THE FIFTH PEARCE LECTURE

The 5^th Pearce Memorial Lecture was held at Homerton College, Cambridge last Thursday and Malorie Blackman was the speaker. The title of her talk was: 21st Century Storytelling: Will the advent of new technology create a paradigm shift in the writing and reading of children's literature?

Here she is with Jill Paton Walsh

     

 

 and with Philppa Pearce’s daughter, Sally and grandchildren Nat and Will.

Malorie opened up a big discussion about the merits of both the physical book and the enhanced e-book. I guess that anyone attending this lecture series would be a lover of the physical book but possibly open minded about the merits of interactive links to stories and on-line reviews by young bloggers. So it was good to hear one book form could compliment the other and there would still be a place for the quality book to treasure, touch and hand on down to grandchildren.

It was interesting, also, to hear that Julia Donaldson was against The Gruffalo becoming an e-book.

All the lectures can be downloaded from the website:

 

The Pearce Lecture

CHANGES TO THE TYPEFACE

Well, the coloured typeface in We're Going to build as Dam did all change – for two reasons: coloured font presents problems for overseas translation if it’s part of the colour plate and if it’s going to have to be printed separately then that’s extra cost. The other reason was aesthetic – the black font looks good with the black line. It’s all a bit stronger. Now I have to decide whether the boys voices are going to be differentiated in tones of black – the more emphatic character in bold possibly. However, the more I read the story on its own without pictures, the more I’m in favour of leaving them undifferentiated. They are simply two boys – anonymous.

     The two boys who inspired them both happened to be called Calum – or more often ‘the two Calums’ - as if they were one. Here’s a photo of them having just made their dam on Kiloran beach. On a rare sunny day all those years ago!

 

 

GETTING STARTED - ADDING THE TYPE FACE

I’ve Lisa Kirkham's delicate typeface, Nara, in both The Little White Sprite and Zoe’s Boat. The new book, We’re Going to Build a Dam -very much a boy book - needs something different.

In the story the boys are nameless –just ‘two boys.' The narrative is mainly in dialogue and the boys’ voices need to be differentiated. We thought of using different fonts, playing around with bold and italic and size of font. In the end we decided to use a just the one font, Compendio, in Roman. Compendio has a broken line and fits the way I’ve drawn the two scruffy boys using a scratchy black ink line.

The boy’s voices are differentiated by colour; the more dreamy and imaginative boy has an orangey red font and the other who is more practical and drives the dam building forward has a browny red font. At the moment the narrative is a blue font rather than black making the typeface merge with the palette of the pictures. That might change.

WATERSTONES SIGNING

Lynn News

After all the recent bad press about open ended Saturday signings in Waterstones, I thought I’d interrupt my sequence of posts on getting started on a new picture book to list a few positives about these signing events.

    But first I must add that I totally agree with the complaint that sparked the controversy - authors should not be over-zealous in their selling, pursuing around the shop, customers who have come in for a quiet browse. Nor should self published authors be selling poor quality material. However, to ban these signings because a minority have broken the rules is short sighted. Authors give up their Saturdays to help boost Waterstones sales. We sell a lot of books over time and get rewarded in all sorts of ways - like, in my case, meeting a customer who as a child had to learn by heart my picture book What’s the Time Rory Wolf? because it was one of the books on the National Curriculum list for the 7 year old tests. I guess she passed the test as here she was buying books for her own children, not to test them but to instil a love of reading.          

Then there were the two little girls who recognised Selkie. It turned out they owned an earlier edition that I’d signed for them after a visit to their school a few years ago. Even though they were now too old for picture books, they persuaded their mother to buy Zoe’s Boat and then peered keenly at my signature to make sure it was the same as the one in their copy of Selkie.

   Perhaps the nicest moment of all in an open ended Waterstones Saturday signing was when a sales assistant called me over to the phone to speak to a customer who had bought a copy of Zoe’s Boat earlier in the day. It wasn’t a complaint –  instead the customer told me she had read the story to her two year old daughter as soon as they got home and she was phoning because she wanted me to know it was the very first book her daughter had listened to from start to finish.

GETTING UNDER WAY – THE LOOK OF A BOOK

The beach that inspired my new story We’re Going to Build a Dam is Kiloran Bay on the Isle of Colonsay. Here are some sketches done long ago on family holidays.

Having worked a lot on the layouts of this book, my focus is now on the colour and texture of its beach setting. I’m doing colour roughs in watercolour on Arches NOT, a french water colour paper which gives a bit of texture but what I really want is that flecked, print-making look. Not being a print maker, I have to replicate it with wax resistance and random patterns of masking fluid.

   A visit to Old Hunstanton Beach, after a Waterstones signing at Kings Lynn last Saturday, helped me with beach details: the sky reflected in ripple patterns on the wet sand – a raw umber colour – the debris: scattered scraps of seaweed, driftwood, pebbles and shells in sharp relief on the long stretches of dry sand – catching the light and casting shadows.

    Each book, unless it’s going to be a sequel to the last, demands a new look which is always a challenge. I’ve decided with this one to emphasise light and shadow, using a black pen and ink line, instead of my usual softer line. Here’s a colour rough.

GETTING STARTED ON LAYOUTS

Alongside doing the character thumbnails of the new book, I’m now working on the page layouts. I have the text in first-draft form but the moment I start to place images alongside words, the text moves into a second draft; I see words that can be removed and sentences that can be improved to fit in with what’s going on visually around them.

    I like this part of getting started - thinking spatially in broad sweeps - and the hours start to go by quickly. I’ve always liked working to Radio 3 rather than Radio 4 where the talking distracts me but I’m finding these days there’s more and more chat creeping into Radio 3, with its ‘brain teasers’ and invited guests. Strange to think, that in order to create words we need to be in a space where there are no words.

GETTING STARTED

Getting started on a new picture book seems to take more effort and more will power than ever before. After the rush of school visits, bookshop events, RLF work, not to mention all the Plaister Press work,  there’s now just the blank sheet of paper, the slow tick of the clock and the endless rain on the roof.

In the first few days of the first week, I never got anywhere near working a full morning – fleeing the drawing board long before lunch break to check emails and anything else on-line that could distract me from a feeling of isolation from the real world. But gradually, day by day, there would be one drawing out of all the discarded ones that would lead me on to another until suddenly I knew what the dog in my subplot, and the boys in my main plot were going to look like...