I would love to say that I wanted to write a story about how it’s good to be adventurous, which is in some way how it ended up. I have four kittens in the story and this is the thing about picture books: you have 18 pictures to tell a story, don’t waste your time with what they were wearing and you know what they had for breakfast, go right to it.
Once there were four kittens who had never seen snow….Once there was a boy who planted a carrot seed. Once there was an old man and an old woman who wanted a cat. I mean, get to it right away. I knew the basic premise, once there were four kittens who had never seen snow. They are kittens for a reason because cats tend to be cautious, it’s not an armadillo tale because I don’t know what they’d roll around in, I don’t know what they would do.
Three of them are cautious and one of them says I can’t wait the whole time. I heard Richard Peck talk once, the author, Richard Peck, and he said that we never write about who we are, we write about who we wish we were. The adventurous cat is not me. The rabbit in My Friend Rabbit is not me. I’m the little guy in the back who hides behind the whatever, you know, that’s who I was when I was a kid.
It starts off with an adventurous cat and then finds its way through all those drafts, through all that thinking about you know who the cats are, how they would react to things. All the time I’m drawing cats. I see how they react to things that they’re not sure of. That adds into the story as well.
The inspiration begins with sort of one little idea about an adventurous cat and then by looking at cats, by writing, by making pictures, by observing the subject that started to present itself and find its way. There was millions of directions that you went in that just don’t come about.
