Description:
Interview with award winning author Tammi Sauer
Transcript:
Interviewer: Sheldon Beach
Interviewee: Tammi Sauer
SB: Welcome. Today I am talking to children’s author Tammi Sauer, winner of multiple book awards including three-time Oklahoma Book Award winner. We are going to talk a bit about children’s books today, so I hope you enjoy.
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SB: Welcome, Tammi, it’s good to have you.
TS: Hi, I’m happy to be here, Sheldon, thank you.
SB: You know, you’re our first children’s author. I’ve talked to a few young adult people, but I have different types of questions for you I think today, so,
TS: Okay.
SB: So, it’ll be interesting. So, how did you get into that? How did you start?
TS: Well, I was planning to be a third-grade teacher, that was always my dream. And my senior year in college I had the best teacher of my life, her name is Dr. Marjorie Hancock, and she pulled me aside after class one day and she said, Tammi, you have a gift with words, you should pursue publication. And knowing that my favorite teacher believed in me, that made me think maybe this is something I should pursue, and so I did. And years later I thanked Doctor Hancock the best way I knew how: I named a chicken after her in one of my books.
SB: Fun! Are you, you’re not originally from Oklahoma. How long have you lived here?
TS: I’ve lived here almost 17 years, so it feels like I’m a real-deal Okie at this point.
SB: Now, do you feel that that has any influence on what you write? You mentioned the chicken, it made me think, when I was a kid, I grew up on a farm, we had cows and chickens and things, does that—
TS: Well, I grew up on a farm in Kansas, so I think that’s where that stemmed from, but little things have happened to me in my life in Oklahoma that have made their way into my books. For instance, my book Oh, Nuts!, I got the idea for that at the Oklahoma City Zoo, so ideas are everywhere, so since I’m usually in Oklahoma, a lot of those ideas pop up right around here.
SB: One of the things I do want to ask, because specifically as the author of children’s books, I know a lot of people look at children’s books and think, oh, well, it’s probably easy, everybody has one, all of these, you know, celebrities will write children’s books. I’ve always thought kind of the opposite of the way a lot of people think, you look at a children’s book and you say, oh, this whole book has ten sentences, that’s a lot of pressure, that’s--you have to make sure everything’s perfect for it.
TS: I really like that. I love to try to tell as much as possible in as little as possible. I speak at a lot of writing conferences, and I speak to kids at lots of schools, and I’m always telling them to choose the best words possible because in a picture book, every word counts.
SB: I know, I can’t remember how many it was, but I remember reading quite a while ago that Where the Wild Things Are, somebody pointed out how many words it had in it and that seems like—when you write a novel, you can have a bad sentence every now and then. If you have a bad sentence in a children’s book, well, that’s 10% of your book.
TS: Exactly. So you have to be really judicial in what you keep. I do lots and lots of revising, I also have a critique group, I have a couple of critique partners, I have an agent, and so I just always want to make sure I’m always putting out the best thing possible.
SB: Now you said you just sold your 20th book?
TS: Yes! Wordy Birdy just came out in February, and Penguin Random House sent me on a book tour, so I went to five different cities, that was really fun. I also have five more books coming out in 2018, so it’s a busy year.
SB: You’ve been doing this for a while, but obviously with so many books, what was it like doing your first one?
TS: Oh, wow. My first one of course didn’t become a book, my first one was a really terrible story, I thought it was great at the time, but when I speak to people at writing conferences and when I speak to kids at schools, I always say that those early stories I did were not a waste of time, those were me putting in the practice. It’s just like playing a sport, or just like playing an instrument, the more you do it, the better you get at it. My very first book was Cowboy Camp, and it came out in 2004, but before that I wrote plenty of other stories that were, again, just the practice stories.
SB: When you do that, what’s kind of your process to write it, like do you just come up with an idea and say, well, I’m going to--
TS: Every one is just a little bit different, a lot of my ideas start from something weird that’s happened to me. For example, with Cowboy Camp that was my first one, one night it was when my kids were really small, my husband and I, we tucked our kids into bed for the night, we were getting ready to finally sit down and watch a movie when we heard a knock at the door and we went to go answer it and it was a kid, and he said hi, I’m selling newspaper subscriptions, I’m trying to raise money so that I can go to cowboy camp. Well, this kid didn’t look like a cowboy or act like a cowboy or walk like a cowboy, or do anything like a cowboy, and at first, I thought, ooh, I hope he’s okay when he goes to cowboy camp, and then I thought, ooh! That would be a great idea for a story! So I’m always paying attention to those moments and figuring out is that something that I could orchestrate into a book somehow. I never do everything factually, but I use things that happened to me as little seeds that get that story started. So once I get that seed, I think about my character, I think about my setting, I try to think of words and phrases, idioms, jokes, anything I can think of that ties into those kinds of things, because I think that helps to make my word choice stronger and the story stronger.
SB: Which of your books have won the Oklahoma book award?
TS: My first one was Chicken Dance, and then Mostly Monsterly, and then Nugget & Fang. And Nugget & Fang, I just sold the sequel to that one, so that’s coming out Spring of ’19. So I’m really excited about that.
SB: And you’ve won other awards as well, right?
TS: Yes, I’ve won other awards as well, plus some of my books have been made into musicals. Right now, Nugget & Fang: The Musical is touring the nation. This spring they were scheduled to do at least 60 different venues from everywhere from New York to California. So that’s been pretty exciting.
SB: Is it Chicken Dance also, was made into a musical—
TS: Yes, Chicken Dance was also a musical.
SB: Was that your first musical?
TS: That was my first musical, and that theater company really found success with my writing and they thought that my writing was laugh-out-loud funny, which made me really happy because that’s a goal of mine is that I want to amuse people when they’re reading what I write, and they said it was just, it worked so well for the stage that they asked if they could go ahead and do Nugget & Fang as well, so we arranged for a deal, and yeah, that’s currently happening.
SB: So what’s that like? Do you know the songs, or?
TS: Yeah, they go ahead, and they send me the scripts, so I have approval on everything. For Nugget & Fang, for example, I loved most of it but there were three little things that I didn’t quite agree with, and so I visited with the person behind the scenes, and he visited with the screenwriter and everything was just adjusted just right, and I think the end product is really, really strong.
SB: So do you ever put the music on when you have people over?
TS: Oh, I don’t actually have the music. That would be great to get. Maybe I need to contact them and see if I could get that.
SB: Yeah, next time you have a dinner party, can you guess what this is?
TS: Exactly! Exactly! Let me just play a little something for you.
SB: Well, that’s fun, though, that’s really interesting. ‘Cause I don’t think I know anybody that’s had their own musical made for anything.
TS: Yeah, it’s just, it was just, it’s a really big honor, it’s just nice, I get these Google alerts saying “it’s in this city, it’s in that city,” and it’s just really neat to know that something that I came up with in my imagination stemmed into something this big.
SB: Do you feel pressure that you have to write things now more cinematically or more theatrically?
TS: I don’t, I’m just always trying to write the best thing that I can. And Nugget & Fang two, that was a little bit of pressure just for the fact that Nugget & Fang one, the first one was really successful, but once I got back with those characters it was so much fun because I was back into that same world and that kind of same environment and that same sense of humor, so it ended up being like I was hanging out with old friends again even though one was a shark and one was a minnow.
SB: So how long have you been writing full time?
TS: I’ve been writing full time, the first book came out in 2004, so gosh, almost, it’ll be 14 years in November that I’ve been an author and I’ve been doing lots and lots of school visits since then, I usually do 30-35 a year, I think this year I’m on track to do about 45, so it’s really fun for me to get into the schools, I used to be a school librarian, I used to be a teacher, so it’s fun for me to get back into the schools but I don’t have to go every day, which is pretty nice too. Plus, I get to talk about what I love the most, and that’s books and that’s reading.
SB: Do you get a lot of interesting feedback from the kids when you talk to them?
TS: I do, I do. And every once in a while, they’ll say something that might trigger a story idea. On my Facebook page I usually write down the best thing I’ve heard from a kindergartener today. Like the best thing I heard from a kindergartener last week was this little girl came up to me and she just told me, she’s like, “You’re my biggest fan!” I mean, they’re just so cute, and sometimes I get marriage proposals, I get invited over for playdates, I get invited over for birthday parties, I mean they’re really sweet and they’re very warm and welcoming and they just want to give you a big hug, and it’s kind of flu season right now so I’m like, we have to do the air hugs now, but it’s just really sweet that they get so invested and they come up to me and they say “I want to be an author now, I want to be an illustrator,” and it’s just fun to get into the schools and get them excited about reading, get them excited about writing, and get them really into books.
SB: That sounds like a lot of fun. I have not been to a lot of children’s author visits at schools, so—
TS: Well, I’m going to Blackwell on Monday, so if you’re free!
SB: So, the things that you’ve been working on recently, you say you’ve got five—do you write five books at a time?
TS: No! Actually, they came, I sold them in different years, so you just never know, and they’re with different publishing houses, I think I work with about ten different ones right now, and I have editors, great editors at each house. One book I sold back in 2012, but then that editor decided, she moved to a different part of the country, and then another editor took it over and then she ended up going someplace else, so sometimes things end up going on the back burner, sometimes things they want to rush right through, so out of these six books that come out in 2018, I think maybe two of them I had sold maybe two years ago but the others have been prior to that. My agent asked the different publishing houses if they’d like to bump to a different season because I had a lot of things coming out at once, but everybody was gung-ho with going with 2018, so, here we go.
SB: I don’t really know anything about the world of children’s publishing, so in my mind it’s like the scenes in Elf—
TS: Oh, yeah! I wish it were like the scenes in Elf. It’s really hard, it’s a very competitive field, editors get thousands and thousands of stories, so your job is to try to come up with something fresh, something original, something that they haven’t seen before. And so, it’s very challenging but it’s such a thrill. I just, my agent just called earlier this week with an offer for a book and there’s really nothing like that feeling when an editor says yes to something. So, it’s pretty fun.
SB: So, when your editor said yes to something, what’s the next step?
TS: Well then, okay, so--sometimes what happens is a book will go to auction, and that’s really fun too. So, let’s say my agent sent out one of my manuscripts to five of my publishing houses. If one really likes that manuscript, then my agent will contact the other five saying we have an offer. And then sometimes one of those remaining editors might decide that they want to–he or she might want to place an offer as well, and then sometimes things go to an auction where an editor is saying “pick me because of this” and then the other editor’s saying, “no, pick me because of this,” and that’s really fun and that’s a great way to get extra marketing support when you know that editors have that kind of enthusiasm, sometimes it results in a two-book deal, which is also pretty nice. And then once I agree to an offer, then usually the editor and the art director, they do some searching for just the right illustrator, most authors don’t have much say at all in who the illustrator will be, but I’ve been really fortunate, a lot of times my houses will ask me if I have anybody that I would like to suggest, or they might give me three different illustrators and ask, please rank them in order of your favorites. And so, and then I also get to have a little bit of input on the sketches, and a little bit of input on the colored art, and what happens is they will send me maybe a PDF of the sketches with my text embedded on those sketches, and my job is to offer some feedback that I think will really help to make the book stronger, and what feedback that I provide that the editor and the art director like, they’ll incorporate my feedback with their feedback when they go back to the illustrator. And it’s usually a pretty long process for a picture book to actually get published, because once you sell something, it usually, generally it takes at least two years if not three years. And there’s just a lot of behind-the-scenes things that go on. And it’s fun, but you have to be really, really patient with this job.
SB: Do you ever have an illustrator come to you with something and it just doesn’t look like what you’re thinking?
TS: One time that happened and, so I don’t look like the bad guy, my agent will go to my publishing house and say, this isn’t what we had discussed, this isn’t what we had envisioned, and they did a big change on their end and we ended up getting a book that got starred reviews and has done really well and has been published in many, many different languages, and so I felt really good about sticking to my guns on that particular book because it ended up doing so well after the fact. And then that illustrator who was originally assigned to that book was placed with a different book, and that book went on to do really, really well. So I think everybody won from that situation.
SB: Actually, one of the things I heard you said was you have books published in other languages. What’s, do you have copies of those?
TS: Oh, yes, that is so fun. Let’s see, I have books that are published in French, in Spanish, in Italian, in Korean, in Hebrew, and it’s just, it’s so fun to know that kids in different areas of the world are able to find your book and appreciate it, appreciate that book in that kid’s language, I mean, it’s, it’s so fun. And I take a lot of those books with me to school visits to show kids the differences, and I don’t know. It’s a really nice honor, I feel like, whenever we sell a foreign edition.
SB: Yeah. How many languages are your books in?
TS: I think, I think altogether maybe, I think six or seven different languages. So, I have a little collection on my shelf which is really fun. So, yeah, Chicken Dance was my first one to do a foreign edition, so that was, and it was the first one for Dan Santat, the illustrator, so we were like “Yes!” It was one of those “we made it” kind of moments. But yeah, any time, any time something gets picked up by the Scholastic book fair that’s a really huge thing, any time you find something in those Scholastic reading clubs that’s a really nice thing, any time you get awarded something, any time something’s made into a musical, it’s just really, there are so many different ways that you can have really good moments, I feel like, in this business.
SB: It sounds like there are a lot of opportunities for rewarding experiences.
TS: Yes! Yes! But I mean, but really some of my favorite things are when I get mail from kids and my favorite line from a letter that I received, I think it was last March, it was a girl in Wichita, and her last line was, she was talking about how she was so happy that I came to her school, la la la, and then she said “You make me light up like Christmas lights.” And that was just like, oh, that, I mean, it really doesn’t get better than that.
SB: Do you save all those?
TS: I save my favorites. If I saved everything then my whole office would be filled with letters. But it’s so nice, like when I do a school visit and then a couple weeks later, I get a giant packet of letters in the mail or a box filled with letters or drawings, and it’s just really nice to know that kids really connect to something that I’ve done.
SB: And it’s nice that you can go out and see the people who are reading the books all the time.
TS: Oh, yeah. And it’s great because before I start my presentations for the kindergarteners and the first graders, I have a scrolling PowerPoint where I have music playing and then it just shows, flashes up different covers of the books that I’ve written, and it’s just really neat when those kids are like “Nugget & Fang!” “Me Want Pet!” because they have read that book or they have checked out that book, and they’ve really connected with that book, and it’s just really fun to do that, and it—but anyway, so I’ve really enjoyed doing the school visits. It’s really fun and I value that part of my job. I never realized that that would be a part of my job, but it’s part that I really love.
SB: One of the things that I’ve always noticed about children’s books is that everybody remembers books that they had when they were kids. Everybody remembers things that they read, so I feel like that’s got to be pretty interesting when you see someone who’s learning to read with what you’ve written.
TS: Yes. I have two nieces and in 2012 that was when they were just starting to read and I had a book that came out called Me Want Pet! It’s about a cave boy who goes in pursuit of his perfect prehistoric pet, and there aren’t very many words in that book, and I remember my niece Sierra, that was the first book that she read that she felt like she was a reader, and she called me up and was telling me about it, and my sister was so happy, and it’s just so great to know that something I did created that nice moment between the two of them, and also created a nice moment for Sierra and me to have.
SB: What, do you remember any of the books you read when you were a kid?
TS: Oh, my goodness. When I was a kid, in the first grade I had a teacher named Miss Romey and she would take us into the library every Tuesday morning and she would say you could choose one book. And I found this book called The Golden Egg Book by Margaret Wise Brown and the cover had this giant egg that was covered in flowers, and there was a butterfly and a ribbon, there was a bunny, it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. The most beautiful book. And so, week after week and month after month for the whole rest of the first grade year, that was the book I checked out, I just, I couldn’t get enough of it. The book that I remember at my house that I loved was I remember my mom buying the Golden Book The Poky Little Puppy. So those would be my top two from when I was in the picture book age, I guess. But I feel like picture books are for anybody, picture books, I, you know, I just walked into the library today and I just grabbed a stack of ten picture books, I think you don’t have to just be a child to enjoy a picture book. I feel like a picture book has everything in it that a novel has. It has, it has drama, it has a setting, it has a conflict, it has characters, and it’s just done in a concise way.
SB: What was it, now, Hugo was a really big book several years ago,
TS: Yes!
SB: And I remember looking through that because it’s thick, if you remember, if anyone listening to this has never seen it the book itself is very thick, and it looks like it might be daunting to a child, but it’s all pictures. There’s hardly any text at all in it. And I think telling a story like that through pictures is really unique, but kids can look through that and say, well, I got through this huge book.
TS: Sure! And I think another thing that people need to know about a picture book is it’s half the author’s and half the illustrator’s, because the story generally won’t make sense unless you have those pictures too. Sometimes people ask me, well, what if you don’t like your book, and, or, what if you don’t like the art, and you just have to realize that it’s, sometimes people think what if it’s not exactly like how you pictured it, and generally every time I’ve seen one of my books come out, the illustrators brought so many other levels to the story that I hadn’t even thought of, so I love that I have a partner in a book, and so, anyway, so I never think of it as my book, I always think of it as our book.
SB: When you’re writing, do you doodle little doodles to make it make sense to you when you look at it?
TS: Sometimes, and I do, I also include little art notes. An art note is something that I would include in a manuscript when I’m writing something, but if there’s something that should be in the scene that’s not readily apparent in the text, then I’ll doodle something off in brackets that gives a little clue as to what should be happening. I did a book called Caring for Your Lion, for example, it’s on the Red Bed Read-Aloud list this year. And in that book, a little boy really, really wants a pet kitten, but the pet delivery truck drops off a lion instead, so the book is written as a guide, it offers the different steps that you would need to do to take care of a lion, and the text is very dry and it makes it seem like it’s super easy to take care of a lion, but the art tells something completely different, and so I had made notations in my art notes as to what I was envisioning.
SB: What kind of things do you like to read? Like, what do you get excited about?
TS: Oh, my goodness. Well, I love picture books, first of all. I really love young adult novels. My favorite right now, though, is the psychological thriller, I’m just, I’ve just been crazy about books that have that intrigue, that have that Gone Girl kind of feel. But I just, I love just about any kind of book. But I’d say right now it’s the psychological thriller.
SB: Do you find that has any influence on what you’re thinking for children’s books? I realize there are not a lot of psychological thrillers for kids.
TS: No, maybe that’s my next thing, maybe I need to come up with that idea, try to put a spin on that, so who knows? But yeah, so usually what I read doesn’t affect what I write. But a great thing that can help a writer, especially somebody who’s getting into writing picture books and wants to know what to do, I would always suggest read as many picture books as you can, and not just your old favorites, read the current books, go to the bookstore, go to the library, grab a stack, read hundreds before you decide to start writing one, and you can dig into a picture book by studying somebody else’s picture book and realizing, okay, how did that author pull that off? How did she get the page turns just right? How did she use word choice? How did she create drama? And it’s really like a masterclass in writing picture books, if you dig in and really analyze how some of the really great books have done it.
SB: Do people ever see you walking out of a library or a bookstore and say, oh, look at all those books, how old are your kids? And you say, oh, these are for me…
TS: Oh, it hasn’t happened, but you know what, I’d be proud of that, I think, I mean, picture books, that’s what I still get myself a lot of times and I go to lots of writing conferences and I’m always getting autographed books, I have a whole shelf of autographed picture books and if I’m ever struggling with a new idea I might just take a day where I’m going to dig those off my shelf and I’ll just read through their books and hopefully being immersed in that great language and those worlds might trigger a new story idea of my own.
SB: I used to do a lot of children’s stuff as a librarian, and I remember I was able to talk to kids about books because I would look through them sometimes. And I remember at one point I went to a conference and Mo Willems was there and I saw him speak.
TS: Wow.
SB: And, actually I think it was just like a month or two ago a kid was looking for one of the Pigeon books and he held it up and was like, I want to check this out and I was like, oh, that’s cool, I’ve seen him speak before.
TS: Yeah, I’ve seen him speak before, too. He’s a fantastic presenter. He’s, he just has that charisma.
SB: Yeah, actually when I saw him it was at a library conference where he and Jon Sciezka were,
TS: Yes, another great one.
SB: They were doing commentary for the book cart drill team championship.
TS: Oh yeah, awesome! Yeah, I’ve never seen it. I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never seen it.
SB: Yeah, it was interesting, it was actually really cool that the two of them were doing it, though. They seemed very charismatic, and,
TS: And it’s nice to build up that kind of energy, I think, too.
SB: But no, it’s a lot of fun to be able to talk to kids when they come in and say, oh yeah, I’ve read that.
TS: Yeah.
SB: It’s not, oddly enough, it’s actually not as often with adults when they come in and say, oh, do you have a copy of, I don’t know, something by Proust. Like, I have not read that.
TS: See, you don’t have to read everything, but I mean, I always tell people, too, the more you read, the better you write. So, if I am having a day where I’m struggling with coming up with that next idea, like I told you, I pull other books off my shelf, I’ll also just take a day and just read a novel because all of that helps me, I feel like, to be better in my own writing.
SB: I do think it’s interesting, though, that you’re really into psychological thrillers
TS: I know!
SB: As a children’s author.
TS: I just, it’s like, everything’s always, I go in waves, so that’s my latest wave, so.
SB: Well, you know, I always find it interesting how you see people that are like Roald Dahl has all those books that he wrote with, you know, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and stuff like that, and then you look at his adult things, like, oh, well, these are really dark.
TS: Yeah, yeah.
SB: Very different. You hear about children’s authors that are like, oh, this guy is basically Hemingway but he wrote kids’ books.
TS: Yeah. So, I mean, I love reading and like I said I feel like the more you read the better you write, and so I don’t think it’s--it’s great to read in the area that you like to write, but it’s good to also try out different things.
SB: So do you find the other aspects of, other things in the world influence what you write too? Do you find yourself watching, I don’t know, The Fast and the Furious or something and think, oh, well, I haven’t written a kid’s book about cars yet, but…?
TS: Well, I would like to. I’m always jotting down notes. What I do is I keep notes on my phone so if I ever get an idea, I’ll just jot it down or I’ll email myself. I’ve actually done lots of writing on my phone because I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and sometimes that’s when you get your best ideas or the best suggestions to yourself as to what you should do next with that character, and so I always have that phone right there, and that way I never miss those kind of moments. So, yes, so I do pay attention to what’s going on in the world around me, that’s where I say to celebrate that weird stuff in your life because it really is good material for stories, so I jot down things, I jot down lists on my phone, I jot down lists on napkins, I jot—whenever I get an idea, I remember with Mr. Duck Means Business I was trying to come up with a new idea and it was a time when I just couldn’t think of anything, and I remember I was on Kilpatrick and I was driving, and then all of a sudden I was like, oh! and I had that idea, and so I had to pull right off the road so that I could just jot down a note to myself as to here’s what you need to do, and that was, that’s really great. I know a lot of people get their great ideas driving, a lot of people get their great ideas in the shower, people say that when you’re not trying to come up with a good idea sometimes that’s when the best stuff pops up into your head, so.
SB: I used to keep a little notepad next to the bed so that I could write down things when I woke up and I always found that I would look at it later and it was like, oh, well that’s just some sort of fever dream, or something--
TS: Yes, exactly! But when you wake up, you’re thinking, oh, that’s awesome! So that’s why it’s really nice to have that phone where you can just go to your notes section. So, yeah, one time on my phone I thought I’d lost all my notes and I thought, that was just devastating to me because I have so much on there that could maybe be developed into something really good.
SB: Are you working on anything fun right now?
TS: I just sent the latest thing to my agent yesterday, so today is the day where I had this, and I think I’m just going to just take a fun day and just dig back into things again tomorrow. It’s a really good feeling to send something off, but then there’s also a feeling of loss because that’s what you’ve been invested in for days and days and maybe weeks and weeks or maybe months and months, so it’s freeing but then it’s also a little bit sad to see those characters go. So right now, I’m waiting for her to read it and give me feedback to see if she thinks it’s ready to go to an editor.
SB: Well, thanks for taking the time to talk to me today, I really appreciate it.
TS: Well, thanks for having me! This has been really fun.
SB: Yeah, thanks! Is there anything you’d like to add? Where can people find you?
TS: Oh, people can find me on tammisauer.com, that’s my website, I’m on Twitter @sauertammi, I’m on Facebook, I’m barely on Instagram, let’s see if there’s anything else you need to know, But the Bear Came Back is my next book and it comes out in April. So, there you go.
SB: Alright, well, thanks a lot!
This will be the last episode for Season 1 of our Oklahoma author interviews, but we will be returning at some point, so keep listening for new author interviews. We’ll be interviewing our State Poet Laureate, we’ll be doing some fun stuff on paranormal literature for Halloween, and check over at our other podcast, Check Your Shelf, from the librarians and see what they’ve got coming out. Thanks for listening.