I wanted to write something from a child's viewpoint... Five of the characters I have played in movies have either been abused or became abusers, themselves, and I just kind of felt like there was a need.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I love developing children as characters. Children rarely have important roles in literary fiction - they are usually defined as cute or precious, or they create a plot by being kidnapped or dying.
One of the reasons I began to write was because I wanted stories for my children where the characters spoke as they did and had similar life experiences.
I know some children's writers write for specific children, or for the children they once were, but I never have. I just thought children might like my sort of visual humour.
I always love writing about children.
If children are given some real content, they can feel powerful with their own understanding of it. I think a movie like 'Indian in the Cupboard' will instruct them how to proceed as people. They can think about whether they would have done something the way a character did, how they would have felt about an event in the story.
Part of the joy of writing for kids is that you have to have a real adventure story. You can get really involved in the fantastic in a way that perhaps you can't so much in adult fiction.
I think that usually the risk in trying to write children in fiction is the tendency to make them too cute or something.
I don't know if anything I write will endure, but I do try to write it as a narrative that will not only challenge but also entice the reader into the lives of children.
It is extremely important to me to write for children.
I do not really write for children: I write only for me and for the few people I hope to please, and I write for the story.