Here’s the thing about the collaboration with Dan Santat for Lift is that I always try to leave room in the manuscript for collaboration. And in this instance, so in the story a girl discovers a magical elevator button that she puts up next to her closet, and when she pushes it her closet transforms into a magical elevator that takes her to all kinds of fantastical places.
I never specified what was on the other side of that elevator door. So, in the manuscript she pushes the button, it goes ding, the doors open, and then I left that up to Dan. So, it was almost like he was in charge of creating the fantastical world on the other side of the elevator and in that way we kind of built in this space for a collaboration. Because for me Dan is such a creative and imaginative individual, I was like I want to give him every opportunity to draw what he wants to draw, to be as creative as possible within this story.
And I think it worked out really well because it’s almost like the book is embodying that collaborative spirit. Just like the girl, Iris has to learn to work with her younger brother, it’s like the author and illustrator are working together to create this, create something magical.
While I didn’t specify what was on the other side of the elevator for Dan, once he decided and showed me sketches of those imaginative worlds, we kind of went back in and figured out how to put in those clues that would kind of give the reader breadcrumbs for how those – how Iris ends up in those worlds. So that for me is the fun part of getting to kind of like put in all of those details.
As a creator of children’s books, the hope is that you create something that the reader will want to revisit over and over again. So you want to put in those little details that you might not notice the first time around, but then you’re rewarded when upon a reread because then you notice those details and it reveals different meanings. And each book that we work on kind of has those little details that hopefully you can discover along the way.
