If you ever find yourself in the wrong story, leave.
When you make a decision, you don't have to be locked into it. One of the ways that you grow is by starting over.
The difference between children and adults is that they're shorter - not dumber.
All of the life-changing awesome words and pictures and ideas inside your library are useless without just one word outside your library: Open.
My favorite book is my next one. I’m always hoping to make my next book my best one.
A book, being a physical object, engenders a certain respect that zipping electrons cannot. Because you cannot turn a book off, because you have to hold it in your hands, because a book sits there, waiting for you, whether you think you want it or not, because of all these things, a book is a friend. It’s not just the content, but the physical being of a book that is there for you always and unconditionally.
An artist is waiting for the audience to understand the work. A craftsman is working to understand the audience.
Aggle flabble kabble . . . snurp?
The first bowl of chocolate pudding was too hot, but Goldilocks ate it all anyway because, hey, it's chocolate pudding, right?
Writing for children is as easy as describing the history of the Byzantium in three words.
A picture book is a motorcycle: small, loud, fun, and zippy. An easy reader is a chartered bus: obliged to carry a rather dull passenger roster of sanctioned curriculum, plus the baggage of an approved, limited vocabulary. The trick is to design your chartered bus to be as cool and sexy as a motorcycle.
I always say, 'Books beat boredom,' said Amanda wisely.
Kids are super-independent. This is the time when you don't need your parents for a story anymore. You have a great degree of agency and independence.
I bet your mom would let me." -Pigeon, Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus-
Elephant and Piggie have a very large input. They have a distinct aesthetic taste. They like books that are philosophical. They like books that are dialogue-driven. They like books that are about issues that they live with, in their own elephantine and porcine ways.
When you make a decision, you don't have to be locked into it. One of the ways that you grow is by starting over. There are all kinds of really powerful things in that moment, which is what makes story work. Part of Laurie's Keller personality is this ability to revise, to come back and to look at things from a different angle. I don't want to tell stories too much out of school, but Laurie Keller is the only person who sent me a card on my birthday and then sent me a revision.
I think Laurie's Keller story 'We are growing', resonates because when you have that amount of independence, you're starting to ask yourself questions that the grownups in your life have been answering for you. Before that, you are a good kid, or you are a funny kid, because you're told that's who you are. But when it's just you and the book, you have to figure out who you are.
The common thread of the series is that these are the books that Elephant and Piggie like to read. Elephant and Piggie are retired, so this is what they do in their spare time. What will they end up wanting to read? Time will tell. We've got to let that evolution happen as the series goes on. Any return of a character would have to be organic, would have to be, for example, Laurie Keller saying, hey, I really want to do this, and me feeling that there's a story there, rather than just saying, yeah, we can get three books out of these characters.
I also learn a lot about everybody else's process. People create in different ways, so that has opened me up to different processes and experimenting. Laurie Keller is a character person, so she came to the project with these blades-of-grass characters that we were able to literally grow a story around.
I've been lucky enough to have made enough of these types of children's books that while I don't necessarily know what works, I know what doesn't work. I've got a sense of the rhythm and the form. With this series, I get to play with ideas that I would never have myself.
Elephant and Piggie could just Google themselves! With the Elephant & Piggie Like Reading! series, we're picking artists who have a voice already. They have a sensibility. I don't want to make a book about blades of grass. That doesn't interest me. I want to make a book that Laurie Keller uses to express herself in this format. That's the key. That's what's going to keep it individual.
