...I write my books on what I call "The Pizza Model." Fifty years ago, pizza was a strange exotic food, the subject of ethnic slurs. Now, not only does it have coast-to-coast acceptance, but American chefs and eaters have made it their own: in Italy you would be hard put to find a Cajun-blackened-chicken pizza topped with mango salsa on a whole- ( Read more... )

I have been attempting definitions, but I am never really comfortable when writing about "fantasy". The label is so limiting. It seems to me that every work of art is a fantasy, every book or play, painting or piece of music, everything that is made, by craft and talent, out of somebody's imagination. We have all dreamed, and recorded our dreams as ( Read more... )

Despite his faults, Taran, hero and Assistant Pig-Keeper in The High King, somehow manages to find enough courage and wisdom to go through the most difficult and perilous ordeals. In an equally difficult and perilous undertaking, whether his author will manage to do the same is open to serious question. For a man who has loved the English language ( Read more... )

The people in books told me things that the real people in my life either wouldn't admit or didn't realize I needed to know in the first place. And the more I read, the more I thought about writing my own stories, with my own kinds of truth in them. By the time I was nine, I knew I wanted to write. But I didn't tell anyone, because it was too wild ( Read more... )

Source

I've several times spoken of my interest in how people felt and thought as being greater than in what they actually did; I suppose one of the most fundamental groupings of novelists is into two classes: those who primarily want to know what is done, and those whose interest is largely in why. For better or worse I belong to the second group. I was ( Read more... )

Not long ago a kid in a group I was speaking to raised his hand and said, "Where do you get all that stuff?"
I looked out into a library full of cross-legged floor-sitters, their eyes wide, mouths agape, all wondering the same thing, their classmate having put his finger on their second most pressing question - the first being, of course, "How much ( Read more... )

This means that I have impressed my daughters by having been awarded the Newbery Medal, and I impressed my son even more by defending the fact that I had won the Newbery Medal from the hilarious attacks of Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report, so the Newbery Medal made me cool to my children. This is as good as it gets.
You are almost never cool ( Read more... )

Read Mary Poppins, and you get a good glimpse of upper-middle-class family life in England a quarter of a century ago, a family that had basis in fact. Besides Mary there were Cook and Robertson Ay, and Ellen to lay the table. The outside of the Banks' house needed paint. Would such a household exist in a middle-class neighborhood in a Shaker ( Read more... )

...I write for the child I was and the child I still am. Like countless other lucky adults, I have much in common with children. We daydream, wonder, exaggerate, ask "what if?"--and what we imagine sometimes is more true than what is. We like to play with squishy things--mud, clay, dough, words--and we make stuff out of them. We like kids, animals ( Read more... )