I felt like I was cheating on my novel, but I didn’t care. The more I read, the more I fell in love. I was searching for a sense of how stories were built, and I knew that picture books had patterns I could see clearly, structures I would recognize. There were plenty in our house, but I knew those too well to read them objectively (and my kids kept interrupting), so I went to the library and gathered stacks of new ones, old ones, favorite classics and unfamiliar texts.
While wrestling with the plot of my second novel, SOME OF THE PARTS, I turned to picture books for help. However, these complications presented certain problems for me once I began writing my own novels. Novels were other worlds in which I could become fully immersed for long stretches of time, emerging only to jot down particularly beautiful sentences in my journal. I loved long descriptive passages, the rising tension and angst, the unexpected twists and turns of complicated plots, and all the ways that casts of characters could clash, conflict, and come together. Novels were my first love-as a children’s literature graduate student, as an editor, as a bookseller, and then as a writer.
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