“Being persistent and being stubborn have also been key to dealing with those sorts of challenges, and those qualities just so happen to come in handy in my research efforts.” —Chris Barton
Chris Barton approaches research with a gusto that has paid off with the naming of four of his books to the Texas Library Association’s Texas Topaz Nonfiction Reading List in recent years. Chris (www.chrisbarton.info) is the author of picture books including bestseller Shark vs. Train, Sibert Honor-winning The Day-Glo Brothers, and Whoosh! Lonnie Johnson’s Super-Soaking Stream of Inventions, celebrated on 21 state lists. His newest nonfiction books include Glitter Everywhere! (one of NPR’s “Books We Love” for 2023), Moving Forward (a School Library Journal Best Book of 2022), and How to Make a Book (About My Dog). Chris and wife Jennifer Ziegler, author of Worser, live in Austin and co-host the children’s literature video series “This One’s Dedicated to…” He also serves as vice president of the Texas Institute of Letters.
On Saturday, September 28, Chris Barton is teaching a class for the WLT called “A Writer’s Guide to Research.“ In this class, you’ll learn tips for researching effectively and how to organize and wield what you find.
Here’s what Chris had to share with us:
Scribe: Tell us a little bit about yourself. What do you write? How did you come to writing?
Chris Barton: I’m a lifelong Texan—born and raised in Sulphur Springs, a resident of the Austin area pretty much ever since I showed up for my freshman year at UT—and a full-time author of nonfiction and fiction books for kids. To my surprise, my journalism background (The Daily Texan, internships at the Houston Chronicle, Texas Monthly, and Rolling Stone), history degree, and many years of dredging and sifting for information about companies for Hoover’s Handbooks and Hoover’s Online here in Austin were great training for the deep dives I do when researching my nonfiction books for young readers.
Scribe: In your own work, how do you approach overcoming the challenges that come with writing, be it writer’s block or craft or business-related challenges?
CB: I hustle—multiple writing projects at a single time, multiple types of projects, multiple endeavors on the periphery of my writing. I look forward to a day when I don’t need to hustle quite so much, but I guess that’s when I’m likely to find out how much of it I do because I just enjoy doing it. Being persistent and being stubborn have also been key to dealing with those sorts of challenges, and those qualities just so happen to come in handy in my research efforts.
Scribe: Has there been a moment of epiphany in terms of your work, when you thought, “This is it! Now I know what I’m doing?” How long did that feeling last?
CB: Well, just because I might think I know what I’m doing doesn’t mean editors and publishers are going to agree—I have written 24 published books, and I still create things that I deeply love but which the folks looking at it in the current market don’t see the same value in. But when it comes to individual projects, the example that stands out is my nonfiction picture book All of a Sudden and Forever: Help and Healing After the Oklahoma City Bombing (Carolrhoda Books/Lerner Publishing, 2020). I spent several months reading books about the bombing, plowing through articles in databases, visiting the archives at the Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum, and interviewing survivors, victims’ family members, and first responders—and then I began having trouble sleeping. I kept waking up at night. I wondered what was wrong—and then I realized it was just that my brain was ready to write. It had absorbed all that information and was raring to get started telling the story. That feeling carried me all the way through to the end of that very challenging manuscript.
Scribe: What piece of advice do you find yourself giving to writers again and again?
CB: Find or form a writing community—even if it’s just one other person that you share your work with, or turn to for feedback, or create stories with. Nothing has ever made writing more fun for me, or given me greater motivation to finish a piece of writing and make it as good as I can, than knowing there was at least one person looking forward to reading it. That was true for me as far back as elementary school, and it’s just as true for me today.
Scribe: What is one thing that people will take away from this class?
CB: An assurance that whatever research challenge they’re facing—whether it’s a specific obstacle with a specific project, or just something daunting about research in general for them personally—they aren’t the first to encounter that sort of thing, and there is a way around it, over it, under it, or through it.
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Thanks, Chris!
Click here to learn more about Chris Barton’s upcoming class.
