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.

Thomas Jefferson once said, "Women shouldn't wrinkle their pretty little foreheads with politics." Now does that mean he was a sexist, or was he just expressing what most males, and maybe most females, felt at that time? Or are both true?

If you're doing a good job as author, then you get the reader to engage in whatever speculation might be called for. And it's much more meaningful for the reader, if he or she comes up with the questions.

Digging up new information and speculating on it isn't your primary purpose when you're writing a biography intended for young readers, unless you find compelling evidence that departs from the accepted wisdom. A biography for young people calls for the demanding art of distillation, the art of storytelling, and your responsibility is to stick as closely as possible to the documented record.

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.

The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights were all written by affluent white males, but to discuss them in any meaningful way, you have to bring in the roles of African Americans - the enslaved blacks - and the roles of women, who were scarcely acknowledged by those documents. You have to discuss why slavery wasn't outlawed by the Constitution, why women weren't given the votes. The Bill of Rights isn't about dead white males anymore, and it's not just about live white males either; it's about every minority group that exists.

I'd like to ask Eleanor Roosevelt what she regrets most, because I think that might reveal something that I didn't catch on to while I was writing my book and, hopefully, that would start a conversation.