I write in longhand on yellow legal pads.
I just wrote about childhood as I had known it.
When I was in the first grade I was afraid of the teacher and had a miserable time in the reading circle, a difficulty that was overcome by the loving patience of my second grade teacher. Even though I could read, I refused to do so.
In my grammar school years back in the 1920s I used my ten-cents-a-week allowance for Saturday matinees of Douglas Fairbanks movies. All that swashbuckling and leaping about in the midst of the sails of ships!
I was a very observant child. The boys in my books are based on boys in my neighborhood growing up.
Otis was inspired by a boy who sat across the aisle from me in sixth grade. He was a lively person. My best friend appears in assorted books in various disguises.
With twins, reading aloud to them was the only chance I could get to sit down. I read them picture books until they were reading on their own.
My mother would read aloud to my father and me in the evening. She read mainly travel books.
Today I discovered two kinds of people who go to high school: those who wear new clothes to show off on the first day, and those who wear their oldest clothes to show they think school is unimportant.
I had a very wise mother. She always kept books that were my grade level in our house.
I enjoy writing for third and fourth graders most of all.
I feel sometimes that in children’s books there are more and more grim problems, but I don’t know that I want to burden third- and fourth-graders with them.
I was an only child; I didn’t have a sister, or sisters.
I have lovely memories of Los Angeles in the 1930s. I came down to live with my mother’s cousin and they invited me to come and go to junior college for a year.
He was dressed as if everything he wore had come from different stores or from a rummage sale, except that the crease in his trousers was sharp and his shoes were shined.
We didn’t have television in those days, and many people didn’t even have radios. My mother would read aloud to my father and me in the evening.
I had a bad time in school in the first grade. Because I had been a rather lonely child on a farm, but I was free and wild and to be shut up in a classroom – there were 40 children on those days in the classroom, and it was quite a shock.
I don’t ever go on the Internet. I don’t even know how it works.
The humiliation that Jane had felt turned to something else – grief perhaps, or regret. Regret that she had not known how to act with a boy, regret that she had not been wiser.
Writers are good at plucking out what they need here and there.