It’s an interesting question whether authors think about their audiences. And I was talking to some other authors about this recently. My theory is that we do, or at least I do. I’m very conscious of the audience for whom I’m writing. I think school visits have helped me tremendously with that. I’m a parent, but my kids are older now. And I just need a refresher course every so often on what a third or fourth grader is thinking.
Invariably I’m surprised by how incredibly idealistic they are, how kind, how thoughtful. They tolerate no BS. I mean, they’ll tell you if they don’t like a book. Not afraid to critique. And when they love a book, they love a book so much. You are a rock star. It’s life-changing when that happens. So I like to think about those kids. And when I wrote Wishtree, for example, I was very consciously thinking, “I want this small and fable-like.”
And when I wrote The One and Only Ivan, I very much wanted it to be — I wanted the format to be a little bit different so that I could lean toward a little more lyrical prose, hopefully, but I wanted a lot of white space to reflect his experience. So I very much think about it. That might just be because it doesn’t come intuitively for me, but when I’m writing for a picture book audience I have to remind myself what works and what doesn’t. And sometimes you get it right and sometimes you don’t.