| I’ve always liked
to draw pictures and make up stories. My earliest childhood
memory is of sitting in the kitchen, drawing pictures of ships
and trucks on a blackboard. To this day, I could be happy spending
hours doing nothing but drawing pictures of ships and trucks.
I started doing children’s books by accident. It happened
like this.
One day, my nephew Adam asked me to draw him a picture of
a pirate. I sat down at my drawing board to draw a few pirates
and ended up drawing a TON of pirate pictures and writing
lots of nonsense about pirates. When I was done, I had about
twenty pages of nonsense and silly pictures about pirates.
It was enough to fill a book. So I did. The name of the book
is “Everything I Know About Pirates.” Since then,
I’ve written books about monsters, cars, grumpy kids
and a boy with a very messy room.
I get ideas for books from remembering what it’s like
to be a |
kid and from listening to kids.
I have a wall in my studio covered with photographs of kids.
Whenever I’m stuck for an idea, I look at one of those
photographs and think to myself, “What would make THAT
kid laugh?”
My illustrations are done in watercolor and colored pencil.
First I put some color on the page with watercolors, then
I spend many hours building up the shapes with colored pencils.
I get a lot of help from our cats, who lay on my pencils,
my drawings, my hands and anything else that puts them in
the way of what I’m trying to do.
I also get a lot of help from my wife Jan. She helps me decide
which ideas are good and she usually writes the endings for
my books, which is the hardest part. Thank you, Jan.
That’s everything I know about writing books. Thanks
for reading my story. |
