When I start sharing in the process
I have to rein myself back from doing it too early because I’m always dying to get feedback and I really want to get peoples opinions, but I only have a limited circle of friends. So I can’t really abuse their generosity too much.
And you also have to know from your friends, I think early in the process, you want just encouragement. So I tend to then show it to people who I know are going to be easy reads. And the further along it gets, I’ll start showing it to people who I know will be far more critical.
But for me the one of the best parts of it is
is sharing it with is sharing your new stories with other people. And you get so much immediate impact and I think probably if I’d learned to do anything, anything that was really bad with, when I first started off about 12 years ago, is to be able to take other peoples criticisms, even when I think it’s unfounded, to be at least, see where they’re coming from.
And it also helps, it’s helped me to realize that the vision that you have in your head will never be the vision that anybody else takes to a story. And that what you’re doing, especially when you write, is you’re allowing your readers to create their own experience with the work that you’ve created.
And it’s not a medium where everybody experiences it the same way and that’s really the best thing and I try to leave a lot of space within a story that I don’t try to explain everything. I did that when I first started off and now I really want it, especially in picture books.
One of the most fantastic things about picture books is that you only have, it’s not only one other person, it’s two other people because you have a lot of times parents reading it. So it’s their interpretation and then it’s also what the kids are going to get out of it.
And if you can leave things for the parents to explain, even things the parents don’t know and maybe they have to look up or
it just enriches the experience, especially because you hope they’re going to be reading to the kids the same book, 10, 20, 30 times.
