On writing for children

The genre of children’s picture books remains the field I love most in all of literature — and, as any writer for this age group will tell you, it looks easy, but is actually . . . well, kind of impossible.

Maybe  the first step is to lighten one’s load of all that being a grown up involves.  To remember how the world looks and feels to a child.

What better way than to laugh over some good cartoons?  Cartoonists are brilliant at accessing the funny bone, and the artifice-slicing, honest viewpoint.

Here is a cartoon I often come back to, for delight and inspiration.  It’s by a wonderful cartoonist, Tom Toro.

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