Children’s Author

Just Read

| Charlie Bown

They say if you want to write well, read well. Read often. Read everything. Read good writing and not so good writing. Read. Read. Read.

Getting transported into a good book is one of my favourite feelings. I have lost count of the times my husband has walked in on me sobbing, clutching a book with total heartbreak, or longing, or love for one of the characters. He even walked in once when, whilst reading One Day for the first time, I hurled the book across the room because I couldn’t believe that David Nicholls could do what he did with such callousness.

Likewise I have often stirred the household from peaceful slumber with raucous laughter in the middle of the night as, by the nightlight glow “I’m just going to finish this chapter” has rolled into 3 more hours of bleary eyed joy, most recently when I was following the story of Don Tillman in The Rosie Project trilogy.

Some nights, sleep has refused to claim me as I’ve been left in nail-biting panic after reading the latest crime-thriller by Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen. Every creak in the house, every pipe gurgling has transported me back into his world and left me unable to reason my way back out.

And that’s before I even get to one of my all time favourite authors – Susan Hill. More terrifying than any horror film I’ve ever seen is the fear she instils in me as I read another of her ghost stories. It’s just words. Words. How can words make me feel with such intensity that I can’t sleep, or stop laughing, or cry inconsolably? Just words.

And then there is my favourite crafting of story – The Picture Book. In less than 1000 words a good picture book author can tell the perfect story with drama, tension, relatable characters, satisfying conclusions and heart. Most importantly, heart. Often they can achieve this with hardly any words at all because of course the joy of a picture book is that perfect pairing of minds between an author and an illustrator.

Both bringing their own talents to the page and, when done well, bringing out the best in one another’s work. It is a common misconception that a picture book is a story with pictures which show the reader what the writer has written.

How condescending that would be when the audience of young children, and the adults who are reading the story to them, are capable of absorbing so much more. Let me give an example…

Erik sat on the bench eating his sandwich. [Image: boy sitting on a bench, eating a sandwich]

Now we have a picture to match the words. It’s not that this is wrong but it’s not exactly inspiring is it? Children are naturally curious. So let’s give them something to be curious about…

Erik sat on the bench eating his sandwich. [Image: boy sat on a bench, eating a sandwich. Crumbs from the sandwich are on the floor and an octopus like arm is reaching out from under the bench to pick them up. The boy is unaware.]

Which image would have you turning the page?

There are some amazing picture books which utilise this picture-word relationship. Rosie’s Walk, for example, tells the story in writing of a hen walking around a farmyard. It would make for a fairly uninspiring audio book I can assure you. At no point does the text mention that there is a hungry fox following Rosie the hen around the farm, but we know he’s there because we can see him.

The author-illustrator goes one step further because not only can we see the fox which is never mentioned, we are left questioning whether or not Rosie can also see him.

Is it coincidence that the fox falls into several traps along the way? Or did the seemingly unaware hen know exactly what she was doing walking around the farm and leading him into danger?

Pat Hutchins captures perfectly in Rosie’s Walk the symbiotic relationship between pictures and words – and perhaps as he is both author and illustrator this journey is one step easier – he could see the bigger picture, as it were.

As an author writing picture books I am still learning the craft of ‘leaving space’ for the images. When I write I picture the words on the page and can imagine the characters and how the images might look. Yet, were I lucky enough to get to the collaboration with an illustrator stage, I am sure they would have different ideas of how the text should be brought to life.

After all, I am sure when Julia Donaldson wrote The Gruffalo she had an image of the Gruffalo in mind as she crafted the story. Indeed she tells us certain key details in the text – “purple prickles all over his back” – but it is Axel Scheffler’s Gruffalo that is the image we know and love.

When I first started writing picture books I found myself drifting between not enough written narrative and too much. Now I always have the mantra “leave space for the pictures” in my head. And if in doubt I just read what I’ve written aloud. Why have I included that detail? Is it information which would be better told through an image?

The same goes with the emotional journey I want to take the reader on. If I want to make them laugh then I could use words or I could leave it unsaid for the image to evoke as a page is turned and something funny is revealed. More often than not a combination of the two, and best of all when the two work hand in hand, is what brings the story to life; text and illustrations combining to create magic on the page.

Editing

| Charlie Bown

Teaching children at primary school how to edit their work is not an easy process. For them, the first draft is the only draft.

“You asked me to write a story about a mythical creature, Miss. So I did. Now it’s done. Is it break time yet?”

Something happens quite early on in children’s learning which I saw time and time again with children who arrived in my classroom. By the age of 7 (and often long before) children have categorised themselves into two camps – good at maths and bad at maths. It happens much sooner with maths than writing.

Why? Because when you look at a page of maths working it has been marked one of two ways – right or wrong. As a young child you are not interested in the process, the method or the working. It is irrelevant to you whether or not you got the first step right because you are looking for one thing and one thing only – did the teacher give me a tick or not?

Ticks equal confidence and once children lose confidence in themselves it can be very hard to rebuild. Some schools have abolished ticks and crosses in a bid to ease pressure on children, but guess what – highlighting in two colours or using dots and lines creates the same problem. The symbol might be different but the outcome is the same.

So we work hard to build resilience and teach children that it’s okay to make mistakes; it’s okay to be wrong. We praise the journey and not just the finished product. Learning to edit work celebrates this process. Children should learn that the first draft is exactly that – not right or wrong, just the starting place.

The natural editors in the classroom tend to, in my experience, be the confident mathematicians. The children who don’t mind the crosses or the orange highlighter, the ones who can bounce back and have another go.

I was not a confident mathematician. When I was at school my nose itched for most of my maths lessons, especially the double period on Friday afternoons. Itch. Itch. Itch.

When I don’t understand something my nose itches. I am told it is a displacement technique my brain has invented to distract me from the fact that I can’t work something out. The same thing happens when I try and read maps. Thank you World for the wonder that is Satnav.

So when I started writing, editing my work became a bit like solving a maths problem. I didn’t really know where to start. It turned out I was one of the, “Work’s done: Playtime now,” children. I couldn’t see past the first draft.

Was the second draft meant to be a proof reading exercise? Or should I put the end of the story at the beginning and see if it’s better that way around? Maybe I needed to start again completely and rework the entire thing so it’s a farm story set in space.

Suddenly my nose was in itch-overdrive.

So I did what I encouraged the children to do when I taught them how to edit their writing…

I showed someone else. Actually, I showed a few people. They say it’s best not to show your work to friends and family because they won’t be objective; good manners and social kindness etiquette will replace productive and useful criticism.

So you need to show the right people. My husband is one of my biggest fans but he cannot let a grammatical error, spelling or punctuation mistake go unannounced. I could write a truly terrible story and he would tell me it was wonderful but I know I can trust him to tell me when a comma has lingered too long or an ellipsis has overstepped the mark.

He didn’t disappoint. But once the fundamentals were in place that left me with the story. The big bit. How would I start editing that?

Time helped. Leave your writing for long enough and you can come back to it with fresh eyes all of your own. I left some of my stories for 8 months this year and when I came back to them I saw them in new and interesting ways.

Time helps most things – wine, cheese and apparently picture books. I had to overcome my usual impatience and need to “just get it done” and the pay off was the magical second draft.

The wine and cheese have long gone but I persevered with the picture books and let time do its magic. The third draft, well, that’s a whole other story. Literally.