Using different forms for different parts of a book for me definitely is dictated by the story I think. But it’s also dictated by, you know, I go back and forth, most of the time I go back and forth between writing and the visual part of it.
And you know often, I have a friend who is an artist who also plays bass and he says when I’m stuck in my art, when I’m stuck in my music I draw and I think that works that way for me too. When I’m writing, ideas for visual things come to mind and when I’m working on visual things, bits of dialogue. So I always have the little side notebook where I make notes about what I’m going to do next.
I remember when I was working on Criss Cross, there’s a line where a character named Hector says the world was opening up like the civic arena. Which is a building that no longer exists, but it was a big arena in Pittsburg that had a roof that opened up in nice weather. And I had sort of for some reason I had thought Hector’s thoughts in this book would be photographs where Debbie’s would be pen and ink drawings.
And I also had a job for a while working for a model railroad company where models of buildings, so I thought I’m going to make a model of the civic arena and I just, I love making things anyway. So I cut a globe, my husband did this part for me, cut the globe in half and I made this little stadium and I used little beads for the people.
And then I put Vaseline around the outside of my camera lens and then I put you know little rocks and moss around it so it would look like it was in a landscape. y editor called while I was working on this and my husband told her what I was doing and she said what is she doing that for? And you know once you start thinking about those things you think of more and more of them and so I sent her this sort of first draft with all these various things in thinking she’s going to tell me I can’t do this.
But she didn’t and you know she didn’t even question it, she just talked about what was there and I felt like this carte blanche had been given to me, I can do anything I want as long as it has to do with the story. And so that was a really freeing moment. And I just like trying different things, like in the chapter with the haiku, the pen and ink illustrations are sort of…
I tried to refer to Japanese prints and how they’re composed. Just because it was fun to do and it was Japanese. So, I don’t even know how much of any of that registers with the reader but it’s fun for me.
I think there is more allowance for different forms, way more now. When I did All Alone in the Universe I had all these pen and ink drawings that I sent. I’ve only ever had two editors so this was with my first editor and she said I really like this but kids this age don’t want pictures in their books.
And this was in the 90’s and by the time I finished that book they were saying more pictures, more pictures. And since then it’s just been really interesting to watch like the graphic novel scene and the straight novel and how there are all these different hybrids and people combining them in different ways that I think it makes sense, it’s a lot of fun, why should it all be just one way or the other?
