Author Christopher Paul Curtis never knows where his characters, his stories are going to take him, which is one of the biggest joys of the process. When writing Elijah of Buxton, he wrote the last chapter first, but once he got to know the characters and their lives, the ending changed. As for Bud, Not Buddy, he started out with the aim of writing about his grandfather and though the story includes his grandfather, the book followed a whole other trajectory.
