Interview with Donna Jo Napoli, Author

by Christine Liu Perkins

An award-winning author of nearly 50 books for children, Donna Jo Napoli is also a mother of five children and a professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College. She answered these questions by e-mail from Venice, Italy.

Donna Jo Napoli, Author

What challenges did you face in establishing your writing career?
It took me 14 years to sell my first story. Sorry about that. But don't be discouraged. You, members of SCBWI, are light years ahead of me already because you are attending writers' conferences--you know that there is something to learn. I didn't know that. I worked in a vacuum. I learned via osmosis, and that is a slow, painful, and not very effective way to learn. I made just about every mistake a starting writer can make--and I made up a few new mistakes of my own.

But I had my family--my husband and children--and every time I got a letter of rejection, I would cry, but they would say, "what jerks those guys are--too bad for them, they lost out on your great story." When I finally sold the first story, they took it in stride. They had expected it all along. But for me it was incredible.

How has your writing changed and developed through the years?
Oh, dear. I don't know. I don't look back over my writing and try to analyze it. That would be the death of my soul. I might find out I've gone downhill. Yikes. I have consistently written about what fascinates me. And I love both natural history and human history, and that's been part of my work all along.

What are some unusual questions you've been asked by children in school visits or fan mail?
Usually the questions seem fed to them by their teachers--things like "where do you get your ideas?"--junk like that, which really can't come from the kids, since they are always overflowing with ideas. The questions that really come from them are things like "what happened to Roberto next? did he ever make it home? did his friends? did he get to see his parents again?" These are real questions (about Stones in Water)--and I got so many of them that I decided the children were right and I have been working on a sequel to that book.

Sometimes I've gotten questions that surprised me—like, "what kind of book do you like to write best?" from a kid who listed several books of mine as having read--and I knew immediately that this child plans on becoming a writer.

What do you find most rewarding about being a writer?
Just the act of writing itself. I most definitely am writing for myself and strangers--I want people to read my work--but foremost always is just the joy of sitting at the computer and discovering a story.

How has your view of your writing career changed over time?
Now I make money--that's a surprise. Before I spent much more than I made (on postage, phone calls, Kleenex).

Do you still receive rejections from editors? How do you deal with them?
Absolutely--lots. And I still cry. But I still have my support group--my family--and, of course, there's always chocolate.