And so in my writing, I try to have the same type of fun, same sort of unpredictability. You sort of think you know where this story is going and then it takes a left or right turn. And one of the things that my aunt did, it was a brilliant device.
She — in the first book and in a couple of later books, she used a list of things for Amelia Bedelia to do, and which is a great device because it allows the grownups, Mr. and Mrs. Rogers, to give her this list, and then they exit the picture and she’s allowed to sort of run amuck. And otherwise they’d be there correcting her the whole time and it wouldn’t be any fun at all. It would be like the word police had shown up. And so I wanted the same sort of fun with misunderstandings, but I thought, you know, there must be a way to have a face-to-face misunderstanding.
And my inspiration along those lines was this brilliant radio comedy of Who’s on First with Abbott and Costello. It’s from the, you know, from the 30s. They talk — it’s about a baseball game and Who is the name of the player on first base. And so I think this lasts about 9 minutes, 11 minutes. They are no closer at the end of that to understanding each other than they were at the beginning.
And so I thought, “Well, that’s great. I wonder if you could put like through homonyms, homophones, expressions, if you could put people together, have them misunderstand each other just relentlessly, and don’t try to resolve it, just go on to the next thing?” And so that was sort of my pattern for the book, Good Driving, Amelia Bedelia.
