Inside a Writer/Author/Illustrator's Brain

Nope. It's not a typo. I'm in flux. If you count novels, picture books, or partial chapter books, I'm a writer. If you count poetry, I'm an author. But I've been writing, critique-grouping and not submitting for quite a while.

Bravery came first for illustration and graphic design, so I made a living out of it. Now I'm semi-retired and working hard again on my own writing and writer/illustrator projects.

Okay, so it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that when I’m writing, I think in visual scenes. When Illustrating, I think of deepening the story.

• I love words, but keep things spare when writing for children, choosing the best and fewest that fit the project.
• I love the sound of a good sentence and read aloud to check. The length of the manuscript doesn’t change that.
• I love dialog—if you don't succumb to the deadly "as you know, Bob" exposition, it shows so much without telling the reader what to think. It's a pace-controller, too, if you like.
• Dummies for picture books? Yes. Outlines for novels? No. But for both, I'm thinking ahead, pacing things out, knowing where they need to end up in order to matter.
• I love warm humor, it shows us the good sides of life, especially when times are awful.
• Revising helps me sort and show what I really mean—way better than talking or early drafts.
• Chapter endings need to tempt a page turn.
• And page turns—I think of them all the time.
• I’m slightly OCD (you may have guessed). I care about each project's production process. I work from the intended result, backward, often after asking too many questions.

A friend of mine who used to be my husband, still says, after I recover from something germy, “You’re not back to normal, you’re back to your usual self.”

That just about sums it up, I think, for all creative people. He’s a creative thinker, too. Scientists need to be, at least part of the time, so . . ..

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