Daniel Pinkwater thinks that the question, "Where do you get your ideas?" is a bit silly. "Ideas come 60 a minute to everybody, not just me. And like everyone else's ideas, mine are mostly lousy." But he has learned how to work with his ideas. "I take one of those lousy ideas and chew on it, tug at it, and develop it until it starts to be a better sort of idea."

When Daniel starts to write anything, he uses what he calls "the greatest single and only formula for writing fiction: the two words what if. So, a kid is sent to the store. What if he's sent to the store to get the Thanksgiving turkey? What if they haven't got any birds of any kind? What if he ends up buying a 266 pound chicken? That's how ideas get developed. The next step is to develop the plot."

Once Daniel was giving a talk at a school. A kid looked him up and down and said, "You're not really the guy who wrote those books, are you?" Daniel thought the question showed insight and sensitivity. "He looked me over, he heard a few words from me, and he realized that I'm just another stupid adult- -that I'm nothing like the guy who writes the books must be." Daniel thinks the kid was right. "He was meeting me in my adult persona. The only time my child persona comes out is when I'm alone at the computer. Even I find the actual me boring. But the one that does the writing is kind of clever." Daniel says that when he sits down to write, he feels like he's meeting up with an old friend. "Or more than an old friend. I know it's me. Part of the pleasure of writing for an audience that is younger than I am is that I get to go back to a particular kid who is me, younger than I am."

A BUILT-IN AGE-APPROPRIATE CRITIC

He has thought his theory through well. "If you're eight years old and then you get to be nine, you don't stop being eight years old. Likewise, the nine- year-old is incorporated into the 10-year-old, and so on." When he sits down to write a children's book, he uses what he calls a "simple device. I go back and figure out what this nine-year-old would have read, or would like to read now. Then I write that book for him. I have a built-in age appropriate critic to make sure I don't wander into writing about human relations or something boring."

In addition to many artifacts and memorabilia, Daniel's office contains a desk and a big old leather couch with a dog on it. The dog, "a great monstrous brute," came home with Daniel from the pound, at which time he looked "like he was made out of pipe cleaners." Thanks to daily walks with his master, the dog is now a "tremendous athlete."

On Daniel's desk is a little statue of a Chinese man named Ho Chi. "He was a Chan master who threw it all over to walk around with a little bag of cookies. The kids all liked him because he gave them cookies. When he ran into an adult, they'd ask him to knock it off and be a teacher. He'd say, 'Give me a penny.' He's like me."

"All of my stories are based in Chicago in one apartment."

As a child, Daniel was "surprisingly happy" and a writer already. He remembers writing one page parodies when he was in fifth grade. "I was highly inspired by MAD magazine," he recalls. "I bought the first issue off the newsstand." In school, Daniel used to write funny notes "that I would pass around the classroom to try to make my friends laugh out loud and get in trouble."

His breakthrough moment came when he entered a short-story contest in school and won a prize--a subscription to NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC. "That's how I first learned that you could get things by writing. It was a lesson I didn't dwell on, but I knew somewhere in my head that you could trade writing for things."

What does Daniel like to read these days? He answers, "I stopped." But he read a lot before he stopped. "The last thing I read was MOBY DICK. I read it continuously for a period of 15 years. Now I read it sporadically."

When not writing children's literature, Daniel says he likes to "think in my head." He enjoys writing and reading commentaries for NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO. He's also endlessly interested by people. "I like to know people and witness the different things they work out and how they do it." He doesn't have too many friends near where he lives. "My neighbors stay away from me completely," says Daniel, which he likes. "It's very good for me in terms of preventing me from developing an inflated ego, Nobody knows what I do or could possibly care."

Once he allowed the local paper to interview him. "I was launching a syndicated comic strip," he explains, "and I was willing to do anything to get it publicized." After that, he was better known in town. "All the different citizens came up to me and said, 'So you do a cartoon!' They finally had an idea of what I did, this big, shambling man with a Woody Allen hat and a dog."