Well, one thing about being a picture book writer is that someone else is going to go and make the pictures and you might have some say about the pictures or you might have very little say. So, it is inherently a process of letting go and letting someone else make something beautiful and understanding that it is not 100 percent my book; it is a shared creation.
I think that experience has served me very well as a collaborator because in co-writing Upside-Down Magic with Sarah Mlynowski and Lauren Myracle, I just felt so happy to see what they were doing. They are so funny and they think of things that I would never think of in a million years. And my experience as a picture book writer meant that I was just excited to see what they did. I didn’t feel like I needed to control it, you know.
I was so excited that it had gone off in new and hilarious directions. They are two of my best friends and it’s also a wonderful change from the fairly lonely work of writing on your own, to be sending a manuscript back and forth, sometimes daily emails, sometimes, “Oh, I just rewrote this scene. Do you want to have a look?”
Sometimes the whole manuscript comes back with new things and you have never thought of them and there they are and now they’re part of the fabric of the book and they seem great mostly. So, it’s very energized, right, because there’s so much sharing. We’re trying to make each other laugh, and it’s a great way to balance the lonelier work that I do most of the time.
