"A biography for young people calls for the demanding art of distillation, the art of storytelling, and your responsibility is to stick as closely as possible to the documented record."
"Fictionalizing is no longer a controversial subject: you simply don't do it. That's been a total change since I first started writing. My first book Teenagers Who Made History, which was published in 1961, is full of invented dialogue. That was the standard of the time, and, in fact it was fun to write, but I'm glad the standard has changed. I think that today's books, in which every quote, every conversation, is taken from a memoir, an autobiography, an interview, or what-have-you, are much more convincing."
"The historian strives for objectivity, does the best he or she can, but the result inevitably reflects the life experience and the values of the person writing the book."
"If you're doing a good job as author, then you get the reader to engage in whatever speculation might be called for. And it's much more meaningful for the reader, if he or she comes up with the questions."
"With the audience I write for, I want to make sure that the reader is eagerly turning every page. I want each of my books to be an absorbing reading experience, an authentic piece of literature."
"If I thought that I was writing books just so that kids could write classroom reports, I'd quit."
"I want to write books that a ten-year-old or a teenager or maybe their grandmother will pick up and sit up all night reading, and then can't wait until they go on to a longer book about the same subject."
"Why do kids read biographies? Why does anyone read them? I think it's because we're all trying to learn how to live our lives."
"Writing history and biography for kids calls for special skills that can only be acquired through practice and that are different from those required for an adult audience."
"A biography for young readers, if it's successful, is a feat of imaginative storytelling that is informed by the historical record."
"A children's biography doesn't have to be comprehensive, and it doesn't have to be definitive. It does have to be accurate, to the extent that's possible. And most of all, it has to be a piece of literature, a compelling read. I want the reader to discover the joy of reading."
"Photographs can help form ideas about the subject or provide impressions of what it is I think I'm doing. These come from a variety of sources but the images always influence what I'm writing. Sometimes I'm even writing with the images in mind."
School of Library and Information Studies
TEXAS WOMAN'S UNIVERSITY