All podcasts / The Tim Ferriss Show / Summary

Tish Rabe — 200+ Children's Books, Getting Picked for Dr. Seuss, Lessons from Early Sesame Street, How to Write 300+ Songs, and More

2026-02-18 - source - Read full transcript
Tim Ferriss (host)Tish Rabe

Key insights

Rabe writes the last page of every children's book before anything else.
She learned this from Sesame Street writers, who studied classic film comedy (Abbott and Costello, the Marx Brothers) to reverse-engineer how a scene's ending dictates everything that precedes it. Because the last page is the final thing a child hears before sleep, nap, or play, she treats it as the most important page in the book and always writes it first, without exception.
childrens-media-craft
Rhyme works as a mnemonic device even when a child doesn't know the vocabulary.
Rabe describes pairing an unfamiliar word with a rhyming partner the child already knows, her example being 'migration' rhymed with 'vacation.' Kids who had never heard the word 'migration' before still retained it because the rhyme itself was memorable, which she says is why every one of her books rhymes.
childrens-media-craft
When a rhyme won't work, invent a word rather than force a slant rhyme.
Dr. Seuss required both perfect, unvarying meter and pure end rhymes, never near-misses like 'farm' and 'barn.' When he got stuck he invented a word to complete a couplet (the Van Vlecks in his sleep book); Rabe follows the same rule, inventing the place name 'Gerplets' in Oh, the Pets You Can Get as a direct homage to that trick.
dr-seuss-legacy
Sesame Street's double-level humor was a deliberate strategy to get parents to watch alongside their kids.
Writers built jokes and songs, like Joe Raposo's non-rhyming 'Bein' Green,' that worked differently for children and adults simultaneously. Research had shown that children learned more when parents watched with them, so the show's writers treated humor sophisticated enough for adults as an engagement mechanism, not just comedy for its own sake.
sesame-street-origins
A rejected manuscript led directly to Rabe inheriting Dr. Seuss's unfinished science series.
In 1991 she submitted a rhyming dinosaur book, Maurus O'Raurus Was a Brachiosaurus, to Random House. It was rejected specifically because Random House was 'the rhyming home of Dr. Seuss,' but the same call offered her the chance to write the Cat in the Hat's Learning Library science series that Seuss had planned and died before completing. Her manuscript's rhythm and rhyme scheme matched his closely enough that editors saw her as the right fit.
dr-seuss-legacy
Rabe starts every book by immersing herself in already-simplified source material rather than raw research.
Rather than starting from technical references, she goes to the children's section of her local library and pulls every existing book on the topic, since that material has already been simplified for a young reader's comprehension level. She fills a spiral notebook with facts for each book and looks for words with rhyming potential before starting to write.
childrens-media-craft
Anticipating writer's block by front-loading her own deadline protects her actual delivery date.
When a publisher gives her a real deadline, she privately sets an earlier personal deadline, expecting there will be a stretch where she is fully stuck and unable to make progress. When that happens she stops entirely and works on something else rather than forcing it, treating the block as inevitable rather than a failure to plan around.
childrens-media-craft
She started her own publishing company at 71 to write books larger publishers had turned down.
After decades writing on assignment for other publishers, Rabe founded Tish Rabe Books during COVID to have full control over subject matter, including dialogic-reading formats and a book for military families that she says no traditional publisher would commission. She frames the shift as filling a gap she felt for years but couldn't act on inside the traditional pipeline.
second-act-entrepreneurship
Sometimes Apart, Always in My Heart grew from months of interviews with military families, not from research alone.
Rabe, the daughter of a WWII POW, interviewed service members, spouses, and children for months before writing, gathering concrete coping tips (like a father tracing his hand on paper so his kids could 'high five' it while he was deployed) that she wove directly into the book. A naval-base librarian's tip led her to United Through Reading, the nonprofit whose video-reading program the book was designed to complement.
storytelling-for-service
You do not need to have children to write for children, but having them can change what you write.
Rabe explicitly tells audiences that many successful children's authors never had kids, but says the final page of Oh, Baby, the Places You'll Go!, written from a pregnant mother's perspective, likely wouldn't exist in its exact form without her own experience raising a son and daughter.
childrens-media-craft
A single spontaneous image, not a structured brainstorm, generated a full book concept in two days.
Asked on the spot to write a children's book about Mystic, Connecticut with a July deadline set in February, Rabe describes seeing an unbidden mental image of four seagulls flying over the person asking her, which became the premise for Mystic by the Sea is the Best Place to Be, written in two days. She calls it her first full creative 'hallucination' in a coffee shop.
childrens-media-craft
Real business content can be taught to young children through character and rhyme rather than direct instruction.
Commissioned by an Ohio bank for a financial literacy book, Rabe built three bunny triplets around distinct money behaviors (earning, saving, spending) rather than writing direct instructional text, arguing that abstract concepts like financial literacy land better through character and story than through explanation aimed at young readers.
childrens-media-craft

Books referenced

Media referenced

Companies

Techniques and frameworks

Summary

Tish Rabe, the New York Times bestselling author of more than 200 children's books with over 11 million copies sold, traces her career from an unlikely starting point: she trained as an opera singer, not a writer, and only ended up at Sesame Street in its second season because her former high school music teacher, newly hired as assistant music director, asked if she could type. She spent years singing on the show and its albums (including duets with Oscar the Grouch), and her first book, Bert and the Broken Teapot, came from volunteering a personal childhood story to Sesame Street's book department when they put out a call for ideas. Much of the conversation dwells on the creative culture of early Sesame Street: curriculum-driven writing sessions, live child focus groups that reshaped characters (Oscar was originally orange), and a house rule she still uses in every book, learned from writers who studied classic film comedy, of writing the ending before anything else.

The show's pivotal turn came in 1991, when Random House rejected her rhyming manuscript Maurus O'Raurus Was a Brachiosaurus because it competed with their exclusive Dr. Seuss line, then immediately offered her the chance to finish the Cat in the Hat's Learning Library science series Seuss had begun and died before completing. Rabe describes the exacting rules of writing in his voice: perfect, unvarying meter, pure end rhymes only, and inventing a word when nothing else scans, a device she still uses. She later collaborated directly with Audrey Geisel, Seuss's widow, who commissioned Oh, Baby, the Places You'll Go! after Rabe read all 41 of his books, and who personally had to approve Rabe's Seuss-adjacent original characters for a later American Academy of Pediatrics health book (which Michelle Obama's office later funded an expanded edition of).

At 71, during COVID, Rabe started her own publishing company, Tish Rabe Books, to write projects larger publishers wouldn't commission. The centerpiece is Sometimes Apart, Always in My Heart, written in honor of her father, a WWII POW, after months of interviewing military families about deployment; the book's companion plush dog, Alaska, came from a chance encounter with a stuffed animal she'd bought as a gift. She also describes two civic-minded commissions that arrived almost by accident, a book for Mystic, Connecticut's chamber of commerce written in two days after a spontaneous mental image of seagulls, and an upcoming Central Park book tied to a crowdfunding campaign for free copies to underserved first-graders across New York's five boroughs, plus a forthcoming book with Rotary International.

Throughout, Rabe returns to a few durable working methods: pulling already-simplified library material rather than raw research before drafting, using rhyme as a memory aid even for words a child doesn't yet know, privately setting deadlines ahead of her real ones to leave room for inevitable writer's block, and Googling a character's name before committing to it. The episode closes with her recounting the chaotic 1982 production of Big Bird in China, the first Western film crew allowed into the country, and her closing message for the show's "billboard" question: that children are society's most precious asset and deserve to be read to, echoing the phrase she says to close every school visit: "Read a book or write a story, start right now."

Notable Quotes

"I always write my last page first, always." - Tish Rabe, on her core writing process

"You do not have to have kids to write for kids." - Tish Rabe

"When you're in trouble, make something up." - Tish Rabe, on Dr. Seuss's habit of inventing words when a rhyme wouldn't work

"The only voice your child wants to hear is yours." - Tish Rabe, on why parents should sing to their kids regardless of vocal skill

"Remember the children are our most precious gift." - Tish Rabe, answering Tim's billboard-message question