A good book written for children can be read by adults.
A lot of things have happened because of the book. It really did change my life. I've met a lot of people, I've gone places, getting invited here and there, and it's provided me with a lot of flexibility in my life because it brings in money and gives me a certain amount of freedom.
And when I'm writing, I write a lot anyway. I might write pages and pages of conversation between characters that don't necessarily end up in the book, or in the story I'm working on, because they're simply my way of getting to know the characters.
As you get older you find that things start to connect to other things, and when you reach my age nothing you learn doesn't connect to twenty other things.
But I find the best things I do, I do when I'm trying to avoid doing something else I'm supposed to be doing. You know, you're working on something. You get bugged, or you lose your enthusiasm or something. So you turn to something else with an absolute vengeance.
But it seems to me, I think you have to be prepared for the idea that something will be generated that may not be exactly what you anticipated.
But that's fine because the whole idea of giving someone a piece of time to pursue something, is that that pursuit might lead to something unanticipated. And that's great.
For some reason, an extraordinary concentration of children's book writers and illustrators live in the Connecticut Valley, where I live, so I see a lot. People send me stuff, but I'm not what you would call a student of children's literature, no.
I can't write unless I have other things out of my head. I can't just switch gears. I know there are people who can, but I can't.
I did a lot of research for the other book, but whenever I sat down to write I kept going back to the fictional story. But that's where a lot of the ideas came from, the book I'd originally intended to write, because that's what I'd been thinking about.
I don't think you try to write a style or model it on something. There's no way you should do that. You have to start doing it just as you feel it, and see it, and hear it.
I finished one, which is at the publisher, and it should be out at the end of the year. Another will be in to the publisher in the next few months. And I have another chapter book I'm working on. I keep busy now.
I had my own architectural practice for many, many years.
I received a grant from The Ford Foundation to write a book for kids about urban perception, or how people experience cities, but I kept putting off writing it. Instead I started to write what became The Phantom Tollbooth.
I remember when I was a kid in school and teachers would explain things to me about what I read, and I'd think, Where did they get that? I didn't read that in there. Later you look at it and think, That's kind of an interesting idea.
I run out of juice and I have to refuel for the rest of the day. That refueling can be the most mundane sort of thing, sitting in front of the television set or taking a walk. Vegetating, really.
I started creating characters that Jules wouldn't know how to draw. That's how I came up with The Triple Demons of Compromise.
I think kids slowly begin to realize that what they're learning relates to other things they know. Then learning starts to get more and more exciting.
I think really good books can be read by anybody.
I used to like to write and mess around when I was in elementary school and in high school, but I never took it too seriously.
I was a babe in the woods. I didn't know anything about childrens' books. Or rules for writing them. Or how they sold. Or what the situation was in the childrens' book world.
I wasn't involved with the first film. I don't have the rights, so I don't have any leverage. They do seem interested in me being involved in the proposed project, and I hope that's the case.
I went to architectural school, and then went over to England for a year.
I write best in the morning, and I can only write for about half a day, that's about it.
I've always received a lot of mail. I used to get it mostly from the publisher, but now there's a web site where someone has posted my address, so I get a lot of mail from that, too.
If you've ever read a book that you don't like a hundred times, you know what a chore it is. So it's the good ones you really savor.
In fact, it seems to touch very much a set of universal ideas and circumstances for people, especially kids when they're about that age. It feels very good.
It was really written as most, I think, books are by writers - for themselves. There was something that just had to be written, in a way that it had to be written. If you know what I mean.
It's a tough world, the movie world. I try to keep it out of my head. If it happens it will happen. Otherwise you're waiting for sugarplums dancing in the air.
It's one of the reasons that kids go with any book, because they can move through it in a way that's both acceptable and pleasurable for them. Not a conscious thing, I don't think.
It's the literary equivalent of drawing outside of the lines, thinking outside of the box: follow an idea wherever it goes, play with it. I really do think that's important. We tend to be so directive of the way children think.
My father was an architect. My brother was an architect. From day one, my toys would be the samples my father brought home from the office: wood samples, stone samples. That's what I messed around with. I loved the idea of making things.
My influences were my father, who loved to play with words, and the Marx Brothers.
Once I got the idea and got plugged into it, I wrote it very quickly.
One of the problems you have when you read with kids is that once they like something they want you to read it a hundred times.
People always ask about my influences, and they cite a bunch of people I've never heard of.
Sometimes I have a problem labeling a children's book as if it were some lesser form.
The book has grown at a steady pace, year by year, which is very nice. There aren't too many books around for forty years in print.
The Harry Potter series uses the same style of art from book to book and edition to edition.
The number of people that have told me it's affected their lives... sometimes I'm in absolute awe of that.
The only other thing which I think is important is: Don't write a book or start a book with the expectation of communicating a message in a very important way.
There are good books and there are bad books, period, that's the distinction.
There were a lot of scenes that I pieced together afterwards. And there was no outline, so I didn't know where I was going with it.
There's a lot in the book that I didn't know was there. I just wrote it from my own experiences, how I remembered things used to feel. I'd get an idea and run with it, play around with it.
There's a whole agenda there, and once you start with that you're in big trouble because then it's a product, not a story; it's less than what it should be.
When I went to school I couldn't conceive of anything else I wanted to do.
When I wrote the book I really didn't write it with any sense of mission. I wrote it for my own enjoyment.
When you write a book like this, any book really, you have no idea whether it's going to resonate, whether it's going to mean anything at all to anyone else.
When you're very young and you learn something - a fact, a piece of information, whatever - it doesn't connect to anything.
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