carlito22

Did you find it difficult to go from writing ads to writing children’s books? I write the former and would like to write the latter. I’m finding that conceptually it’s easy to come up with interesting ideas for books, but in practice they’re a hell of a lot harder to write than a 30 or 60 second spot. I think I naively thought the transition would be easy. Any advice for someone looking to make the transition from writing about things no one cares about to writing about things someone will hopefully care about. Thank you.

Thank you. That’s such good advice. I’m definitely guilty of falling into the trap of trying to write the perfect debut book as opposed to just writing something I would love. It’s strange being used to working off a brief and now being able to write about absolutely anything. Strange and a little daunting. And you’re right, old ones are the best, house on east 88th street, how little Lori visited Times Square, anything by Leo Lionni or William Steig (I could go on). One more question if that’s ok, what do you think about writing and critique groups and stuff like courses. My issue is that everyone who teaches aren’t exactly the kind of people whose work I admire, and these crit groups are full of people who haven’t really had anything published. How did you go from working with a partner (art director or copywriter) who you could bounce stuff off to just working on a manuscript by yourself? I know what I should really do is just get off Reddit and start writing, but procrastination is so much easier.