Do Picture Books Have To Tell A Story? By Pippa Goodhart

My most successful picture book so far is a book called You Choose, illustrated by Nick Sharratt.  It is a picture book that sits on the fiction shelves, and yet it doesn't tell a story.  It was because it didn't tell a story that nine publishers rejected it before Random House took it on.  But must a picture book always tell a story?

 

When a text has been rejected nine times, and when the publishers all agree on the perceived problem with the text, and your agent agrees with them, it is usually time to put that text aside, and move on.  But I believed in the idea of this book too much to do that.  Having watched three daughters and their friends looking through catalogues and happily choosing things that they knew they'd never actually get, I knew that at least those children loved the game of choosing.  And, since the point of the choosing didn't seem to be necessarily then acquiring whatever was chosen, I felt sure there was fun to be had in offering choices that were totally fictional.  So a child can choose to live in a pink fairy tale palace, or a tree house, or a mushroom, or any of the thirty-two different kinds of home on offer.  They can have Santa or a wizard or a Viking, or any number of other kinds of people (many of them ordinary) as their father.  They can choose twins, an alien, a giant, or all sorts of others as siblings or friends.  Pets, places, clothes, jobs, foods, and so on; there is a mass to choose from.  And over the eight years that You Choose has been around its sales have risen and risen, and it's even winning prizes, which is lovely.

Now Nick has again spent literally years in illustrating a new book along a similar theme.  Just Imagine came out ten days ago. 

This time, instead of choosing things, you choose to change yourself.  What if you were made of jelly or cheese or were a balloon or a ghost or a robot?  Now we're getting into really imaginative territory.

 

Nick's pictures are full to bursting with ideas.  What would you like this machine to be doing or making?

Neither of these books tells a story, but it is clear from the reactions I've had to both of them that they are fich with story potential, and that all sorts of stories - serious ones, funny ones, sad ones, exciting ones, nonsense ones - come out of them.  Not my stories, but the children's own stories.  I find that exciting.  With over a million copies of You Choose out there, being shared and chatted over, I hope that well over a million stories have brewed in children's minds from the ingredients it offers. 

What particularly excites me about Just Imagine is that the protagonist in the stories that come out of this new book will almost certainly be the children themselves.