So, I do write in many different genres and for many different ages. And I don’t know what I’m going to do next because it’s not the genre or the age or the form that drives me; it’s the story. So if I find a story that has grabbed hold of me and I find engaging and I want to spend a lot of time with, that sort of steers who is the story for. Who wants to know about this in addition to me? Is it a story for younger kids, is it a story for older kids?
I don’t really worry about who the audience is before I know what the story is. So that’s why I don’t know if the next idea will be a picture book or a teen novel or a long form non-fiction because I might not know what the story is yet. It’s always about the story. Always. It’s never about form and function and structure for me.
I usually choose my topics as sort or a mysterious combination of serendipity, instinct, and conscious thought. I think it all sort of works together. I’m always listening to the world around me and trying to just pick up on things. I find that so often in my life — I don’t use the word coincidence anymore, because so often in my life someone will say something or I will then see something in successions of three and four and five times within the course of a couple of weeks that will be pointing me clearly in one direction.
It’s like the universe is speaking. It’s that same kind of phenomenon when you learn a new word and then you hear it all the time. That’s what happens with me and stories. I’ll come across something or I’ll hear someone mention something or I’ll have a thought, and then it’ll repeat itself over the next span of some kind of time.
I’ll think, okay, well, then that’s the next thing I need to be thinking about. And the genre often changes. So Almost Astronauts started out as a picture book and became long form non-fiction. And the book that I’m working on right now called Courage Has No Color started out as a picture book and is now becoming a longer form non-fiction like Almost Astronauts because the story demanded it.
Well, I do varying amounts of research depending on the story and what’s required of it. But I do take my responsibility to young readers very seriously. If I’m writing a true story, I need to be as wholly accurate as humanly possible.
That’s a tricky thing to do because I tell kids all the time — don’t forget, anytime you read anything, whether it’s a newspaper article or you hear a news report from an anchor person or your read it in a book or an encyclopedia, every single thing that you read has been written by a human being, and human beings see the world through their own unique set of eyes and set of thoughts.
So, my responsibility is sort of a mixture of recognizing that I’m a human being and I see the world through my own eyes, and then being as careful as I can possibly be to make sure that I do the best research that I can and document everything, and lay all of that fact matter out in the back of the book so that kids and teachers and librarians can go and read something further if they want and maybe add their own sense of what happened in a story or what happened to a person by extending the reading experience, seeing what I looked at and having some thoughts about it for themselves.
So, the research process for me is pretty deep and extensive. Anytime I can do primary source research I do, especially when I’m writing about people who are alive. That’s fascinating, because then you’re also getting their sense of what their life was like, which isn’t factual either. So you have to sort of factor it all in and you really get to know a person and you learn how they walk and talk and what they smell like and what their face looks like when they’re happy. All of those things inform your writing in a way that if you were just researching them on paper you wouldn’t get to know, you wouldn’t get to learn about.
