Kabou learning about the world - click to enlargeCreating a Children's Book - A long and Winding Road
Any book with images for children, from picture books for the little guys to first novels with illustrations, takes a long time to create from inception to finish. Leaving out the duration it takes an author just to imagine and write out a story, it can take up to two years get a story published - even after a publisher has accepted it!
Forget watching a kettle boiling, if you are an author it can be an excruciating process waiting for your book to be published. One of the main reasons for this obscene wait is the time it takes to do the illustrations. If you have the same author and illustrator (as in my case), you can likely whittle this time down. Otherwise, a publisher has to 1) find a suitable illustrator, 2) the illustrator has to agree to do the project, 3) the illustrator has to finish up the contracts they are currently working on, and then 4) the illustrator has to go into the lengthy process itself of creating the illustrations for the story. The first of step in this final process is usually to create roughs for a preliminary storyboard.
The Storyboard
Most people have heard of storyboards in connection to the display of scenes in a movie or a comic book, but storyboards are also used to organize the scenes of children's picture books. Depending on the illustrator (and their experience working with a particular publisher), sometimes thumbnail storyboards in very rough form are created, with about four larger developed images. Other illustrators will choose to make their first storyboard images all relatively large.
As mentioned, I am creating my own illustrations for The Blue Jackal. This means I may be able to cut down on some of the time to get my story published, but it is still a time-consuming process. If I was making a picture book, there is usually a total of 32 pages that I could work with for images. Since mine is a chapter book rather than a picture book, I have a bit more flexibility with how many images I can make, but colour plates cost more money, so there may be limitations with the number of colour plates vs black & white drawings that could be put in the book.
Below is part of my preliminary storyboard for The Blue Jackal. I have shrunk the images down so you can get an idea of the storyboard format, but you can click on the "Full Screen" button in the top right of the embedded document then use the zoom tool to better see the images within the file.
Not knowing how many pictures you will end up with can throw a bit of a wrench in the works of the creative process, but what I did is just go with the basic picture book format, and start sketching away. An art director would probably suggest changes no matter what I do, so I just dove in without worrying too much about details in the initial phases.
Before making the above sketches, I made a couple of pages of tiny thumbnail sketches that were really rough, and then I proceeded to make a second set of larger images. Each image is actually the size of the image of Kabou at the start of this post (click to see actual size). Although larger, I still consider these images to be preliminary roughs, and it took me abnout a weekend of marathon sketching to get them done. I'm looking forward now to developing these images as well as diving into my manuscript. I hope that you are as interested as I am in seeing what the future holds for Kabou.
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5 comments:
Thank-you for sharing your creative process! It is hard to know all the work that goes into children's stories. It seems so simple at first. I had no idea it could take up to 2 years to get a picture book published!
I look forward to seeing how your book develops.
The sketches are lovely! It's brave of you to let people into your process, and I think it's really valuable for us to see.
I have a good friend who was justifiably thrilled the day he landed an agent for his children's picture book. It was right about the time Tom Hanks greenlighted ANTS so we were all pretty jazzed by the possibilities of his new success.
Two years later he'd become embarrassed to bring it up anymore. And he wasn't even doing the illustration, so the time was REALLY dragging for him.
And then, to add insult to injury, the publisher paid him and the illustrator a kill fee for the book and never really gave them a solid reason for scrapping the project.
I hear this a lot in graphic novel circles too where it's not uncommon to hear about authors and artists who lose their passion for a piece of work after sinking a year or two of creative life into a project.
So more power to you, Maria. I'll be keeping an eye on your progress, and keeping my fingers crossed for you too. :-)
@Zoe You are right about courage. I almost didn't post them! I tend to be quite private about things, so blogging is forcing me to open my own creative black box a bit more and see what is going on in there. :)
@Don It troubles me to hear these kinds of stories, and I have heard others, especially regarding writing for film. I have also heard from some people to avoid agents when starting out, and I have also heard that a good publisher will typically stick to their word. I don't expect it to be easy, but in many ways facing that uncertainty is easier than facing the nag in my head that drives me up the wall if I don't at least try.
Thanks for the heads up too. I'll see if I can get me a good crash helmet. Why do I suddenly feel like I'm on the trapeze?
Love the article and the sketches. I would love to write a children's story book one of these days.
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