All stories are part of a history of stories, and I do think that’s important for kids and for emerging writers to know. My Toys Go Out series, which is a series about toys who have a secret life is, you know, in a continuum with, in a conversation with Winnie the Pooh and the Raggedy Ann stories that I grew up with and with work by later writers like The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo or the Toy Story movies.
So, toy stories are always going to be in conversation with one another and magic school stories like Upside-Down Magic are in conversation with the Magic School stories that have come before and those have a long history too. So, I think that when kids start to write, it is very natural for them to write in conversation with the books that they love, and that is a great skill-building exercise, right.
You love stories with knights and dragons let’s imagine. So, you’ve read a bunch of them so of course you want to write one. And all right, what are you bringing to the conversation, right? How is your knight like you? How is your dragon like you, right? How are their feelings like your feelings? What are you borrowing from this writer? What are you borrowing from that writer, right? This I think is very empowering to kids. It was certainly empowering to me as a way of thinking about my own writing.
When I go into classrooms and schools, I sometimes see kids who are being encouraged only to write about their own everyday experiences, memoir essentially. And they aren’t yet understanding that you can take your own emotional life and put it into a dragon, your own emotional life and use that as a way of having a conversation with the stories that you love or with that history of stories that have come before your story.
