| Where do you get your ideas from? |
 The world is full of exciting people and events and relationships. Some
are lovely, some awful, some funny. Most of my ideas come from my
own life in some way. I am a little sister but I have a big sister, and I wrote
Big
Sister and Little Sister.
But I wrote
Big Brother when my daughter and
son were little, from watching and thinking about the two of them. Later, my
daughter grew up to write children's books too, and she also wrote about her big
brother, the same one I had written about, but in a very different way: her book
was called I Hate My Brother Harry. |
| Every writer finds his or her own
truth and ideas. And his or her own way to express these. |
| Ideas are everywhere. It's finding a form to put them in that's difficult.
That and time. |
|
What was your first published book? |
The Park Book,
with illustrations by H. A. Rey. It was
published in 1944, a very long time a go. If you click over to the page my
daughter put up about the book, you will learn how and why I came to write that
book, and see many of the illustrations (click on them to enlarge them). You
can also see the park where I got most of the ideas for it, Washington Square
Park, in New York City. Here is a picture of
The Park Book's
cover: |
| How long does it take to write a book? |
| A writer is always writing books inside him or herself. Any idea for a
book swirls around in uncounted time in one's head before it takes shape as a
book. |
| What was your favorite book when you were little? |
 The Secret Garden,
by Frances Hodgson Burnett (author Burnett,
pictured below, courtesy of
www.corbis.com.
I read it over and over. I loved the wisdom of
the children in it, and their connection to the garden and the natural
world, and the whole feeling of life it engendered. Later, I read it
aloud to my own children.
|
|
What is your favorite of your own books? |
| I care
about each book in a different way so none of them could be a favorite,
or maybe all of them are. Each comes from a different part of me, a
different time in my life, different experiences. |
| When and why did you start writing? Who helped you
become a writer? |
| I always loved to read, and I began
writing in the third grade. In the fourth grade, a wonderful teacher, Mrs.
Danforth, encouraged me and I began to write even more.
|
|
What advice would you have for someone who wants to be a writer? |
|
Keep a diary and write down your feelings about each thing you do. This
means you have to notice and remember. And not just feelings, but the
color and shape and taste and smell of things. This helps you to make
what you are writing about clear and alive. |
| Also, read a lot. |
|
How do you choose your illustrator?
|
| An editor, not the writer, chooses the illustrator for each story. |
|
What do you think makes a book good? |
|
Something that
interests you deeply and trying to understand what other people feel even when
it's different from your own feelings.
|
|
What
is the difference between being a writer and being an editor? |
|
Being
a writer makes you go into yourself; you put down what you think and feel, and
no one else should try to make you say anything you hadn't wanted to say. Being
an editor is the opposite. You have to turn yourself off and get completely into
the world of the writer to help him or her fully express his or her own story.
Being an editor makes a person go into other people's minds, and so extends the
life experience of one's own. For more about being an editor, see
Books CZ Has Edited.
|
|
Kids'
questions about Charlotte's life |
|
