Mo Willems

ReadKiddoRead and Mo Willems


ReadKiddoRead: Just for starters, we know you’ve made TV shows. You’ve done standup. You’ve done films. I’ve read a little bit about why you decided, but why did you get into writing books?

Mo Willems: You know, there are a lot of reasons for me to start making books. The primary ones, I have to admit, are selfish, in that when somebody writes books, you get to do it at home. And I had a kid, and I was making television for kids and not seeing my kid, which seemed sort of contrary to what I was trying to accomplish. There’s also something really exciting about books in the physical sculpture of them. They’re real. They don’t have to be turned on. They don’t need electricity. And kids come to them in their own way. They can be read with different voices. They can be played different ways. Essentially, television, which I love as a medium, but essentially, it’s a medium that you consume. You sit for a certain amount of time and you consume what is being given to you.

But with a book, you really get to interact with it. That is, not only by reading it, but by playing it later. You can draw the characters. You can do it as a play. There is laugh time, if you would, your caregiver, that you’re sitting on this, put on his lap and getting read to. And it’s this great physical thing that you can come to on so many different terms.

ReadKiddoRead: Yes.

Mo Willems: And then on just a business level, television takes an insane amount of money. And when a lot of people are spending a lot of money, they really are afraid to give up control. And so there are all these criteria you have to work with. And when you make a book, you can really make an experiment because there’s not that much invested in it, which allows you a lot more freedom to just do weird stuff. And ironically, the weirder it is, the better it’s going to be.

ReadKiddoRead: One of your missions is to de-mystify the creative process to make it easier for kids to get involved?

Mo Willems: Yes.

ReadKiddoRead: And I was thinking, I mean, it seems like we all seem to believe or are taught that writing always follows reading. If you’re composing music, it’s because you’ve listened to music before. But do you think this is 100 percent true? I mean, I don’t expect anybody to doubt that reading is one of the keys to becoming a great reader. And of course, you can’t physically write unless you first know how to read. But I guess I’m wondering is there something to encourage readers to be confident?

Mo Willems: Oh, absolutely. I mean you know, again, I hope that my books are only going to be the spark for a larger sort of creative process, and one of that is writing and drawing. One of the great things about drawing and cartooning, in particular, is that you can’t make a wrong drawing. You may not like your cartoon but that’s fine because your pencil has an eraser and you can erase and do it over, so there’s nothing wrong about your drawings.

And cartooning and writing comics, that is, drawing characters who then have word bubbles, is a form of physical empathy. That is to say that when you are drawing, you are thinking about that character you’re drawing and you’re empathizing with them. So if there’s anything that this world needs more of, it’s empathy. So one of my real goals is not just to get kids to draw but to get their parents to draw. You know, instead of using photographs for your Christmas cards, make a little comic. All those sort of things will help kids realize that drawing is real, is fun, is a form of communication.

ReadKiddoRead: And is accessible to them.

Mo Willems: Yes. Well, you know, you’re never going to be a professional basketball player but a grownup guy is still going to play hoops in the backyard. You should, as an adult, still be sketching, still be doodling. Even if you’re not going to end up being a comic book artist or a cartoonist, it’s still -- it’s a form of communication and frankly, it’s fun.

ReadKiddoRead: And the same with writing, I mean, it’s --

Mo Willems: Absolutely, absolutely. And there are so many opportunities to do that. And one of the great things about technology is now, with email and all that stuff, the written word is becoming more important. We used to only talk on the phone. Now, you can really compose funny little poems or tell funny little stories and make drawings and attach them and communicate to an audience, and that maybe an audience of one.

ReadKiddoRead: Yes, that’s brilliant. You said that you prefer that your books be played rather than read. Do you remember when that realization first struck you? I think that’s a brilliant line.

Mo Willems: You know, all of this stuff sort of evolved so all of this stuff comes from what I had learned as a writer on Sesame Street and the research I have done, which is sort of the boring pedantic stuff, and then discovering that kids were taking my stuff and messing with it. I mean it’s so awesome. Once a month, I get this sort of this big envelope or a box of kids infringing on my copyright in really wacky ways and they’re doing, “Don’t Let the Pigeon Operate the Catapults,” or “The Pigeon Finds a Girlfriend,” or I just got one, “The Pigeon Meets Obama.”

ReadKiddoRead: I saw that on your blog and I think that’s great.

Mo Willems: Yes, it’s really these hilarious things. And I think that as the kids started doing this, I started to realize, that’s the real thing about the book. It’s not the consumptions, it’s the creation. And so I decided to make a very dogmatic decision in my work, which is that the lead character of every book I do can be reasonably drawn by a five-year-old. So that you can take that character and run with it very quickly, that you can draw the pigeon –- even if you can barely hold a crayon and your Mama or your Daddy won’t say, “What is that?” They’ll say, “Oh, it’s a pigeon.”

ReadKiddoRead: Right.

Mo Willems: And that then allows you to go off into these really fantastic journeys of communication.

ReadKiddoRead: Yes, that’s empowering them. That’s great.

Mo Willems: I got to say, usually, if I go to a school group, I talk to a bunch of kids and I say, “Do you have a title for a Pigeon book?” it becomes really -- it becomes a catharsis. Most of the boys say, “Don’t Let the Pigeon Have Food,” because the boys are always hungry. But sometimes, they might be communicating to a friend, or a parent, a desire through this ridiculous animal.

ReadKiddoRead: Yes. James gets a lot of fan fiction based on his own series.

Mo Willems: In a sense, it’s really blessed technology for that because fan fiction, that’s what I’m talking about. That’s what I’m talking about, with even adults still doing it. It’s not embarrassing. You’re not doing it to make a living but you’re still doing it to communicate. And I guess that that accessibility to the author and to their works and to other people who like that work has really been facilitated. It’s great.

When I was a kid, I went to a very small high school. There weren’t that many people who liked Monty Python. So I couldn’t do sketches of Monty Python with anybody because I was freaky. But if I had grown up in an area or in an era where you could just find a Monty Python fan site, I could have been writing sketches and skits and sharing them and become a better writer at a very early age.

ReadKiddoRead: Now you have a daughter. I gather she’s an active reader?

Mo Willems: She is. And I can’t take any credit for that. That’s my wife, is a very active reader. I am more of an active writer than I am a reader, I’m afraid, to my embarrassment.

ReadKiddoRead: Does your wife have any good tips on getting kids into reading?

Mo Willems: Well, my daughter loves stories and one advantage that my daughter has is that for several years, she did not read a book written by someone she didn’t know. And that sort of de-mystified it for her because she could say, “Wow, Jon really did a good job this time,” or “Boy, So-and-So could have done better on this,” or “I didn’t understand this,” or whatnot. You know, books are made on paper. They’re not made on stone. And it allowed her to read critically and therefore, enjoy it more.

And I would say what Jon Scieszka says as well, “Any reading is reading.” Let them enjoy what they’re reading. Let them choose. Which is not to say that I don’t come into the room and say, “Hey, I found this thing that’s really cool. Give it a shot.” But if they don’t like it, that’s fine. There are more than enough stories out there that you can find something that your kid is really going to be jazzed by.

ReadKiddoRead: Right. Find their level and what they’re comfortable with and excited about.

Mo Willems: And just what jazzes them, you know, just what’s working. If they like funny, what’s funny. If they like princesses, what’s princessy. You know, whatever it is.

ReadKiddoRead: Both funny and princessy. I know. I’ve seen the book with own kids. How about your daughter? Does she have any leanings, any genres she’s into?

Mo Willems: You know, my daughter reads voraciously. She was reading a lot of the classics. She read all the Oz books last summer. In the last three or four days, she’s read six of the Lemony Snicket books.

ReadKiddoRead: Oh, fantastic, yes.

Mo Willems: And you know what she loves about that? Is in chapter four, she can go, “Uh-oh, I see the villain,” and she has ownership of the structure of the plot, and that really entertains her. And therefore, then, her games start becoming about when does the villain come in and how is the villain thwarted? And even though my daughter is an accomplished reader, we read together all the time and I had been reading Bone with her and we sit down everyday or every other day and we read a chapter or so of Bone, which is a lot of fun.

ReadKiddoRead: Out loud?

Mo Willems: Yes, absolutely, absolutely. Just because you can read by yourself doesn’t mean that you have to.

ReadKiddoRead: Do you think there’s an age on when that should stop?

Mo Willems: I would say probably in the mid to late hundreds, you should stop reading together. Because then, by the time you’re 120, 130, your hearing isn’t that good. Your lap might break because your bones calcify after a while.

ReadKiddoRead: Right. Plus your parents get inattentive.

Mo Willems: Yes, it’s dangerous. But I would say any point at that point and beyond, not so wise. Before that, it’s fine.

ReadKiddoRead: Excellent. Let’s see if I got anything else for you. How about just kids in general? Even before you were doing books, obviously, you were doing Sesame Street and Codename: Kids Next Door and all that stuff. How did you get into that even before you had a daughter?

Mo Willems: I fell into kids sort of backwards. I got hired by Sesame Street as a very, very young guy because they were looking for writers who were funny. They figured, “We could teach you how to write for kids but we can’t teach you how to be funny.” And so they hired me based on my adult comedy work.

ReadKiddoRead: You did standup, right?

Mo Willems: I did standup. I did sketch. I made animated films for Tournée and things like that. And so the first couple of years, I was excited because it was a job and I was learning about structure and how to write but I didn’t really think of myself as a kids’ writer and I didn’t really aspire to it. And then I started to realize how much harder it was, because it’s pure, in a sense. You don’t have cultural modifiers. You can’t write about the Arc de Triomphe or you can’t write the word “Lincoln” and, suddenly, kids understand because they’re four. They don’t have that cultural awareness.

So everything has to be really fundamental, and I enjoy that sparseness. Trying to make something funny, like the Elephant and Piggie books, never have more than fifty distinct words. Well, how do you have a real emotional, heartrending, dramatic story when you can’t have any words that are more than two syllables? That’s an exciting puzzle. It appeals to the mathematician in me.

ReadKiddoRead: It definitely works. It’s just paid great dividends with my six-year-old daughter and I think I Am Invited To A Party! has to be her all-time favorite.

Mo Willems: Awesome, awesome.

ReadKiddoRead: It’s so bright and quick, it’s awesome. I know you talked about not talking down to kids. I know that’s part of the challenge there, too. They don’t have that depth of reference out there that you could tap into…

Mo Willems: They don’t have the depth of reference but they do have the depth of feeling.

ReadKiddoRead: Right.

Mo Willems: They’re not dumber than we are. This always seems to surprise people but it turns out that we are actually members of the same species. So we go through the exact same things. It’s more difficult being a child because you don’t have the context of how to relate to what you’re going to, but they’re not dumber. They’re just shorter.

ReadKiddoRead: Right. Now, if you would just catch us up with the present, Naked Mole Rat is out. Is it going over well?

Mo Willems: Yes. Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed is my most recent picture book and I’ve been traveling around and reading it to kids and everybody seems to be enjoying it and the book is doing well. One of the exciting things about that book is I grew up ripping off Charles Schulz. I grew up drawing Snoopy and Peanuts characters, all the time as a child, and this book, Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed, was actually drawn with a nib that Charles Schulz had used.

ReadKiddoRead: Oh, fantastic.

Mo Willems: Which was given to me when I went to go visit there. So for me, that’s a real kind of coming full circle.

ReadKiddoRead: Oh, cool.

Mo Willems: I discovered how difficult it was to draw like him. I mean, my drawing -- that nib is a hard nib to use. It gave me even greater appreciation for Sparky’s draftsmanship.

ReadKiddoRead: Fantastic. All right, Mo, I think that’s just about everything. Thanks so much for your time. This is totally an honor.

Mo Willems: Awesome. I appreciate it.

ReadKiddoRead: Thanks Mo. Bye.