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Your picture book stories are told just as much through your illustrations as through your words. Do the illustrations sometimes come to you before the story?
The words always come first. But, because I'm both the author and illustrator, I often edit as I write, knowing that the pictures will provide important information. For example, in Chester's Way, I didn't mention Lilly's boots, crown, or cape when I wrote the story, although I knew long before the manuscript was finished that Lilly would be wearing them.
When you begin a picture book such as Wemberly, do you always know where the story is going, or do your characters ever take you by surprise and pull the story in quite another direction?
Books begin with character; character is the seed from which a book grows. When I set out to write Wemberly Worried, I didn't know the book would end with the start of school, although in hindsight, it seems a logical path for the book to have taken. That's the magic and mystery of creation.
It must be a very different process, working on a novel. Do you still have vivid pictorial images of the characters and their environment in your head?
Writing a novel is very different. I can delve much deeper into a character's psyche, for example. I can describe a scene at length. And I can deal with subject matter that is more complex than the subject matter of my picture books.
But, because I'm a visual person, I do have very strong images
in my head as I work. I love describing my characters
and their environments. Setting a scene—providing
proper lighting, the colors and textures of things, sounds—is
one of my favorite things about writing a novel.
To what extent is your writing inspired by your own experience, or by watching your children's experiences?
Of course, all of my writing is filtered through my eyes, my experience. And I suppose I remember how things "felt" when I was young—this helps me when I'm writing. On occasion, I'll use a fact or two from my life, but only as a starting point. And I've never directly used an incident from one of my children's lives in a book.
The Horn Book wrote of The Birthday Room as "a story that helps us see our own chances for benefiting from mutual tolerance, creative conflict resolution, and other forms of good will." Is this a theme that you are consciously pursuing in all your writing?
I don't really think about that sort of theme as I'm writing. I want my characters to be believable. I want the story to be convincing. And I want to write good sentences. It's as simple and difficult as that.
If you had to sum up in one word the characteristic you most admire in each of your mice—Chester, Chrysanthemum, Lilly, Owen, Sheila Rae, Wendell, Sophie, and Wemberly—what words would you choose?
| Chester: | reliable |
| Chrysanthemum: | sensitive |
| Lilly: | exuberant |
| Owen: | centered |
| Sheila Rae: | brave, of course |
| Wendell: | clever |
| Sophie: | tenacious |
| Wemberly: | thoughtful |
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