I would say probably for every book that I’ve done, I’ve probably had about 10 or 20 ideas that I’ve just really quickly jotted down or
sketched down. Even though I’m an illustrator really first and primarily, I always start with writing and I, whenever I have an idea, if it’s a sentence, if it’s a
you know, if it’s a whole story, I’ll just write it down and I’ll put it away.
And sometimes they come right away, sometimes I never see them again. The book I’m looking to do next actually is probably an idea I had 10 years ago and I just came across it again and I thought, this is a good story and it was something that I really couldn’t have done 10 years ago, but I feel like I can do now.
And I think it’s very interesting when you start something and you stop and you start it again and you can look at it with a fresh perspective and I think it’s very important to take time between drafts of something or while you’re working on something to really get perspective and I think it’s great to work on many different things at once.
I think if you’re only working on one thing, it’s very hard to keep your perspective. So I like to start, as far as process goes, you know I like to start with a quick story and then once I get that into a form where I know the beginning, the middle and the end, then I do quick sketches.
With the Madeline book, it’s different because it’s in rhyme, so I’ll come up with couplets of rhyme that I like which almost in the end are never used and the sketches are never used. But it just gets you started. And one of the things that is great about being a writer and an illustrator both is that you can go back and forth.
And I think that’s
I think going back and forth is really the best way to make a unified whole of it.
