for Cynthia Leitich Smith's Cynsations
Chris Cander happened upon a children’s story by way of her real life as a mom of two kids.
Below, Emma Kate Tsai interviews Chris about how she conceptualized The Word Burglar, illustrated by Katherine Tramonte (Bright Sky, 2013) and her perspective on children’s literature as a writer who’s also a mother of two.
Can you tell the story of how The Word Burglar came to be?
My daughter, who is now eleven, was going to camp for the first time when I wrote it.
At the time, I would tell her a story that I made up on the fly every night. When she went away to camp, it was the first time she wasn’t going to have a story at night. But the camp allowed me to email a letter by 10 a.m. that they would then print and, by bedtime, give to her.
So I would get up and give myself forty-five minutes to write a story. I’d drink coffee while I was doing it and try to keep the baby occupied, then I’d email it.
I really didn’t know if she was liking them, but I started posting them on Facebook every morning. They amassed a bit of a following. People were downloading them and reading them to their kids.
Did it come out of your head like that--that forty-five minute exercise—or did you go back and fine-tune after it became popular?
It was the forty-five minute draft. I’d wake up, and I would grab anything I could think of.
My son was trying to learn how to read.
Now, of course, he didn’t have fourteen brothers and sisters like The Word Burglar, or parents who didn’t know how to teach him. But I immediately thought: Sasha’s gone, he doesn’t have his role model here—she and he would read together in bed—and then it happened.
That was the kernel of the idea and, believe it or not, it’s freeing to have a constraint of time. I wasn’t trying to write for publication. I was trying to write for my eight year old, so she’d have a bedtime story. That internal voice that gets really critical and tells you to over-analyze? It wasn’t there because I had forty-five minutes.
It’s such a great technique if you haven’t tried it. Give yourself either a time constraint or give yourself permission to write the very worst thing that you’ve ever written.
There’s something very liberating about having permission to fail, having permission to do garbage work, because you might actually find something wonderful comes out.
That gatekeeper, that critic, has been turned away.
You used your own illustrator, is that right?
My illustrator, who is a very good friend of mine, will say that I strong-armed them, and I kind of did. I had two illustrators in mind, one who did the cover of a novel I author-published this year, 11 Stories. He was one of my top two choices, and he was a friend, too. We went to middle school together.
But his agent said he didn’t have time to do it. Kat is a good friend, and our kids are friends, so when I got the contract from Bright Sky, my contact there asked, “Do you have any kind of illustration style in mind?”
I said, “I’d just really like you to meet my friend.”
Kat had never done any children’s books before. So it was a risk on everybody’s part, but she had great samples and great enthusiasm.
Plus, it was a great story because of the fact that we’d been friends and our kids were the same ages, and so we were able to build the kids into the book. Mine were characters and hers became represented in it: Her son was the model for The Word Burglar, and her daughter’s bunny, Hop, is represented in the bunny on every page.
The publisher got excited about that story aspect. It’s a selling point when we’ve gone to festivals. We go as a pair, and people enjoy hearing the back-story of how we work together.
Most of the time, at the point of the contract being signed, the author has almost no input into the rest of the process, and yet I was able to chat with Kat at five in the morning about sample illustrations. “Do you like this direction?” she’d ask. That part of it was great. I’m glad they gave her a chance.
Could you share with us the story behind your blurb?
 |
| 50th Anniversary Edition |
I loved that book when I was little, and I kept it for forever.
At some point, I was inspired to go to my library and curate my own favorite books on my own shelves.
Mr. Pine’s Purple House was there. I thought to myself, I wonder what else he’s done.
He’s published over 250 books for children and young readers, he’s 93 years old, and he lives in Sarasota, Florida.
One day, I pick up the phone—because that’s how intrepid I am—and I looked him up.
I called and said, “I would love to talk to Mr. Kessler. Would you give him my email and pass on a message?”
And the woman that answered the phone said, “Oh no, I’ll just give you his phone number.”
And she did.
So I called him on the phone and we had a lovely, amazing talk that ended in tears, because it was the most satisfying, full-circle of my life. Add a Comment