Don't teach in your picture book. Do not preach. Do not talk down to the reader. Kids are lectured and told what to do all day every day, and they feel disempowered. So, the strongest possible way to get a message across is to have a child go through something, learn something, practice something, maybe even teach something to somebody else, without actually coming out and directly saying the words.

We've all heard people who claim that somebody took their idea and is now publishing it, or that somewhere somehow, another writer has come up with basically the same idea, sold it, and now, what does that mean for your idea?

Writing invariably is a passion for a lot of people that I work with. And they just, for whatever reason, have not been able to sort of devote themselves to it until now. And that's usually when they come to me and I plug into their process.

This one's for all the people who are still casting around for an idea. How do you create a story? What matters to you, and what matters to readers?

Stories are like people. They have a body, and a soul. The body is the plot, the actions that happen. And the soul is the character, the protagonist, the key person (or persons) bound by the circumstances of the plot and forced into decisions.

Here's an energizing pep talk on how to write, including the ingredients you need to get started and keep going.