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Telling stories with visuals is an ancient art. We've been drawing pictures on cave walls for centuries. It's like what they say about the perfect picture book. The art and the text stand alone, but together, they create something even better. Kids who need to can grab onto those graphic elements and find their way into the story.

Not only is writing more important than ever, but visual literacy is vital. We don't teach enough design, art, visual things. We have to recognize what we're seeing. It matters if you send someone a cluttered design. It matters more than ever.

We're really interested in more visual storytelling, figuring out a way to blend our level of observation with a bigger visual scope.

But I think we're also just talking about the literacy of the audience. The visual literacy of the audience. They've seen so many images now, especially here in the States. There's so much to look at, to watch. So the visual storytelling literacy is harder to impress.

My fiction has been influenced by the visual arts, though not in obvious ways, it seems to me. I don't offer tremendous amounts of visual information in my work.

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.

Writing children's books gives a writer a very strong sense of narrative drive.

The telling of stories creates the real world.

As a visual storyteller, a lot is learning what to include so you're not being redundant between images and text.

When I was coming out of college, storytelling was very much something you did with pencil and paper, so the technological platform versatility, I think, is really valuable.