Writing history and biography for kids calls for special skills that can only be acquired through practice and that are different from those required for an adult audience.

I try to find clues in the documented record - from the subject's own testimony, from the testimony of other people. When you're writing a biography, you're trying to understand your subject in the same way that you try to understand one of your friends, and that effort at understanding is always very imperfect.

A children's biography doesn't have to be comprehensive, and it doesn't have to be definitive. It does have to be accurate, to the extent that's possible. And most of all, it has to be a piece of literature, a compelling read. I want the reader to discover the joy of reading.

Writing history and biography for kids calls for special skills that can only be acquired through practice and that are different from those required for an adult audience.

I think that today's books, in which every quote, every conversation, is taken from a memoir, an autobiography, an interview, or what-have-you, are much more convincing.

With the audience I write for, I want to make sure that the reader is eagerly turning every page. I want each of my books to be an absorbing reading experience, an authentic piece of literature. The worst thing that can happen is for a book to have a chilling effect on the reader, to have a kid pick it up and look at a bunch of footnotes and think, No, I'm not going to read this, it's too intimidating.

Let's say that history is what happened. The record of what happened is how each individual happens to see those events. They've already been filtered. When the historian or biographer takes over, history is no longer exactly what happened, because there has been a process of selection going on; it's impossible to write about anyone, any event, in any period of time, without in some way imposing, even unconsciously, your own standards, your own values.