I love picture books - with picture books, you can use words and pictures as a double act, even tell two different versions of a story at the same time.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Picture books are the distillation of an idea, and you have to use just the right words. I love that, and I try to use a lot of action verbs.
Making books is a very specific kind of activity. It's not really a collection of your best pictures - although it is - but it's also a way of presenting your work so that it's not repetitive, so that it flows, and so that it makes sense in a book.
I have to write what I can write, and writing the text of a picture book is like walking a tightrope, if you ramble off... As my friend Julius Lester says, 'A picture book is the essence of an experience.'
More than conventional picture books, the notebook format allows me to leap from words to images, and this free-flowing back-and-forth inspires my best work. It reflects the way I think - sometimes visually, sometimes verbally - with the pictures not there just to illustrate the text but to replace it, to tell their own story.
As writers, we do our best to conjure a world so vivid that the reader can practically walk through it - but we're still only using words and relying on readers to do a lot of work of imagining. Providing pictures as well as words offers a whole new dimension to the experience of consuming a story.
If anybody reads a story in a magazine or book, different pictures compete in their minds.
It's too bad for us 'literary' enthusiasts, but it's the truth nevertheless - pictures tell any story more effectively than words.
Literature is the stringing together of pictures in words.
I've never really thought of writing books. I've never thought about stories as a part of a collection.
I don't like books that play to the gallery, but I've become more concerned with telling a story as clearly and engagingly as I can.