7 minute read
Children’s books aren’t
After 35 years as an adult-non-fiction publisher, Penny Phillips learnt how to appeal to young minds in her new book
Children’s books aren’t child’s play
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Once upon a time, there was a woman with plaits in her hair who worked as an editor in book publishing.
For 35 years, she worked chiefly in adult non-fiction (at Bloomsbury, Piatkus, André Deutsch, then Bloomsbury again) across a range of genres, from political memoir, celebrity biography and cookbooks to popular science, miscarriage-ofjustice exposés (remember the Guildford Four?) and military history.
Those titles were usually illustrated – and finding the illustrations was a job in itself.
A gardening guide might need a diagram showing how to prune a pear tree. Film director Fred Zinnemann’s autobiography called for a film still of Burt Lancaster in a clinch with Deborah Kerr. A memoir by an ex-SAS soldier needed photos of the 1980 Iranian Embassy siege. In the pre-internet era, picture libraries such as Hulton-Deutsch and Bridgeman were physical spaces where the woman with plaits could while away an afternoon in search of the perfect image.
That woman was me. Why did I write all that in the third person? Perhaps because even though – or maybe because – I worked as an editor, I was always also drawn to story-telling. Stories are what life is made of.
And stories for children are where it starts.
At Bloomsbury in the 1990s, the children’s department was bang next to my office; I got used to the shrieks of enthusiasm or frustration coming from the other side of the wall – and, yes, Harry Potter was born within earshot. Long before he became a worldwide phenomenon, I twice sent a first edition of the very first book to friends’ children, who, many years later, sold them for… But that’s another story.
Choosing illustrations for adult non-fiction may have taken time, but it was quite straightforward. I probably vaguely assumed the same applied to children’s books. My own childhood favourites had included Babar, Winniethe-Pooh, Ameliaranne and the Green Umbrella, Uncle and Struwwelpeter. The pictures just told the story, didn’t they? Nothing complicated about it. The illustrator drew what was in the text. You read the words and looked across the page and – pfff! The words were brought to life.
It wasn’t until I worked as a picturebooks editor, at children’s publisher Walker Books, that I paid proper attention to how children’s illustrated titles really work. It’s not simply a question of having images that depict exactly what the words say.
The relationship between the text and the pictures, whether it’s direct or oblique, hinges on a kind of active symbiosis: they work together to create something that tells a bigger story.
The illustrator’s approach might be inspired as much by what isn’t in the text as by what is. A sentence that reads ‘Katy put on her green boots and hurried out into the storm’ is not, obviously, going to be well-served by a picture of Katy wearing red boots under a sunny sky.
But is a green-booted Katy stomping through the wind and rain enough? Might she have a hat? An umbrella? A puppy running beside her? Is she feeling excited or grumpy? Why is she in a hurry? An illustrator will often add either bold clues or fuzzy layers of suggestion that aren’t explicitly in the text.
A picture might portray a past event, or capture the present moment, or anticipate the story’s direction – for example with an unexplained footprint, or a broken gate.
Animal magic: Rose the rabbit and bedtime (right)
Clare Mallison gave the eagle glasses (above) and the antelope binoculars (below)
If the words say, ‘Tom jumped into the pond,’ does the illustrator opt to show what made him jump, Tom in mid-air or Tom sploshing into the water getting wet?
And what about Tom? Is he a boy? A bear? A penguin?
‘Bill crept down to the kitchen and ate the whole trifle.’ Do we see Bill creeping down the stairs, opening the fridge door, dipping a spoon into the trifle or licking his lips with an empty dish in his hands?
The illustrator’s job is to make pictures that both reinforce and enhance the story. They mustn’t contradict the text; yet they shouldn’t be confined by it. Sometimes an illustrator might ignore the text altogether and break away on a flight of independent imagination.
Helen Oxenbury, illustrator of – among many other titles – Michael Rosen’s bestselling We’re Going on a Bear Hunt (1989), says she tries ‘not to religiously echo the text, but [to] give something a little more … [something that] develops, but doesn’t interfere with the actual story’.
Unless an author illustrates his or her own words – like Beatrix Potter, Dr Seuss, Maurice Sendak, Raymond Briggs or Chris Haughton – it’s often the publisher who will pair a commissioned writer with an artist. Given the freedom and scope an illustrator is likely to expect, it’s important that the author feels confident in their understanding of the text. If there’s no trust, there’s no synergy.
David Walliams said of the illustrator of his The Boy in the Dress (2014), ‘And of course he’s Quentin Blake – so you don’t need to stand over him while he does his illustration. He knows what he’s doing!’
As a book becomes known and loved, the illustrations are often so much a part of it that they resist even the notion of alternatives; they’re definitive. Imagine The Gruffalo illustrated by Beatrix Potter – or Winnie-the-Pooh illustrated by Maurice Sendak!
In my view, when writing for adults, you’ve got to be true to your own vision and not think too much about readers, or you’re in danger of losing that vision. But writing for children is different. You need to be in cahoots with your young readers and give them the tools to interpret and enjoy what’s in front of them.
And that’s where illustrations come in. Children interpret the world through visual images long before they understand anything via the written word.
I was lucky. Some years after leaving Walker, when it came to finding an illustrator for my own children’s book, I wasn’t sure exactly what I was looking for. Nor was my publisher – until we found Clare Mallison. As soon as Clare read When Cherry Lost Terry, her enthusiasm was like a firework.
Because the story begins with an antelope (pictured below) looking out to sea, Clare researched how antelopes stand and look: on their hind legs, which Clare found ‘an immediately attractive image and nice to draw – very elegant’. And the ‘arms’ being up high seemed to lend themselves to the idea of holding binoculars … perfect. Ann keeps her binoculars close by throughout (though they come off her neck at bedtime).
The first set of rough sketches revealed the eagle wearing spectacles (another surprise to me!) and relationships between various characters evolving independently of the text. When the cat jumps off a ferry, Clare first drew the boat but then reconsidered: it was too literal, she says, and not really needed – the main thing was the leap, driving the reader forward, on to the next page.
The pictures complement the text but, as Clare says, ‘They have to be interesting, and pull the eye in. They have their own life’ – separate from the text. It’s important to capture the mood as well as the minutiae. And anything that might add to the conversation between an adult reading a story and a child following it can only be good.
Variety is important: children – and adults – can tire of looking at similar layouts page after page. Rose the rabbit’s head occupies a full page; children pounce on the boldness of it. Clare is a genius!
Certainly it’s great if, as the author, you have a rapport with the illustrator, but it isn’t really about that communication. If you have to explain to him or her what you’re trying to say, the words aren’t doing their job properly.
Blake has said, ‘The fundamental collaboration is a collaboration with the words … with the story. I don’t usually talk to the author – I relate to the text.’
Lots has been written on this subject by people more expert than I am. Of course there are no rules. Some things work better than others. There’s a kind of magic – and logic, or deliberate absence of logic – in a successful children’s picture book.
And it does help if the story ends at bedtime.
When Cherry Lost Terry by Penny Phillips and Clare Mallison is published on 26th April by Old Street
