Kate DiCamillo: How she became a bestseller after 473 rejection letters

"My father left when I was six and I've been turning that over in almost all the stories. Most of my books have a missing parent in them but they are mostly mothers. This way I met [the pain] head on, and I think it was from standing up in front of all those kids and speaking the truth and so the truth ends up in the book, does that make sense?

"When I sat down to write Raymie it was not what I intended to write. I thought I was going to write a funny book about an inept child who's in a beauty contest and it quickly morphed into, well, OK, why is she in the contest? She is in the contest because she wants to get [her father] back, and then I realised, 'uh oh', I'm basically telling the truth of myself."

In a note to readers, DiCamillo ticks off her younger self's autobiographical similarities to Raymie.

Born in Philadelphia, she moved with her mother to a small town in Florida. Her father did not follow. She missed him and plotted ways to bring him back and competed in the Little Miss Orange Blossom contest at age eight and did not win.

"I remember looking down at the floorboards at my feet and thinking I should not be here on this stage," she says. "Mercifully, I don't remember what else went on. My mum is not alive anymore so I can't ask her now what she was thinking putting me in a contest like that. What I craved was a quiet corner with a book, that was the kind of kid I was."

DiCamillo tried to do good deeds and worried over the state of her soul. Friends stood beside her and sustained her as she worked jobs at Disney World, Circus World and a camp ground while harbouring a secret ambition to be an author.

It was following her best friend back to her hometown of Minneapolis that brought DiCamillo, jobless and with no winter coat, to a book distribution warehouse where she found the motivation to end years of writing procrastination.

"I was assigned to the third floor of a warehouse, and it was all children's books. I didn't start off thinking I wanted to write for children, but I started to read all those books on that floor I was confined to and I kind of fell in love with middle-grade novels for kids – that hope and humour and immediacy. You get to a point where you love a story so much you want to tell a story back."

Sitting down to write shortly before her 30th birthday, DiCamillo clocked up a staggering 473 rejection letters within six years before striking a publishing deal for her first novel, Because of Winn-Dixie, written in the midst of one of Minnesota's worst winters while homesick for sunny Florida.

"I didn't have the money or the wherewithal to move back to Florida," she says. "It was also the first time in my life when I had been without a dog for any long period of time so my subconscious came up with Winn-Dixie.

"That is a book of longing. I worked for that book distributor and I had a very realistic idea of what to expect for a first middle-grade novel. My big hope was, if I'm really lucky and things went really well, I would sell 5000 copies of that book and that would let me do another book. And then that thing happened where people opened their hearts to that book. Teachers read it to their kids and librarians read it and it changed my life, that book did."

Persistence will be a theme of her upcoming talks in Sydney and Melbourne. DiCamillo often makes a game of asking children to guess her number of knockbacks.

"They start with five or 10. And then they will get really excited and say '50'. And I'm like 'nope, nope, nope'. Some kid will always say, 'Well, why did you keep going'?"

"I certainly could not control whether I was talented but I could keep on trying. I spent so much time – 10 years – knowing I wanted to write, talking about writing, collaring people and saying I'm a writer and not writing. Oddly enough, that time was what gave me the [incentive] to keep on persisting because I didn't want to go back to being the person just talking about doing it."

DiCamillo attributes her hesitancy to laziness and fear, "and those two things are still very present".

Seventeen years after its publication Because of Winn-Dixie remains a beloved children's book of American Millennials.

DiCamillo tried to repeat the magic "so everyone would keep on loving me", and it "went very miserably". "I learned at that point that that was no way to write – in the hope of pleasing everybody and making them happy. So I thought if I'm going to survive as a writer I'm going to have to go in a totally different direction and that was Despereaux."

DiCamillo works on a book, one at a time, taking the idea all the way to final draft before starting fresh. Typically, she does eight to nine drafts, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane being an exception. "It was like it was telling itself." The best she can do in those circumstances is "get out of my own way".

Not so long ago, DiCamillo tallied up the hours she spent reading versus writing. "It was kind of shocking to me. I write for maybe 12 to 15 hours a week and I read for 35 to 40 hours per week. Sometimes when I feel guilty about the reading, I think it's my job to immerse myself in language that way."

Seventy to 80 per cent of her reading material is adult literary fiction. "The rest is going back and reading the books that moved me so much as a kid and trying to figure out how they did it, and keeping up with what's going on in children's literature."

That tendency to reflection is why DiCamillo's style often echoes with the dark-light verities of Victorian or Edwardian children's literature which, too, dwell on the private lives of playthings and speaking animals on heroic quests.

Homesickness for a feeling of safety and warmth is what DiCamillo suspects motivates all writers, not only herself. The preponderance of stray dogs, rabbits and mice that inhabit her stories reflect an adoration for the adventures of Paddington Bear and Stuart Little and Beverly Cleary's The Mouse and the Motorcycle, and "a way to get to my kid self".

One of her favourite books of last year was Joan London's The Golden Age, 2015 winner of the Prime Minister's Literary Award. "Put it in the paper I want to shake her hand while I'm over there. I couldn't live without books as a kid and I surely can't as an adult."

Raymie Nightingale is published by Walker Books at $19.99.

Kate DiCamillo is a guest of Sydney Writers' Festival, May 22-May 28 (swf.org.au) and appears at Melbourne's Wheeler Centre (wheelercentre.com) on June 1.