A Quote by Paul O. Zelinsky

In its jolly mission to expose the dark underbelly of the children’s book world, Wild Things! turns up stories I’ve been hearing noised about for ages, but with a lot more detail and authenticity. The stories may not be quite as sordid as my own imagination had conjured up—although a few of them are—because there’s no denying that this field is full of mostly nice people!—but it’s all fun and a great read for anyone interested in both children’s books and the collection of people who make them.
Making fiction for children, making books for children, isn't something you do for money. It's something you do because what children read and learn and see and take in changes them and forms them, and they make the future. They make the world we're going to wind up in, the world that will be here when we're gone. Which sounds preachy (and is more than you need for a quotebyte) but it's true. I want to tell kids important things, and I want them to love stories and love reading and love finding things out. I want them to be brave and wise. So I write for them.
I want to see children curled up with books, finding an awareness of themselves as they discover other people's thoughts. I want them to make the connection that books are people's stories, that writing is talking on paper, and I want them to write their own stories. I'd like my books to provide that connection for them.
I think my style changes somewhat. The themes I am interested in exploring are mostly the same, but I tackle them differently. My Younguncle books are at the surface comic adventures of the eccentric title character but they are also serious beneath the fun and frolic. And I use Big Words, like "ambrosial," which bothers some children's book reviewers. The children's short stories you mention are mostly quite serious.
It's great hearing stories of my mum growing up in Brooklyn, then moving to Florida, having me and growing up with this eccentric, fun family. Although I don't eat a lot of Italian things, because I'm vegan. I was raised on meat and cheese, so I've had enough for anyone's normal life span.
I hope that when children read my stories that they evoke images for children. I four stories can help children use their own imaginations and lead them to act the stories out or to embark on related research, they will learn more and learn to love reading more.
I believe that if a child has a feel for writing and wants to write, there is an audience. Children should just dive in and go at it. I would encourage children to write about themselves and things that are happening to them. It is a lot easier and they know the subject better if they use something out of their everyday lives as an inspiration. Read stories, listen to stories, to develop an understanding of what stories are all about.
Kids not only need to read a lot but they need lots of books they can read right at their fingertips.They also need access to books that entice them, attract them to reading. Schools...can make it easy and unrisky for children to take books home for the evening or weekend by worrying less about losing books to children and more about losing children to illiteracy.
Writing my own stories had always been one of my dreams, but I didn't start until I was 29. I was working in a book warehouse and was assigned to the third floor where all the children's books were. For four and a half years, I spent all day, every day around children's books, and it wasn't long before I fell in love with them.
Blogging has mostly been an opportunity to react more immediately to experiences to try out ideas that I may end up using in the print media or in some other place. When I write books, it's a way for me to bring readers into the experience of writing the book, all through the process of writing the books that I write. I talk about what I'm up to in the blog. I let people know what I am doing. To me, it's just part of putting my professional life up in a way that people who are interested in it can access; and learning things from them as well.
I'm inspired by the people I meet in my travels--hearing their stories, seeing the hardships they overcome, their fundamental optimism and decency. I'm inspired by the love people have for their children. And I'm inspired by my own children, how full they make my heart. They make me want to work to make the world a little bit better. And they make me want to be a better man.
It is through hearing stories about wicked stepmothers, lost children, good but misguided kings, wolves that suckle twin boys, youngest sons who receive no inheritance but must make their own way in the world, and eldest sons who waste their inheritance on riotous living and go into exile to live with the swine, that children learn or mislearn both what a child and what a parent is, what the cast of characters may be in the drama into which they have been born and what the ways of the world are.
I'm always loath to make generalizations about what is for children and what isn't. Certainly children's literature as a genre has some restrictions, so certain things will never pop up in a Snicket book. But I didn't know anything about writing for children when I started - this is the theme of naïveté creeping up on us once more - and I sort of still don't, and I'm happy that adults are reading them as well as children.
Often you hear stories about never working with children. I disagree because children still have that residual magical thinking. They haven't had their imagination knocked out of them by turning into adults and life experiences.
To be able to make up stories has been a great gift to me from my ancestors and from the storytellers who were so numerous at Laguna Pueblo when I was growing up. I learned to read as soon as I could because I wanted stories without having to depend on adults to tell or read stories to me.
My father always says, ‘Never trust anyone who has a TV bigger than their bookshelf.’ So I make sure I read. Back at home, I just put up a massive bookcase and asked everyone I know and love to help me fill it with their favorite books. It’s been quite nice because I’ve learned a lot about my friends and family from what they’ve been giving me. A book says a lot about a person.
We have an obligation to read aloud to our children. To read them things they enjoy. To read to them stories we are already tired of. To do the voices, to make it interesting, and not to stop reading to them just because they learn to read to themselves. Use reading-aloud time as bonding time, as time when no phones are being checked, when the distractions of the world are put aside.
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