I want a nice picture book with 12 pictures - I do my best with that format.
Even tiny children looking at a picture book are using their imaginations, gleaning clues from the images to understand what is happening, and perhaps using the throwaway details which the illustrator includes to add their own elements to the story.
My daughter has seen the transition from struggling screenwriter to successful picture book author, and she's enjoyed it very much because she's a wonderful little kid. And she's always believed in her daddy.
The first book I could call mine, my first book, was a picture book, 'The Magic Monkey' - it was adapted from an old Chinese legend by a thirteen-year-old prodigy named Plato Chan with the help of his sister.
Picture books have terrible PR amongst the children of this country. Ask any librarian: after a certain age, children just aren't interested in the picture book section anymore. It's filled with moms, strollers, and unbalanced toddlers.
I sculpted for four or five years. Mostly for my own amusement, I decided to do a picture book, and that was kind of a turning point.
The novels take longer to write than the picture book texts, and they do take a different sort of concentration. However, a very short, simple story that works well is just as exciting to me as any longer and more complex book.
It is a good idea to know which publishers publish which stories. For example, there is no sense in sending a picture book text to a publisher who does not publish picture books.
I have written a picture book that is based on my daughters. You know, my youngest one likes to tell everybody, 'Mommy wrote 'Best Day Ever' about us.' Which is true.
I did have a child, and I was reading a lot of picture books to her, but at the same time writing a children's book was something that I'd been wanting to do for many years, pretty much since the start of my career.
Growing up, I lived in a house without art: no picture books on the shelves, no visits to museums, no posters on the bedroom wall.
With twins, reading aloud to them was the only chance I could get to sit down. I read them picture books until they were reading on their own.
I read everything aloud, novels as well as picture books. I believe the eye and ear are different listeners. So as writers, we have to please both.
I think picture books should stretch children. I think they should be full of wonderful, amazing words.
I'll be left writing picture books and fairy tales.
And that's why any of my picture books exist: They all seem to be built backwards from a simple, emotionally optimistic story beat.
Force me to choose my best book, and I always come back to 'Gorilla.' It was the first time I felt I understood what picture books could do.
I didn't have picture books - there weren't many around when I was a child.
Maurice Sendak is the daddy of them all when it comes to picture books - the words, the rhythm, the psychology, the design.
Many adults that I have met in my time believed that picture books are 'babyish'. I hope I have changed minds on this, as I set out to do.
