Beginning with her first historical novels, Lenski sought to depict her characters' environments as accurately as possible through her writing and illustrations. She understood her role as that of an outsider whose job was to observe, document, and share what she had learned with other outsiders. Malone argues that this attitude reflected the broader patterns of documentary realism that came to prominence in American arts and letters during the Great Depression, especially through the work of WPA-affiliated artists and writers. Lenski often wrote dialogue in dialect form, explaining in the foreword to "Blue Ridge Billy" that "to give the flavor of a region, to suggest the moods of the people, the atmosphere of the place, speech cannot be overlooked." She wrote, "it seems to me sacrilege to transfer their speech to correct, grammatical, School-Reader English, made easy enough for the dullest child to read." Overall, she committed herself to transmitting the experiences of her informants without sanitizing them to remove sad or difficult material; she wrote that her child readers agreed with this decision, since "life is not all happy." In addition to including childhood problems and concerns in her plots, she revealed the grim and hazardous aspects of life in the communities represented by her characters, including descriptions of poverty, social and economic instability, and violence that she had observed or learned about through her research. In her acceptance speech for the Newbery Award for "Strawberry Girl", a book which includes a running conflict between the family of her heroine and their drunken, feckless and violent neighbor, Lenski stated that leaving out such things would "paint a false picture."