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One Question, Five Authors #7: “How does a book begin for you?”

January 7, 2019 / / One comment

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Welcome to “One Question,” the world’s laziest interview series. In today’s edition, we’re interested in origin stories — or the origins of story — those interstices of time between books. An author casts about, open-minded and perhaps a little lost, wondering what in the world that next book might be. And then, hmmm, like a fish nibbling on a line . . . something appears.

My thanks to Matt Tavares, Tony Abbott, Keely Hutton, Greg Neri, and Aimee Reid for their contributions.

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Matt Tavares

Every book is different, but I’ll tell you how Red & Lulu got started — with a suggestion from my editor, Katie Cunningham, in late 2011 that I do a book about the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. I loved the idea, and began working on a nonfiction manuscript about the tree. I envisioned a book along the lines of those great David Macaulay books (Castle, Cathedral…), where I would show how they find the tree, how they chop it down, get it to the city, decorate it, etc. I spent a while working on that, and submitted a manuscript to Candlewick. They told me they liked it, but felt like it needed more of a story. My editor suggested I add some characters.
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Meanwhile, I had this whole other idea about cardinals. I often noticed cardinals in my yard, and was struck by how whenever I saw a male cardinal, if I looked around a bit, the female cardinal was usually nearby. I wondered what would happen if they ever became separated. I felt like there could be a story there.
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At some point, those two completely separate ideas became one, and my nonfiction story about the Rockefeller Christmas tree became a fictional story about two cardinals who become separated.
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So, long story short: It was my editor’s idea.

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Tony Abbott

Different motives begin a new book for me. Denis Ever After began when I read a single word in the newspaper. It was “Toms.” I don’t recall now whether it was a piece about Toms toothpaste, or some other reference, but the idea of their being two “Toms” in the same family — brothers — started me thinking about twins. Almost immediately after birth the first boy, already named Tom, succumbed, so when the second came out, and lived, they named him Tom, as a sort of remembrance. Thus . . . Toms. The story changed leagues from that, but that’s how it began. Origins are one of the most pleasurable parts of writing for me. The whole universe of story seems capable of being encompassed in a new novel. This new story will be about love, dreams, oak tables, stars, dust, shoes, the rings of Saturn, hot chocolate, and the Gulag. Only when the pages pile up do its contours shrink and define. So. No shoes, no prison camp, and more joy than first imagined. Anyway, a way of saying reality seeps in. In my new novel, The Great Jeff, coming in March, it was the chance “sighting” of a character from a book published a dozen years ago. I’ve written about this before, but it’s probably true of all writers (and, they hope, their readers), that characters live beyond the book in some place and time, and that a story written about them is by no means all that that character is. So I saw a boy in a library, alone, reading, and I was convinced that this boy was Jeff, from Firegirl (2006). He’d reappeared, and I had to write about him. That’s how it happened. I hope it happens again. There’s something deeply satisfying in knowing that these people we seem to create are, once born, living on and on.

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Keely Hutton

I never know when inspiration for my next book will strike, but I’m always on the lookout for subjects that spark my imagination. The spark for my upcoming middle grade novel, Secret Soldiers, started with some confusion while I binge-watched the BBC show “Peaky Blinders” two years ago. The main character, Tommy Shelby, runs his family’s criminal organization in 1919 England and suffers from PTSD due to his time as a soldier in WW1. My editor and I agreed that my next book should be in the same vein as my debut novel Soldier Boy, so I’d been researching wars and child soldiers. I hadn’t found anything that really grabbed my attention until I watched Tommy Shelby’s flashbacks, which showed him fighting in tunnels. I kept asking my husband, “Why are they underground?” After my third such query, my exasperated husband kindly suggested I Google it, so I did. A quick search revealed that thousands of sappers and miners tunneled beneath the battlefields of the Great War to undermine the enemy’s position and break the brutal stalemate of trench warfare. Fascinated, I researched whether any child soldiers fought in WW1 and was shocked to discover that over a quarter of a million underage British boys lied about their ages to join the war. When I learned that many of those young soldiers were used as beasts of burden on and under the battlefields, I knew I had found my next story and began researching and writing Secret Soldiers.

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Greg Neri

My cousin the horse thief. Who would’ve thought? When I was growing up, I went to Texas once to stay on my uncle’s ranch. He had thirteen kids. Ten of them boys — strapping ranch hands and school wrestlers who liked to surprise-attack each other in the middle of the night out in the bunkhouse their dad built for them in the fields. To be a girl in that family, you had to be tough and willing to stand up for yourself. I could see that in my cousin Gail straight off the bat. She didn’t take no guff, and she could dish it out just as hard as her brothers — maybe harder. But inside, she was thoughtful and caring, and she loved horses. I had met Gail Ruffu only once when I was younger. Thirty-some years later, at a Christmas party at my parents’ house in California, I met her again. In the intervening years, I had occasionally heard tales of her exploits. The Texas part of the family, like the state of Texas itself, was always bigger than life. When I asked what she’d been up to lately, she paused and pulled me aside. “I’m a wanted woman, ya know,” she said. For the next hour and a half, she told me a whopper of a story of how she stole a thoroughbred on Christmas Eve and became the first person in 150 years to be charged with Grand Theft Horse — a case that went all the way to the California Supreme Court. When she was finished, I sat there, floored. My first thought was that would make a great book. So I wrote it.

 

Aimee Reid

One ordinary night, I was tucking my then 2-1/2-year-old daughter into bed. As usual, she asked what our schedule was for the next day. No matter how simple our plans—visiting the library, dropping in to playgroup, or simply playing at home—she always delighted in looking forward to them. After I shared my thoughts about what we would do together, she wiggled her whole body in delight and said, “When I grow up and you grow down . . . .” She proceeded to list the everyday activities we would do together if our roles were reversed.

Zing! Her words flew like a spark to my imagination. This is a story, I thought. Not long afterward, Mama’s Day with Little Gray was born (Random House). It is the tale of a small elephant who dreams of growing big enough to take care of his mama just as she has cared for him.

That story began by listening to my daughter. Sometimes, words for a story will surprise me and start running through my head. For an upcoming book, All the Earth (Penguin Random House, spring 2020), my brain fed me the first line of a lyrical text. Zing! Those words became a rhymed picture book about animal babies being cared for by their parents.

Ideas can come from anywhere. What the best book ideas have in common for me is that spark of recognition. Zing! Then I know: this is a story I am meant to write and share with the world.

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One Question, Five Authors #6: “Tell us about one detail in your new book that particularly pleases you — a sentence, an image, an idea?”

December 19, 2018 / / No comments

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No matter how they may feel about the book overall, all book creators can point to at least one small moment that gives them outsized satisfaction. So I put that question to a few talented friends: Nora Raleigh Baskin, Eugene Yelchin, Nick Bruel, Erin Dionne, and Alan Katz.

 

Nora Raleigh Baskin

I recently wrote a scene about a girl who is mourning the loss of her friend but doesn’t quite realize that yet. Throughout the book, and throughout her journey during the course of one day, her grief finds form and then wings and then she is able to let it go. Without knowing why, as I was writing some dialogue between my character and a stranger, I saw, in my mind, a heron lift into the sky. As my character listens to someone talking about her friend, the heron rises from the water and into the sky, until it is nothing more than a dot against the blue.
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“The heron hunches its shoulders, then spreads out its wings across the sky, past the sun, and lets its skinny legs dangle below.“
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Finding Joy by Gae Polisner and Nora Raleigh Baskin (Knopf Spring, 2020)

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Eugene Yelchin

The illustrated sequence that serves as the epilogue for The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge, a book I co-authored with M.T. Anderson.  On the surface, our book is a fantasy narrative, but even a young reader will easily discern the parallels between the world of goblins and elves and the world we live in.

The formal tension in the book is between the written chapters (penned by M.T. Anderson) and the wordless ones (illustrated by me). The written and the illustrated chapters contradict each other. They are “at war” until a crucial moment in the book when the two opposing points of view converge.

During the course of our collaboration, M.T. Anderson had this brilliant idea of goblins shedding and preserving their skins as mementoes of their lives’ passages. As a result, I drew the epilogue sequence, in which Brangwain Spurge, who initially finds this skin business repulsive, sheds his own skin. As a metaphor, this metamorphosis is a complete character transformation, a complete reversal of one’s initial belief system.

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Nick Bruel

Nearly two years ago, I was driving to go pick up my daughter from school when a story on the radio came up referencing how the current administration had decided to cut the number of refugees allowed into our country to 45,000 (that number has since been reduced to 30,000), a moot number considering the literally hundreds of thousands of refugee applications this country receives annually. As the son of a woman who lived in constant fear inside war ravaged Shanghai and a man who fled from Belgium just prior to Hitler’s invasion, I took this personally.

Bad Kitty: Kitten Trouble tells the story of what happens when Kitty’s owner decides to bring three kittens into the house, and Kitty does everything she can to sabotage their presence. It’s my Bad Kitty take on the refugee crisis, conflict, and conflict resolution.

This is a single panel of a three page, wordless dream sequence Kitty has in which she essentially experiences the reality the kittens came from. The collar in the foreground belongs to Puppy, her constant foil in nearly every book, but his fate is uncertain albeit likely grim. To me, this is the moment she truly understands the severity of the conflict the kittens escaped. Meanwhile, a hardly discernible sound effect appears for the first time in the background, one that will grow with every panel over the next page. Telling my stories with both words and pictures affords me a lot of latitude in how I choose to depict drama. In this case, dialogue would have only interfered.

 

 

Erin Dionne

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It’s so hard to choose just one thing in Captain’s Log that I love, because illustrator Jeffrey Ebbeler did an incredible job bringing the words to life via his art. But, since you’re forcing me…It’s this page. Part of the text reads:

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Later. (Day 1.)
The first mate and I led a shore party onto the glaciers. The wind howled! Snow flew!…
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Jeffrey took those words and created a dynamic, funny moment that captures the story’s sense of imagination and exploration in a way I never would have expected. The Captain is bundled up in his winter gear, riding his “sled” (a battered folding chair), pulled by his trusty first mate. His expression and position convey his zest in the moment, and even the dog is into the romp!
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When I first saw this page, I gasped out loud. To me, it represents the best of an author/illustrator pairing–my words interpreted by his art combining to make a dynamic story. I’m so grateful to the Charlesbridge team, including editor Karen Boss, for putting Jeffrey and I together on this book.
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Alan Katz

I’ve written more than 35 books for kids, and I always tried to make them funny. I probably succeeded 14.34% of the time.

But for my two newest books, Awesome Achievers in Science and Awesome Achievers in Technology, humor was only half of the goal. I set out to write non-fiction profiles of unsung heroes; inventors and explorers whose accomplishments kids knew, but whose identities they probably didn’t. The inventor of Velcro, seat belts, the microwave oven, and more.

Frankly, I didn’t know if I could do that. But I did. Totally shocked and delighted myself. Wow, would Mrs. Furschmidt, who as you know was my sixth-grade teacher, be proud. Each profile is followed by several pages of funny; not mocking the achiever, but expressing creative ideas about how his/her work impacts my life.

My favorite marriage of non-fiction and humor came in the section about the inventors of Post-It Notes. Seems Arthur Fry had invented a slighty sticky glue, but had no market for it. Years later, he met a co-worker whose page markers repeatedly fell out of his hymn book. Voila… Post-It Notes!

Following their story, there’s a “letter I wrote to them,” offering up my inventions in need of partnership. Inspired by Mr. Fry’s non-sticking glue, I suggested…

Shampoo that won’t clean hair.

Scissors that don’t cut anything.

Dog food that dogs won’t eat…and more.

This, my friends, felt like the perfect blend of fact and humor, and I printed the pages with great satisfaction and stapled them together with my stapler that doesn’t hold staples.

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One Question, Five Authors #5: “How has your work been affected by today’s political climate?” 

December 3, 2018 / / No comments

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Welcome to the fifth edition of the “One Question” series.

My thanks to the five respondents below: Tanya Lee Stone, Jennifer Sattler, Lesa Cline Ransome, Barbara Dee, and Travis Jonker. For your answers . . . and for your fine work.

This is an issue that fascinates me, since it’s been the crucible for so many of us these past few years: How do we proceed under these conditions? As citizens, as artists, as storytellers, how do we respond? Does the job description, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, change?

Note: If there’s a published author or illustrator who’d like to participate in this series, please feel free to email me at jamespreller@aol.com. I’m also on Facebook. There’s a link to the previous ones in the series in the right sidebar under “categories.”

 

Tanya Lee Stone

For the past ten years, my work has focused on filling in some of the gaps in our histories; namely, true stories about women and people of color. Those stories have always been important, but perhaps now more than ever it is essential that they are more widely spread and that readers understand that we are all connected — in our pain and in our triumphs.

In Girl Rising, for example, which deals with the fact that 130 million girls globally are not being educated, I hope I have made it difficult for readers to ignore the fact that these are not “other” girls in “other” places — they are kids just like them — with similar hopes and dreams. And with this awareness of connectedness, I hope, comes increased activism. To that end, I structured the third part of the book around guiding readers toward activism without becoming too daunted by such large issues of slavery, early child marriage, and lack of access to education.

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Lesa Cline-Ransome 

I have always enjoyed writing books that celebrate history, culture, heroic figures and the power of perseverance. When I began writing nearly twenty-five years ago, I was interested in finding the untold stories of everyday heroes—Satchel Paige, Marshall Taylor, and Pele, who rose above obstacles. Later I wrote about historic figures like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, who had endured their share and more of injustices and hardships. My hope was that all children who read of these struggles would begin to understand how the pains of our past were met with fierce resistance.

And then the election of 2016 happened. And suddenly the distant past seemed not so far away as hate crimes rose and civil rights and protections of marginalized communities were rolled back. Each book I write now feels like less of a focus on history and more of a roadmap to how we must continue to have a voice. The word resistance has now taken on a new urgency, reminding young readers, not of our distant past, but of a world that continues to need voices to speak out against injustice. Now, more than ever, I am using the power of story to chart the progress we’ve made through the years, while reminding readers, there is still a mighty long way to go.

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Jennifer Sattler

Right after the election in 2016, I was wondering, like everyone else I know, what on earth I could do to effect change. I can’t go door to door, or make cold calls. That’s not who I am. But then I read somewhere (I wish for the LIFE of me I could remember where) a woman saying, “Do what you do but with a new sense of purpose.” That really resonated with me. So, I wrote Bully. I needed it to still feel like one of my books. I didn’t want to preach or be overtly political. After all, my books are for young children, so I wanted to address something that a lot of them were now dealing with now more than ever.  Most of the books on bullying that I’m aware of have this sympathy for the bully and, honestly, VERY unrealistic expectations for kids to deal with the situation. The bully always comes around and becomes a friend. This has not been my experience . . . ever. As a mother, as a kid who faced bullies, and as a woman. I want kids to feel empowered. And most importantly, not alone.

 

Barbara Dee

In January 2018 my publisher offered on a full manuscript of a middle grade novel — plus whatever MG I wrote next. I’d never had a two-book deal structured this way before, and it struck me as both a vote of confidence and incredible pressure, because at that point I didn’t even have an idea for another book. As I waited for my editor to send notes about Book 1, the news last winter was full of stories about sexual harassment (including some about prominent kidlit authors). These stories horrified me; and the more I researched the origins of such behavior, the more I was convinced that we needed a #MeToo story set in middle school. I began writing very fast, telling myself it was just a draft for Book 2. But before I got to the end, I knew that this story, both timeless and very much a product of the Trump era, needed to be out in the world as soon as possible.  Fortunately, my publisher agreed to flip the order of the two books, releasing Maybe He Just Likes You next fall.

 

Travis Jonker

In my role as school librarian, the current divisive political climate has made me more vigilant about the books in our collection and the books I read aloud with students. Themes of inclusion, kindness, and diversity have become even more of a focus. And it doesn’t always have to be an overt, “Hey, kids, here’s a book with a lesson about kindness.” Usually the more subtle the better. Now as a newly published author, I feel stories that in some way talk about universal themes — and I know I’m not making news here — tend to be more engaging. My favorite line from an Andrew Smith book is that, “The best books are about everything,” which I think means that good books reach for universal topics — love, death, fear, etc. In the podcast interview I did with Mo Willems, he said that every Elephant & Piggie book was addressing a “philosophical question.” So I definitely think about how a story I’m writing connects to larger ideas. With The Very Last Castle, the rough plot came first, but it wouldn’t have become a book without the themes of community and courage that came later in the writing process and gave the story depth. But I honestly can’t say any of that is a direct result of the current political climate. However, I do think it’s made me more sensitive to themes of inclusion, kindness, and diversity in the books I read and share.

 

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One Question, Five Authors #2: “Tell us about one book or comic you loved as a child.”

October 30, 2018 / / No comments

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Welcome, readers, to the second installment of “One Question” — the interview series where I do as little work as possible. Personally, I always enjoy hearing authors talk about books they love — particularly those books that made a difference early in their reading lives. The books that helped light the fuse.

Much thanks to our five guests below: Paul Acampora, Rachel Vail, Don Tate, Audrey Vernick, and Julie Fortenberry. Click here to read the debut installment if you missed it the first time around.

 

Paul Acampora

In those years that astronauts were still wandering around on the moon, I discovered The Mouse and the Motorcycle by Beverly Cleary. The book featured Keith and Ralph, a couple boys about my age (at the time) in an off-the-beaten-track world that seemed a lot like my own. Keith and Ralph had families and rules and squabbles and accidents. They wanted adventures and they made mistakes. They were just like the cousins and friends and classmates that surrounded me. It’s true that Ralph is a mouse who rides an awesome red motorcycle, but that’s not really the point. Rather, The Mouse and the Motorcycle made it clear to me that real-life adventures were possible. And if Beverly Cleary is right (spoiler alert: she is) adding friends to the mix makes real-life adventures almost inevitable. When I grew up, I did indeed get my very own awesome red motorcycle just like Ralph’s. I don’t have the motorcycle anymore, but I still have the friends which means I’m still having the kind of real-life adventures that books are made of.

 

Rachel Vail

One book I really loved as a kid was Blubber, by Judy Blume. I remember wondering as I read: how did she KNOW? Not just about the overt, senseless, casual cruelty of some kids, but also about MY complicity in the cruelty: the rotten, rotting feeling of seeing somebody be mean to a less powerful kid, and deciding to do nothing. Choosing just to go along, because otherwise I’d be putting myself in danger. And it felt like that, no exaggeration: like danger. Judy Blume captured the complex ethical calculus of being a kid, making choices — the truth of it, the power and the cost of it. Humor and relatable details made the story feel real, but the empathy I felt for every character is what made it feel TRUE. I was particularly moved by the respect Judy Blume was showing to me as a kid, as a reader, as a person. (I felt she was writing for me, in particular, of course. Her writing is that intimate.) She was telling it to me straight, and trusting me to think through what it all meant. There were no tidy resolutions, no morals to print on a poster. It was just, here’s how we sometimes treat one another, and how it really feels. What do you think?

 

Don Tate

I wasn’t a big reader when I was a kid. It is embarrassing to admit — especially to kids! I had trouble with comprehension and retaining what I’d read. So I tended towards the visual. My favorite book was our Better Homes and Gardens Illustrated Medical Encyclopedia. I loved it because of the cool illustrations. I also loved our Funk and Wagnalls Young Students Encyclopedias. They were heavily illustrated. Inside, I learned about all kinds of things, but I was drawn most to the diversity inside. I learned about people from all over the world, I saw people who looked like me. In high school English literature classes, I pretty much refused to read what was presented to me as classics. The Grapes of Wrath, Greek and Roman Myths, Poe, I just couldn’t get into those. I sketched my way through those classes. I didn’t become a reader (for enjoyment) until I was in my early 20s, when I discovered the book Black Boy by Richard Wright. It was a memoir about his life. In Richard Wright, I saw myself. After that, I became a lover of reading. I read all of Richard Wright’s books, and especially loved Native Son.

 

Audrey Vernick

I was a voracious reader as a child, in part because I lacked the kind of friends I read about in books. I had friends, but our relationships never seemed to measure up to the epic friendships in the books I loved most.

The book that hit me right in the center of this spot was The Secret Language, written by the legendary children’s editor Ursula Nordstrom.

Victoria was only eight years old when shipped off to boarding school. What?! Boarding school? My brain had to grow and shift to entertain this new-to-me reality. Vicky was shy and miserable and hated boarding school (this reader, who faked sickness to get out of day camp, could relate to that). And then, impossibly, a strange and funny girl, Martha, befriended Vicky. And shared with her secret words — leebossa, ick-en-spick, ankendosh.

When I think about this, I’m almost inclined to feel sad for young-me, but the truth is I found literary friendships very satisfying. They fed me something I needed — in a way that actual eight-year-old friends could not.

Unexpected friendships. That’s still a pretty sweet spot in my reading — and writing — life.

 

Julie Fortenberry

The Little Golden Picture Dictionary (the original 1959 edition) left a lasting impression on me. I still have my copy. Each page has eight words with descriptions like, “alligator—The Alligator has sharp teeth,” and “kitchen—Mother cooks in the kitchen.” (Later editions have been updated to correct a few unenlightened words and descriptions.)

I’m still fascinated by the little Tibor Gergely illustrations. (Gergely was mostly self-taught, but studied briefly in Vienna. In 1939 he emigrated to New York where he illustrated several New Yorker covers.) It’s so obvious that he loved his job. The pictures are detailed but uncomplicated. And like a lot of Golden Book illustrators, Gergely’s style is both realistic and cartoony. His illustrations of people and animals are great, but even his illustrations of mundane objects (glove, iron, pie) are still intriguing to me.

I don’t remember anyone reading this book to me, so I guess I was able to decipher most of it on my own. I think it was the first time I saw the world arranged in an orderly way. The whole book is very tidy and sunny, like the best kind of kindergarten.

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