Hands down, the biggest thrill is to get a letter from a kid saying, I loved your book. Will you write me another one?
We forget that the simple gesture of putting a book in someone's hands can change a life. I want to remind you that it can. I want to thank you because it did. - 2010 Indies Choice Award
Every well-written book is a light for me. When you write, you use other writers and their books as guides in the wilderness.
What would make me happiest is if kids read these books [Bink & Gollie] and think: there is so much to love in the world; and words are so much fun.
When it is my editor telling me how to rewrite a story, I listen and do what she asks because I have learned that I get a better book in the end. I can't say I'm happy when I read that editorial letter. It is always a little painful and scary. But I have learned that - bit by bit - I can make the changes and do the work.
The image I had was very clear, and so in that way The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane began like other books.
I love words; I love the way they sound. Once I've worked on everything else, the last drafts of my books come down to how they sound.
To me the book is like having a kid. I have to let it go out in the world, and great things will happen. Maybe they won't, but it has to keep on moving.
I remember wanting to write a book with someone, the someone being Kate [DiCamillo], and we decided to write about two friends. We had no idea how to begin this project - neither of us had ever collaborated with another writer - and I'm pretty sure that we began by giving our two friends a sock, just to see what they'd do with it. And it went from there.
Anybody who puts a book into someone else's hands inspires me - teachers, librarians, booksellers, parents.
The book [The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane] is about the fact that living in this world means that your heart is necessarily going to get broken. But the book also says that's okay. That's the only way to live a truly human life - with your heart getting broken - and eventually getting flooded with love.
When I get to a point in my book writing when I don't know what I'm going to do next, I'll come back look at underlined passages and see if the images I wrote still have a certain amount of resonance for me.
May God strike me down with a hammer on the head before I write a book with a teach-y goal!
In the beginning of the book, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, Edward is more enamored of himself than he is of anybody else. He's a very fine rabbit; he's been constructed incredibly well, and he has a wardrobe of amazing clothing. He's arrogant, and he doesn't care whether Abilene loves him or not. As the journey progresses, as he gets passed from hand to hand, he learns what it means to love. He gets more and more bedraggled, and his clothing is lost; yet he becomes finer in soul and heart than he was at the beginning of the journey.
Nothing new ever happens in the books. It's the same old theme.
Reading a story should be a fabulous, wonderful thing. The most important thing that parents can do for kids is to read with them and to let their kids see them reading books for their own pleasure.
What I hope is that the book [Bink & Gollie] delights children. What I hope is that they laugh and laugh and laugh, just as we did when we wrote them.
Most of my books begin with an image or a voice - one small thing - and I don't know what it is going to become.
The funny thing is, when I've gone through the relentless editing process, my editor and I are amazed the Mercy Watson books still make us laugh. The same jokes that made us laugh the first time around still make us laugh in the 16th rendition.
I'm grateful for every teacher or librarian who reads a book and says, "This is exactly the book that so-and-so needs to read; I'll get it in his hands." I'm amazed at the network of adults who make sure that kids get books.
For children: I'm writing a picture book about the Big Dipper and a novel about a cricket, a firefly and a vole. For grownups: I'm writing poems.
The themes in my books, like in life, are about grace and redemption and you never know when they're going to show up and what form they're going to be in. Stories emerge from keeping your heart open to the people that cross in front of you or the dogs or the mice, and their ability to open you up and enrich your life.
As a kid books changed how I looked at the world and helped me understand things. Books still deepen me and open my heart.
There's nothing more fabulous than an adult saying to you, "I think that you might like this one [book]." So I'm grateful every time that happens. It's an amazing thing that people care that passionately.
We [me and Alison McGhee] probably wouldn't have said that when we were writing the stories, but it is so apparent to me in the finished product. For me, looking at Bink, it's like looking at myself on the page in a way that I've never experienced with any other book that I've written.
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