I wish I could plan for it, and then I could plan for each book! You just have to keep working and hope that moment comes. Every story has that moment where it just clicks. Yeah, you have that cat passing that row of cat toys, totally disinterested, the tags are still on them, and then you find that one toy, and see the aliens inside. OK, I was off, but it’s interesting to me that you still have that opening where you have that shock, that shift of point-of-view, but it’s from a human/cat perspective instead of the aliens’. Wuffles, and I just needed a really silly name that this cat would probably hate. One of my son’s friends has a cat that’s named Mr. I no longer had that great opening with the ship in that sandbox, but the story started to flow, in these directions where I never expected it to go.īy the way, I based the cat on my own cat, but he’s not named Mr. That was the magic bullet - the story started to spill out of my sketchbook and I had the story. I gave it up, did Flotsam, came back to it, gave up again, did Art and Max … and I was drawing in my sketchbook while waiting for my daughter at her music class, and I drew a spaceship with all these little nodules all over it, and I said, “My cat would love to scratch its neck all over this thing!”

(laughs)Īnd then I couldn’t come up with anything else! The only other idea I had was that the aliens were speaking their own language, which were symbols, and the aliens and the girl would have a fun day in the sandbox. So after The Three Pigs, I wanted to turn that into a book that would have been called Greetings!, and I tried and I tried, because the opening sequence was so wonderful - you followed this alien spaceship coming down onto the Earth, and landing in what looks like the desert, and then this giant hand comes into the frame, and when you turn the page, you see it’s this young girl who’s lifted up a couple of them and you realize the reality is they’re very small and in this sandbox. It was an alien spaceship, and they’ve landed in the desert, and they’re getting their picture taken, but when you turn out the back cover to see the wraparound image, you see they’re actually in a sandbox in the backyard, and they’re very tiny.

It actually began years ago, when I did a cover for Cricket magazine.

Wuffles, and he likes to play with a little toy that looks like a spaceship. The best of INDY Week’s fiercely independent journalism about the Triangle delivered straight to your inbox.

David wiesner caldecott