So Why Do You Write for Kids?

The author at one and a half–in Iowa, just like Bill Bryson

People ask this a lot, and sometimes it’s hard to find a better answer than, “Um….because I like to.” The truth is that kid’s book are my favorite kind of literature–direct, unpretentious, powerful, concise, beautiful, varied, exciting, and fascinating. Honestly, I can’t figure out why all these authors write books for boring adults. But I am too polite to say this (most of the time).

Sometimes somebody else says it better. Bill Bryson, for one. This is how he answered an interview question inquiring why he wrote a memoir of Iowa childhood. “All childhoods are really very, very interesting and also very, very funny. And I think it’s a strange thing that we have this intensely felt period of our lives, you know, twenty years or so of really really strongly felt experiences, and then we get to be grownup and we forget all about it. It seems to me that childhood is actually the most important part of your life, the part where, really, you have all your strongest feelings and all of your most vivid experiences, and I wanted to write about that.”