My Mom is a retired elementary school librarian, so we spent a lot of time in the library at school, especially after school waiting for her to be finished. There were always books around in our house and on the weekends, we spent lots of time in the libraries. My Dad is a professor and also wrote a lot of science trade books for kids in the 1960s and 1970s.
So there are actually a lot of storytellers in my family. I started writing stories probably around the age of seven or eight. I remember in particular there was a series of stories that I started writing called “Henry, the Happy House.” There were just terrible pictures that went along with it. I did those all the time, and I’m sure I wrote other things too, but I think those are the most vivid in my mind because I did them so often.
There were recurring themes and there were other characters and there were adventures that Henry the Happy House would go on even though it was obviously a stationary building. Somehow that didn’t stop me.
I never really stopped writing. So, even though my first career was as an editor of children’s non-fiction, I always wrote on my own. It was more poetry and journaling and things of that nature, and the years that I’ve spent editing I loved. I loved being an editor. I loved coming up with ideas for children’s non-fiction series.
All of that informs what I do now. A lot of what I learned as an editor I had sort of in the back of my mind I think probably mostly subconsciously when I’m writing. But I knew a lot about the publishing business before I ever started to actually write.
I think my inner editorial voice is always there and I edit as I go. I’m always editing as I go. And so, it’s not just the copy editing or the grammar or things like that, it’s sort of the more structural, larger editorial questions that I ask myself as I’m going.
Is this working? Is it central to the story? Is it important to the character? You know, am I speaking to that idea of what does she want and how is she gonna get it? I do a lot of that as I’m going, so I do a lot of rewriting. People sometimes ask me how many drafts I’ve done, and I honestly could never answer that question because I’m continually redrafting and revising.
I don’t necessarily stop and call it Draft Number Three, you know. And then the kind of editorial relationship that occurs after I turn something in is a different one because then that’s sort of more thought provoking questions that someone else is asking me as they’re looking at it with a more objective eye.
