So some books – there have been a couple times that I’ve had a book that started with an illustration. I wrote a book called Extra Yarn that’s illustrated by Jon Klassen, and I saw a picture that John drew when he was in college. It was a picture of a girl and a dog walking in the snow, and they were wearing matching sweaters.
And I loved it. And I couldn’t stop thinking about this picture. I then started thinking about the story behind this picture, and that became the manuscript for Extra Yarn. So I sent it to Jon. Well, first I sent him an email, and I was like, is there any story behind this picture?
And he was like, no, that’s just a thing I did in college. And I was like, good. Here’s a Word doc. And luckily he liked it, and that was the book. But that was a book that started with an image, an image I couldn’t get out of my mind. Sometimes books will start with images that I kind of have in my head, but I can’t draw.
But they’re images I created. But that book started with an image that Jon created, you know, probably eight or nine years before I actually wrote the story.
