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The second common denominator has to do with an ability to keep the child within the self vivid and vital; to know more strongly than most adults ever can what it feels like to have not grown up yet, and to care about that knowledge with passionate concern. This knowing and caring is connected with a special quality of remembering -- an ability in the act of writing almost to "re-be."
Partly this is conscious, an acknowledged resource to be tapped into . . . the place of Jean Little's "blueberry popsicle". There is something else there too, though, something beyond explaining. It is revealed in Ginette Anfousse's remark that through her stories she finds herself reviving memories of things she thought she had forgotten so that in her book La chicane she drew a school she believed she had imagined, only to find it was the school she had first attended when she was small. 1
This knowledge of "something beyond" probably contributes a great deal to another element writers and illustrators have as "common" -- a willingness to head out into the unknown. This willingness is evidenced most dramatically by Suzanne Martel's delight in the fact that, for her, starting out to write a new book is like opening a door and stepping into another country. But it is there so clearly in the shaping of the Isis stories and in Bernadette Renaud's explanation that time after time she has to go back in her text before she can go on.
Such experiences direct us to one more element in the make-up of the creators of children's books, and that is tenacity. They need it in the beginning merely to achieve a manuscript because all that "unknownness" means, inevitably, that there will be rewriting and then more rewriting, versions upon versions, over and over again. After that there is the matter of finding a publishing house. A publisher receives at least 100 manuscripts for every one selected. Each author, each illustrator (with the possible exception of Gordon Korman!) has tales to tell of seemingly unending rejection slips.
Finding a publishing house is in a way only another "beginning." It means that now there will be other people, the all-important editors, who will be involved in the search that has in fact been going on throughout the process -- the search for the way to "get it right." So ... for all the changes there have been already, there will be changes upon changes more. Stéphane Poulin will have to become convinced about what happens in the girl's washroom (girls keep their pants round their knees not their ankles, right?) and take up his pencil and make his adjustments. Ann Blades will reshape a proposed picture. Jean Little will set out (albeit for the fifth time) to make the story not be "told" but "live".
1 Other references in this section were taken from quotations in either the exhibition itself or in the catalogue. This one is an expansion on thoughts given in Ginette Anfousse's "Les livres que j'écris, comment et pourquoi", Des Livres et des jeunes, Vol. 5, no. 13, Autumn 1982, p. 8.
 
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