Once I knew I wanted to tell stories for kids, I went back to college, and there was a great writer teaching at my school. His name was David Foster Wallace, and he was a fantastic novelist.
And I took a fiction course and a nonfiction course with him, and when I was applying for the fiction course, I said I wanted to write for kids, and he said, “I have no idea how to write for kids. I don’t know if this class is going to help you.” I said, “No, you know what, like I know how to talk to kids. That part is fine. I just want to know how to write.”
Because I do think that art for kids is the same as art for adults in terms of the standards it should be held to. There’s a difference in terms of the experience our audience has. But the underlying rules – they’re the same. You just want to know how to write. You want to know how to get to the truth of the matter. And a child’s truth is going to be different from an adult’s truth, but it’s not a lesser truth.
And the techniques that you can use to convey that truth are the same as the ones you can use in adult literature. You just have to – you just have to speak to a kid’s experience. And to me, being with kids and talking to them has been the most important kind of piece of my writing philosophy.
