In this episode of The Storyteller’s Shelf Podcast, we’re joined by Philip C. Stead, award-winning picture book creator and author of many beloved children’s books, including A Sick Day for Amos McGee, illustrated by Erin E. Stead, which received the 2011 Caldecott Medal.
This transcript comes from the video’s automatic English captions. Names and wording may contain errors. Timestamps open the recording at that point. References to events and offers reflect the time of recording.
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0:43 learn directly from people in the business. You'll have access to live Q&A sessions and networking breakout rooms, so you can ask questions, connect, and apply what you're learning in real time. We can't wait to see you there. Get a ticket at the storytellersshelf.podcast.com. >> [music] >> Hi storytellers, welcome to the Storyteller's Shelf podcast season 2026. Today, we are excited to welcome Philip Stead. Philip, could you share a little more information about who you are and what you do? >> Well, first, thanks for having me. I am a bookmaker, and I've been a bookmaker for a long time, ever since I was 6
1:28 years old. Um, although professionally not not quite that long. I have been primarily a picture bookmaker for most of my career. My one of my very first books was a book I did with my wife, Erin, called A Sick Day for Amos McGee, which Erin won the Caldecott Medal for in 2011. So, if people have ever heard of me or know of me at all, a lot of times it's because of that character and that book. But, I've made a lot of books since, and I am now in the process of I'm ready to promote my very first ever middle grade book. Your work has received some of the highest honors in children's literature. What did creating that book teach you about picture book craft and what
2:10 changed for you after it was recognized? To answer the first question, so what did it teach me about craft? I think every single book I've ever done has taught me something about craft because every every book you do is its own unique problem. I think what has really resonated with people with that book or one of the things that has really resonated is that just the simplicity of the story. It doesn't try to do all that much, honestly. And some of that was just a byproduct of of Aaron and I wanting to be very very careful with the first book we made and not wanting to make any mistakes and so just moving at a very deliberate pace and having a very
2:43 simple story in mind and just really trying to respect each page of the book one by one. And that very slow process of making the book kind of blend into the book itself. So when you open it and you read it, something of that really slow deliberation that happened in the studio I think is inherent now in the story itself and people can feel that. And so it became a little bit of a road map for us for how we wanted to proceed from then on, the kind of stories we wanted to tell and the the kind of work we wanted to do in the studio. We wanted to make things by hand. So that book is completely made by hand and every book we've made since has been
3:22 completely made by hand. Which I have to say was not all that original of a thought back then. Began that book in the year 2007, early 2007, so almost 20 years ago. And back then, I don't know the exact numbers, but I think probably more than half of working artists at the time were working traditionally with um you know, all handmade media. Whether that's pen and ink or painting, pastel, whatever, collage. These days we've become more and more of an outlier as a team. Very few books these days are made completely traditionally. And I always like to add the caveat that it's not that I don't like books that are made digitally. A lot of my favorite
4:06 books every year are made that way. But I think it would be disingenuous for us to make books in any other way than the way that we love making them. And as we're as we're in that is increasingly going to be dominated by artificial intelligence. Some of the things that we were really sort of adamant about early on about wanting to make sure that you could see flaws in our work as a way to have sort of like a remnant of our own humanity inside of the work, those things they were kind of philosophical to us early on, but now I think a lot more people are kind of catching on that these things are important for all creative work that we we really want to be able
4:46 to see that the humans behind things that get made. So that was a really long way of answering the first half of your question. I think the second half of your question was how did the Caldecott change things? In innumerable ways. It changed things for us, but the most important way is that it allowed us to tell whatever kinds of stories we wanted to tell. So we got to because it was our first book together, we never had to have that uncomfortable period of of your career when you have to make compromises just to make books at all. We really really lucked out. And so there's really not a book in our catalog that isn't exactly the book we wanted to make at the moment that we
5:23 were making it. There's so much to unpack in that, but I would probably say the theme from what you said is slow and steady wins the race. What allows you to get that freedom? >> What has allowed us to have the freedom to make the things we want to make? Well, we we've had a number of things happen to us that are I guess you could call them lucky. So the very first book that I made was actually a book called Cream Tune a Fish and Peas on Toast. It's very sort of like an unknown little like artifact of our career that you know, they didn't print very many copies and I think my dad bought most of them. So, but then right on the heels of that came Amos McGee.
5:59 And we did both of those books with an editor named Neal Porter. And Neal Porter is he's now retired, but we ended up making I'm not sure the exact number, but approximately 20 books with Neal. And what was really special about Neal as an editor is that and it's very different from any other editor or art director I I have worked with since is that he would find artists and want to work with them because he saw something unique in them. But not because he was trying to get something specific out of them. And Amos is the the clearest example of that because of the very unusual story of how that book came to be. It wasn't something that we pitched or we're
6:39 trying to pitch. I was working on my first book with Neal and several of our friends were also working on books with Neal and one of those friends let slip that I was married to an artist. That artist, Erin was very very shy and would not show her art to anybody. And so Neal was just very curious about this. So, he sent me an email one day and said, "Is this true? Are you married to a an artist and is she so shy she won't show me anything?" I said, "Yes, it's true." And as it just so happened, Erin, who had just come off of a three-year hiatus of art making. She hadn't made any art in over three years. Had kind of had a crisis of confidence about art and what her place really
7:22 should be in the art world. She knew she wanted to work in books, but she thought maybe she ought to be in more of like a publishing capacity, like working inside of a publishing house or even in a bookstore. At the time she was working at Books of Wonder in in New York City. But um on the advice of a friend, Erin had been working on a drawing and the drawing, which she had just been completing at our kitchen table was a of an old man and an elephant. And it was the only drawing she'd done in 3 years, so I had nothing else to show Neil, but without asking Erin, I scanned that drawing and I sent it to him in an email. And he loved it. He said, "This is This
7:55 is beautiful. How do we convince her to make a book?" So, Neil and I kind of came up with this plot of taking Erin out to dinner in a few days and basically pitching her pitching her on the idea of making a book. And so, between I sent that piece of art on a Monday, on a Thursday, we had dinner. So, between Monday and Thursday, I wrote a draft of A Sick Day for Amos McGee, kind of without really telling Erin that I was doing it at all. And sometimes I look back at that and think that that restriction of time, the Monday to the Thursday, is a big part of what made that book simple and effective in the way that it was simple and effective. I didn't have
8:36 months or years to sweat it. It just needed to be a simple problem and a simple solution for a story. What I ended up doing was instead of creating a narrative at first, I created just simple scenes that I really thought Erin would enjoy illustrating. So, the first scene was an old man playing chess with an elephant, and then it was an old man running a race with a tortoise, and those Those little scenes became the backbone of the book, and the story was built on top of that essentially or around that. So, that's how Amos McGee came to be, and that that's not a usual story. But, because it did so much better than anybody, including Neil, our editor,
9:15 ever anticipated, um it then gave us even more cover to do to experiment more with the kinds of stories we wanted to tell. We already had Neil on our side, but but then Neil now didn't have to do any convincing of anybody above him because Amos kind of paved the way for our whole team. >> That is an amazing story. When you are beginning a new book, what does the process look like from idea to finish? It's a really hard question question because I'm not the type of artist that has a process at all. It kind of is it just it happens or it doesn't happen. I mean there there are stories that I've written where I get the idea on the tarmac in an
10:01 airplane and by the time wheels are up and by time wheels are down again, I've got the whole thing. And then there are other ones that I for years I'm tinkering with and trying to get right. So the writing process is really like an an never ending mystery to me how it happens at all. You know, once an idea is there, it's as if it's always been there, but prior to that I I don't know. I don't know how to I don't have any advice for artists for how to generate ideas other than to just kind of be in the world and not sit at your desk. But when it comes to art, art I can do. I was an artist before I was a writer. And I think that art as a daily practice is something that I've
10:36 really been able to hone. And so there there is sort of a rhythm to to how a piece of art gets made, either a single piece of art or the or the art of a whole book. Where you you kind of slog through those those initial sketches and you allow them to be terrible. And you just reiterate and reiterate and reiterate until it it starts to look right. And and I know writing works in a similar way, but for me there's something something about art making that's more concrete. I can see it happening. I can see each stage and then all of the the various stages can exist on my desk at the same time and so it's a really it's just easy to see the lifespan or the
11:13 life cycle of an entire piece of art. Whereas with writing, it's like all the earlier things just kind of disappear. And yeah, you could dig them up and look through them and read them, but I I don't know. Maybe people do that. I don't do that. And so when it's finally finished, it almost seems as though it was always there. And that why in the world did it take you so long to make it happen? I'll say I've had to kind of examine myself a little bit, like what kind of writer am I now that I've been working on longer things. Writing for picture books is a lot has a lot more in common for me with poetry, writing poetry, which is actually the only kind of writing I've
11:50 ever studied. In school, I took a lot of poetry classes and and I wrote a lot of poetry. And there's something really There's something about the kind of head space you have to be in to write a poem that's very similar to the kind of head space that you get into when you're writing a picture book. And similar to how a poem can just kind of strike you, a picture book can do the same thing. I don't know that a 50,000-plus word manuscript can just hit you. Though the process has to be more deliberate than that. And so I kind of had to figure out for that particular project, like what How do I work? How do I even make it happen? And I'm not an outliner. I'm not an outliner
12:30 when it comes to writing, I'm not an outliner when it comes to life at all. It's It's a like a very common point of like mild friction between Erin and I, in that she's a Capricorn who wants absolutely every detail of her life for the next year to be perfectly mapped out so that she's not surprised by any of those things when they happen. And planning even for what I'm going to do in a day gives me a lot of stress. I'm I much prefer to let it just kind of wash over me. So when it came to writing, I knew I needed some kind of intentional practice, the way that I've developed an intentional practice with art. But I didn't know what that should be. I know
13:07 I'm slow in everything I do. And I know that I'm to a fault kind of painstaking in everything I do. And so I thought, why not Instead of working against that, I'll just I'll lean into the things I I already know that I am. And I had read somewhere that Kurt Vonnegut, when he was writing some of his early novels, would write them not in a a flurry, not 10,000 words a day or 2,000 words a day or even 1,000 words a day. He would do 2 to 300 words per day, and that's it. Usually 200, and they would be act as little distinct sections, and he would work them and rework them until he felt that they were perfect. And then he would work move on to the next 200 words and the next 200
13:48 words and the next 200. I thought, "Okay, that makes sense to me as a picture book writer." The the idea of the these really small chunks and making them perfect. So, I I figured if I did 200 words a day, and I was working 5 days a week, by the end of a year, I would have a draft for a novel. And Wha- And so, I essentially what I did is 200 words a day. And if I could get to 200, sometimes I would get to 200 in 45 minutes. Usually, I would it would take me the whole day. And there were days when I didn't get to 200. There were days when I got to 80. But, you know, it averaged out over time. Some days you had like a really good day, and you got to like
14:30 210. So, you just put those 10 in the bank for tomorrow, and you feel good about it. But, I enjoyed the process of not knowing where the story was going. I kind of figured that if I was surprised continuously with what was happening in a story, then a reader would similarly be surprised. At some point, things have to come together, though. That was an ongoing an ongoing struggle for me is how how to maintain the feeling of not knowing as long as possible before sort of like the tyranny of knowing what your story is actually about takes hold. >> I will say, I don't think you're slow. I think you're detailed. >> I think So, the detail is some of it,
15:14 but to because I came out of picture books, and I take picture book writing really seriously. Every picture book has to work Not every picture book, but most picture books have to work out loud. So that the rhythm and the pacing has to has to really work as actual speech. And there's a there's a musicality to the best picture books. That can mean different things. It doesn't mean that it's rhyming or that it behaves like a song, but there's there's a musicality in some way to every good picture book, especially fiction picture books or picture books, I would say. And because that's how I've been training myself, kind of unknowingly training myself for
15:48 almost two decades, I found that I didn't have other skills to lean on as a long fiction writer. So I had to lean on the things I could do. And so even though this book is massive compared to the size of the the picture books I write, I was still trying to put every single word in in the right order in the same way so that the book would have a musicality. And a lot of my favorite books, both for children and for grown-ups, have that inherent music in them, where they can be read. Of course, they can be read for plot, but you could almost disregard the plot and just kind of be like washed away in the feeling of of what of how say Gabriel Garcia Marquez
16:31 writes a sentence. Or even if even when you're thinking about writers for children, just the way that William Steig could put one sentence in front of another and kind of put you in a feeling without even describing that feeling, just with how it with how it sounds. Um And so sound was so important to me as I was writing. And so the 200-word thing really kind of worked with that process because it was like, "Okay, I'm working on a stanza essentially. I'm not I'm not working on a chapter today. I'm not work I'm definitely not working on a act." Like I never thought of like, you know, the three-act structure of a book or anything like that. It was never a concern to me. It
17:08 was more like one stanza after the next. >> how you mentioned when you're talking about collaboration, like with Neil Porter and the fact that you're also working with your wife Erin, collaboration can feel like a big part of picture book making. So, how has working with editors or other creatives influenced your work over time? I haven't collaborated with very many people actually. It's been a a pretty tight little circle of people, which is not to say I'm not inspired by a lot of people. But, as far as the people I've actually made books with, it basically narrows down to to Erin is my main collaborator. And then I've I've made quite a few books with my good friend
17:44 Matthew Cordell. And and then as far as editors go, it's it's a really small handful. And with Neal being my primary editor, but now I I've done several books with his protege Taylor Norman, who is the editor on my my middle grade novel. And with each of the each person I work with, editor, artist, writer, whomever, it's important to me that that the interaction is always what you'd call an improv comedy like a yes and kind of situation. I I just I don't know very many creative people that respond well to to no but, and I really don't. I shut down immediately as soon as it's like, that's not going to work because. I'd much rather it be, well, that's not working
18:22 yet, so let's do let's do more. And all the relationships I I've had so far have been have been like that. And I have to say that my the story of how the the novel came about has some things in common with how Amos McGee came about too, because it was I knew I I had known for a long time I wanted to write a novel for a variety of reasons. But, I also knew that the only way I could write a novel is if somebody would just let me do it and I didn't have to explain all that much about it in advance, which is not how the publishing business usually works, especially in in long fiction, you usually have to have several completed chapters and then probably some sort of summary about
19:04 where the story is going. I really think that some of the systems we've put in place to get books off the ground is inherently antithetical to how creativity is supposed to happen. And a lot of really good books, I think, are not happening because they can't they can't clear those first hurdles. And probably a lot of mediocre books are happening because they can easily launch themselves over those hurdles. So, to Taylor's credit, she was my editor on the novel, she was kind of prodding me to work on something long. And I said to her what I had said to a lot of people before that, is that I I really would like to and I have the seed of an idea.
19:48 And I've even got little pieces of writing that I've worked on over time that I know are part of it in some way. But the only way we're really going to do that is if you just say, "Okay." And I and I don't I really just don't have to tell you anything. And to her credit, she said, "I trust you." And she trusted me because she knew the careful work I had done in my picture book work. And so, she believed that I could do the same kind of careful work with something longer. But it is a leap of faith, and it's not easy for any editor to do that. And you have to be you have to be a specific type of um editor, but you also have to be lucky enough to be working within a company
20:25 that's going to allow you to do it, too. So, I have to shout out my publisher, Holiday House, for being that type of company. And in the past, I've I've I've really lucked out being at McMillan in particular, who also has really allowed myself and Aaron to make pretty much whatever books we felt like we needed to make. I want to kind of turn back to when you were pitching the idea originally with Aaron for picture book creators, balancing text and illustration, um is it's a unique challenge. So, what principles or techniques help you make sure the words and art serve each other well? Yeah, so this is picture books are a very unique art form. There's not any other art form
21:09 that does exactly what picturebooks do. So, it has some elements of writing for film or even making a film at all. It has a lot in common, I think, with stand-up comedy, the rhythm and pacing of stand-up comedy, and how you have to dole information out at a very specific in very specific amounts at just the right time. So, it has a lot in common with a lot of different things, poetry, music, etc., but it's it's totally its own thing, and you have to have these two things working in perfect harmony, text and image, to have a perfect picturebook. Is it irony, then, that most authors and illustrators don't communicate at all? And which is mystifying to a lot of people when they
21:52 when they hear this for the first time, but but typically artists and authors if they meet at all, it's usually at their very first book signing, if they're lucky to have a book lucky enough to have a book signing. The editor and the art director tend to be the go-between, and they keep those two entities apart. There are times when that's absolutely the right thing to do. Not all artists are visual thinkers, at least that's the commonly that's the common sort of excuse that gets made. I can almost buy it, but then I don't. And the reason is if sure, not all artists are visual thinkers, but if you're not the type of artist who is in some way, then this is not the form
22:34 of writing that you should be in, in my opinion. Um And the best writers, it doesn't mean that you have to be able to draw yourself, be able to paint yourself, but you have to be the type of writer that can see something in their mind. And then know that if they can see it in their mind, then somebody else can, too. And so, we might not even need words to describe it. If that makes a kind of sense. And the best picturebooks know exactly when to shut up and let the art do the work. And similarly, the best picture book artists also know when when they need to to not fill a page corner to corner, but instead let there be space just for the text to do the work.
23:17 Um I mean, the greatest example ever of text doing the work would be the last page of Where the Wild Things Are and it was still hot. It's just text on a white page, but it's most important page of the book, I think, along with the wild rumpus itself, which is page after page of no text at all, which would have been completely ruined by text. So, it's the the loudest and craziest portion of the book, but there's there's no text at all. Um I think one of the reasons that a lot of the the greatest picture books come from a single mind and not from a collaborative team is because it it is easier. There is just something easier about one person being
23:55 able to just communicate with themself about these choices as opposed to it to be an author and illustrator. Aaron and I have this incredible advantage of we're two separate people, but we're working in the same studio. And when I'm working with my friend Matthew Cordell, because he's a really good friend and he was my friend before we became collaborators, we can make these decisions just the two of us before we move it into a sphere where we've got other people trying to come between our choices. So, while you'll hear a lot that authors and illustrators ought to be kept apart, I really try to advocate as much as possible for the opposite. It
24:31 might not always work out, but because these two things have to collaborate, art and art and text have to collaborate, I just don't understand how they're supposed to if the two people in charge of those two things aren't allowed to. All right. So, I want to talk a little bit more about the publishing process. What surprised you about publishing when your first book was >> It's funny because when I think back to that time, I got published very young, but back then it seemed like I'd been trying for a very long time. So, I I got my first book deal when I was 25, but because I had been telling people that I was a picture book maker since I was 15, to me it was the end of a
25:09 decade-long struggle to become a picture book maker. And I think throughout that whole lead-up, it really felt like once I get the book once I get that book deal, now I now I will fully be the thing that I've always known that I am. And I'll be able to pay my bills, and nothing will stress me out ever again. I was shocked, absolutely shocked at how little I got was going to get paid to make that first book, and the second book, and the third book, and the fourth book, and it took it took a while before it really became a fully viable career. It was like we had to both have books that we were
25:55 making, but also started to when once we also had a backlist, so that the career was not just the things we were making currently, but also the things we had made in the past, that's when it started to feel like, "Okay, this is actually a a comfortable enough lifestyle that we can live." But if you're not willing to make pretty significant sacrifices to your day-to-day well-being, then the first couple years of your creative career are going to take longer than just a couple years. Because it you need to kind of hammer through an uncomfortable period to get to the other side of that. But there is another side to that. And I don't even think you necessarily need to have hit
26:37 it really big with something to get to that point. You just have to you know, keep plugging along and and have created um you know, a little bookshelf of your own books. And and over time, that becomes like a little um insurance policy for you, those books you've already made. So, anyway, that was that was what was most surprising to me. I will never forget when I got off of the phone call where I learned how much I was going to be making for my first book and I thought, "Well, shoot." And and what it what it meant for me at the time is it had really real consequences. I was living in New York City with Aaron at the time. And we knew that once we started these
27:16 books, I started my first book and it was only, you know, a matter of maybe four or five months later that we signed up Amos McGee. So, it happened in a really short span of time. We knew that because we wanted to make these books in a specific way that would take a very long time that we couldn't have other jobs. This had to be the only thing we did. We also knew there was no way we could live in New York City anymore if that was the only source of income we had. So, we we moved out of the city and we moved to a cabin about 90 mi north in the Catskill Mountains to a house that literally had no heat and we I just kept the wood stove going for a year.
27:54 And we made do and we were we were honest to God poor, like in the truest sense of the word, for several years. But we believed in the thing we were doing and really thought we could see a future that we could see a viable future if we just kept going. So, my advice is just keep going. If you really really think that you can't do anything else, then don't even try. Just just do exactly what you're supposed to do. If you don't have a plan B, then plan A will eventually work out. Do you have any advice on how to deal with all of that sort of restlessness that happens when we are in the waiting period of publishing? Because publishing is not as fast as a lot of people think it is,
28:34 especially for picture books. Yeah, I know, publishing is not fast at all. Um it's infuri- infuriatingly slow at times. Even even my first book, the way that my I didn't tell the story of how that worked out. I think I'll tell it now. I haven't told this story in years. So, when I was in my early 20s, um I just kind of I decided that rather than sending my work out, and at this time I was just sending artwork out. I wasn't sending stories out. I was I saw myself primarily as an illustrator, so I was sending portfolio images out. And I thought instead of sending it out broadly to, you know, 20 or 30 different publishers and waiting for 20 or 30
29:09 different rejections to come back, I thought, "Well, why don't I start rejecting them first?" So, I I went to bookstores and libraries, and I would make stacks of books I would make stacks of books of anything that really appealed to me. And what I started to notice is I would look at the spines of those books, and I would see commonalities. So, it it wasn't my stacks did not represent a broad spectrum of publishers. In fact, it represented a really small spectrum. Five, maybe six publishers that were consistently publishing the books that I love. And I thought, "Okay, if I love the books from these publishers, there's a decent chance that they will also
29:49 enjoy my work because something there's some sort of vibe happening here." So, I targeted I I'm pretty sure it was five publishers exactly. It was Candlewick Press. It was Roaring Brook Press, which was a, you know, brand new at the time. Barefoot Books, which I don't even know if Barefoot Books still exists. And the other two are escaping me right now. I knew that these were the five I really cared about or thought that I I really cared about. And rather than sending them out just standard this sort of standard cover letter, whatever, I found these nice 9 by 12 envelopes, and I hand illustrated corner-to-corner, one-of-a-kind envelopes for each editor that I was
30:30 going to send something to. And I knew that these things most likely they're going into the mail, and they're just going straight into a wood chipper, essentially. Like they're they're never coming back. So, you know, I made sure to scan and photograph the artwork because I was pretty sure I was never going to see it again. Inside in the envelopes is exactly what, you know, these people had asked for. So, it wasn't that I was going completely rogue. Whatever their submission guidelines were, once you opened up the envelope, it was the right stuff. But, the envelopes themselves were unique works of art. And I was so pleased because all five of those
31:03 envelopes earned me a response that was favorable. I didn't I didn't go on to work with all five, but all five sent me notes that were positive, were encouraging, and would potentially lead to something. But, there was one of the five that didn't seem to lead anywhere. That was the one I sent to Roaring Brook Press. It was just kind of I don't know what what it was doing. It was just sitting on a desk somewhere. And so, I figured, okay, well, four out of five is not bad, and it kind of like gave me the the feeling like I can continue to do this. I've heard something positive. Sometimes all you need to hear is just something positive to know that you're not on the
31:39 totally wrong track. And then almost a year goes by, and suddenly I completely out of the blue I get an actual phone call, and it was from Neil Porter at Roaring Brook Press, who said, "I just got this envelope." He obviously had gotten it ages ago, but it was just sitting on his desk and just got shuffled around, whatever. People are busy. And he's like, "I really like this. Let's Let's meet up. Let's make a book together." And within a a week of that, I had my very first book deal. But, that's the pace it can work at sometimes. Like, sometimes you actually are in the mind of somebody, but you don't know it. I I hear this all the time from editors. They They have a
32:14 manuscript that they kind of love, but it's not the right time to pitch it within their own within their own corporate structure or whatever. And it can just take forever. So, my advice, cuz you have None of this was advice. My advice is just keep busy in the meantime, because that's that is something that I had always done and continue to do. And sometimes the thing you're working on just by keeping busy, that's actually the thing and you don't you don't know it yet. So, you'll finally take a meeting with an editor that you really love. And this is exactly what happened to me with Neil, in fact, is that when I finally met with Neil he didn't actually want to talk about
32:53 the things that I had put in that envelope at all. He liked them, but he didn't want to talk about them. He wanted to know what kind of story I actually wanted to tell, so if I was going to write it myself. And in that year between me sending out the envelope and me meeting with Neil, I had been working on writing for the very first time. So, I was able to pitch him in the moment a story that I had just been working on. And if I hadn't been doing that, I wouldn't have been able to make that pitch and maybe Neil and I wouldn't have worked together and we wouldn't have made 20 plus books over the the next several years together. That was a twofer, so you gave two pieces of
33:28 great advice. One of them was to stay busy and the other one was to also get to know who you're querying or who you're submitting to, which is something that Teresa and I and our guests always talk about because when you're in the beginning of your career, you just want to communicate with someone and like you said, one bit of validation means so much. So, you're casting a wide net, but sometimes you can make a better connection if you actually know what that type of person or publisher is representing because what's a good fit for you right away and then you'll be ready like you said when you actually have that conversation. Yeah, and you know, you said one bit of like
34:07 positive feedback is what you're really looking for, but the other side of that is like you might get negative feedback from somebody that you you shouldn't actually listen to. But, that can be devastating if it's the only thing that you've heard. And so, you can you can very easily set yourself up for failure by putting yourself into communication with the wrong people. And it's not that those are the wrong people for everyone, but they're they're the wrong it's the wrong person for you. And we've we've even at the stage of our career we we do have the experience sometimes of of a manuscript of ours getting into the hands of the person that is just not
34:40 right for. And then once they've put their own little piece of negativity in your mind it's it is really hard even at this stage of my career to let that piece of negativity go and to continue to believe in the thing that you're doing. >> I want to keep talking about communication and going back to something that you said earlier in the interview, which was when it comes to feedback when you're actually in the editing process. What have you learned about revision over time and feedback that you think aspiring creators should really understand before they enter into a professional relationship? >> So I I've really noticed every editor has their own style for how they they
35:16 like to give notes. Just, you know, as an example we brought him up a million times so we'll start with Neil Porter. Neil Porter offers very little in the way of notes on a project. Very very little. And it's become almost like a bit of a cliche with him that we all know it's going to happen that he'll ask what we'd call like the Neil Porter question. So instead of marking up your manuscript with a bunch of red pen, he'll ask you a single devastating question that's open-ended, that doesn't have a solution in mind, but makes you realize like oh the thing I'm working on isn't working yet. It's it's not that it's fundamentally flawed or anything like
35:53 that. It just doesn't have all of the things it needs. The best example I think of that happening in my own career with him was actually when we were working on A Sick Day for Amos. I had presented a draft and and in a lot of ways the draft resembles resembles like what you experience now in the finished book, but it was missing a couple of the scenes at the very beginning of the book. In particular that the scenes of Amos getting ready for his day. So when you open up the book the very first page you see is Amos getting out of bed and putting on his uniform for the day. And then you you turn the page and you see him making breakfast at his kitchen
36:31 table. It takes a few pages before we actually get to the zoo where he can start interacting with anyone other than himself. And the question Neil had asked me, which was his sort of like inscrutable sage on the top of the mountain kind of question was, "What does Amos eat for breakfast?" And at the time I was like, I I don't know what he eats for breakfast. But what he was saying is you don't you're taking for granted that we that we know this character before we've had an opportunity to know this character. So we need to spend just a little bit of time feeling the rhythm of this character's day before he starts having interactions. And so in that moment, now
37:13 he makes himself breakfast and he has this quiet moment where he interacts with not speaking characters or other creatures, but he's interacting with the inanimate objects of his home. And he's very polite with his with these inanimate so he's says please and thank you to his sugar bowl, that sort of thing. And it's not that much writing. It's like it might be 50 words. But by the time you've gotten to page three now, you already have a sense of who this man is. He's got a way of going about his life that makes him unique in some way. So that's an example of the kind of note I like to get because it leads to a constructive solution. And it's non-prescriptive. Maybe that's not quite
37:59 the right word for it. It's non-specific. Like he asked the question, but he didn't also offer the solution. He didn't say, "What does Amos eat for breakfast? I think he has waffles." It actually really wasn't about exactly what he eats for breakfast. The question was was bigger than what is he eating for breakfast. The question was, "Who is this guy?" So I respond really well to criticism m like that. And and I think it's okay for creators to tell editors up front what kind of criticism they respond to. There are people it's it's insane to me, but there are people that really don't mind the look of red pen on their on their work. It gives me a lot of anxiety. It makes
38:42 It makes the work look and feel like homework to me. Uh and if you're the type of person that has anxiety working that way, I think it's okay at the start to tell those people that you're working with like this is not this is not a way that I can work where I'm going to be at my best. I think there's a lot of lot of hesitance with with creative people to have those kind of conversations with the people that they work with. But I've noticed that it's all the artists are often expected to have very thick skin, but the other side of that relationship really doesn't have that same expectation. We don't have that same expectation for them. And I found that
39:25 editors and art directors can can have a lot of the same insecurities about whether or not they're making the right choices as as artists. So, we need to figure out how to do it together so that it's fun in both ways. It is fun for both parties. Going off of what you were speaking about with understanding your character, there are a million ways to make an exercise out of that to grow your manuscript. So, besides the Vonnegut's dead method of 200 words a day and developing characters for our more green creatives, what is another practice that you might know of that could help them mature their craft or really find their voice when it comes to picture books?
40:05 >> I I'm always so hesitant to say like this is a way you can do it because what makes you special is the way that you figure out how to do it like figuring out the act of not knowing how to do a thing and figuring it out on your own is so integral to finding what will make you unique in the first place. So, yeah, you can take like little things from people, and I took from Vonnegut the 200 words thing, but I actually ended up using it in a very different way. He did 200 words that were each distinct sections, completely set apart from the next, and mine is not like that. Mine is a continuous flow of prose. But, man, yeah, what can what can you do? I I
40:41 often think of the the things that Aaron does for me. Aaron is my first editor on everything. So, before anybody gets to read anything, it's it's always Aaron. And I've always written and rewritten and this applies to art, too. So, I've made and remade any number of times in Aaron's presence before any editor or director gets to look at it and have a say at all. And she is always pointing out to me that I'm moving too fast. And the reason I'm moving too fast, at least this is from her point of view, the reason I move too fast is because I already know things about my character that others don't know yet. And so, I need to slow down, and I need
41:24 to let the internal life of the character be external every now and then. In some way. That can be in a variety different ways, whether through narration or through that character's interaction with somebody, how they, you know, even tiny things. What are they What are they doing with their hands as they're speaking? Because the character is always going to be more fully formed in your mind than it is for anybody else initially. What are their main traits? Are they Are they anxious and nervous at their core, or do they have like a indomitable spirit at their core? And it's not that you need to say all of those things, but you need to hint at those things as you're going, so
42:02 that people can recognize characteristics that you're already aware of. Could you tell us more about your upcoming titles that we should be on the lookout for. Typically, Erin and I we like to have about three different projects going at the same time. So, one and a half projects between us. But right now, we're in the kind of insane reality of having 10 different things at at various stages. So, the most important thing right now is is my novel, which will be out April 7th. So, that's called A Potion of Powder, a Little Bit of Magic, or Like Lightning in an Umbrella Storm, a Story Out of Order. So, it's a very long title. And that book has dominated
42:42 my life now for almost the last 5 years, definitely the last three. So, it's really almost surreal to me that it's actually going to be a book on bookshelves, finally. Other than that, I'm working on a picture book that I'm really excited about about bird watching. It's sort of a poetic exploration of uh what it means to to watch a bird. It's called Birdwhistle. Birdwhistle is a a term made by created by Ralph Waldo Emerson that describes the amount of time that a bird allows you to watch it. So, I'm very excited about that. It's I I haven't actually worked on a picture book for a few years, so I'm excited about it. And then the other thing that's really
43:19 active in the studio right now is that Erin and I are working on a a fourth Amos McGee book called A School Day for Amos McGee. I'll just tell you a little bit about it super briefly, which is that um Erin has a love for a certain type of picture book that I I I actually forget the term that she uses for it. But it's essentially like books that help Oh, first experience books. That's what what I wanted to say. So, books that help a child with an experience that they're going through for the first time, you know, going to the doctor, going to school, like these these kinds of things. And Amos seems like such a has always seemed like such a great
43:53 opportunity as a character to work through first experiences. I mean, Sick Day Sick Day for Amos McGee actually is sort of a first experience type of book for for many kids. What is it like to get sick and be home? And then later on the snow day for Amos McGee, which came out last fall, was kind of like first experience of of a joyful moment. But School Day is going to be the first real swing at at a bonafide first experience book. And so Amos will be going to school, and and I won't go into all the details for how Amos gets to school, but I I'm I'm really I'm as pleased with this story as I've been with anything in a long time. It's just so much fun to spend time with Amos,
44:38 especially if you've been working for 3 to 5 years on an interminable novel, and you can come back to the the kind and gentle world of Amos McGee. There's just something really really comforting to me about that. >> Well, we are looking forward to all of your projects, and we will share links as much as we can with our audience. But thank you so much for being here, and thank you for sharing all of your insights with our storytellers. Thank you. Yeah, this was great. I really enjoyed this. >> [music] [music] [music] >> If you're showing up, but not seeing book sales, struggling to grow your socials, unsure how to get media
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