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Born to Read. Illustrated by Marc Brown. Knopf, 2008. The Story Behind the Book I wrote Born to Read as a companion to Wild About Books. I wanted to celebrate the benefits of knowing how to read, and I got to thinking about how teachers and parents are always telling kids that if they learn to read, they will have better lives in the future, as adults. I decided to write about Sam who does amazing things while he's still a kid, and all because he's a reader. First, he outdoes a doctor at diagnosing his strange illness, then he wins a big bicycle race against adult riders, and finally, he tracks down and tames a baby giant who stole the toys of all the kids in his town. In Born to Read, I celebrate the power of nonfiction reading, and of reading picture books to babies and rambunctious toddlers. If you've studied picture books at all, in class or at a writers' conference, you've probably heard that editors don't let writers and artists communicate while a book is being illustrated. This is usually true, but it was not the case for either of my two collaborations with Marc Brown, Born to Read or Wild About Books. Marc and I live at opposite sides of the country, so we communicated by e-mail. He would take photos of the illustrations on his drawing board and zap them to me so that I could see them while the paint was still drying, and I could make comments (such as "ooh!" and "aah!"), and he would also ask questions about what I had in mind when I wrote certain parts of the manuscript. |
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