Just Because A Man Glances Up At

I Think That Books For Young People Should Have Serious And Important Themes, They Shouldn't Be Trivial. So The Books I Write, They Would Be The Kind Of Stories You Would Write In An Adult Novel Only They Just Happen To Feature A Child At The Center Of Them.

I Like Reading Books About Kids Where There Weren't Really Many Adults, Where They Didn't Need An Adult To Come And Solve The Problems For Them. They Could Use Their Own Ingenuity, Use Their Own Talents To Solve Whatever The Issue Was. And I Like That Still. I Think That Children Want To Read About Heroic Children. They Don't Want To Read About Children That Have To Be Saved All The Time.

... Nine-year-old Boys Usually Turn Ten At Some Point. It's The Nineteen-year-olds Who Have Difficulty Turning Twenty.

I Was A Very Quiet Child, Quite Introverted, Really. Independent, Yes; I Didn't Need A Lot Of Supervision. Less So Than I Did When I Got Older, Maybe. But I Was A Bookish Child, Not Surprisingly. I Could Sit Quite Happily In A Corner For Hours And Entertain Myself With Books.

With The Adult Ones, I Feel I Need To Get As Deep Inside The Psychology Of A Character As I Can, And That Needs To Be First-person. In The Children's Books, I Feel I Need Some Distance. I Don't Want To Be The Nine-year-old At The Center Of The Story. I Need To Have Some Type Of Narrative Voice.