00:25We'll be right back in Michigan, Grand Rapids, Michigan.
00:30And the kind of setting that I grew up in had a real kind of, you know, in the country
00:35feeling like there were ponds and there were streams and there were places to go catch
00:38tadpoles and things like that.
00:41I had some interest in art as a child and I was a pretty good drawer in elementary school
00:46and I didn't take art in high school.
00:48But when I went to college, what I discovered was that there were very many students that
00:53had committed themselves to art as high school students and they showed up as freshmen at
00:59the University of Michigan with these drawing skills, which I took to be innate.
01:04And so I was intimidated by their skills, how well they could draw.
01:08So I pretty quickly found myself attracted to sculpture.
01:21So I graduated around the mid-70s and took my degrees in sculpture, made sculpture and had
01:29some shows in New York City and things were really, you know, looking fine.
01:32At the same time winter had set in and my studio that I had to make sculpture was almost impossible
01:38to keep in the winter.
01:40At some point I said, this is crazy, I can't make stuff here.
01:43And I decided I would spend my time at night making something in my apartment.
01:47So I started drawing pictures.
02:01My wife at that point was an elementary school art teacher and she was looking at my drawings.
02:07She said, you should think about maybe thinking about, could these be illustrations?
02:13So she took a portfolio of drawings up to Boston to own a headphone company.
02:18And the editor there liked them very much.
02:20And so I started working on a little story.
02:23The Garden of Abdel-Gazazi, it was of a boy chasing a dog through a topiary garden.
02:31And the fact was, once I delivered the book, I'd actually gone back to my sculpture again.
02:34I thought that first book would just do the whimsy, a lark.
02:37If they'd print 10,000, they'd sell two and I'd have 8,000 remainders that I could buy for, you
02:43know, a buck a book.
02:44And I would have Christmas presents for eternity.
02:47But they sold them all.
02:48And many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many more.
02:54I get a lot of mail from kids.
02:57And I would say that that's probably the number one, the number one question.
03:00Where do ideas come from?
03:02You know, ideas come from every place.
03:04The simplest example of where ideas come from.
03:06I was once in my kitchen and I saw two ants on the countertop.
03:10And I was pondering what a journey that was for them.
03:14That ended up being the inspiration for two bad ants.
03:17The story that actually grew out of that is a story about making a bad trade.
03:23The ants basically trade sugar for their life in the ant hole.
03:26So you actually have two things there.
03:27You have one, which is a stimulation to tell the story about two ants, which was just the result of,
03:34you know, seeing the two ants on my countertop.
03:36But then you have the other story, which is the story inside the story, which grows out of values that
03:42I have as a person.
03:49In Polar Express, I saw in my mind's eye a train.
03:55It was stopped on the tracks because it was cold.
04:01It was snowing.
04:02The steam that was coming out of it was just creating a kind of like a cloud around this train.
04:07You could still see it.
04:08You could still see that there were lights on in the cars.
04:11And then as I thought about this train, I was struck with the idea of a train that was all
04:18-powerful, a train that could go anywhere.
04:19But the odd thing with the Polar Express is that it felt more like a recovered dream, a recovered memory.
04:27You know, because suddenly I didn't have to wonder what happened.
04:30I knew what happened.
04:31You know, I knew exactly what happened.
04:33I got up there, and I saw what I saw.
04:37And I came home, and I believed in what I saw.
04:40I believe.
04:43Kids have a tendency to rely very heavily on the things they're exposed to, what they've seen on television.
04:50Or what they've seen in a movie.
04:54And I try to encourage kids when I start to write, to write about things that actually happened to them.
05:00And then if they want to fantasize about it in a way, that's okay.
05:04But I try to get them to start from themselves.
05:23And then if they want to talk to them, they're going to talk to them, they're going to talk to
05:26them, they're going to talk to them, they're going to talk to them, they're going to talk to them, they're
05:27going to talk to them, they're going to talk to them, they're going to talk to them, they're going to
05:27talk to them, they're going to talk to them, they're going to talk to them, they're going to talk to
05:28them, they're going to talk to them, they're going to talk to them, they're going to talk to them, they're
05:28going to talk to them, they're going to talk to them, they're going to talk to them, they're going to
05:28talk to them, they're going to talk to them, they're going to talk to them, they're going to talk to
05:28them, they're going to talk to them, they're going to talk to them, they're going to talk to them, they're
05:28going to talk to them, they're going
Comments