Eight picture book artists talk shop in these pieces about tools and techniques

“Ticonderoga #2″ by Donald Crews

“Pulp Painting” by Denise Fleming

“The Sculptural Quality” by Arthur Geisert

“Family Albums” by Margaret Miller

“My Next Medium” by Chris Raschka

“Sharpie Markers to the Rescue” by Lynn Reiser

“Tiny Pieces of Paint” by Peter Sís

“Why I Use Oil Paints So Much” by Paul O. Zelinsky

Originally published in the March/April 1998 issue of The Horn Book Magazine, these pieces are part of our Picture Book Month 2012 coverage.

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My mother taught me photography. She was a superb amateur photographer, and as a child I was introduced early to the wonders of a darkroom. I grew up in a house filled with family photographs that were valued and enjoyed. And even when I was young I was aware that my mother’s photographs provided strong visual connections to the past.

I think of my books as extended family albums. In fact, many of the children have appeared in four or five of my books as they’ve grown from cradle to nursery school. But, more importantly, I seek a close “family” connection with each child that combines both photography and friendship.

None of the kids in my books is a model. They are children of friends, friends of friends, or strangers that I approach in the grocery store or the park. Sometimes I have never laid eyes on the child until I show up with my camera and lighting equipment in tow.

When I walk through the front door, I’m hunting for an emotional bond with the child, the joy of new-found friends that animates a photograph. In my ideal picture, the child is comfortable and relaxed and at the same time radiates an appealing energy. Overcoming the basic discomfort of the situation — the common anxiety of being photographed, the flashing strobes — is a continual challenge.

I always arrive with a wish list of photos, but I have learned to go with the flow of the child and to improvise quickly. I will use every device from silly animal noises to playing hide-and-seek to sharing crackers to create my personal hybrid: a photo playdate. As I pack up my equipment and say good-bye, I may be tired, but I’m also high with excitement because I’ve tapped into a special pool of energy — I’ve found the genuine smile.

This article is part of our Picture Book Month 2012 coverage.

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See, the thing about the medium I’m using now is, every morning I get up to it, or sit down with it, and I try just a little red with it, and BANG I have the same trouble with that red as I did yesterday. But that’s the medium I’m using now. Cat hair. Did I mention cat hair? There will be no cat hair problems with the new medium. Also, and this is important, my new medium is not going to be the kind of medium that would have me work for months with it, finish page upon page of paintings using it, only to find, after some reflection, that I am disgusted with both it and them. My next medium is the medium I never looked at through the spaces between my fingers, hands over my eyes.

My next medium is going to flow like mad, fluid, yes, mmm, like honey but not so sticky, like butter but not so greasy, like melted chocolate but cool.

All that I ask of a medium is that it let me create something that looks like you could hold it, like a real object, something that could carry some story along. That it look like it was really easy to do, just this side of uncouth, held there by the lightest touch, that still satisfies me just as colored shapes and lines. I want a medium that can be applied simply, casually, which, if repeated and layered in some hitherto unfathomed sequence, will knock me on the head and make me leave my table to dance the Hucklebuck.

This article is part of our Picture Book Month 2012 coverage.

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“While there is copper there is hope.” — an old French proverb

As an etcher, I think etching, of all graphic media, is the most beautiful way of putting ink on paper. The lines are both freely drawn and sculptural. I love etching.

I’ve tried other graphic techniques but had difficulty getting the desired expressiveness from the techniques that require manually manipulated tools to form images in hard surfaces—woodcuts, wood engraving, and metal engraving. Other techniques that I’ve tried are lithography and serigraphy. And, although both allow ease of movement when making lines, the resulting prints look flat to me when compared to the sculptural quality of etchings.

All graphic media have special qualities difficult to achieve in another media: crisp whites — woodcut and wood engraving; clean precise lines that swell and taper — metal engraving; subtle tonal gradations — lithography; large solid shapes with precise edges — serigraphy.

My work is almost entirely line, and I rely on the ease of execution that moving an etching needle through wax allows. The sculptural quality is just an added benefit. Run your finger gently over the surface of an etching and you can feel the relief.

If you could see an etching at its most beautiful — when it is first pulled off the plate with the paper still damp and soft, the ink shiny and glistening, and the relief of the lines at its highest — you would see exactly what I mean.

This article is part of our Picture Book Month 2012 coverage.

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I have to fix dinner every day at six p.m. Watercolors dry too slowly, but I can dry them in front of the oven, and bake while I’m drying my pictures. I notice people’s surprise when they meet me in the street carrying a bag smelling like a roast or a chicken. Some of the shapes on my pictures just might be sauce. Now that I have gotten used to watercolors, Madeleine paints at home (with oil).

This article is part of our Picture Book Month 2012 coverage.

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With the lead from a pencil I can make thin delicate words and lines, bold solid black forms, and wispy, smooth gray shadings. All with the same soft lead. Everybody can, anybody — no experience necessary. Everybody can do it, from the very beginning, right out of the box.

Any pencil will do, but my absolute favorite would have to be a TICONDEROGA #2, brand new (they don’t last long) and freshly sharpened. Golden yellow (Cadmium yellow), six-sided, with yellow and green ferrule, and at one end a pink eraser.

Sharpening a new pencil, cutting away the wood to get at the lead, was, at first, very conservative: a hand-held sharpener with one or more hobs for various thickness of pencil. A little later on, and more interesting and bold: a penknife (a non-threatening, pencil-sharpening-only penknife). More limiting: a wall- or desk-mounted hand-turned apparatus.

Up/down, side/side, cross/cross, scribble/scribble, swirl, and then smudge/smudge with a thumb or finger. A wonderful way to make marks on paper. Spare use of the eraser preserves it and avoids losing some potentially useful bit.

Number two is a degree of lead soft enough for most of my needs, but if I must have a very bold, extra-black image for a dog or a train in a tunnel or the night sky, only an EBONY VERIBLACK will do. The whole pencil is black, the lead very soft with unparalleled smudge-ability.

Sketching, note-taking, list-making using a lead pencil in sketchbooks, on envelopes, and on bits of paper of every size and description is a necessary, useful, and pleasurable part of my life. Finding a bit of an old pencil note or sketch, no matter how cryptic, can bring entire events into focus.

Never-used lead pencils also have their place. I often come across pencils in my drawer that say Grand Rapids, Michigan; Bismark, North Dakota; Meteor Crater, Arizona; Mississippi State University. I’m sure the lead in any of these pencils would produce very satisfactory images, but I can’t bring myself to spoil the typography in order to use them. So I’ll just sharpen another TICONDEROGA #2 and get busy.

This article is part of our Picture Book Month 2012 coverage.

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Cotton rag fiber suspended in water (a wet, messy, colorful slurry) is poured through hand-cut stencils (made from foam meat trays) onto a screen (a window screen will do). The result—an image in handmade paper. The paper is the picture. The picture is the paper.

The advantages of this technique are many:

I now have a use for all those discarded yogurt containers and hair coloring squeeze bottles; they make excellent pouring cups and drawing tools.

I’ve developed marvelous upper-body strength, without the cost of a gym membership, from hauling forty-two pound pails of damp fiber (pulp) around the studio.

At the market I’m known for my fashion sense; my pulp splattered clothing makes quite an impression.

I’ve discovered that a bucket of pulp is the better mousetrap (I am withholding the disgusting details).

Looking for additions to my motley collection of blenders (used to mix pigment and chemicals) gives me a reason to stop and shop garage sales.

Friends have found that the five-gallon pulp shipping pails make nifty nesting buckets for Rhode Island Reds.

And, of course, there is the pleasure of swirling my hands through five gallons of glorious color to mix fiber and pigment.

The drawbacks are few:

Cotton rag fiber spoils, and it is no secret when it does. Open the doors and windows and turn on the fans!

Then there is the problem of color test strips catching fire in the microwave — quite a dramatic touch, but a bit dangerous.

So why pulp painting? It works.

This article is part of our Picture Book Month 2012 coverage.

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In designing each of my books, I try to match method and medium. As I lay out the pages, the story takes shape, the text evolves, the art and the words begin to interact. Best Friends Think Alike is a play — written in dialogue — about playing. I looked for ways to indicate the speakers and to convey the interaction of fantasy and reality. Colored names, type, and clothing — red for Ruby and blue for Beryl — would identify the actors.

Markers are not just watercolors in a different delivery system. A limited palate of watercolor offers a limitless variety of color. A marker, like a crayon, asserts its own color. But I found that dotting, swirling, striping, and stippling created new colors and built contours and textures. Like watercolors, washable markers are transparent, and become deep and rich when layered. Unfortunately, their color can run when one line is drawn over another. Sharpie markers to the rescue. Like technical ink, Sharpies are not waterbased, do not smear, and make clear lines. This property suggested the use of colored outlines to define the boundaries between the everyday world and imagination — black for reality, and each girl’s color for her fantasies — and inspired the design for the endpapers. Throughout the book I had used purple — a mixture of Ruby’s red and Beryl’s blue — to express the friends’ agreement. In the pattern of the endpapers, red and blue meet in crisp stripes to make a purple grid — simple with markers, too difficult with a brush.

Like watercolors, markers reveal the activity of the artist. This gives the art immediacy and energy, but comes at a price. Both media are unforgiving when there is a mistake. Each picture is quickly drawn, but often must be drawn again and again before it is right.

Not every picture book calls for markers, but I look forward to being surprised again by their happy vitality.

This article is part of our Picture Book Month 2012 coverage.

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“Any book which is at all important should be reread immediately.”
— Schopenhauer

The management has suggested that I review picture book reviewing. “Feel free to rant about its sorry state.” I also feel wary, as I did when I first began to review children’s books in the 1970s. I had written and/or illustrated more than twenty-five books by then, and believed that I knew from both my education (in graphic arts) and my vocation a good deal about the subject. So when I was given the opportunity to voice some of the many opinions I had been storing up, I shivered slightly and jumped in.

Of course I was already aware, from personal experience, just how pleasant it is to be well reviewed, how devastating to be devastated. But would that make me a responsible reviewer? Could I be objective and generous enough with other people’s work? Fortunately, I quickly realized that it is always a major pleasure and triumph to discover good new work, no matter whose it is. My most difficult experiences have continued to be translating very negative, almost visceral, reactions into sensible criticism. Many years and hundreds of reviews later, I still feel challenged when faced with the twin tasks of judging and then explaining, clearly and succinctly, the reasons for a judgment. I persist because of a very deep conviction that (Note to the printer: please set the following in 18pt. Whatever Bold) A PICTURE BOOK IS A COMPLICATED FORM OF COLLABORATIVE ART. When it is very well done, it is an artistic achievement worthy of respectful examination and honor. Even failures, and especially near misses, deserve the kind of attention and understanding given to serious creative endeavors.

Picture books do not get this often enough. Like children, they are short, and often condescended to by people who, because they do not spend much time with them, do not know better. Have I ever been at a dinner party where someone, hearing what my work is, has not offered to share with me his or her “great idea for a kids’ book”?

“A few hundred words . . . a handful of pages . . . I can do that” is the common, if unspoken, belief hovering in the air between us.

Just a few hundred words? No problem, right? Then let us begin with them. Like poetry, a picture book has to be written in two ways. It must work when read aloud, and also when read silently to oneself. Every syllable counts. Most important, the well-chosen words need to be simple but never simplistic, clear and strong enough to interest a child and hold her attention. Style alone is not sufficient. When Isaac Bashevis Singer won the Nobel Prize for Literature he announced that there were “five hundred reasons why I . . . write for children.” One was that, “they still believe in God, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity . . . ” Another was: “They love interesting stories.” Short, interesting stories are the structural steel that supports the illustrations in picture books. Look up “illustrate” in a Webster’s Unabridged. The root is illustrare. And among the definitions are “to light up, illuminate, embellish, shed light upon, to throw the light of intelligence upon, to make clear, to elucidate by means of a drawing or pictures.” And all that is just what wonderful illustrations do, and have done ever since books were first illuminated in medieval times by talented, cloistered hands.

In 1972, Nancy Ekholm Burkert began her illustrated version of “Snow White” by illuminating the O in the word Once. “Once it was the middle of winter, and the snowflakes fell from the sky like feathers.” These are the first words of the Randall Jarrell translation. The type starts three quarters of the way down a large white page. A bare tree stands behind the decorated “O.” A hunter and his dog step through it into the fairy tale. The reader follows, drawn by the pictures into the story, by the story into the pictures. It is this always-changing relationship of words and pictures that makes and shapes picture books.

About 1200 to 1500 of these slim volumes are published in a year that approximate figure includes fiction, nonfiction, and board books. Most of these are noted at least once, a few lines to a customer, in a couple of professional journals. A very small percent of the books published will receive more than two or three hundred words of public recognition. A talented, highly regarded editor of my acquaintance suggests testing even the more extensive reviews by crossing out any analytical comments with your pen to see what is left. The result? Even the longer reviews turn out to consist almost completely of plot summary. In the days of color overlays, this editor added, one journal consistently used slight variations of the same last line to comment on the art, “the pictures are done in striking shades of melon, pimento, and avocado.” Can a plot summary or an appraisal, more suitable to a discussion of lunch, really be all there is to say about thirty-two pages of graphic drama starring pictures and words?

Two clichés may help explain why so few picture book reviewers study the form they are dealing with and its history. The first, “it’s just a kids’ book,” is not usually articulated but relates to an old bias toward childhood. The other, heard too often, is “I don’t know much about art but I know what I like.” The problem with this one is that a critic not only needs to know what she likes, she also has to be able to say why. Know-nothing attitudes are at least partially responsible for the short shrift or “plot summary” school of picture book criticism.

In fact, there is more to learn about art, and that includes the art of illustration, than most of us will absorb in a lifetime. Looking at the work of a fine illustrator, we see, as we do when we examine fine painting or sculpture, a particular vision drawn from styles and techniques of past and present, filtered through a single sensibility. The period relevant to contemporary picture books began with the advent of modern printing, about ninety years ago. There have been wonderfully creative people at work over this time. And the more familiar one is with their output, the more discriminating one becomes. Without this background it is much more difficult for a critic to recognize original, new talent. Or to differentiate between the fresh skill in little book A as contrasted with the competent but very derivative little book B.

Many years ago, I was invited as a poet in brief residence to help introduce some classes of eight-, nine-, and ten-year-olds to writing and poetry. Working two weeks at a time over a four-year period, I found an effective starting point for those young writers that, considered in retrospect, may also be applicable to critical writing. The students and I talked then about the differences between looking and seeing. How important it is when you are writing, and drawing, to really pay attention: to see. The first assignment I gave them was to write a description of a thing. This was an exercise in using words with precision, to convey a picture of something the writer might have looked at, perhaps often, but not really paid close attention to. I wanted these students to make pictures with words so accurately that whoever read them would see what the children had seen. Gretchen described her running shoes in a paragraph. Henry studied the picture over his bed and wrote about it with care. Sara captured her favorite stuffed animal on paper. And when we read these descriptions to one another, it became obvious that many of them contained feelings about the thing being described. Sharp observation, we deduced, often goes hand in hand with personal response and judgment.

Another point my students and I discussed is also relevant here. I asked them not to be satisfied with describing something as “nice” or “pretty.” Instead I told them to be specific, and use details to explain how some place or thing was special. In a tribute to James Marshall, his friend Maurice Sendak has written, “[He] was . . . entirely himself . . . uncommercial to a fault . . . . He paid the price of being maddeningly underestimated — of being dubbed ‘zany’ (an adjective that drove him to muderous rage.)” Zany is one of those inexact, nondescriptive adjectives like pretty, nice, and wacky; the last, a label stuck on the charmingly complex compositions of William Joyce. Reviewing his book Santa Calls, I attempted a mini-analysis of its charm.

The author’s acknowledgments to “Robin of Locksley, Nemo of Slumberland, and Oz, the first Wizard Deluxe” alert us to a few of the artistic ghosts that influence these pages. . . . This is Spielberg territory, full of homages to beloved clichés. . . . Mr. Joyce is meticulous and wily. Each of his elegantly painted illustrations is set up, costumed, and lit with a cinematographer’s eye. . .

But are the thirties film touches in an artist’s style or a feeling that his work is “underestimated” meaningful to a child? And if they are not, then why bother with such specifics in a review of a book for children?

Ursula Nordstrom, one of the most noted and creative of the grand old generation of children’s book editors, used to insist that if you put a child happily in your lap and read the phone book to her, she would be delighted. After all, nobody is born with taste, either good or bad. When a beloved parent or a teacher espouses something new, the odds are that the children close to that parent or teacher will be pleased with it, too. But, both bookmakers and their critics have responsibilities as taste-makers and therefore as educators. That is why it is in a critic’s job description to point out when the wit in a story is not evident in the art, or the drawing of the central figure is an awkward knockoff of something Arthur Rackham did better. Even though the child the book is meant for will not necessarily see these fine points, someday when he is picking out books for his own child he will be more discriminating, in part because you and I have been.

Re-reading these last paragraphs I realize that I seem to have stressed the importance only of an educated eye for a wise appreciation of picture books. Obviously, intelligent criticism of such a true combination form must give equal time to the words that provide the book’s skeleton. But because so many teachers, librarians, and scholars are devoted readers with cultivated literary points of view, I am making the assumption that the written word is not neglected or misunderstood as often as illustration is.

A contradictory note here is that when picture book prizes are being handed out, it is the words that are frequently overlooked. The major medals are almost always awarded to the illustrator alone. If you have ever been a judge on such a jury — with hundreds of books to winnow away before one gets down to the preprize stack — you know that judges don’t have time to read most of the books but simply riffle through acres of pages searching for striking art. And yet, that excellent illustrator and lover of words Arnold Lobel once compared illustrating with another interpretive art, the work of an actor learning a new role. “You read a manuscript a hundred thousand times,” he sighed, explaining how he approached his job. In an ideal picture book world, why would anyone separate prize-winning illustrations from the words that have made them prize-winning?

And in the same ideal world, humor and simplicity, two arts that depend on artlessness, would receive the attention they deserve. Some years ago, writing about James Stevenson’s work, I commented on the fact that “understatement is often overlooked when awards are given to picture books.” A book I referred to especially is July (1990). It is based on childhood recollections, and in it Stevenson achieves “the essence of photographs, in wash drawings . . . .Scenes are reduced to essentials with a calligrapher’s appreciation for each brush stroke. They record the heart of things so minimally but so tellingly that we are able to recognize the children as ourselves and the memories as our own.” Too many critical (but not critical enough) eyes are impressed by self-proclaimed ART, overinflated, glossy work reflecting the graphic fashion of the moment but with little either personal or unique to recommend it. Spend some time with the work of Marc Simont, William Steig, Jon Agee, and Tomi Ungerer to appreciate the artists gifted with the ability not only to draw but to draw funny. And never forget the wonderfully careful hand and refreshing vision of Crockett Johnson. The creator of Harold and his adventurous purple crayon and of the classic comic Barnaby, and illustrator of Ruth Krauss’s The Carrot Seed, never won a prize, but left the world a better place anyhow. Surely someone, somewhere, could award him, in absentia, the first platinum Carrot for quietly sustained, imaginative humor.

A parenthetical thought on illustrative art: I am not convinced that the medium is really the message. Of course, if you know what gouache is and can tell it from transparent watercolor or acrylic, then you, and I, will find it enlightening to read about such details. However, if you, like the majority of readers, are not familiar with artists’ materials and techniques, learning that a picture is done in Prisma color and croquil line is not really helpful — better for a critic to explain that the delicately rendered scenes are sketched in fine pen line and softly shaded colored pencil, thus making it easier for nonexperts get a little more of the picture.

Because reviews of a picture book are not written for the book’s orimary audience but rather for teachers, librarians, and other interested adults with wallets, the critic, like the book’s author, needs a dual perspective. First, her own perception and standards, and second, that of the book’s young viewers and listeners. How will the sounds and rhythms of a narrative impress the ears of nonreaders? And will the life and action of the art appeal to a child’s observant eyes?

Back in 1959, in a picture book called Just Like Everyone Else, I cast a small soft dog as a special friend for sharp-eyed nonreaders to follow through the story. Although the dog was rarely mentioned in the text, he appeared on every page, quietly, uh  . . . dogging the action. I was sure that I had made an excellent discovery in using him this way. Since then I have become familiar with a lively, bursting world of minor players in picture books. Caldecott was a master of them; Mussano used cats in the opening chapters of his 1911 edition of Pinocchio; small, silent players have enlivened works by Ardizzone, Seuss, Margot Zemach, and countless others. Not to mention the hop-, scamper-, and walk-ons in all those Disney films.

Over the years that have passed since I did my first book for children (Roar and More, 1956), I have written, read, illustrated, and concentrated my attention in and around this fruitful field. But in trying to frame some coherent final thoughts on reviewing, I have arrived at only one obvious conclusion: there is always more to learn. The history of illustrated books is long and wide. But each new volume, whether it is awful, amazing, or, most usually, somewhere in-between, requires the critical ability to recognize what is old, to appreciate what is new, and to exercise faith in one’s own judgment. Samuel Butler, who specialized in saying things better than the rest of us, said this better, too. “The test of a good critic is whether he knows when and how to believe on insufficient evidence.”

This article is part of our Picture Book Month 2012 coverage.

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The beginning of a picture book comes before the pictures. In Margaret Wise Brown’s beautiful Goodnight Moon, it was the magic of her words, their simplicity and the music in them, that made Clement Hurd’s now-famous visual interpretation possible. Unless the writer is also an illustrator, the writing always comes first.

Many fine writers can write about children but are unable to write for them. Writers such as William Maxwell awaken in us, the older readers, an understanding of childhood that many adults don’t have, a sensitivity to children that is exquisite. But writing for children is different. The writers writing about children are looking back. The writers writing for children are feeling back into childhood.

Many adults think of children as an emotionally different species from ourselves. But if there is any difference between the adult’s and the child’s feelings, it is in the greater intensity of the child’s. We adults have developed what John Donovan called our “protective coating.” Humor, irony, religion, resignation — anything to give us control and protect us from the full impact. (It can’t always work, but generally it does.) Kids don’t have those defenses yet. Their emotions are the same as those of adults, except for that one tremendous difference — children experience anger, loneliness, joy, love, sorrow, and hatred whole and plain; we, through our adult protection and veneer.

There is no feeling that can’t be explored in picture books. Everything from birth to death is the province of those who write them. When we experience an emotion as adults, when the power and the mood returns with the force of childhood, we use writing to reach back to ourselves, to our own childhood where we still need comfort or understanding. This desire to communicate with someone still alive within us is the source of certain children’s picture books.

There are all sorts of picture books. There is a place for them all. There are those with plots and those without plots, stories that are funny and stories that are sad and stories that can be both at once.

There are books which are entirely a mood that the words, like a piece of poetry, can evoke. But in the great variety of books that are picture books, each so different from the others, there is one common gift (the good ones, at least). Ursula Nordstrom, one of the great children’s book editors of our time, called it “retaining a direct line to one’s childhood.”

Picture books are written from a child’s point of view. That is the direct line to childhood Ursula talked about, the off-center way the world looks to children, to whom the world is new and who are trying to make sense out of everything adults take for granted.

I remember one little girl who lived in Tarrytown, near Sleepy Hollow, where fascinating stories were told. She went to kindergarten and Sunday school. One day, she asked me if Jesus ever lived. “Yes,” I said. She paused. “And Abraham Lincoln?” “Yes,” I said. A long pause and then, “The headless horseman?” She was wrestling with half-understood realities and a hidden fear. It’s the kind of confusion that can seem charming and funny and dear from an adult point of view, but it is a wondering, serious desire to know, to understand, from the child’s.

I’ve enjoyed and admired so many of the picture books I’ve read as a mother and as an editor. The mischief of H. A. Rey’s Curious George, the suppressed fun in Nat Benchley’s brief sentences and offbeat point of view, the lyrical beauty of Margaret Wise Brown, the wry funny twist of Karla Kuskin, and so many others who are a delight to read and reread over and over.

But when people ask me why one writes picture books for children, I can really answer only for myself. Most of my books are about relationships, friends with friends, brothers with sisters, brothers with brothers, sisters with sisters, parents with children, the interpersonal relationships and the emotions they engender, joy and sorrow, hate and love, admiration and envy, anger and hope. These are all emotions we adults feel, too, but children are coming to everything for the first time, and give in to the immediacy of the moment.

Writing for them, I am really writing for myself. Some adult emotion sets me off, but it is a sort of déjà vu, a double exposure reliving the child’s emotion but reaching back into it with an adult perspective that gives it some protection or explanation.

What makes you write, where do you get your ideas? Constant, ever-recurring questions. For me it is a current emotion that I can recall from long ago as well. I am familiar with it in a double way. It is what the poet called “emotion recollected in tranquillity” . . . but different. It’s emotion re-experienced and experienced at the same time.

Take for instance My Grandson Lew, the story of a little boy and his mother easing their loss of the boy’s grandfather by talking about what he was like. There is a mixture of things from my life that went into Grandson Lew. But the book is not about any one grandfather. What made me write it was the death of an aunt I loved dearly, an aunt who spent a lot of time with me when I was small, and stayed down South after we moved away. I had not seen her in so many years that my children never knew her.

The afternoon I came home from her funeral, I was sitting with my five-year-old daughter, who was puzzled that someone of whom she had hardly heard could be so important to me. I was thinking about Ann while trying to show my daughter how to crochet, and she was struggling to get the hook through the wool and felt my preoccupation. “How come you liked her so much?” she asked. She obviously had not known me as a child and had never met Ann, and it was hard to make Ann real for her. But when I remembered and said that Ann was the one who had taught me to crochet and described the doll clothes she had made, the connection from Ann to me to my daughter brought Ann to life for both of us. And eased my own sadness.

There is no aunt in Grandson Lew and no little girl, and no wool and no crocheting. But the lessening of loss through sharing memories is. That was the force behind my writing a book with bits and pieces of unrelated kindnesses I remembered from other people who had also died and whom I would always miss as I do Ann. There was my father-in-law taking my very young son to the museum and Steve’s falling asleep with his head on his shoulder when Mr. Zolotow brought him home. There was my own father coming in the night when a dream woke me and the image of him sailing like a white ship through the bedroom door as he came to reassure me. There was my uncle letting me put my hands around his lighted pipe (I can still, through the years, almost feel its warmth). All these bits and pieces went into the character of that fictional grandfather and came back to me the week of Ann’s death. My own sense of loss released these loving events, and I was able to relive those kindnesses from the past while writing the book.

A quite different kind of emotion impelled me to write The Hating Book. The book begins, “I hate hate hated my friend,” and mentions childlike incidents that caused the anger. “When I moved over in the school bus, she sat somewhere else. When her point broke in arithmetic and I passed her my pencil, she took Peter’s instead.” It goes on, filled with the trivia that is everyday stuff in childhood but not trivial to a child. It made the little reader understand in his own terms the anger of the narrator, which was also my own from different causes.

Children ask in their letters if I have a little girl, and was this her fight with her friend. One child wrote, “I had a fight just like it.” What made me write that book, however, was a falling-out I had just had with a fifty-year-old friend when I was in my sixties. The unconscious memory that furnished some of the things about pencils and blackboards, coupled with my adult pain and anger, produced a book for young children triggered by a quarrel between two adult women. And kids understand the book, what is hidden under the hate, the relief when it is possible to return to friendship and affection.

How do I get my ideas? Take William’s Doll — another example of the way adult beliefs and feelings transform into a story children respond to. As with all my books, many threads went into what impelled me to write it. I’ve always felt that little boys not encouraged to play with teddy bears or other stuffed animals, and certainly not with dolls, are denied a form of expression for the deepest of human instincts. I feel very strongly that men who stay out of the nursery miss much early joy and a bonding that carries over into all relationships. This was something I felt at a time when many more fathers than today avoided the early contact with their children. I felt anger at what both the baby and the father were missing because of this then-very-common pattern. From the mail I still get, it is still a pattern in a great many homes.

But the immediate impetus for William’s Doll was a specific little boy who wanted a doll. His father bought him a toy gun instead, thinking this would set his child on the right masculine road. I was very fond of the little boy and angry at the preconceptions of the father and at the muddy thinking behind this. It all came together in William’s Doll. The concept I’d had for a long time, but the emotional impulse to write came out of that real incident. Feelings, rather than ideas, are the root of the books I’ve written.

It’s only after sixty years of writing picture books that I’ve formulated this theory in answer to “where do my ideas come from?” So all explanations of how and what I’ve written over the years is like trying to explain the taste of water or the smell of air. The analytical attempt really doesn’t answer the questions. If I succeed in a book, I guess the book itself is the only true answer.

Charlotte Zolotow has been writing and shaping picture books since 1944, as author of more than seventy books reflecting the everyday experience of young children and their discovery of the world around them, and as a distinguished editor at Harper Junior Books. Here is what she says about herself: “Born in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1915 on my sister Dorothy’s birthday. Later lived in Brookline (Mass.), Detroit, and New York City. Went to University of Wisconsin, studied writing under Helen C. White, a wonderful teacher, met Maurice Zolotow , eccentric, brilliant young man, married him in 1938. Son, Stephen, 1945; daughter, Ellen (now Crescent), 1952; divorced 1969; happy to be still alive, 1998.”

From the March/April 1998 Horn Book Magazine. This article is part of our Picture Book Month 2012 coverage.

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