Roland Smith began working with animals at a zoo part time while attending Portland State University. He decided to write about the animals that he had worked with around the world for the past 20 years. The Elephant Run was based on his experiences living in Myanmar for a month and working with elephants. He learned about the elephant's behavior and wrote about that in the book (scholastic.com). His experiences are very similar to those that Nick had in the book. He took a trip to Burma during WWII and hardly knew anything about it. He met a lot of different people who showed him the elephants and how they train them. Smith wrote this book to show his experiences when he took the trip to Myanmar while working with animals around the world to learn about elephants. In his biographies, Smith said that a lot of his similar experiences are in the book Elephant Run.