Sarah: And the question is how do we collaborate together? I loved that, you know, making the use of both words for emphasize. And we’re not together at all in the making of these books. And we often say to audiences that that’s the reason we think we have such a good marriage is that I’m a writer and that’s what I do every day. I write every day. Oftentimes I’m thinking about writing when I’m not writing, especially in my garden, as he knows, lots of day dreaming, even to stumbling sometimes or losing my way in the practical world.
And that said, I write every day and David draws every day. And I write in my mind as I just said, but also in a tiny room in our house, upstairs, away from everything else. No noise, no interference, nothing but my desk and my books. And David’s next door in his studio making art. And when I have a story I think he’ll like I read it to him, and if he likes it I send it to my editor in New York and if she buys it, she is Margaret Ferguson at Farrar Strauss and Giroux, then David takes my words and he makes that extraordinary life bigger, richer, deeper with his art.
David: It’s really, what we practice is really the traditional relationship between a writer and illustrator. I have actually turned down manuscripts in the past, some very good ones, because they came accompanied by two pages of single spaced type instructions to the illustrator from the author.
Sarah: Not from me.
David: And I’m certainly, you know, I appreciate that if you write a story you want to have it presented the way you would if you could draw, but I think in fact if a story is good it calls up good imagery in everybody’s mind. And if you’re an illustrator that’s your job is to retell stories in pictures. And I don’t like to be told what to do, I don’t mind criticism, I don’t mind interaction with somebody who speaks art, like a good art director or a good editor. I love that kind of collaboration. But in terms of the author and the illustrator there’s too much, it can devolve too much into a clash of artistic egos. And that’s hard.
