Most rural schools have more than one grade in a room. Mine had four grades in the same room. Each grade was in a separate row. The teacher would teach my grade a lesson, give us a seat work assignment, then move on to the next grade. When you finished your seat work, it was up to you to keep yourself busy. I usually read a book.

When I was in the fifth grade, my mother, an English teacher, decided I should do something else besides read. She wanted me to learn to write stories. So she bought a composition notebook and pasted some magazine pictures on every third page. I wrote stories about the pictures and took them home to share. My mother helped me learn what was good about my writing and how I could improve it.

That next summer, she bought me a Baby Brownie camera. I was the only kid I knew that had a camera. Most families had only one camera and the grownups used it. There were no smart phones back then. You had to buy a roll of film, take the pictures, send them off in the mail to have them developed, then wait to get them back and see how they turned out. If you goofed up, you still had to pay for the ruined exposure. Even so, for me to have a camera of my own was very exciting.

“Louise,” Mama said. “I will buy you one roll of film each week, all summer, and pay to have the film developed. In return, you owe me a story about one picture each week. No story, no film!”

I really wanted to take pictures, so I agreed. I took pictures of my horse, Flicka, of the toad in the dog’s water pan under the outside faucet and of all sorts of other things. And I wrote a story each week. Again, Mother helped me keep improving my writing. By the time I left home to go to college, I had become a pretty good writer.

When I was a grownup:

While I went to college and university, I had to write all sorts of big research papers and I got even more experience with writing. Then, I got married and stayed home one year instead of teaching. One day, I saw an ad in a magazine. It said, “We’re looking for people who want to write for children.”

I thought, “That’s me!”

I sent off for their writing test and they said I passed. If I wanted, the letter told me, I could enroll in their course in how to write books for children. But the cost was too much for our family budget. So I did what I always do when I really want to know something. I went to the public library. (Remember, this was before the World Wide Web was invented and regular people didn’t have access to the Internet.) I checked out every book they had on writing books for children and teens and I read every single one of them.

When I had learned all I could, I began writing what became my first published book – Grandpa Had a Windmill, Grandma Had a Churn.