I think a picture book is, I’ve always said is sort of you take War and Peace and turn it into haiku. And so the challenge is to take out every single possible word that you don’t absolutely need. Or that can be seen in the pictures. Why say that the mouse has a red vest when he’s wearing a red vest in the illustration?
So although the writing comes first you think ahead, what can I remove? So that it’s a process of sort of truncating and truncating and truncating until the story comes very clean. With a novel I loved it, because I kept writing these tiny little short chapters, Randall and I, Randall Wright. And he had written novels before and that’s how this story came together. We were at a conference in Utah and we were swapping stories and I told him the one about the Cheshire Cheese Cat. And he said, “Have you written it?” And I said, no, it’s a novel. He goes, “I’ll write it with you.” And, of course, as the writer I went, “My story, my story. My precious, it’s mine.”
But he convinced me. He said, “Look, you’ve never written a novel, we could do this together?” And I said, “But we’ve never … how do we get one voice?” He said, “I don’t know, that’s the great thing, we haven’t been ruined yet. We don’t know how to do it right or how to do it well or how to do it poorly. Let’s just try.” So he flew out and my husband made countless meals for us, we worked 12 and 14 hour days and loved every blessed minute of it.
He would write a chapter then I would rewrite it and then he would write it, because we had an arc, you know, we had a story. And then he would give it to me, we’d do it half dozen of times, a dozen times. And then the person who finished that chapter would sit back and say you do the next one. And then say I would write that one, hand it to him. We’d go through the same process, slowly a voice emerged.
And a lot of, you know, wonderful nitpicking, I don’t want this in there, I do what this. And so sometimes you win by attrition.
I’ve never had so much fun working on a story. It’s a gentle story. No one gets blown up, although there’s a lot of tension and there are betrayals and there’s skullduggery and there is cheese. But it’s about the old Cheshire Inn I visited in London with my daughters. And it’s marvelous. Samuel Johnson used to hold court there and Charles Dickens not only wrote there there’s actually a brass plaque that says this is the place where the author Charles Dickens often sat to write. It was marvelous.
And in the story of course Dickens, it becomes ancillary. He is not a primary part of the story, but you read as he being a writer is observing what’s going on and putting together his own version of what he thinks is happening in this inn with these animals. It is an animal fantasy historical fiction, sort of, kind of thing. And a mouse and a cat become friends. And then they don’t. And then they do. And then there are many surprises. And some are lost. And some are found.