People create in different ways, so that has opened me up to different processes and experimenting. I also learn a lot about everybody else's process. Every now and then, I point out the potholes, or nudge them to come together, which is just a joy. With this series, I get to play with ideas that I would never have myself. I've got a sense of the rhythm and the form.
MW: I've been lucky enough to have made enough of these types of books that while I don't necessarily know what works, I know what doesn't work. LK: Did I tell you I was voted most neurotic in high school? Instead of having to tap my neuroses, wouldn't it be interesting to tap theirs? And with this new series I thought, I have all these friends who are neurotic. The premise of the original Elephant & Piggie series, as we were getting started, was that they were a distillation of whatever neuroses I was going through at the moment, whatever questions I hadn't figured out. I hadn't seen it, but being so good at what he does, Mo noticed it right away. I remember him saying once, "No, you need a beat between this page and this page," and it was like, oh yeah, of course.
Working with him was like taking a master class in comic timing, because he could pinpoint right away if a section wasn't working. He's so great with comic timing, as you know. He'd review what I had done up to a certain point. We did a couple of Skype sessions along with Tracey Keevan, his editor. I had met him a number of times, and I knew from his books how funny he was, of course, but it was really neat to be able to have his feedback.
It was tricky to try to come up with an entertaining story with far fewer and simpler words. I didn't include any of those sorts of things here. My picture books have a lot of little jokes and asides that aren't necessarily part of the main story. I had to keep the text pretty spare compared to what I would typically do in a picture book. LK: For one thing, using much simpler words, and fewer words. RS: What did you discover you had to do differently from a picture book? RS: Laurie, is this your first early reader? One of the first two books in the series, Laurie Keller's We Are Growing!, won the 2017 Geisel Award as the most distinguished book for beginning readers published in 2016. While - sob! - the beloved Elephant and Piggie went into retirement with last year's The Thank You Book, it seems that they are going to devote their golden years to reading, and thus Elephant & Piggie Like Reading! helmed by Mo Willems. Talks with Roger is a sponsored supplement to our free monthly e-newsletter, Notes from the Horn Book.
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