Episode 47: Where is the weirdest place you’ve ever gotten an idea? -With Sarah Albee
Welcome to another great episode of Kids Ask Authors! We are here today with authors Grace Lin and Sarah Albee who answer a kid question; “Where is the weirdest place you’ve ever gotten an idea?”
TRANSCRIPTS:
Grace Lin: Hello. I'm Grace Lin, children's book author and illustrator of many books, including the middle grade novel Where the Mountain Meets the Moon and the picture book A Big Mooncake for Little Star. Today I'm here with Sarah Albee, the author of numerous nonfiction books like Dog Days of History: The Incredible Story of Our Best Friends, Poison: Deadly Deeds, Perilous Professions, and Murderous Medicines, and Poop Happened: A History of The World From The Bottom Up. Hi, Sarah.
Sarah Albee: Hi, Grace.
Grace Lin: Thanks for joining me today.
Sarah Albee: I'm so happy to be here.
Grace Lin: Okay. Are you ready for today's question?
Sarah Albee: I am. Lay it on me.
Grace Lin: Today's question is from a person named Evelyn and Evelyn asks-
Evelyn: Where is the weirdest place you ever got an idea?
Grace Lin: Where is the weirdest place you've ever gotten an idea?
Sarah Albee: Oh, Evelyn, I am happy you asked me that question. Actually, I get ideas in weird places all the time. And probably because when I'm staring at my computer and trying to think of an idea, I don't get an idea, but if I go and sort of make my brain do something else like walk my dog or go for a run or take a bath, that's when I get my best ideas. So I think I get ideas in a lot of weird places. How about you?
Grace Lin: Yeah. I always get ideas in strange places, but not interesting strange places. It's like when I'm taking a shower, in the middle of the shower or usually right before I fall asleep.
Sarah Albee: Right. Yeah, me too. And I remember before I learned to harness these ideas, you have to write them down when you have the idea. You think you're going to remember, especially as you're falling asleep. I'll think, Oh, that is a brilliant idea. I'm a genius. I can't wait to get up and write the story. And then I wake up the next morning and I have no idea what it was. So I've learned to keep a pad and paper next to my bed. Or if I'm in the movie theater and I'm watching the previews, I've grabbed my son's popcorn and written an idea on the side of it because it was the only thing I had to write on.
Sarah Albee: But I want to answer Evelyn's question properly. I'm going to tell you this story. I don't remember every single idea and where I had it, but I remember this one, and I tell this story a lot at school visits. I have three kids and my husband is a teacher and he's a basketball coach. And back when my youngest kid was about two, he was kind of one of these nightmare two-year-olds that you just couldn't take your eyes off of him for one second or he would go run away somewhere. I don't know. He's turned into a perfectly nice, grown up kid now, but back then he was just one of those kids.
Sarah Albee: One day it's a Saturday and we're I'm cooking dinner. My husband is bringing his entire basketball team for dinner. My son's name is Luke. Little two-year-old Luke is in the kitchen with me and I'm trying to get dinner cooked, and he's where I can see him, in the middle of the floor just stomping a Costco-sized box of Cheerios into powder, but it's keeping him busy, so I'm good. I turn to take something out of the oven. I stand back up and the kid has vanished and I hear the toilet flushing around the corner over and over again. So I run around the corner just in time to see him flushing all of his super balls down the toilet. He had a lot of them, and so he stopped it up.
Sarah Albee: Now, I couldn't yell at him. I mean, he was two and he was cute and he thought it was hilarious. But here I am with a broken toilet. It's a Saturday. I have 18 people showing up for dinner. It's too late to clean the upstairs bathroom. And I'm thinking, Oh, no, what am I going to do? I have to call a plumber. I have to. It's a Saturday. I mean, what did people do before they had flushing toilets? And it was like one of those moments in the movies when the clouds part and the heavenly choir starts to sing. It's like, wait a minute, I'm a nonfiction children's book author. I could do a whole book about the history of toilets. So that's how I came up with that idea. How's that for weird?
Grace Lin: That is funny. So that's what became your book Poop, right?
Sarah Albee: That? Yeah. It turned into more than just the history of toilets. It turned into a middle grade as we call it in the business. It's for kids eight years old on up, but it's really more about the history of sanitation because the history of sanitation is arguably the history of civilization because societies that have paid attention to what to do and how to get rid of their waste tend to survive and thrive, so it really became a much longer book. It turned into from a picture book about the history of toilets to Poop Happened: The History of The World From The Bottom Up.
Grace Lin: That's a really cool story, actually.
Sarah Albee: Thank you.
Grace Lin: So you have to thank your son for being such an inspiration.
Sarah Albee: Yeah. He reminds me of that a lot.
Grace Lin: I wish I had a really good story like that, too, but I don't have anything really exciting. Like I said, I don't have any weird places, but I do remember getting a good idea in the grocery store. I'm in the grocery store at the Whole Foods and, at the Whole Foods, they have a little eating section. And so I remember I didn't have any paper for some reason, but I did have a marker, a thick Sharpie marker, and I grabbed a whole bunch of napkins and I started writing it all down on the napkins.
Sarah Albee: Oh, that's really funny.
Grace Lin: And I still have those napkins in my folder over there. So that is what taught me to always, always keep a notebook with me from then on.
Sarah Albee: Yeah. I think a lot of us writers do that. In fact, I was just in a meeting with my friend, Michelle Cusolito who's also a nonfiction writer and she was talking about how she had this brilliant idea for her book, but she didn't want to wake up her husband. It was dark. It was at night. So she started writing in the dark on a pad of paper, and then the next morning she realized her pen had run out. She saw just the littlest indentation on her pad, so she like in the movies with a detective, she like took a pencil and sort of lightly shaded it so that the idea came out. It's like invisible ink, but it worked.
Grace Lin: Did it work?
Sarah Albee: It did.
Grace Lin: Oh, that's so cool.
Sarah Albee: Whatever it takes.
Grace Lin: And that could be a book in itself.
Sarah Albee: There you go.
Grace Lin: All right. Well, thank you so much, Sarah, for that great answer. And thank you, Evelyn, for asking such a great question.
Sarah Albee: Yeah. Thank you, Evelyn. Thank you, Grace. This has been so much fun.
Grace Lin: Thank you. Bye.
Sarah Albee: All right. Bye.
Today’s BOOK REVIEW comes from Oliver! He’s reviewing the “How to Train Your Dragon” series by Cressida Crowell.
I want to talk about the "How to train your dragon" series, by Cressida Cowell.
In it, well, it's full of adventure, but then it's also so funny, and challenging for the main character. Its main character is named Hiccup, this viking boy, who in almost every book, tries to defeat this evil person, named Alvin the Treacherous. This series was so good, I want to read it all over again.
Thank you so much Oliver!
More about today’s authors:
Sarah Albee is the New York Times bestselling author of more than 100 books for kids, ranging from preschool through middle grade. Recent nonfiction titles have been Bank Street College of Education Best Books selections, Notable Social Studies Trade Books, and winners of Eureka! Nonfiction Children’s Book Awards. These days she writes primarily nonfiction, and especially loves writing about topics where history and science connect.
Prior to being a full-time writer, Sarah worked at Children’s Television Workshop (producers of Sesame Street) for nine years. She played basketball in college, and then a year of semi-professional women’s basketball in Cairo, Egypt.
She lives in Connecticut with her husband, who is a high school history teacher and administrator, their three kids, and their dog, Rosie.
Grace Lin, a NY Times bestselling author/ illustrator, won the Newbery Honor for Where the Mountain Meets the Moon and her picture book, A Big Mooncake for Little Star, was awarded the Caldecott Honor. Grace is an occasional commentator for New England Public Radio , a video essayist for PBS NewsHour (here & here), and the speaker of the popular TEDx talk, The Windows and Mirrors of Your Child’s Bookshelf. She is the co-host of the podcast Book Friends Forever, a kidlit podcast about friendship and publishing (geared for adults). Find her facebook, instagram , twitter ( @pacylin) or sign up for her author newsletter HERE.
Special thanks to the High Five Books & Art Always Bookstore, Ms. Carleton’s 2nd grade class at Jackson Street School for their help with our kid questions and reviews.
