The editorial relationship is so important.
I don't know where I would be today without Dick Jackson who was my first and most significant
editor.
He took me from Iggy's House and Margaret and Then Again, Maybe I Won't all the way
through Here's to You, Rachel Robinson.
I think that was the last book we did together.
So a lot of books, forever, many of my favorites of my own books.
He taught me by asking me questions about my characters.
He taught me to dig deeper and deeper and apparently he works different with every writer
he's ever worked with, but for me, it was always questions and his questions unleashed
whole new places to go.
He was just wonderful.
There's no way I could ever thank him.
I've worked with many other editors since then and each one works in a different way.
With Summer Sisters, I have Carol Barren to thank for making that book work or making
that book happen — that's a book that almost killed me.
That was the most painful book I ever wrote — three years and 20 something drafts, literally.
That was the book that made me say, "I will never, ever do this again," and I really meant
it.
I was 60 when that book came out and I thought, "It's time to stop."
Now it's 10 years later and I'm really going strong, so I'm glad for that, but editors
are very important to the process.
My process is a strange one and the way that I explain it to kids…
well maybe it's not so strange.
Maybe I just think it's strange.
The first draft for me is pure torture — there's no question about that.
I had so much inside me.
I had so much creative energy and I needed to let it out so badly that the first few
books I think just poured out, but that was then.
For many, many, many, many years now, I have found first drafts to be torture, to getting
something out.
Once I have a first draft out, then I like it.
I like the rewriting.
I'm a reviser more then a first draft writer.
The best always comes out when I have pencil in my hand and I'm working on the first draft
and it just, good things will start to happen, second, third, fourth, fifth.
I tell it to kids this way, that for me a first draft is getting the pieces to a jigsaw
puzzle, is having that big piece of wood or cardboard and cutting out all these little
pieces and mixing them all up.
The second draft is trying to put them together and then I have to sand them down and make
them smooth.
Then I paint them wonderful colors and then I have to polish the whole puzzle so it looks
really pretty and finished.
I go through at least five drafts.
It's a little harder to keep track of now that I work on a computer.
When it was a typewriter — yes, I did write on typewriters.
Some people don't even know that.
My son recently saw carbon paper — onion skin from carbon paper.
He's 46 years old and he was sitting with my grandson who's 18 and he said, "Look, Elliott!
Look," he said.
"This is what they used to do," as if it was 3,000 years ago.
To them, of course, it is.
But anyway, since I work on a computer and I have for many, many, many years, it's much
harder to keep track of how many drafts you're really going through because you keep doing
it over and over.
That's not good.
It was better and I'm trying to encourage myself to go back to get through a draft,
get through another draft and to do that, I'm now printing out on three-hole paper and
putting it in a notebook so that I can keep track of the drafts as they go.
I think that's much, much better for me.
I was getting lost in wasting paper, reams of paper.
So this is much better, the way that I did it when I started out using a typewriter.