Whether it's music, loss of something, loneliness or friendship - if that emotion is heightened in some way and painted to fit in between the covers of 32 pages, that can become a picture book.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
And that's why any of my picture books exist: They all seem to be built backwards from a simple, emotionally optimistic story beat.
When we read a book, we have a blurry image that's kind of physical but blurry. But we have an emotional image also. We have an emotional connection to the character.
I really appreciate what it takes to create a book. I understand the loneliness that it involves and the excitement and the vulnerability: I especially identify with that.
I just sort of write the book I feel like writing given the emotional place I am in my life at the time.
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.'
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.
In my subconscious, my books were part of a single emotional journey.
So while it is true that I find really dark stuff funny sometimes, it's also true that as a writer of books I want to have the whole range of human emotions.
I always feel sad when I come to the end of a book.
I think after you write something and you're finished with it, there is a sense of loss. That this is a world I can't really re-enter the way that I could when I was working on it. The covers of the book close it to the writer.
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