Well I started doing pictures books and I loved the picture books. After I wrote The Ugly Vegetables, I had such a great response to it that I wanted to write a sequel. And I said, this is about my family, my mother and I. So I tried to write a sequel but every time I would start writing and writing, it would never fit into this format, into a picture book format. And I kept struggling with it over, I think over three or four years trying to get it to fit into a picture book format.
Until finally I said “oh maybe it doesn’t want to be a picture book, maybe I should just keep writing and see what happens.” So I kept writing and that became my very first novel, The Year of the Dog. And when The Year of the Dog came out, that was a really great thing that happened to me because for pictures books which you hear the reaction that you hear is usually from parents or little kids, very small kids, but the small kids aren’t really that articulate. They just say “I like it” which is really nice.
But what I started to hear when I wrote The Year of the Dog was directly from the kids and very articulate about what they liked and what they loved about the book. It was so wonderful to me and I was so touched, I was like that is why I’m an author and an illustrator. This is why I create books. And to know it was such a direct connection with the reader it made me feel so happy and so satisfied with what I was doing.
The best thing that happened to me was at a book signing I was signing, I think, The Year of the Rat. And this girl came up to me, and her mother said “We love your books. We’ve grown up on them.” And I said “Oh”. And it didn’t really quite click with me what she meant. That they’ve grown up on them. And then she pulled out a photo of her about six years with her as a little girl.
With her, not the mother, but the little girl, as a really little girl holding my picture book. And now she was buying my novels and I realized, wow, she really did grow up with my books. As a picture book reader she was with my books and now as a novel reader she is reading my books. And that’s actually why I wanted to write the easy reader, I felt like I wanted something in between so they could really grow up with my books. So that the kids who read my picture books have something every step of the way.
