I do have an end in mind, but it doesn’t usually end that way because there are things that happen. How do you know what you want until you see what you have, you know? As a visual person I have to have it in front of me, I can’t hold that thing in my brain, I can’t say okay, I’ve got this idea.
I mean, My Friend Rabbit, people always say well, it’s about the power of friendship. The rabbit gets the mouse in trouble basically. The rabbit causes havoc and the mouse sort of goes along with it. I was thinking that it would be funny for that to happen. I had friends, I was more the mouse and I had friends that were more the rabbit.
So that made some sense. In the end, for me the story was about it doesn’t matter if your friends get you in trouble — think about how dull your life would be if they weren’t in your life? I don’t know if that comes out, but a lot of teachers look at it and say well, we use this as a lesson to say that friendship is really important.
I did this book called Pumpkinhead. It’s about a little boy who’s born with a pumpkin for a head and I wanted to make a story about a helpless child, because when I was four I felt like I was being pulled back and forth. He’s born with a pumpkin head and his family loves him. A bat comes down and takes his head.
He’s helpless. He goes here and there, can’t
well, in the end he realizes that this is it, I’m home, I’m safe, and I kind of loved the adventure. The thing is about telling a story like that is unlike the My Friend Rabbit story there’s, you know, there’s not another character like the friendship character that comes into the story.
It is about something else. A woman came up to me at a book signing and said I use your book in my work. I’m thinking what do you do, you know, you’ve got pumpkins, you’ve got decapitation. What do you do? She worked at a pediatric burn unit. She said something about the book, something about here’s a child who’s different, but at the very beginning of the book you say although he’s different his family loved him.
Then he becomes helpless and he looks different than everybody else and in the end his family still loves him, even though the world will be more difficult for a boy with a pumpkin for a head. You could not write a book and say this is going to be for children at a pediatric burn unit.
It all depends, you put it out into the world and somebody uses it some way. Once it leaves the studio it’s not yours anymore; it’s everybody else’s and they find their way to it or they don’t.