Caroline Arnold graduated from Grinnell College in Iowa where she majored in art. After graduate school at the University of Iowa, she worked as an artist and art teacher for a number of years. Her writing career began in the late winter of 1976. She was living in an old farmhouse in upstate New York. Her children were young and she was looking for a way to use her art training to work at home. She got out her art supplies and sat down to start her first book but realized almost immediately that she couldn’t do any pictures until she had a story, so she started to write. That’s when she discovered that the story always comes first. No matter how wonderful the art may be in a book, it needs to support the story. Her first story was a simple account of the changing seasons in the field behind her house, and she illustrated it with black and white pen and ink drawings. She never sold that story, but it helped her begin to understand the challenges of creating a book. When she sold her first story two years later, her editor told her that she wanted to use a known illustrator since Caroline was an unknown writer. She decided to work at becoming a known writer so that she could have the chance to illustrate. Several books later, she did do some illustrating but soon realized she wanted to focus her energies on writing. Lately, after over 30 years of publishing for children, Caroline is once again working on illustrating.

Her article for Writing It Real is adapted from a speech she delivered at the April 22, 2006 Writer’s Day celebration at the Los Angeles chapter of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators.

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I know almost nothing about sailing and can count on one hand the number of times I’ve been on a sailboat. But one thing that has always fascinated me is how boats manage to sail against the wind. It’s easy to see how you sail with the wind — you simply stick out your sail and the wind pushes you forward. But how do you get back where you came from — or how do you reach a destination that is in the opposite direction? The answer is that you tack. You sail across the wind in a zigzag pattern. You reach your goal by aiming elsewhere. And sometimes, as you are zigging and zagging, you make new discoveries along the way.

In 1981, I came up with an idea to do a book about a city animal shelter. When I proposed it to my editor, her response was that she liked the idea but thought it would be best to illustrate it with photographs. The problem was that she didn’t know any photographers in Los Angeles. As it happened, I did. The photographer was Richard Hewett, the husband of my friend Joan Hewett, another children’s book writer. He agreed to take the photographs for my book, which became Pets Without Homes. That book was the beginning of a collaboration that lasted nearly twenty years and produced almost fifty books. Looking back, I believe that meeting Dick was the most significant event in my writing career. Together we produced a new kind of photo book, in which the words and pictures told the story together to become an integrated whole. It was a true collaborative process in which my words influenced his pictures and his pictures inspired my words.

Sadly, Richard passed away in April after a long illness. He will be greatly missed by his friends and family, and by the countless people who knew him through his books. Dick also worked with his wife, Joan, and with several other children’s book writers. We all learned a great deal about writing books from working with Dick.

 Dick had also come to the world of children’s books as a second career. For most of his life, he had been a magazine photographer, doing stories for Life, Look, TV Guide and various other magazines. His specialty was animal photography, so with my interest in animals and the natural world, we were a good match.

In all of our books, we worked together as an author/photographer team. While Dick took photographs, I took notes and did onsite research. For every book that we did, the first step was to come up with an idea or a topic. Typically, we did life cycle books about animals and the challenge was to find a zoo or animal park where the animals were breeding and were displayed in naturalistic enclosures. Then my job was to do enough preliminary research to write an outline of the story. At this point we were usually ready to go “on scene” and start taking pictures. From the beginning, Dick was always looking for his lead shot, which would open the book and introduce the reader to the main subject, and for the end shot, which would be the final image of the story. Besides the cover, these were the most important pictures in the book — they were like the two pieces of bread that hold a sandwich together. The inside of the book could be a bit flexible, but the two ends had to make the book look and feel complete. The same had to go for my writing. I often spend as much time on the opening and closing paragraphs of my book as the words in between. And, one of the first things I learned from Dick was that each book sets its own rules. There is no one right way to get the information or pictures that you need. Dick was like all good photographers — he did whatever was necessary to get the picture he wanted and often drove people crazy in the process. When we were working on a penguin book at the San Francisco Zoo, Dick persuaded the zookeepers to loan him a pair of hip boots so he could go into the water and get close to the birds. More than once, he climbed over a fence because the picture was better on the other side.

My role during the picture taking process was as the photographer’s assistant — I drove the car, carried cameras, held the sun shade, and provided an extra pair of eyes for spotting a possible photo subject. The advantage of being “on scene” was that I understood the circumstances surrounding each photo and I also could be aware of the non-visual aspects of the scene. Later, when I was writing the final version of the manuscript at home, I always tried to include as many of the sounds and smells and other sensual information as I could, to make the reader feel on scene as well.

Another goal of Dick’s photography was to capture some kind of action or emotion in the photo. One thing we learned in all our visits to zoos, is that the vast majority of time, animals just eat and sleep. The brief moments of interaction are rare, and the only way to catch them is just to be patient and wait for something to happen. As I wrote my text, I too tried to create empathy or identity with the animals, without anthropomorphizing them, and this is what connects the reader to the story.

Another type of book that Dick and I did together was a visit to a place, such as Mesa Verde National Park, where you can see cliff dwellings and other remains of the ancient Anasazi who lived in the southwest more than 1000 years ago. When we did a book like this, or about fossils, or rock art, Dick would moan and groan that it was just a pile of rocks — how was he going to get any human warmth into the photos? The solution was to find ways to include people in the photos, and if at all possible, children. Sometimes, if no one else was available, I had to be a model, although always reluctantly. On the cover of our book, The Ancient Cliff Dwellers of Mesa Verde, you can see me climbing a ladder. We needed to have a person in the picture to provide scale. I agreed to do it as long as I remained very small! For close-ups, I often volunteered my hands, which helped show the actual size of objects.

After the pictures were taken and my manuscript was complete, it was time to assemble the book. In all our projects, Dick and I laid out the book page spread by page spread. In this way we could see the flow of the story and how well the pictures and text were coordinated. This process made me very conscious of page turns and the need to think of my text in blocks that would fit on a page.

Many nonfiction books are illustrated with photos. The advantage of a photo is that it shows what the subject really looks like. In today’s world where children are exposed to amazing nature films on video and television, they want to see pictures of real animals in books. But photography isn’t always the best way to illustrate a book. It doesn’t work well for animals, such as pandas, that have elusive life styles, or animals such as sharks or whales, that live underwater, or nocturnal animals such as bats. It also doesn’t work for events that do not have a photographic record or which occurred before the invention of photography. Then it makes sense to illustrate the book with art. Recently I have been doing some of my own illustrating again. After tacking away from the world of art, I am now returning to it.

When my first book was published, I was thrilled just to see my name in print. I never imagined that one day I would have more than 100 books for children. In many ways my writing career has come full circle. I started out writing easy-read books for young children. Perhaps that’s because at that time my own children were young. As they grew the level of my books grew older as well. My children have now grown up and have children of their own. Perhaps not surprisingly, several of my new projects are for younger readers again. In the course of my career I have changed my tack several times. Perhaps some of you might be inspired to change your tack and do something new. Tacking against the wind also has its application in publishing. Whether you are an already published writer or hoping to be published, the most direct route to your next book may be to change your course and try something new. It could be something fairly simple such as changing your point of view or writing for a different age group, or it could be a more drastic change such as adopting a whole new format or genre. You never know what might happen as you sail over the horizon.

My first published book was Five Nests, an easy-read book about five different ways that birds take care of their babies. It came out in 1980. At that time, children’s nonfiction books were very different from what they are today. Most of them looked and felt “educational” and the illustrations were mainly in black and white. Most of them were for older children and were meant mainly for use doing school reports. All this changed in the mid 1980’s when technology made it possible to publish full color books at reasonable prices. Suddenly, nonfiction books became colorful, attractive, and fun! Suddenly, anything was possible.

In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s there was an explosion of new nonfiction, especially in the science and nature field and increasingly for younger children. In recent years, however, demands of the business world for higher profits from children’s books combined with ever shrinking budgets for school and public libraries — where nonfiction books are traditionally sold — have put publishers of nonfiction books for children under increasing pressure. They are still publishing plenty of nonfiction, but the books have evolved to fit today’s needs.

So what does the world of nonfiction books for children look like today? One of the newest concepts is a category of book popularly called Creative Nonfiction. I dislike this term because it implies that most nonfiction is uncreative and presumably less interesting fiction. There is a preconception that nonfiction books are easier to write and not as creative as fiction. I assure you that writing good nonfiction is not easy and it can be just as creative as fiction. The creativity comes in your choice of material and how you present it. Good writing is always good writing no matter what its form. Nonetheless, what people are calling creative nonfiction are books that depart from the norm of straightforward factual presentation. Here are a few examples of creative nonfiction for children. Some books use fictional formats to bring the characters to life, as Karen Winnick does in Mr. Lincoln’s Whiskers; some use rhyming verse, as in Madeleine Comora and Deborah Chandra’s book George Washington’s Teeth, a humorous look at our first President’s travails with his false teeth; others focus on little known facts, as Kathleen Krull and Kathryn Hewitt do in their Lives of the Artists and other books in that series.

Another current trend is the combination of fiction and nonfiction in the same book. Usually, this takes the form of informational back matter at the end of a fiction story. Barbara Joosse is the author of Ghost Wings, a beautiful picture book story about a girl and her grandmother, set in the mountains of Mexico where the monarch butterflies spend the winter. Her book contains not just the story of the grandmother’s death, but four pages of material at the end giving facts about the celebration of the Days of the Dead in Mexico, about monarch butterflies, as well as activities and discussion material for using the book with children. By including this extra information at the end, the reader gets more for the money and a better understanding of the story.

Still another trend I see is a focus on more nonfiction for younger readers, that is, preschoolers and children in the primary grades at school. Even in first and second grade, children are doing reports and beginning to learn how to do research. They are too young to use the internet because most internet sites are not appropriate for their age group, so these children depend on books. The flip side of this trend is that there has been a decline in nonfiction books published for older readers, who now depend more and more on the internet to find information. This doesn’t mean that they don’t need books too, but books play a smaller role.

Ask any librarian, and you will be told that children, especially young children, actually prefer to read books filled with facts because they love to find out things. So do I, and that’s why I keep writing nonfiction. I love doing research and I enjoy the challenge of presenting this information to children in a way that is interesting and that they can understand. I like to write fiction, too. One of my newest books, The Terrible Hodag and the Animal Catchers, is a tall tale based on stories told around the campfire at the summer camp I attended as a child. Many of you may consider yourselves fiction writers only. But there is no reason that you can’t do both — or that your fiction story might be better told in a nonfiction format. You might find that you enjoy writing those books on the “other side” of the library, the ones with long numbers on their spines, filled with facts about real people, real places and real events.

Several years ago at a party, I heard someone ask my husband, “Why does Caroline choose to write nonfiction books for children?” In other words, why doesn’t she write wonderful imaginary stories?

“Oh,” he replied, “That’s because she has a nonfiction personality.”

He was right. I’m the sort of person who goes to museums and reads all the labels, who likes to take guided tours, and who loves to ask questions. In a photo taken when I was researching my book, Dinosaurs All Around, which was about making dinosaur models for museums you can see me side by side with the head of Albertosaurus, a relative of Tyrannosaurus Rex. One thing I like about doing research is the chance to be up close and personal with my subjects. In this case I’m glad that my subject has been extinct for 65 million years!