ABSTRACT
There are just some hats you never take off. My writing hat is one of them. So in 2009 when I heard children’s book illustrator Halperin (2007) give a talk at a state conference about young children’s drawings—the quality of line, white space, and colors they select, and even the textures they employ by varying crayon pressure—I could not help but see the connections between children’s content and process decisions in drawing and writing. For example, writers revise words to tighten their ideas much in the same way that an artist explores various colors before finding or creating one that speaks. The generative nature of the way a chiseled marker can offer surprise markings is akin to drafting, where a single word or word combination can suddenly move forward a seed idea. And as I thought about these connections, I wondered why children’s writing was not considered broadly, perhaps as “composing,” rather than drawing distinctions between writing and art.
