Suddenly, I wanted to write more about this small character. In fact that was how he came to have such an unusual name for a bear, for Paddington was the name of the station." Brown first met Paddington on a railway platform. We called him Paddington, so I typed the words: "Mr and Mrs. There being nothing more soul-destroying than staring at a blank sheet of paper hoping something will happen (it won't unless you make it), I was sitting at the typewriter one morning when my gaze happened to alight on a toy bear I had bought my wife for Christmas. As Gertrude Stein might have said-a book is a book is a book, and writing is perhaps even more of an agonizing process of distillation when it's for children. Without giving the matter any great thought, I had always regarded writing for children as a lesser form of creativity-quite untrue, of course. At that time I had been a part-time writer for about ten years, following a common progression in those days: short stories, newspaper and magazine articles, radio plays, plus a few short plays for television, I thought it was a good year if I sold one piece in ten. I wrote my first children's book in 1957 and it came about largely by accident.
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