What Is a Butterfly?

First grade was when we were first allowed to check out books from the library. For some reason, we weren't allowed to do it in kindergarten. I will never forget that moment of walking into the library, and I can still smell the wood of Newlinburg Elementary School. I can still smell that sort of musty book smell, and I walked over to a shelf and I picked out a book, and it was a book called What Is a Butterfly? — which was nonfiction.

Up until that point, I had really only read — or been read to — story books. My favorites were The Little House and a book about twin girls who didn't want to look alike, and I really wished I had had a twin so I loved that book, and a book called Debbie Takes a Nap, which was put out by the Miss Frances Ding Dong School. It was propaganda to get people to take a nap and my mother bought it so I would take a nap, which I never ever did. But I loved the book because it had my name in it, Debbie.

So those were the books that I was used to, but then I found this book called What Is a Butterfly? And I took it home — I walked home from school — and my mom read it to me. And it was as if this whole world opened up to me because it taught me so much, right there in a book with pictures. I have a copy of it at home. I bought a copy, a used copy, because I had to own this book. After my mom read What Is a Butterfly? to me, I went back to my elementary school library and I returned it and I took out What Is a Tree? And then I took out What Is a Frog? What Is a Plant? And I was hooked. I was hooked on nonfiction. So from a very early age, I loved both, reading both fiction and nonfiction.

Great Teachers

There were so many teachers who influenced me with writing and with books. My fourth grade teacher, Miss Ryan, had such a love of books that she had special reading nooks. I am getting all worked up! I'm getting moved, but she had these reading nooks so that if you finished your work early, you could take whatever book you were reading and go into one of the reading nooks. And one of them was a big old claw-foot bathtub and that's what I loved. You could climb into the bathtub and read.

Another one was a table that had sort of a tablecloth draped over it so you could go under the table and be private. And it was under that table that I finished Charlotte's Web. And I remember feeling very happy that I was hidden because I was sobbing and I didn't want Steve Peters to see me crying. And I still remember that it was Steve Peters I didn't want to see me crying. But I loved that room. Sadly, the school caught on fire and burned down in the middle of the school year, and that room was gone. And I recently met up with some people who were in that class, and we were all traumatized by that because we kept our teacher and we kept our class, but we had to move schools.

Then the next year in fifth grade, I had this teacher named Miss Laudenslaker. And Miss Laudenslaker was very large and had a very deep looming voice. And some people were scared of her and I worshipped her. One of the reason I worshipped her was that she read out loud to us. Even today most, many fifth grade teachers do not read out loud to their children and I wish they would because there's nothing like having a book read out loud to you. And she read out loud From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg — and one of my all time favorite books along with Charlotte's Web, imprinted on me very early. It was such a wonderful experience.

I still remember two of my teachers who read aloud — Miss Cox and Miss Scott. I love the teachers who read aloud, and I just want to say one more thing… I had high school teachers who encouraged me so much in my writing and one of them just came into New York and had me meet her as she was in line getting into go see a Broadway show to sign her copy of Charles and Emma.

Am I a Writer?

I went to college — I went to Brown University — and I wasn't sure what I wanted to do and I wasn't sure what I wanted to major in. I discovered that I loved the classes in religious studies because those classes taught me how to ask questions and I love asking questions. You could call me nosy, but I love asking questions and I love learning just the right way to ask questions. Those classes also taught me how to write because I had to write many, many papers. I happened to have one teacher who mentored me and helped me with my writing both in the class and outside the class and she became a friend.

I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't think just a regular person like me who grew up in Allentown, Pennsylvania, could be a writer. All the people in college who were going to be writers were all Black and smoked cigarettes and used big words that I did not understand and drank endless cups of coffee. Well, I drank coffee. I would never smoke a cigarette — ever, ever — and I tend to use words that most people can understand. So I thought, "Well, I guess can't be a writer," but I still really wanted to be one.

I got a job right out of college working for a Jewish magazine, and sort of got in through the back door. I had done some freelance writing in college, but mostly I think I got the job because they thought I would be a good person to fetch the coffee. I did a pretty good job at doing that. But I also got to do some writing, and I loved that, but I wasn't doing enough writing. I knew now that I really wanted to be a writer. I was fortunate enough to meet a wonderful man who lived in New York and I wanted to move to New York to be with him.

I went looking for a job and I got an interview at Scholastic Magazines. There was a job opening on the fourth grade magazine called Scholastic News Explorer. I had never thought about writing for children. I thought, "Well, it would get me to New York, and then I could get a better job." So I got the interview. I got along very well with the editor and he gave me an assignment. Sometimes when you get a job, when you're applying for a job you have to do a trial assignment. And he gave me an assignment. It was to write about panda bears being endangered. It was an article about a little boy who went to Anwar Sadat's funeral. Anwar Sadat was the president, premier of Egypt. And I also had to come up with a list of ideas that I thought would be good articles for fourth graders.

I thought, "Well, I don't know. How am I going to know?" I went back up to Boston and I have to say that it was so easy for me. It was as if I was back in fourth grade. I just knew how to write those articles and I just came up with a list of — he said give me 10, 15 ideas. I think I had 30 ideas for articles just like that. And so I got the job. I never knew I wanted to write for children and the minute I started I loved it.

I also would say that working at Scholastic was a fantastic training ground because soon after I got there, the magazines were re-organized so I was writing for first graders all the way up to sixth graders. So we were writing for all these different editions and our deadlines were fast and furious so in the morning I would have to write about Ms. Pacman — that dates this — Ms. Pacman for first graders and second graders. And in the afternoon I would have to write about Rachel Carson and pesticides for fifth and sixth graders. So it was a great, great training ground and I had really good colleagues and editors there.

Start with the Questions

I write books for children of all ages. I write fiction and nonfiction. I write nonfiction for very small children, and now I've written a nonfiction book for teenagers and adults really. The process is really not that different. I tend to write about subjects I know nothing about. What I mean by that is when I start, I know nothing. So if you start with knowing nothing, you have so many questions to ask that you have to answer. I tend to start, believe it or not, with a dictionary and look up just the dictionary definition of the topic — whether it's butterfly, honeybees, Charles Darwin — and you get to know the basic facts. And then I go from there.

One of my favorite things always to do is to start with another children's book about the topic, because I know how hard children's book authors work to do their research. We do so much research to write children's books. It doesn't matter if it's for first graders or twelfth graders, we do a lot of research. Granted, we do more research for the older people because you put much more material in it, but you still have to understand it completely. So if I had written a book about Charles Darwin for second graders, I would still have to completely understand this theory of evolution, right? I wouldn't have read all the many volumes of letters and correspondence that I read, so it's really a matter of degree, but in fact, the process is really very similar.

Never Trust Just One Source

One of the big rules that I learned when I was working at Scholastic was never trust just one source when you're doing research…two, three if you can get it. It's my cardinal rule. I double, triple check my facts. I even sometimes hire a fact checker. I did that with Charles and Emma because I didn't want to make any mistakes. Whenever anybody is doing research, whether it's a published author or it's a child doing a report for school, you should always have more than one source for a fact.

Now we come to the question that everybody wants to know the answer to: what's better — a book or the Internet? Back in the day that I was working at Scholastic, there was no such thing as the Internet. We only used books, magazine articles, newspapers, interviews, interviews with experts, observation…all those great research tools that I'm afraid kids today might be losing — and adults, because we just go to the Internet.

Now there is wonderful information on the Internet, but you have to know what you can trust. Teachers are usually very good at telling kids what they can trust, and a lot of schools have filters. But sometimes you stumble upon a website and you're not sure because maybe you find a mistake because you've already read some books and there's a disagreement. What do you do if there's a disagreement? Well you have to go to another source. If you find a mistake on the website, you can't really trust the whole website.

Also with the book, if you find a mistake in a book it's hard to trust that book. Now I'm an author, I've made mistakes. We've had mistakes in some of my books that we then correct. Sometimes they're little mistakes. They're usually little mistakes. We hope there are no mistakes. But we try very hard to make it as accurate, as accurate as possible. I've always had experts read my manuscripts, more than one if I can, and I have fact checkers help me check facts. Editors can't always do that and they trust the author to do it, so that's what we do.

I was just talking to a group of kids and somebody said, "Well, do you trust Wikipedia?" I said, "Well, that's an interesting question." Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia where anybody can write an article. I think you can go to Wikipedia for some basic facts, but you can never totally trust those facts. I have a couple of funny experiences with Wikipedia. One time I read an article about Easter when I was doing my book on Celebrate Easter, and it said something about how people in Norwegian countries whip each other on Easter, and I said, "Well, obviously somebody made all this stuff up." It turned out it was true! But I had to verify that by talking to people and looking at books — not that I put that in my book about Easter, but then I had to know.

When I was working on Charles and Emma: The Darwins' Leap of Faith, I went to the Wikipedia website about Emma Wedgewood who married Charles Darwin, just to double check how many siblings she had. And I knew right away the website was wrong. I went to one of my book sources, and I went to another book source, and I saw the Wikipedia was wrong. So you can go in and you can change it, so I went in and I changed it. 45 minutes later, I went back, someone had changed it back. I knew I was right! I went back in and I changed it again. The other person went back in and changed it. This went on for about 24 hours and I finally gave up. I feel terrible about it because people who go to that Wikipedia website are getting the wrong information.

Treasure Hunt

I've always been a kind of nosy person. I love to eavesdrop and I won't go so far as to open somebody else's mail, but if that weren't immoral, I think I would do it because I'm just curious. I'm curious about people and what makes people tick. I'm always wanting to know more about subjects. I think most people are nosy — maybe not quite as nosy as I am, but nosy. I think most kids are. Just go to a classroom of kids and you say, "I bet you'd want to know that I saw your teacher this weekend." "What was she wearing? What was she doing? Who was she with?" Right? We want to know.

We want to know things and we want to know the behind the scenes. So writing nonfiction books for me is a dream come true because I get to ask questions, I get to delve into people's lives. A librarian once gave me this great advice. When you start a research project, ask yourself, "What do I know and what do I need to know? What do I know?"

I wrote a book about honeybees. I actually started out writing a book about bees because I never really even thought about the fact that there were different kinds of bees. So what do I know? I know bees sting. I know bees make honey — some of them? I know — what do I need to know? I need to know what kind of bees are there. I need to know how they make honey. I need to know why they sting. I need to know do all bees sting?

So you make yourself all these questions. Then you go about answering them. Now you can answer them by reading a book. You can answer them by going on the Internet and go to a really good internet site, like a site from a museum, or a university, or a scientist's website. You can also ask an expert. Who would an expert be about honeybees? A bee keeper would be an expert. A scientist who studies honeybees would be an expert. You start asking these questions and you start finding the answers to the questions and you'll end up getting more questions because there will always be more questions.

So I found out that it was really mostly just honeybees who make honey — who make the kind of honey that we eat. So how do they do that? So then I researched how they did that, and I found out all kinds of things. For example, that all the worker bees in a honeybee hive are female; the male bees do no work at all. The male bees are there for one reason and one reason only and that's to mate with the queen. And they die and if they don't die they're kicked out of the hive because they get in the way. So whenever you see a bee sipping nectar from a flower, it's a girl bee. They're all girl bees out there. They're not the queen bee; there's only one queen bee in a hive. So you see how I can go on and on when I've found something out?

So that's what happens to me every time I do research. I get so excited and I just find out more and more and more — sort of like a treasure hunt. Research is like a treasure hunt. You find out one clue which leads you to a next clue, which leads you to the next clue, and eventually you have all this research that then you need to turn into a book.

The Story of a Marriage

When I wrote Charles and Emma: The Darwins' Leap of Faith, I was tackling a huge subject — Charles Darwin. There has been so much written about Charles Darwin. There are volumes and volumes and volumes of books about Charles Darwin. I did a book once about the Titanic — same kind of thing. How do you do all that research and how do you find your own story when something has been written about so much?

In the case of Charles and Emma, I was very lucky in that I found a piece of the story that nobody else had really written about, and that was this: Charles Darwin was the scientist who discovered evolution — evolution by natural selection. He came up with the idea, he worked for years and years and years on his book called The Origin of Species, and he is the person that we associate with evolution.

Well, a lot of people are concerned that evolution pushes God out of creation because some people feel that the story in the Bible — as it's told in the Bible — is literally true. And that the world was created by God in six days and all the creatures were created just like that. And they did not evolve. They do not change. Some people believe that. At the time that Charles Darwin was writing, a lot of people believed that. And he, Charles Darwin, was not saying God has nothing to do with it; he was just saying this is the process of creation, this is how it happened, how species changes over time, how species are created. He saw this beauty in it, but at the same time, he knew that it was going to upset some people.

Well, guess what? He fell in love with a very religious woman, Emma Wedgewood — his first cousin. He wanted to marry her, but he had a feeling she was going to be upset about his ideas about creation. When I heard first that Charles Darwin's wife Emma was religious and that she loved Charles very much and they had a very close marriage and that she was afraid that he would go to hell and that they would be separated for all eternity, it was as if fireworks had exploded over my head. I knew I had a book to write.

I thought, "What is the story of their marriage? How did they do that? How did that work? How did being married to Emma influence his work?" I had so many questions. So when I set out to do the research, I had a lot of work ahead of me. Not only was I tackling this huge subject — Charles Darwin and evolution — but I had to find out about his marriage.

Now, in fact, it turned out the first part was a lot harder, because when you stick yourself in research and you have all these books that you're reading or think you should be reading, it's overwhelming. And I realized early on that the main thing that I should be reading were primary sources. Primary sources are not books written about somebody, but actual letters written by a person or to a person, diary entries, notebook entries that Charles Darwin kept, little notes in date books that Emma wrote. So when I was doing my research for Charles and Emma, I used mostly primary sources.

Peering into Primary Sources

I have so much to say about Charles and Emma. I could talk about Charles and Emma forever. Once I realized that I couldn't read everything ever written about Charles Darwin, and once I realized also that I did not want to read everything written about him, because I wanted to find the story myself and I started with primary sources, which is a very unusual place to start because usually you get deep background, and then you go to primary sources. But I got out of the library a two-volume, I'm getting teary just talking about it. I miss writing about them!

I got out of the library a two-volume book of letters collected by their daughter, Henrietta. She collected Emma's family letters that were written from the time she was a little girl until the time she died. And this is two-volume book, and with some of Henrietta's notations, but mostly just letters. And I sat down and I read those two volumes on my couch, straight through. And I didn't always know what I was reading because I hadn't done any of the deep background, but I felt that I was getting to know the people in the story.

I also read, right at the beginning, Charles Darwin's autobiography, which is wonderfully written. He was such a great writer. And this was an autobiography that he wrote for his children and grandchildren. He wasn't looking at it to publish it, so it was as honest as it could be. Emma did take a few things out before publishing it, a couple of things that he said that she thought might offend people; mostly about God and religion, but she didn't take out very much. She didn't take out the substance, just one or two lines. But I read the unexpurgated version. I read both of them actually, and I just identified so much with Charles and Emma and their marriage.

And I hope this isn't too personal, but my husband and I have a very close marriage. I read all of his manuscripts. I've been his first — and he would say — best editor, I'm his toughest editor probably other than he himself. He reads a lot of my things. We are very, very close. We hate to be apart. I majored in religious studies in college. When I met him he was writing about science. So you can see how it was a very, very personal story. I don't think we're anything like Charles and Emma.

In fact, I remember one moment when I read that her daughter said that Emma was not at all sentimental, and I thought, "Well, why isn't she sentimental?" And I realized, "Oh, wait. She's not me. That's okay. She's allowed not to be sentimental," because I was probably over-identifying with her at that point, but that was a good moment. I realized, "Okay. This is Emma Wedgewood Darwin. I've never met her — will never meet her. We're very different people."

However, I think that it was that connection that I had to them that helped me really see how much being married to Emma influenced Charles. It's all there to see. It's all there in the letters. It's in the letters that he wrote about her. It's in the letters she wrote to him about wishing that he would take another look at religion…these beautiful letters that she wrote to him about that, and he wrote on the bottom of one of them, "Know after I have died that I have kissed this many times and cried." Does that not say it all right there? I mean, it's such a beautiful story.

One of the great things about doing primary source research was there were pieces of a puzzle I could fit together. So I could look and see what a letter that Charles was writing on a particular day — because so many of his letters are already published either in books or online — and then I could go online, because they had just published this while I was working on the book, Emma's day diary where she wrote things down and I could see what was happening in the house at that time.

So if Charles was… When he was trying to decide whether he should publish a paper on his theory, because he had just heard that another man had the same idea. At that same moment, their last baby was dying, and one of their other children was deathly ill. She did not end up dying. I could go look and see… I could see the correspondence that he was having with his friends about this issue, and then I could look in Emma's date book and she was keeping track of the baby's symptoms. So it was pieces of a puzzle like that I could put together, and there were many, many more of those during their courtship period, what he was writing in his secret notebooks and what he was writing in letters to her, what she was saying to her aunt about him. It was so much fun to weave it all together. It's hard work, but it was fun to weave it all together and create this picture of their really great family life.

Where Do You Start?

It's really hard to know when to stop gathering research and when to start writing because I love to do research. In some ways it's easier than the writing because it's just you keep finding things out. "Oh, this is cool," and you write a note about it. "This is cool! Oh, wow!" I do this thing, by the way, where I take oh, wow notes. I do this for all my books. You can't write every single thing down. So I tend to write down the things that make me go, "Oh, wow!" And so I call them my oh, wow notes.

With Charles and Emma, I had so many oh, wow notes and you can tell the book is long, but there are two things that make you start writing…well, maybe three things. One is you just have to start telling the story because you really want other people to know it. Two is you're overwhelmed with the amount of research. You want to write it down so you see what else you have to research to fill in holes. And the third thing is, you have an editor calling you saying, "When am I going to see that draft?" It's called a deadline. So all of those things made me start writing the book.

So a big question when you're writing a biography is where do you start? A very typical thing is to start with the eureka moment of the discovery of the science and then you go back to the childhood. I think a lot of biographies start that way. Some start right at the childhood, figuring you've already heard of the person. So I struggled about with where to start Charles and Emma, because I really wanted to be able to grab the reader, because it's so important to grab the reader on the first page.

It's really hard to know when to stop gathering research and when to start writing because I love to do research. In some ways it's easier than the writing because it's just you keep finding things out. "Oh, this is cool," and you write a note about it. "This is cool! Oh, wow!" I do this thing, by the way, where I take oh, wow notes. I do this for all my books. You can't write every single thing down. So I tend to write down the things that make me go, "Oh, wow!" And so I call them my oh, wow notes.

With Charles and Emma, I had so many oh, wow notes and you can tell the book is long, but there are two things that make you start writing…well, maybe three things. One is you just have to start telling the story because you really want other people to know it. Two is you're overwhelmed with the amount of research. You want to write it down so you see what else you have to research to fill in holes. And the third thing is, you have an editor calling you saying, "When am I going to see that draft?" It's called a deadline. So all of those things made me start writing the book.

So a big question when you're writing a biography is where do you start? A very typical thing is to start with the eureka moment of the discovery of the science and then you go back to the childhood. I think a lot of biographies start that way. Some start right at the childhood, figuring you've already heard of the person. So I struggled about with where to start Charles and Emma, because I really wanted to be able to grab the reader, because it's so important to grab the reader on the first page.

And there was so much to say, so much to say, so much to say…and I'm going to give credit to my husband, even though he says we shouldn't do this because you never really know where ideas come from, but I believe it was he who said, "You gotta start with the list." And I did. I had a God given beginning for my book and that was this list that Charles Darwin made.

He had just come back from his voyage around the world — this monumental voyage on the Beagle where he was traveling all over and he was so seasick that he kept getting off the ship as much as possible and he would go off exploring. And he loved natural history and he was picking up all kinds of fossils and dead animals, and beetles and live animals and insects and whatever he could do, and bringing them back to the boat. And he got home and he was already making a name for himself in science because he had sent back these specimens.

He was 28 and he was a healthy, vigorous young man. He was good looking, although he didn't like his nose. He was athletic. He was tall and he was getting attention from the ladies — especially this one family of sisters who were courting him. And he was thinking, "Wow! Should I get married or not?" He had so much work he wanted to do with his science because he was already having this idea of evolution by natural selection, and he knew he had a lot of work to do.

He needed to study his specimens. He needed to get other people to study his specimens. There were not enough hours in the day, he was charged up really for the first time in his life about something academic. He knew what he wanted to do with his life; yet he had these sort of feelings of romance that he could not ignore. So Charles Darwin was a very organized man. He wrote down everything, he wrote down all of his thoughts, always — thank you Charles for that — and he was a list maker. So I started Charles and Emma with that marry-not marry list.

And there was so much to say, so much to say, so much to say…and I'm going to give credit to my husband, even though he says we shouldn't do this because you never really know where ideas come from, but I believe it was he who said, "You gotta start with the list." And I did. I had a God given beginning for my book and that was this list that Charles Darwin made.

He had just come back from his voyage around the world — this monumental voyage on the Beagle where he was traveling all over and he was so seasick that he kept getting off the ship as much as possible and he would go off exploring. And he loved natural history and he was picking up all kinds of fossils and dead animals, and beetles and live animals and insects and whatever he could do, and bringing them back to the boat. And he got home and he was already making a name for himself in science because he had sent back these specimens.

He was 28 and he was a healthy, vigorous young man. He was good looking, although he didn't like his nose. He was athletic. He was tall and he was getting attention from the ladies — especially this one family of sisters who were courting him. And he was thinking, "Wow! Should I get married or not?" He had so much work he wanted to do with his science because he was already having this idea of evolution by natural selection, and he knew he had a lot of work to do.

He needed to study his specimens. He needed to get other people to study his specimens. There were not enough hours in the day, he was charged up really for the first time in his life about something academic. He knew what he wanted to do with his life; yet he had these sort of feelings of romance that he could not ignore. So Charles Darwin was a very organized man. He wrote down everything, he wrote down all of his thoughts, always — thank you Charles for that — and he was a list maker. So I started Charles and Emma with that marry-not marry list.

The Power of Place

My husband had written a book about evolution called The Beak of the Finch. And he talked about Darwin all the time, and Darwin, Darwin, Darwin…Darwin, Darwin, Darwin. And it wasn't for many years until he told me about Emma being religious because he didn't know of that himself, because it really hasn't been written about. But even when he told me and I had that fireworks moment of 'I have to write this book about Charles Darwin and his marriage to this religious woman.'

I didn't do it right away because I was daunted. I was daunted by the fact that so many people had written about Charles Darwin. I felt like Darwin was my husband's; he belonged to my husband and not to me. But we had the great good fortune to take two trips during this time. One was to the Galapagos Islands, which we went to and my husband lectured about his book, and I got to see the Galapagos Islands which were central to Darwin's theory of evolution.

Being in the Galapagos, gave me a real feeling for what it must have been like to be Darwin and seeing the world in that way that most people don't get to see it, being so close up to the animals because in the Galapagos, the animals are not scared of people and you can be this close to a finch or this close to a sea lion. Sea lions played with us in the water. It was unbelievable.

The trip, however, that I think made the biggest difference was when we went to England and we visited Down House where the Darwins lived. I already had this idea in my mind, but I didn't know that I was going to write the book. Let me be honest. I didn't know that I was going to have the courage to write the book. I felt that it was a daunting topic, but I looked around with a reporter's eyes. I was there as if I was going to write the book. It took me five years to start writing it after that, but I very smartly paid very close attention, asked lots of questions, and I bought a book that published by Down House that is photographs if Down House. It's referenced in Charles and Emma, of course. And when I was writing the book, I poured over those photographs and brought back all those memories.

Writing about Religion

I am very drawn to the topic of religion. I was brought up Jewish. It was a huge part of my life growing up. We were not — how could I put it? We were what I would call observant reform Jews, which means we belonged to a reform synagogue, which is the most liberal, least traditional, I would say, branch of Judaism. I'm going to get shot for that by somebody, but my dad had been born in Russia to an Orthodox Jewish family, moved to the United States when he was a little boy, grew up in a tiny, tiny town in Pennsylvania called Lehighton, Pennsylvania, where he and his family in the next town together could make a minion, which means ten men. So there were very few Jews and Judaism was extremely important to him.

So he brought me up… He married my mother, my mother had been married before. They hadn't been too into Judaism. My mom was brought up Jewish, but it was not a huge part of her life. My father married her. He said, "We don't have to keep a kosher home, but I want to have a Sabbath dinner every Friday night and go to synagogue," and my mom said, "Fine." So that's how I grew up. It was a huge part of my life. I did a lot of other things, too, but I had lots of friends who were Jewish. I belonged to a Jewish youth group. I was fascinated by all the stories, etc, etc, etc. So that was my world view growing up.

When I went to college and majored in religious studies, my world view widened in the sense that I realized that there was not just one way to look at the world — that the Indians in Mexico who hunt for peyote truly believed that their religion is the true religion. And why shouldn't they? And that Christians who believe their religion is the true religion — why shouldn't they? And Hindus and Buddhists and I'm just fascinated by how different people and different religions look at the world, and I don't honestly believe that any one way is the right way to look at the world. I think they're all the right way and I think they're all beautiful and I'm fascinated by it.

I believe that too many bad things have been done in the name of religion, too much conflict in the world because of religion. And when I did the series The Holidays Around the World for National Geographic… When I was trying to decide if I should do the series, a friend said to me, "Just think, you'll be helping to promote world peace." And I thought that is actually why I want to do the series because I think the more we know about other people's religions, the more we will treat those people with respect and kindness and tolerance. And yes, so I'm very, very drawn to this. And that's also why I was very drawn to the story of Charles and Emma: two people with different points of view, who work really hard to understand the other person's point of view, and end up forging a beautiful life together.

Connecting with your Characters

I got so attached to Charles and Emma Darwin. This is completely true what I'm about to tell you. It is not made up in any way. I got so attached to them that every time I read about Charles dying or wrote about him dying, I cried. Oh, I also cried when Annie died and I also cried when Emma died. But for some reason, Charles dying just slayed me every time. I think because I so relate to their marriage, and I just, well, I can't go there.

But with each draft, you would think I would cry less. I cried more. Every time I wrote about Charles dying and I wanted the scene to be just right, and the same with the Annie scene, and the Emma scene; I just wanted them to be just right and I don't want to overwrite them because you don't want to overwrite for your reader. You want your reader to be able to bring his or her own emotion to it, but every time I wrote about Charles, I sobbed more and more.

So I have to back you up a couple of years. When my older son went off to college, I cried a lot, a lot, a lot. Very attached to people I love, and as I was finishing the last draft of Charles and Emma, my younger son was going to college. He was going to college 13 blocks from where we live. I didn't think this was such a big deal. I was a little upset because these life changes are big, and for a mom, when her kid goes, it's a big deal.

But one day I was sitting in my office, and he was packing to go to college, and he was literally packing, and I had to finish the book, and I was writing that scene again where Charles was dying, and I was sobbing as I wrote it — just sobbing. And Benjamin comes in, and he pats me on the back, and he says, "Oh, there, there, mom. I'm not going that far away. I'll see you soon." And I said, "Oh, I'm not crying about you. Charles died." And he still hasn't forgiven me, but his older brother was good enough to cry about. Why wasn't I crying about him?

And one more story about Charles dying… My husband claims, and I believe he's correct, that one day, I was writing that scene and he was next to me, because sometimes we share a desk and an office, and, and I said, I whispered to myself, "Oh, maybe this time, Charles won't die." Not only is it true, it's a true story. Of course, he dies and I was writing the book so it was completely illogical, but there you go!

Letting the Manuscript Cool a Bit

Revision. Someone once said, and I wish I knew who said it, "Writing is all about revision." We have a saying in our family and I'm going to clean it up: the first draft is the barf draft. Was that cleaned up enough? The first draft is the barf draft. You just barf it out. I mean, ideally, that's what you do. You just get it on paper because in a way, that's the hardest part, and then you go back and you revise, and you revise, and you get it just as good as you can possibly get it. And sometimes you know that there's something wrong and you don't know what it is and it can take the third, fourth, or fifth revision until you get it.

That happened with me with just one sentence at the end of one chapter with a couple of — I change the word order a little bit and it always bothered me, that sentence. And then at the 11th hour, I changed that word, and I said, "Oh, my goodness," because it went out in the bound galleys — the copy that some people get first. It went out with the wrong word order, and I was so worried that the reviewers wouldn't like the book because of that one sentence. Thank goodness nobody mentioned it, but it's all the revision.

There's a great book called Writing on Both Sides of the Brain. So you write with your creative side first and then you bring in your critical editor. And the trick is not to bring in that critical editor the first time. You write and you write and you let yourself be as creative — and this is for fiction and nonfiction — and then you bring in the critical editor. And then, ideally, you put the manuscript away. Then you come back to it with fresh eyes, and then maybe you let your creative part come back in again, and it's this balancing act, but it's always nice to let a manuscript cool a little bit. So that's why, at the very end, that 11th hour when I hadn't seen that sentence for a long time, I just got it, and I knew what was the right thing to do.

Critique

I have a couple writers groups. It's great, up to a point, to work with a writers group. There are times in the writing of a manuscript when you really want the input. There are times when you don't want the input. But my writers group that I've been going to for many years in Pennsylvania — and I try to still go back to as often as I can even though I live in New York now…we just trust each other so much, and we love each other after all these years of working together. And we're very, very good at critiquing.

And what's interesting is that different people in the group bring different things to the process. And there's some people who are great at plot. And there's some people — critiquing about plot. Some people who are great at critiquing the nonfiction side, voice. All those things come into play in both fiction and nonfiction. And with the writers group, it's always great to have these different set of eyes. I go back to my office and I have all the copies of the manuscript that they've written on, and I know everybody's handwriting by now or they've signed it. And it's so interesting to see who says what and if everybody says the same thing about one passage, I know they're right. I don't always take everything that they say, but I do take a lot of it.

I think the critiquing process is a great process. I believe there are rules, though. Some people are not good critiquers and I've been with people who are damaging rather than supportive, and so I think some of the rules, if I may offer them. You should always start with something good. There's always something good to say. And don't think, but there is always something good to say. Never tell the person what to do. You can point out the problem. "I didn't understand this passage," or, "What did you mean by this?" If you have an idea, because I always have ideas, you can say, "Now this is just my idea. You may not want to do this."

As a writing teacher I know says, you should say, "I don't want to write for the author," but too many people say, "I don't want to write for the author, but…," and then they write for the author. You don't want to write for the author. It has to remain the author's work. Likewise, when you are being critiqued, you are not allowed to talk back. So if someone critiques you and says, "I don't understand what you meant by that," you can't say, "What I meant by…," because when an editor, someone who you want to publish your book or when your teacher is reading your report, you're not there to defend it. You're not there to say, "This is what I meant." So your words on the paper have to say it. So when you're being critiqued… Unless you're specifically asked a question, you're not allowed to talk.

ike to read along. Some people like to just listen. I like to be able to see the words in front of me. Some people might be better critiquers reading along. Other people might be better listening, but I think all work that's being critiqued. In fact, all work that's being written should be read out loud. So even when I wrote Charles and Emma, which is a very long book, I read it out loud. I read chapters out loud. I read it out loud to myself. I read it out loud to anybody who happened to be in the room — that kind of thing because you can hear things when you read it. Because books were originally oral. So we want to be able to hear it in our heads, too.

INK Think Tank

So INK Think Tank… It's a really great new idea. It all started with this blog called I.N.K. — Interesting Nonfiction for Kids — that was started by this woman named Linda Salzman, who is passionate about nonfiction writing for kids. So she got together, she asked a group of nonfiction authors to blog, to write blog posts about their writing nonfiction books, how they think nonfiction books can be used by teachers and librarians, what kids get from nonfiction books. Sometimes nonfiction is the 'ugly stepchild.' Fiction is the glamour we want, and nonfiction — nonfiction is very cool. Nonfiction is great, and there are a lot of kids who only want to read nonfiction. A lot of kids just want to know as much as they can possibly know.

So Linda got together this amazing group of authors — I was not in the first batch of authors — and they started blogging. Recently, I and a couple of my other friends have been asked to join and we've been blogging. It's so fun! You have to do it once a month. And every time that month comes it's, "Oh, it's an assignment. I got to think of something really good to say." Vicky Cobb, who is one of the bloggers and has a very famous children's book science writer — my kids when we read all of her books…

She had this idea that there should be a website that teachers could go to and plug into a search database a topic and an age group and a really good children's book about that topic would come up. Because it's really fun to teach nonfiction topics not using a textbook, but using a trade book written for children that was fun and well-illustrated and with lively language. Also some teachers are a little scared of some topics. I know I was. I didn't take any science classes. So for me to be able to teach about science would have been really hard while if I had had a book to teach with, that would be great.

So we have this new site called INK Think Tank where you can go in, and you can plug in Charles Darwin and different ages and you'll come up with a couple of different books right there on that website that you can then use to teach about Charles Darwin or Thomas Edison or John F. Kennedy or women astronauts or water or honeybees or butterflies. So many different topics. I'm missing many of them, but it's a great website.

Blogging and Tweeting

I've been finding facebook is a great networking for not only people who are my readers but also my colleagues: editors, other authors, and writers. We learn from each other through facebook now. I know that sounds surprising, but it's not. We post questions. "Has anybody been to this library or this book festival?" Or, "I'm having trouble finding photographs about this. Does anybody know?" People answer each other. It's great. Librarians ask me questions on facebook. Bring 'em on. I love it.

Now, Twitter. I just started tweeting. I believe it's tweeting. I believe you say tweeting, not twittering, but you can tell I'm a newbie, a few months ago. I don't know that I have the complete hang of it yet, but I honestly feel I've already made friends. In fact, I have made a friend, a couple of friends from Twitter who then I met in person. I've gotten to know them just through Twitter and it's also a great way for me to get the word out about events that I'm going to go do, about topics that I'm interested in.

When a book is being published, you have a Twitter book birthday party and everybody sends you congratulations. And we did that for a new book, a new little picture book I had out called Cool Dog, School Dog. It caused so much traffic to my website that I had to upgrade my website service. I have to pay more money now to host my website because of Twitter, which I'm very happy to do. It means more people are coming to my website, which I've put a lot of work into and so they not only get to see the book I was tweeting about, that we had the birthday party about, Cool Dog, School Dog, but they come to see my many pages about Charles and Emma, about Holidays Around the World, and all of my books.

So it is taking away from my writing — all the social networking. So I am going to have to figure out how to do it. I want to do both, but I'm going to have to figure out how to do that, the, the tweeting, the facebooking, and I have a blog that I love to write. So I'm going to have to figure out to do all of that and still write more books. I haven't figured that out yet. I would like some guru to tell me how to do that. My friend, Laurie Halse Anderson, should probably tell me how to do that. In her case, it may be lots of coffee and no sleep, although I think I saw on facebook recently that she's giving up coffee. So I'll have to ask her.

All Kinds of Genres

My most recent project is a new genre for me. I know! I just can't not stretch myself. Charles and Emma was a huge stretch for me. I had never written such a long book. I'd never written such a detailed book, such an emotionally book that resonated so emotionally with me. So I decided I had to stretch myself again and I wrote a young adult novel. I wrote a young adult novel. It has not been sent out yet. So I am not going to jinx it, but my agent likes it so we're hoping. And so that's that.

I have in the works a picture book that's already been accepted. It's being illustrated right now. Again, stretching myself. It's a picture book about a mathematician named Paul Erdos and I will just tell you right now that I am pretty much a math dummy. So to write a picture book about a mathematician was a challenge, but I loved doing that. I fell in love with him, as well. That's going to be published, I think, in 2011, and it's going to be called, I think, The Boy Who Loved Math.

And then I am also looking for my next big nonfiction project, and I have a couple of different ideas. I don't like to be bored. So I like to write about lots of different things. I feel that there are many parts to me. I think children's book authors often talk about how old are you really inside. And I think I'm all these ages. I'm not really this age that I really am. It baffles me how I can be 51. That's just not possible because inside I am five… I'm 12… I'm eight… I'm 15. So when I was writing my young adult novel, I was 15. I was really 15. I was so 15 that I had all kinds of 15-year-old issues going on when I was writing it. And I had to really remind myself, "No, not everybody is looking at you."

When I was working on Charles and Emma, people often ask me about Charles and Emma — why did you write it for kids? And I want to tell you why I wrote it for kids. When I was writing Charles and Emma, I wrote it for the me at the age that I wanted to read that kind of thing, and I was a teenager. As a teenager, I wanted to read about science and religion and the big issues and conflict and love and marriage and death and challenges, and so I wrote that book for that age.

When I write for younger kids, I'm writing those books for me at that age. I don't know how else to say it and I think the voice that comes out is the voice that me at that age wants to hear. I hope this doesn't sound wafty or weird, but it's just so real to me. So when I write Cool Dog, School Dog, I am five or seven, or actually in fourth grade because fourth graders love these rhyming books because then they do ripoffs of them, which is fantastic. I hope people send me ripoff, ripoffs of Cool Dog, School Dog.

When I wrote about honeybees, I'll give you a great example. I found out something really disgusting about honeybees, and I cheered in my office because I felt that it's a third-grade book and third graders love disgusting things. And when I go to schools and I talk to kids and I talked with third graders and I tell them the disgusting thing and honeybees, there are a couple of disgusting things in that book. They roar. They love it. So I don't know. Maybe I'm a multiple personality. I just have all these different ages and I love to write them all.

An Excerpt from Charles and Emma

Hi. I'm Deborah Heiligman. I'm going to read to you from Charles and Emma: the Darwins' Leap of Faith. This is the opening. Chapter One: Better Than a Dog.

"Why, the shape of his head is quite altered," said Doctor Robert Darwin, Charles' father in 1836 after Charles' five-year voyage. In the summer of 1838, in his rented rooms on Great Marlborough Street, London, Charles Darwin drew a line down the middle of a piece of scrap paper. He had been back in England for almost two years after a monumental voyage around the world. He was in his late 20's. It was time to decide. Across the top of the left-hand side, he wrote 'marry.' On the right, he wrote 'not marry,' and in the middle, this is the question.

It was easy for Charles to think of things to write under not marry. 'Freedom to go where one liked,' he began. Charles loved to travel. His voyage had lasted almost five years. He had been the naturalist on the H.M.S. Beagle, a British surveying ship. He was hardly seasick while on board, but he spent as much time as he could on land exploring on horseback and on foot and collecting thousands of specimens from corals in the Cocos Keeling Islands of the Indian Ocean to beetles in Australia to a fox in Chile.

He now lived in London with his servant from the Beagle, Syms Covington, fiddler and boy to the poop cabin. Charles had taught Syms to shoot and skin birds and to help him list and catalog the specimens. Now, Charles and Syms were surrounded by neatly-stacked wooden crates, casts, and barrels filled with many of their treasures from Patagonia, Brazil, Chile, and Tierra del Fuego. Fossil, bones, skin, shells, fish preserved in spirits of wine, manella in sprits of wine, insects, reptiles, and birds in spirits of wine, plants, rocks, carcasses of dead animals, and beetles. What if Charles wanted to go on another adventure and collect more specimens? How could he do that if he got married? Next, under not married he wrote 'choice of society and little of it.' 'Conversation of clever men at clubs.'

I'm going to skip around and tell you a little bit more about what he wrote on the not married side.

He wrote 'not forced to visit relatives' and 'bend in every trifle.' He liked his brother, his sisters, his cousins the Wedgewood's, but what if he didn't like his wife's relatives? There was so much compromising you had to do if you were married. He could see it in his friends, many of whom had gotten married while he was away. He wrote also 'to have the expense of anxiety of children perhaps quarreling.' And then he wrote and underlined twice, 'loss of time.' Charles needed as many hours a day as he could to do his work.

First of all, he had to solicit more experienced naturalists to help him analyze his specimens. And what if he had found any new species? What significance did his finds have if any? Charles had a huge idea that he wanted to devote his time to and he was afraid that being married would get in the way. But he also had reasons to marry. And he started his marry side with interestingly, children, if it pleased God. He enjoyed other people's children. He loved playing with them and observing them. He also wrote 'constant companion and friend in old age who will feel interested in one.' He wrote 'object to be beloved and played with.' And then he wrote 'better than a dog, anyhow.'