This is how a book starts being written.
One thing,
one simple, elegant, lovely thing,
that is personal to the writer,
that may mean nothing to another person, seeing the same thing, having the same experience,
but means the world to the writer.

All books for children need an emotional core. In writing nonfiction for middle-graders, I look for what wordlessly touches me. For ONE THOUSAND YEARS DEAD, about the mummies of southern Peru, it was the balls of yarn, still vibrantly red and yellow, found in the tomb of a thousand-year-old mummy, that was the arrow connecting me to the rest of the story. My grandmother's balls of yarn, in her knitting basket, looked just the same. I had something real, in my life, to both keep me grounded and let me fly back through the years and see/visualize my subject's life.

Zena Sutherland, internationally recognized expert on children's literature, said that stories are read and loved by adults and children because 'they satisfy, deeply satisfy, a basic emotional need what we as human beings have, and, in fact, can't escape.' Why would we want to? It's called life, and it is the raw material for our work.