As a child, Theodor Seuss Geisel loved to draw. His father used to say that Ted always had a pencil in his hand. On Sundays and on holidays, Papa Seuss took the family to the Springfield Massachusetts Zoo, where he served on the Board of Directors. Young Ted spent hours sketching the animals. His sister Marnie teased him about how silly they looked.

  At home, Ted drew animals on the attic walls, but his mother didn’t complain. She saw his drawing as a talent to be encouraged.

  Ted was a self-taught artist. He signed up for an art class in high school, but dropped out on the first day after the teacher criticized him for turning his paper upside down to fix a detail in his charcoal drawing. Instead of attending art classes, Ted developed his unique drawing style as cartoonist for his high school newspaper. Positive feedback from his friends and fellow students gave him the self-confidence to keep on drawing.

 In my picture book, Imagine That! How Dr. Seuss wrote 'The Cat in the Hat', I include five writing tips that I distilled from Dr. Seuss’s interviews and from the recollections of his friends and family. Here’s a little more about the fifth tip: 

Tip #5: Revise, revise, revise
 
  Dr. Seuss was a perfectionist. “To produce a 60-page book,” he once told an interviewer, “I may easily write 1,000 pages before I’m satisfied. The most important thing about me, I feel, is that I . . . write, rewrite, reject, re-reject, and polish incessantly.”

  As Bruce Handy observes in Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children's Literature as an Adult, Dr. Seuss showed us that "discipline is not the enemy of creativity."
 
  Dr. Seuss thanked his first Random House editor, Saxe Commins, for teaching him the value of revision. Commins worked mainly with adult authors, including Ernest Hemingway. Dr. Seuss remembered Commins telling him that "I had as much responsibility to take time and work hard as they did. He helped me realize that a paragraph in a children’s book is equivalent to a chapter in an adult book.”

Blogger's note: For young writers, Tip #5 should probably be "Write, write, write" (oh, and also "Read, read, read"). Maybe just one single "Revise."

 In my picture book, Imagine That! How Dr. Seuss wrote 'The Cat in the Hat', I include five writing tips that I distilled from Dr. Seuss’s interviews and from the recollections of his friends and family. Here’s a little more about the fourth tip,
 
Tip #4: Recycle, recycle, recycle
 
  Over the course of his career, Dr. Seuss recycled the "look" of characters. For example, there was a long series of elephants before Horton. Several grinchy creatures lurked in illustrations before the Grinch was born.  Zany cats in hats preceded the creation of the Cat in the Hat. By the time Dr. Seuss sat down to sketch his soon-to-be famous feline character in 1955, he had already drawn close cousins, including

· a magicians’ cat in a tall, forward-tilting hat, for Bartholomew and the Oobleck (1949)

· Ormie, a cat created for a Ford Motor Company ad. Ormie stands upright and wears a tall blue-and-white striped hat, white mittens, and a red ruffled collar. (1949)

· the rangy tabby cat in The Bippolo Seed (1951)

  (Reproductions of these and other early Seuss cats can be found in The Annotated Cat by Philip Nel, pages 36-37. For reasons of copyright, I can't show them here.)

  Blogger's note: All authors and illustrators recycle. Keep your drafts. Keep your failures, especially. The good bits will come in handy later!

 In my picture book, Imagine That! How Dr. Seuss wrote 'The Cat in the Hat', I include five writing tips that I distilled from Dr. Seuss’s interviews and from the recollections of his friends and family. Here’s a little more about the third tip:
         
Tip #3: Stir up story ideas by doodling

“[My books] always start as a doodle,” declared Dr. Seuss. “I may doodle a couple of animals. If they bite each other, it’s going to be a good book. If you doodle enough, the characters begin to take over by themselves—after a year and a half or so.”

(I love these wacky descriptions of his creative process.)

Also, according to Dr. Seuss, drawing was the easy part of creating a picture book. It was the writing that was difficult.

Blogger’s note: I agree that doodles are very useful. Even though I am not an illustrator, my story ideas almost always begin as doodles on paper, or as little cartoons in my head. I continue doodling as I expand the story ideas, too.

 In my picture book, Imagine That! How Dr. Seuss wrote 'The Cat in the Hat', I include five writing tips that I distilled from Dr. Seuss’s interviews and from the recollections of his friends and family. Here’s a little more about the second tip:
         
Tip #2: Draw on your strengths

  "The truth is that I like dogs better than cats, but I don't know how to draw a dog."

  Dr Seuss was having fun with this interviewer, as he often did. He could draw dogs quite expertly. For example, he deftly depicted the Grinch’s dog, Max, for the book he wrote right after The Cat in the Hat.

But in real life, Dr. Seuss was a dog person, not a cat person.  At the time he wrote The Cat in the Hat, he and his wife Helen owned an Irish setter.

  Another strength Dr. Seuss drew upon was his ability to tell a story in rhyme. Early in his picture book career he wrote three children’s picture books in prose--The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, The King’s Stilts, and Bartholomew and the Oobleck. But beginning with If I Ran the Zoo (1950), he wrote all his books in rhyme.

  When writing The Cat in the Hat, Dr. Seuss had to use his rhyming skills in a new way, because he was not allowed to make up long, silly words. He had to use simple words from a first grade list. He lamented that writing The Cat in the Hat was like making apple strudel (a delicious pastry) without the strudels. Dr. Seuss was making a joke: strudels weren’t really a part of apple strudel. Strudel was the German word for ‘waterfall’, which described what the pastry looked like, not what it was made of (Dr. Seuss, who grew up speaking German at home, knew this very well).

   In my picture book, Imagine That! How Dr. Seuss wrote 'The Cat in the Hat', I include five writing tips that I distilled from Dr. Seuss’s interviews and from the recollections of his friends and family. Here’s a little more about the first tip:
         
Tip #1: Set yourself a challenging goal
 
  “All I needed, I figured, was to find a whale of an exciting subject which would make the average six-year-old want to read like crazy.” That’s what Dr. Seuss told an interviewer from The Saturday Evening Post in 1957, soon after The Cat in the Hat was published.

  To accomplish this goal—a goal that seemed so simple but turned out to be so difficult—took him about twice as long as creating what he called a "big book" (like Horton Hears a Who, or How the Grinch Stole Christmas).

  Dr. Seuss knew, of course, that he needed more than just an exciting subject. He needed an exciting subject that he could write about using only simple words from a very short list. He wasn't able to use the names of faraway places, or even the names of wild animals, so he settled upon a fantasy adventure that took place inside an ordinary 1950’s suburban house.

  To make six-year-olds want to “read like crazy,” (and also be able to read like crazy) he added Seussian touches, for example,

• His signature style of rhyming helped kids guess words they didn’t already know. 
• His expressive artwork made the story even funnier. And scarier, too, as the Cat created more and more chaos.
• He encouraged kids to keep reading by making page turns into cliff hangers. Would the Cat fall off the ball? Could the kids catch Thing One and Thing Two? How would they ever clean up the house before their mother got home?

  It was a challenge to write a biographical book about Dr. Seuss. Biographers search for facts about their subjects. In interviews, Dr. Seuss delighted in mixing fact and fiction. When a reporter would ask him a serious question, Dr. Seuss, as often as not, would respond with a completely outlandish story. But an entertaining story. Like the Cat in the Hat, Dr. Seuss was an irrepressible entertainer.

  When asked about the process of writing The Cat in the Hat, Dr. Seuss made up a number of tales. For example, he once told a reporter from the Chicago Tribune newspaper that he had wanted to write about a jungle tiger. His editor liked the idea, said Dr. Seuss, but insisted that he change the word ‘jungle’ to ‘house’, and the word ‘tiger’ to ‘cat’.
  What’s a biographer to do? In the spirit of Dr. Seuss, I included at least one fairly believable, tall-ish tale of his in the book (look for the words ‘queen’ and ‘zebra’)

Note: During January, February and March, I plan to about some of the interesting bits and pieces of Seussiana that I didn’t have room for in my book, Imagine That! How Dr. Seuss Wrote ‘The Cat in the Hat.’  You can email questions here: