This year's University of Otago College of Education Creative New Zealand children's writer in residence admits his inspiration actually comes from sounds or phrases, or even ideas, rather than reality.
A lively imagination is essential for children's writers but this sometimes throws them into conflict with those in adult literary circles who think imagination is not important, he says.
"I've tried both and I happen to like children's writing better. It's natural for me. I always get carried away with ideas.""I wanted to write about death but until `old hu-hu' popped into my head I didn't have a clue what the story was going to be," he said.
Last year Old Hu-hu won the New Zealand Post Children's Book of the Year award. Only two titles have been inspired directly by real events, he admits.
One was The Bear in the Room Next Door (2006) when he was lying in bed listening to his wife snoring and thinking it sounded like a bear, and another was from some friends who taught their little boy his address so if he got lost he could tell people where he lived.
Instead he kept telling strangers his name and address and inviting them to visit him, so his mother suggested that Mewburn write a book teaching children not to talk to strangers.
"I thought nooo ... but I wrote a book about this little boy who invites everyone and the house gets so full there's no room for him." That was No Room for a Mouse (2007) which made the Storylines Notable Picture Book list in 2008.
He doesn't know where such concepts, sounds or phrases spark from, but he says he has a lot on his computer waiting to be born and grow into books.
His 2007 New Zealand Post Children's Book Awards picture-book winner, Kiss! Kiss! Yuk! Yuk! started with the title first, and a vague notion what it might involve.
A new story for which he has just received the drawings is called The Grumble Bee because the phrase captured his imagination and eventually it grew into a story.
When he started writing for children he wrote old-fashioned stories of 1000 words or more, but his work has gradually become more compact, he says.
"Now my stories are down to 300-400 words. That's the challenge now, getting things down to the minimalest."
As part of that challenge he wrote Duck's Stuck which made the shortlist in the New Zealand Post Awards in 2009.
"It has an underlying theme and nice words and everything I want a story to do but in 340 words, which is what I aspire to," he said.
"I spend a lot of time and energy crafting sentences more or less like poetry. I don't do rhymes - I'm more a rhythmic writer. I read them over again and they have to roll on the tongue. It's sort of like music. Kids like to have that flow, but lots of parents play it safe with rhyming books, but often rhymes are often at the expense of the story."
"Eventually the stuff somehow holds together. I keep adjusting, turning them, playing round until it's a nice compact little story - that's what I hope, anyway," he said.
However, it takes him a couple of years to write a story, although he has about 10 on the go at any one time.
"I bring them out and drag them along and pull them along and kick them along and add a word or sentence or phrase and put them away, and one day there's a little click. It will just come to you and often in a big hurry over the next couple of days, but it's all been boiling away for two years or so."
It may then take a couple of years in the publishing process, he adds. His backlog is coming to fruition this year with 10 new books coming out.
"There were to have been 11 but my non-fiction title was canned - and that's not counting [school] readers," he says with a laugh.
Now he is working on a young adult novel, partly because his readers grow up, and partly to combine what he's learnt in writing picture books, junior fiction and school readers, and what he learnt in the first seven years of becoming a writer when he wrote adult fiction.
None of his adult novels were published, although occasional encouraging notes along with rejection slips from editors kept him going, he said.
"The closest I got was an agent in London who took me on and spent two years rewriting with an editor - they paid an editor to work on it and another editor to cut it. It was a historical novel set in the Millers Flat area in the 1930s. It went to the London Book Fair and I got positive responses then it all dissipated - the market was slow, New Zealand was too far away. Meanwhile I wrote my first children's book and it got published and I kept on. I know which side my bread's buttered," he said with a laugh.
The manuscript of Kiss! Kiss! Yuk! Yuk! won the Storylines Joy Cowley Award in 2005 which put him on the radar and a steady accumulation of awards since then has built his reputation in the publishing world.
However, even now fewer than half of the manuscripts he submits to publishers are accepted. He and his wife Marion, a potter, are only just approaching making an average wage between them, he said.
"It's about 30 something thousand. It's not a lot of money but we live in the country, we have no mortgage and no children. It's a good life. I can't complain."
Mewburn (48 "going on 6") grew up in Brisbane and looked for a job involving writing.
"Writing wasn't considered a real job in my neck of the woods. You had to become a lawyer or accountant or something serious so I discovered journalism and advertising which was my preferred option, but after a few months working as a sports journalist for a country newspaper I was so bored I took off."
He travelled round Europe, met and married Marion, who is from Germany, and eventually returned to Australia in 1989.
"I thought this is not for me. At the time they were becoming quite insular. There was a period when Australia became very patriotic and it was demoralising somehow.
"We wanted to go back to Europe and I famously said `we should try New Zealand first, it's a bit like England.' We ended up here and three weeks later we were in the Ettrick area and liked it and six months later we'd bought a property."
On the net: www.kylemewburn.com
Read it
Kyle Mewburn's latest book is Hester and Lester, about the power of imagination and a special sibling bond.
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