wordless wonder

I’m talking to a few classes and groups next week – adults for a change – looking particularly at story and storyboarding. And I found myself thinking a lot about one of my current projects, the wordless book.

It’s been very interesting to see how my approach to story has changed when I’m not getting tied into knots by the words. Like any story I have a certain amount of plot worked out early on, but whereas normally I’d jump straight in and begin writing, this time I have to work more thematically and structurally. When I talk to kids about planning pictures and why you’d want to do it, I often ask if they’ve even drawn a person, starting with all the fun detail of a face but by the time they come to draw the feet – there’s no room for them on the page. It’s much the same in writing – that temptation to leap in without a plan. When I wrote the Night Garden, I had a lot of ideas and a string of scenes I liked. I rewrote each page so many times, coming up with dozens of alternate sentences. There were some lovely phrases and images, bits of word play and patterns but I was floundering around. And I wonder now if the experience might have been different if I’d spent more time right at the beginning without the words, imaging the story and what was behind it and what I really really wanted to convey. Would it have been easier to write?

I did finally do some thematic work. Pete just reminded me that he made me do lots at one stage when I was particularly lost. I had written a version with quite a bit of rhyme but was asked to pare that back by the publishers. When I stripped it away, I realised that there just wasn’t a strong enough story beneath it. I had some good parts in the middle, but I was finding the beginning and end difficult. So I stopped and thought about what it was really all about. I decided that the story was about a few things – wanting change and new things, the two-edged nature of having your wishes answered, and how you really see the good in what you have when you remove yourself from it for a while. And finally I knew what the beginning and end needed to say.

And it did help.

With this new wordless book, there is no safety net of words to fill in the gaps and give us extra information. I have to make the pictures, or sequence of pictures, give us everything – feelings, plot, thoughts, emotions… convey confusion and misunderstanding, express reasoning, and at times, dialogue! I can’t link scenes together with repeated phrases, I can’t convey advanced concepts by describing them. I have to find visual metaphors for everything, from the smallest idea to the biggest underlying themes.

Stripping away the text could be something I make myself do with every book, just for a little while. To make me ask – what is really happening here and what is the story trying to say? What would the pictures have to convey at any certain time if there were no words, nothing that said – he was very sad, or she realised as soon as she stepped out of the house that she had chosen badly. How important is that information to the story? How else can I show it? Now putting back the words I ask myself – do these actually work hard enough?

I don’t think there’s any one way to write or illustrate. Different methods achieve different things. If you want to just play and see what happens (and it doesn’t matter if the feet don’t fit on the page) then leap, dive, pull off your shoes and socks and get creative. See what happens. I bet you’ll get lots of ideas and feel invigorated. But when it gets complex and when it does start to matter that the feet are on the page, that the story is strong, that the book says something, that we’re going somewhere in the story – perhaps a little silence can help to get to the core of a project.