of this book. But it’s what I love and so I take a deep breath and say I want to do the best job I can do and also again writing for young people is a tremendous responsibility and honor.

So I can’t give them schlock because what they learn about Frederick Douglass or DuBois may be their introduction. May in a way stamp what they believe so I have to give them an objective, honest, the best book that I can because I’m shaping a young mind.