Once there was and twice there wasn’t…

I’ve long taken inspiration from animated films.

You watch them and (as you do in a piece of puppet theatre) you sit knowing that what you’re watching is the craft of artists. But it’s real at the same time. In fact, the skill of the craft and the art draws you deeper in than many real things do.

The trick of bringing something inanimate to life is something all us storytellers set out to achieve. But there’s a special magic to the way it’s achieved in animated films which I delight in. And I like to take some of that delight to my writing desk.

Here’s are a couple of short animate films I’ve come across recently which work the magic I’m describing – at least on me…

One’s from France…

L’HOMME AUX OISEAUX // The Man With Birds from Quentin Marcault on Vimeo.

The other from Russia…

the theory of sunset from roman sokolov on Vimeo.

Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu:

“I have never known any distress that an hour’s reading did not relieve.”

Alan Garner:

“To read is also to create.”

Jean Rhys:

“Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.”

Groucho Marx:

“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.”

FUNNY BUMS, FREAKY BEAKS and other incredible creature features is out in paperback. Find out all about how I co-wrote this much-love information book in an interview I recently did, first published on the ‘My Shelves are Full’ website. Also includes news of fresh writing projects with ecologist, Alex Morss…

First and foremost, what a brilliant book this is! The title is fantastic and sure to capture interest immediately. Did the title come early on in the writing of the book?

Thanks. It does feel like a unique book, and it was a total team-effort, putting it together. Each of us contributed different know-how and skills, to make the project special.

Yes, Alex Morss and I came up with the title long before we started work on the text,or got the publisher interested. After coming up with the idea for the book, Alex Morss and I sat down together to brainstorm a list of chapters. Each was based on a piece of animal anatomy that can be strange and wonderful, in certain species. We thought up STRANGE TAILS, TERRIFIC TEETH, PUZZLING TOES… And when arrived at FUNNY BUMS, it jumped out as the one that would make an eye-catching title.

We paired it up with FREAKY BEAKS. And the title of our book was born: FUNNY BUMS, FREAKY BEAKS and other incredible creature features!

Celebrating diversity and difference is important and highlighting differences with animals is a great way to share this message with readers- was this always the intent of the book?

Yes, absolutely. From the word go, we wanted the book to fly in the face of negative judgements about being different. We show, again and again and again, that difference in nature – strangeness, weirdness, extremeness – is there because it’s positive for the animal in question. 

A rattlesnake has an unusual tail because the tail helps it survive. A male wild turkey has a very different kind of neck because its eye-catching dangly bits help him attract a mate. A sun bear has a freaky tongue because it helps her eat what some animals can’t reach. As we say in our introduction, “Nature’s diversity makes planet Earth a richer, more beautiful place.’

How much research did you do for the book?

Both identifying the best animals to include in the book and selecting the most interesting information about them, required a lot of research. 

We were helped by the fact that my writing partner, Alex Morss, has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the natural world, resulting from decades of studying biology, doing field work, and writing about ecology. It was amazing how much information she was able to come up with, simply off the top of her head!

But Alex is also extremely careful about getting facts right. This meant she spent many additional hours properly checking every fact in the book – and not just by searching on the internet, which is home to much false information and can’t be fully trusted.

Because our research was thorough, we’re confident that all the information is spot-on. (At least we haven’t had a single complaint about it, in the year since the book came out in hardback!)

How long did it take you and Alex Morss to research and write the book?

It was a tremendous amount of work. We ended up writing about 107 different species! 

We worked at writing the book for the best part of a year, with an intense spell of about 6 months, in which we dug deep into the research and drafted the various chapters … then redrafted them, and redrafted them again.

Although it was a demanding task, it was made easier by the fact that the subject matter is so fascinating.

Was there something you learned during research which surprised you?

Nearly everything surprised me! I was on the team as the one specialised in creative writing and book-making for young readers. Alex, as well as being an ace writer, was the one suggesting the species we should write about, and coming up with most of the information about the animals. 

In every chapter, there were facts I didn’t know, statistics which took me by surpriseand species I’d never come across. These included the shocking blue tongued lizard, the goofy eastern long-necked turtle and (my favourite animal in the book) the extraordinary peacock mantis shrimp.

The illustrations are so appealing for many ages and share some of the weird and wonderful features of animals- what did you think when you first saw these?

We knew we had a very talented artist on board, in Sarah Edmonds. But we were still very excited by the life, child-friendly appeal, and beauty she put into her final illustrations.

Doing the artwork for a book like FUNNY BUMS, FREAKY BEAKS and other incredible creature features requires two skills. Firstly, a technical ability to bring to life a range of little-known animals, with scientific accuracy. Secondly, a creativeability to make characterful artwork that children will find engaging. Some illustrators would be good at one of these two things. Sarah Edmonds is great at both.

Were there any animals who didn’t make it into the book?

The natural world is so rich in wonders that for every chapter we quite easily came up with more species than would fit into the space allowed!

It was hard to choose what to leave out. Sometimes we did a good bit of research about a particular species, and even wrote what we wanted to say about it, but then realised it would have to fall by the wayside.

Examples of some of the animals we ended up cutting: a squid in FREAKY BEAKS, a chameleon in EXTRAORDINARY EYES, an ostrich in PERPLEXING NECKS, and a blob fish in ODD NOSES.

Incidentally, we also cut a number of whole chapters that were a part of the original plan. This included WHACKY WINGS and CRAZY CLAWS!

Are you and Alex planning more books together in the future?

It’s been a fruitful partnership and we have a new book coming out on 28th June this year. It’s called WILD SUMMER, and it’s the third book in a series about life in the different seasons. Each of the books (aimed at 5- to 8-year-olds) features an imagined story and an information section. 

First of all, we wrote about how plants and animals cope with the cold, in a book called WINTER SLEEP.

Then, last year, we published a book called BUSY SPRING, which explains the big ‘wake-up’ for nature in springtime.

Now WILD SUMMER brings to life the ways nature copes with heat and extremeweather conditions – both of which are typical of summer, and both of which arebecoming more dangerous because of climate change.

Robert Louis Stevenson:

“To travel is better than to arrive.”

English poet, Ken Smith:

“…if I don’t take long journeys and meet different strangers I grow blunt and rusty, like a knife left out in the rain.”

Twelfth century mystical scholastic theologian Hugo of St Victor:

“The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner. He to whom every soil is a native one is already strong. But he is perfect to whom the entire world is a foreign land.”

A school librarian asked a number of authors to respond those two questions for children in his school. Why read? Why books? I’ve got 6 reasons …

• Reading takes you away from screens. Staring at a phone, an iPad, a computer or a television isn’t wrong. But hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of it is. SO PICK UP A BOOK, INSTEAD. 

• Reading trains your CONCENTRATION. When you are absorbed in a book, you are learning powers of concentration which will be useful to you in many, many ways, in your life ahead.

• Reading about other people – whether they are imagined (in fiction books) or real (in non-fiction books) creates EMPATHY. This is the ability to ‘put yourself in other people’s shoes’. And empathy is a great quality for life – especially for anyone who wants to be a responsible and active member of a community.

• Reading teaches IMAGINATION which is essential for our world. No other animal has this gift – the ability to imagine. And human imagination lies behind all books and art, all inventions, all discoveries, and all the many solutions to problems that we depend on.

• Reading teaches you how to USE WORDS. You learn the meanings of words and the spellings of words. You learn how to structure sentences well. You learn how to play and experiment with words too.

• Reading is FUN. Books are full of drama, adventure, poetry, comedy, magic and many other pleasures. SO PLEASE … CHOOSE BOOKS AND KEEP ON READING!

British author, Virginia Woolf:

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”

American President, Abraham Lincoln:

“The sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty.”

British author, George Orwell:

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

“Always make the audience suffer as much as possible.”

“There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.”

“Seeing a murder on television can help work off one’s antagonisms. And if you haven’t any antagonisms, the commercials will give you some.”

To mark the launch of HOW TO BE COOLER THAN COOL I had an Instagram Live conversation with my longtime editor at Walker Books, Maria Tunney. Instagrammers can see our chat here.

Maria asked me to come up with ‘five key picture book ingredients’. That felt like an interesting challenge and what I had to say seems to have set others thinking too.

There are no definitive ingredients for picture books, or any other kind of creative writing. But over the years I’ve developed a list of 9 questions which I ask myself, to test the readiness of a developing picture book text. Sometimes a new story is strong in a number of areas, but not all. Checking through these 9 pointers can identify what needs to be worked on. And it can spark the ideas that a story needs, to evolve…

1. Is there a character with whom young children will fall in love – preferably after one sentence?

2. Is there something about the story that will ‘hook’ readers in from the start?

3. Does the story have a page-turning quality as it progresses?

4. What does the main character want?

5. Is there an emotional journey, as well as a story journey? (It doesn’t matter what the emotion is.)

6. Is there visual variety for an illustrator?

7. Does everything happen across a short time-span? (Picture book stories very often describe a single day, or even less.)  

8. Is the story truly young…truly for and about children under 6?

9. Is there some kind of ending uplift that will delight young readers? (There are many kinds: twists, jokes, echoes, questions, satisfying resolutions. Best of all, perhaps, none of those…but something no one’s come up with before!)

British author, Alan Garner: “I look on the ‘down’ as an imposed period of hibernation that allows the unconscious and creative mind to overcome the rational intellect.”

German artist, Joseph Beuys: “Every creative person must go through a season in hell in order to reach a deeper level of perception.”

American children’s author, Michael Cadnum: “…writers tend to embrace their own suffering with too much enthusiasm. Writing is work, but not the worst work in the world.”

Brazilian poet, Carlos Drumond de Andrade: “pois a hora mais bela/surge da mais triste.” (“Because the most beautiful moment/grews out of the saddest hour.”)