Things were moving in the wrong direction.īut I kept going. But many of my early ideas presented serious logistical problems and I routinely went back to the drawing board. In the first draft, Roz was a soldier who arrived on the island via plane crash. Over the following year-and-a-half I rewrote the entire story. My old friend and editor gave me her notes and I got back to writing. Luckily, the wonderful Alvina Ling was on my side.
But Little, Brown & Company liked it enough to sign it up and in July of 2014 it became official: my robot nature story would be published! There was just one problem…I didn’t know how to finish it. I spent over a year cobbling together my first draft of The Wild Robot. It’s great for organizing notes and research and chapters. I used a program called Scrivener to write the story. But I tried not to self-edit and I let the words flow. Up close, I realized just how hard it is to find the right words. I was no longer looking at the story with binoculars, but with a microscope. With my writing rules and my story maps and my research and my notes and my sketches in tow, I drove out to a cabin in the woods, brewed a pot of coffee, and opened my laptop.
In my free time I scribbled notes about a robot in the wild. I had to get back to work on The Curious Garden, but that question never left my mind. I was really intrigued by the image of a robot in a tree, and a question suddenly popped into my mind: What would an intelligent robot do in the wilderness? And that got me thinking about scenes of unnatural things living in surprising places, and I made a few sketches like this.
I loved imagining scenes of nature living in surprising places. If you have a few minutes I’d like to tell you about it.īack in 2008, while working on a picture book called The Curious Garden, I spent a lot of time making sketches like this. It wasn’t a graceful process, but I survived the stress and the solitude and the crippling self-doubt, and now my novel has entered the world.