Turning a Bedtime Routine Into a Picture Book
Whether I’m talking to elementary school students or giving a keynote address, the Q&A afterwards almost always includes a version of this question: Where do you get your ideas?
(Plotters vs. Pantsers in Poetry.)
We’re all curious about other writers’ inspirations, aren’t we? Where did the spark for that poem, essay, story, or play come from? My first book for children, My Thoughts Have Wings, illustrated by the incredible Leanne Hatch, has an origin story that’s very close to my heart. This picture book was inspired by two things: a conversation I had with my now-teenage daughter Violet when she was small, and years later, a pandemic bedtime routine I began with my son Rhett.
I half joke—but also half earnestly believe—that as soon as children hear the automatic locks click on the car doors, they know they have a captive audience. Time to seize the opportunity to ask big, existential questions! Our conversations while running errands were never dull, that’s for sure. When Violet was in preschool, she wanted to know everything about the world. At ages three and four, she used every short drive to the post office, the library, or the grocery store to ask me big questions from her car seat behind me:
“What is the earth for?”
“What is the future?”
“What is the past?”
“Where was I before I was in your belly?”
I loved her mind—her curiosity, her attentiveness—but some nights she couldn’t turn the thoughts off. I could almost hear her mind whirring, whirring, unable to shut itself down. During one of those difficult tuck-ins, I told her, “Thoughts are like birds—some just fly away, but others nest. Our thoughts are nesters. They don’t want to leave us, and they make themselves right at home.”
I knew what she must have been picturing: winged thoughts gathering twigs and ribbons and even, because we’d seen it once, scraps of plastic grocery bags. Winged thoughts weaving a home for themselves in her skull.
I told her the truth as I knew it: that her head is such a beautiful place to live—more beautiful than any sycamore, maple, or oak—that no wonder nothing wants to leave her. Nothing and no one, least of all me.
I don’t know what helped her more—having a metaphor for rumination and intrusive thoughts, or knowing that she wasn’t alone in that experience, because I had nesting thoughts, too. Sometimes what our children need most is not for us to solve their problem but to listen, reassure, even commiserate.
Years later, in 2020, I published Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change, a book of quotes and essays. I created that book as literal self-help, because writing it helped me weather the end of my marriage, but it was published during the first year of the pandemic, when all of us were grieving and unsure. In the last chapter of that book, “Nesters,” I wrote about that bedtime conversation with Violet.
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Early in the pandemic, both of my children were grappling with a great deal: separation from friends, family, and school; their parents’ divorce; and their father’s move nearly 500 miles away. Tucks-ins with my young son, Rhett, were often difficult.
One night, sad and anxious, he said, “I’m trying to think good thoughts, but the bad thoughts keep pushing them out of the way.” Frankly, I understood. I wasn’t sleeping well either. Weren’t so many of us, children and adults alike, lying awake at night, staring at the ceiling or tossing and turning, our minds whirring like overheated laptops?
The metaphor of thoughts as birds was fresh in my head, on the heels of Keep Moving, but I took the idea a step further. I wanted Rhett to fill up with good thoughts before bed, so they might crowd out as many of the worries and sad thoughts as possible. I wanted to make room for the joyful, peaceful thoughts to nest.
This became our bedtime routine: cuddling in his bed together in the dark, naming happy memories and things to look forward to. And it worked. Instead of dreading bedtime, I looked forward to it. And instead of crying or grabbing my arm, not wanting me to leave his bedroom, my son was more at peace, too.
Given the tumult of the pandemic, I knew that other children must be sad and anxious, too. I wanted to share our bedtime routine with others, so I began developing it into a picture book manuscript. The most magical part of the process for me was seeing how Leanne Hatch interpreted my words in her incredible illustrations. She captured so much of our lives but also took the art in directions that surprised and delighted me.
Rhett and I call My Thoughts Have Wings “our book”—and it is, because we created it from a shared experience. In the months after the text was finalized, I reviewed a few passes of artwork—first Leanne’s initial pencil sketches, and then more complete renderings in color. I will never forget sitting in my office chair with Rhett in my lap, clicking through the first PDF with rough sketches in place. At one point, he turned around, wide-eyed and smiling, and said: “It’s me!”
It is him. In fact, it’s us! When readers turn the pages of My Thoughts Have Wings, they’ll find some of his happy thoughts: fishing in the creek behind my parents’ house, playing with friends, eating ice-cream at the beach, being greeted with dog kisses when he comes home from school. But the book is also an invitation for caregivers and children to think of and share their own happy thoughts.
My hope for My Thoughts Have Wings—and my purpose in writing it—is that it might make tuck-ins a little sweeter, a little calmer, a little easier for other families. I hope it helps caregivers and kids connect in hopeful, positive ways before bed—ways that leave both kids and grown-ups smiling in the dark.
Check out Maggie Smith’s (and Rhett’s) My Thoughts Have Wings here:
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