Last week, I had the pleasure of working with Linda Sue Park and Ed Young at the American Embassy School of New Delhi, India. We were the featured authors at AES’s annual Authors’ Week. During one of our many dinners together, Linda Sue and I talked about the importance of reading children’s books as a prerequisite to writing children’s books. Linda Sue is a Newbury Award-winning novelist and picture book author. Although she is essentially a fiction writer, the crafts of writing fiction and non-fiction probably have more in common than they have differences, and the need for reading is surely a commonality.
Linda Sue has posted something about reading for writing on her website, www.lspark.com. I am traveling in India this week, checking email intermittently at internet cafes (and wondering why they call themselves cafes when they serve neither coffee nor tea nor anything else one can drink or eat). For this post — if I can squeeze it out before the power goes off again — I am going to quote this portion of Linda Sue’s website, and then comment upon it briefly.
The Importance of Reading