PROVO — For many of the authors and illustrators at the 29th BYU Symposium on Books for Young Readers, ideas for stories have come from personal experiences.
Illustrator Molly Idle, whose works include the Tea Rex series, Zombelina series and Caldecott Honor-winning book “Flora and the Flamingo,” has drawn on her childhood experiences and on her children for ideas.
“When we make art … whatever it may be,” she said, “we are bringing all of our past experiences to the art that we make and putting … different parts of ourselves into different pieces of art.”
She showed the audience a picture of herself as a young girl decked out in “a lot of pink for any one person to wear” for a dance recital. She also admitted that, for a long time, she thought “flamenco dancing” was “flamingo dancing.”
Combining the pink dancer memory and the word confusion helped inspire the idea for “Flora and the Flamingo,” an interactive wordless picture book about a little girl, Flora, who makes friends with a flamingo through dance.
Her book series Tea Rex came from an experience she had with one of her sons who, after a trip to the natural history museum, asked her, “Mom, do you think T-Rexes like crumpets with their tea?”
This experience reminded Idle that “things come from unexpected places and usually when you are out and doing.”
Author of the first 35 Baby-Sitter’s Club books, Ann M. Martin was a baby sitter, so she said she had a lot of experience to draw on for the stories.
One experience in particular landed in her book. Once when she was baby-sitting, she went outside to find the kids washing their parents’ station wagon car — with Brillo pads. In addition to personal experiences, she said she also drew on general experiences, such as when parents leave.
Her most recent book, “Rain Reign,” came from a variety of personal experiences. The story is about a girl with Asperger’s syndrome, Rose, who is obsessed with homonyms and her dog, Rain. Martin told the audience that like Rose, she is obsessed with homonyms.
Children’s book author Kristyn Crow loves rhythm and rhyme. She has been making up rhymes and tap dancing rhythms since she was little.
Her first picture book, titled “Cool Daddy Rat,” was inspired by her experience living in New York.
“I loved the street musicians that played on the corners,” she said. “I wanted to capture the flavor of New York, the rhythm, the scat, the jazz.”
“Bedtime at the Swamp” came from her childhood when she imagined there was a monster living in the creek behind her grandparents’ home.
Many of Crow’s other books have come from experiences with her children. For example, one day her son was playing the guitar and he sang, “I’ve got the middle child blues.” She thought that could make a fun story.
A week before the conference, author Elizabeth Wein’s 19-year-old daughter told her, “The story of your life is like a badly written young adult novel.”
That prompted Wein to share stories from her past at the symposium. She had a challenging adolescence with her parents’ divorce, a car accident that took her mother and left her brother seriously injured, among other hardships.
“I’ve never written a full-length novel based on the events of my own life. But I do take strands and themes for my books,” said Wein, the author of short stories and novels, including “Code Name Verity,” “Black Dove, White Raven” and “The Winter Prince.”
One of these strands is a character that has appeared so many times, she gave it a name, “the wounded brother,” she said. This character is a little like her own brother who suffered serious injuries in a car crash.
Wein explained that one reason she likes fiction is “it is so obviously untrue and yet so clearly close to the truth."
Writing fiction, she added, gives writers the opportunity to start over and change the ending.
“You can approach fiction as if it were an alternate history for your own life,” she said.