Q1. What do you think is the biggest difference between creating children's books and other types of work? What drives your passion for creating children's books? How do different creative contents and directions impact your work and life differently?
I think creating children's books offers the kind of parameters and challenges I like best of any kind of work. Because the work must be understood by very young readers, the assignment is to be as clear and engaging as possible with what you are trying to communicate. Interestingly, because the work has to be so clear and simple, it is often ripe for abstraction and subtlety and atmosphere that is neither explicitly in the text or the pictures, but found in the result of combining the two things. When they are working well, the books are at once impactful and mysterious, and very fun to make.
It is hard to know exactly which age group will be interacting with the books when they are done, but I have found that a rough idea of the intended audience's age changes my work quite a lot. I have done picture books that are for a broad range of ages, but I've also made slightly longer books for slightly older children, and everything about the book changes when I think the audience will be older. The trim size, the page count, the palette, the number of words and kinds of words per page, the tone in the writing. I have just finished a set of short board books, for especially young children, probably pre-verbal, and again it informed everything about how they were made. It has made me wonder if I would know how to make anything at all if I didn't have some general idea of the audience's age in mind before I started.
Q2. How do you create picture books that are so popular among children? What characteristics do you think successful children's picture books possess? What are the different focuses in creating picture books for different age groups?
I think, in a very general way, successful children's books communicate the enthusiasm of their creators. Your main job as a creator is to keep yourself interested. There are a lot of very successful children's books that I don't especially understand or like, and a lot of books that I love and admire, but I think the common denominator is always that you can feel that the person who made the book was interested, themselves, in the book they were making. Children are very sensitive and responsive to that, I think they are more interested in that than the stylistic or designed aspects of a book, no matter how accomplished those might be. If you, as the adult, are engaged, the children will be engaged. If you are bored, they will be bored.
As much as I've said that my work seems to depend on what age group I think might be exposed to the book, I've also been encouraged to see that a good idea seems to overcome those barriers more often than not once it is out in the world. I've seen good picture books engage infants, college students and adults, not because they hold secret, separate things for each age, but again, I think because everyone generally responds to how engaged and interested the creator of the book was, how strong the book's general energy is, for lack of a better term. That being said, there are lots of established things you can do to signal who you think the book is primarily for. What I have found lately is that the younger the intended audience, the less their need for a narrative. A very young child isn't following a story for 20 or 40 pages, what they need most is a reason to simply turn the page. That's a much different starting point than an adult who can not only keep a longer story in their mind and respond to it, but also has maybe lost the kind of focus very young children have to squeeze as much as possible out of a much quieter idea. It does not seem like very young children are as interested in character-driven ideas as they are in broader mechanics of visual, sequential storytelling. For older readers, sometimes the character in the book, who they are and how they do things, is the only thing that matters - it drives the writing and the audience's eventual interest. But for very young readers, maybe it works more like instrumental music - some kind of hook or refrain or rhythm is needed, but that is all that is needed.
Q3. What qualities do you think a good work should have? How do you evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the same work?
What I like about picture books is that they are relatively small and short. An idea does not have to be so durable that it could outlast the limited amount of pages that make them up. What this can mean, also, is that qualities in work that seem to bring a book down or make it worse, in another context, used differently, seem strong and make the book better. When you are making a book, it's very hard to know if an idea will work before you execute it across a number of pages, or even figure the whole book out. An idea that seems bulletproof in your mind can fall apart completely when you finally lay it out, and an idea that seemed small and empty can open up and be so exciting as soon as you give it a few pages to wander around. In the same way, judging a book is a very local exercise, considering only what is between the front and back cover and nothing else about how the same decisions or qualities would or wouldn't work in other contexts. As general as it is, I do think that a very simple enthusiasm on the part of the author for the form and its possibilities, and usually some excitement for the fact that it is a series of pages in sequence, rather than individual pages, is common to good book work, but past that, almost anything can fail or succeed.
Q4. What art fields and trends do you usually pay attention to? Where do you draw your biggest inspirations from? Do you think an excellent illustrator should maintain a consistent style? How do you develop your own uniqueness?
I pay attention to all kinds of fields, but from an increasingly far distance, in terms of what I think I could steal or apply to my own work. It feels more like collecting now, rather than absorbing. Painting, graphic and industrial design, sculpture, architecture, furniture design, music - I'm so interested in how these things can find common ground and philosophy and talk to each other and how, when you find a chair you like, if you dig down on who made it, you usually agree with them on all sorts of other points.
Style and its consistency are very mysterious. An illustrator's style seems to be a combination of the way that illustrator wants things to look and the way they can't help but make them look. In most creative work, I suspect, there is a certain lack of control the creator has to reckon with - things about the material at hand that are immovable and things they don't understand about themselves but want to spend time investigating or considering. Why do I draw things that way, why do I like that kind of palette, that kind of typeface, why do I write this way or why do my stories seem to be preoccupied with this subject? You can cover some distance in answering these kinds of questions, but you come pretty quickly to the end of your real knowledge, and get into guesswork. I think rather than seeing it as your duty to be stylistically consistent, you should make it a priority to get better and better at listening to the thing inside you that says either "left" or "right" to a given fork in the road when you are making something. Sometimes those forks are very small, and the "left" or "right" is very quiet, so you can pass a number of them in the dark without knowing it, and before you know it you are in territory you don't recognize or enjoy. Some of my favorite artists are wildly unpredictable in what they will choose to work on or consider, but the consistent thing in their work is you can tell they were true to that voice, and very attuned to it once they have chosen a thing to work on.
My own style seems to result from stubbornness as much as anything else. There is a long and ever-growing list of things I don't want to do, and the work that comes out is a result of not doing any of them, while still badly wanting to make things. I like solving problems, and myself as a tool, with its own quirks and limitations, is a problem to solve. How do you get across a parking lot with a shopping cart that seems to veer off to the left because one wheel is bent? I saw a quote once that said that writing a novel has a lot in common with carpentry, and I like that a lot. A lot of carpentry is about finding graceful ways to hide the joints and awkward seams that are necessary for the thing to hold any amount of weight, and that is a lot of the work for me, too. It's fun to find ways to hide everything you don't like about how you would make something, until everything visible is somewhat agreeable to you. You could argue both sides of whether it is good to nurture and encourage one's own eccentricities and conspicuous faults, whether those things are the result of injury or inattention, and maybe the better move would be to work on healing them instead of allowing them to define your output, but regardless, that is, I think, where your "style" comes from.
Q5. What is your opinion on AI creation? What attitude do you have towards the impacts that AI has already or might have in the future?
Earlier I said that one of the main differences between a good and bad book is in the creator's actual interest in making it - basically how much fun they were having. AI might look impressive, but I have yet to see anything produced by it that gave you the feeling that it was fun to make. I'm disappointed that, so far, one of the main things people seem to wonder is if it will be able to do the part of the work that is the most enjoyable and rewarding - the storytelling itself. I don't doubt that it will, just as a matter of odds, come up with some interesting and thought provoking story work when prompted. But, as I mentioned, creative work that is worth anything usually comes out of the process of working around a creator's insecurity and the ways they find to paper over what it is they don't like about what they themselves produce. There is a sense of a battle, through your shortcomings and limitations, and the goal of the battle is just to communicate to other people, to get something, anything, across. The desperation to do that is felt, and hopefully appreciated by the audience, and when it is done well it seems to prove something deep underneath all of us that links us together and helps us to keep going. Since AI is not starting there, from an emotional need to communicate, and has no insecurity about what it can and can't do, the tension, I think, will be missing, and we will feel its absence, and maybe the market will reflect this.
What worries me is that AI has arrived at a time of mass consolidation, when the people in charge of companies that make things, even companies that make stories, are increasingly people who don't deal in aesthetics or emotional connection - they are, necessarily, not romantics. They are mainly people who concern themselves with the cost of things, and AI, and the things it can be prompted to make, are free. If their product checks the predetermined boxes or generally looks the part of things that have come before, those people are happy with it, and the argument that something abstract and profound is missing will not be enough to convince them to pay other people to make what they can now get a facsimile of for free. I'm not as concerned with AI taking over the specific business of storytelling in books etc. I think that will show its limits fairly quickly if it is attempted. But I am sad and worried about what it will do to our general visual landscape - the design and function of things that surround us and make up our days - those things that always benefited from the care and consideration of personalities and people who were also, in a very real way, concerned with communication and beauty. Hopefully what we have found is a great tool, and only a tool, but it is still too early to tell what else will get swept up in it for some peoples' lack of ability to tell the difference between good and bad work.
