Books are like agates. I always end my school presentations for the book, Agate, with this line. Books and agates have this in common: they both make us want to pick them up because we know there is something truly special inside.

Learn, teach, have fun

You can learn anything from a book. Stephen Chu, energy secretary and a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, says that he learned to play tennis by reading a book.

Books teach us, or perhaps more often, remind us. A book could remind us that we are each unique and valuable (Agate) or that small choices can make a big difference (One Gorilla).

Books like the DoU series (Just Another Monday, Just Another Tuesday, etc.) are mainly about the fun, staying ahead of dragons and aliens, and so forth, but they , too, teach us that our choices lead us through life.

Hard work or fun?

We put countless hours into our books–a couple of years worth of writing, illustrating, designing, letting things cook for a while, then re-working, honing, improving–again and again. Nikki Johnson, the illustrator for Agate, and I  once spent an entire Saturday coming up with a single just-right word. She bought me an hourglass timer after that, saying that was the limit of the time I could spend on any one word.

Dr. Seuss once said of his editor, “He helped me realize that a paragraph in a children’s book is equal to a chapter in an adult book. He convinced me that I had as much responsibility to take as much time and work as hard as [adult writers] did.”

Of course Dr. Seuss also told an illustrator, I think you are taking this job too seriously. . . the trap you have fallen into is one that I fall into almost every day of my life. I continually forget that I am writing and drawing for kids, not critics. I get too self-conscious about style and subtleties, when all I should be doing is knocking it out, and laughing while I’m doing it.”

Creating books is both fun and hard work. That’s what makes anything worth doing. Everybody loves a story.

Filed under: Writing Tips & Hints