Rosemary Wells » Parents and Educators

Parents and Educators

Digging into the Past for Stories
What is the difference in the creation process between writing for very young children and writing for young adults? I don’t really usually think about the difference. They are different. I think it’s sort of like the difference between playing tennis and maybe playing football. They are different arts and they come from different parts of the brain. I’m sure of this even though I don’t have any studies to back this up.

Writing for very young children comes out of my childhood and my emotional experience, and I think that—whatever that might have been—and I think that that’s why all of my books for young children have tremendous emotional content. That’s what they’re all about—kindergarten as a petri dish.

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But it all comes from the past. Writing for young adults, I tend to write about history because I love history. I think the reason I love history so much is that it was so important to my father, and our dinner table conversations, when I was young, usually revolved around the current day politics, world situations, and history. And history as he read it and told it to me, and I have loved it ever since.

When I read, I read mostly in history. I think I’ve read probably 20 books on Abraham Lincoln as well as about 75 on the Civil War. We have a very, very incomplete bibliography in both Red Moon at Sharpsburg and Lincoln and His Boys, but I have read extensively and never tire of it. And in this way, you get the detail … the telling detail that makes history come alive for your reader. It’s a very different cerebral process.

One is almost entirely emotional and the other is very scholarly. And I am not formally a scholar myself or a professor, nor have I studied in college any significant history, but I love it nonetheless and I have learned it and learned quite a bit more about the Civil War than I thought I would ever know and certainly more about Abraham Lincoln.