Last month, I went on a picture book retreat
After a long pandemic break (the previous one had been in 2019), I was keen to try and stretch the benefit as long
as possible beyond the actual retreat. Whilst the place looks lovely
(c) Clare Helen Welsh
as someone who doesn’t picture things, I don’t get to close my eyes and relive the lovely gardens or misshapen old rooms like some people (I’ll take their word for it) do. My three big takeaways from the weekend (other people will have come away with other ones, I know) which I was keen to smuggle home so I could incorporate the retreat life into my own were:
PLAY
TUNING
INTO YOU
ACCOUNTABILITY
PLAY -I was
already trying to get into the play mindset before I left for the retreat and
even packed my Michael Rosen Play book to get me in the mood:
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(c) Michael Rosen
And there was
plenty of it there. It was particularly relevant in the Picture Book Den’s very
own Pippa Goodhart’s sessions on different forms of picture book. We discussed
concept books, interesting use of flaps, holes, books where the pictures are
doing something quite different from the text (my favourite kind)… And we spent
time playing around with ideas of our own.
I’ve always
loved picture books that do things a bit differently, especially wordless books
and those with few words. And I feel like I’ve been given permission (or given
myself permission) to go back to a form I’ve always loved reading and writing.
Pippa’s examples of different books that played with form, or where pictures
play a particularly crucial role -and crucially, which publishers might be
interested in them- really sparked ideas… including going back to old manuscripts
of mine that I’d abandoned because they were a hard sell…
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Books bought for research post retreat for potential new projects!
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TUNING INTO
YOU
I’m not great with yoga. I find it really hard to do the breathing at the same time as moving, and I find following any kinds of instructions pretty difficult so it’s usually a frustrating experience for me. But we had our resident yoga instructor/fellow author/illustrator, Gary Fabbri, there and for those of us who wanted to (and I did want to give it a go) we started our days with yoga before breakfast.
(c) Imogen Foxwell
Whilst I struggled doing the actual movements and breathing the first day, I loved that we were doing something outside and communal, but quiet, to start our day. The second day, Gary went for a simpler session, particularly useful for writers and illustrators who sit for long periods of time. And I loved it! In the evening, we did a yoga meditation (yoga nidra) where we set an intention, a question we’d like to ask ourselves relating to our writing/creating or our lives. Whilst I couldn’t do the imagery side of the meditation, I entered into the spirit of it, got hugely relaxed with the gongs, and allowed my unconscious mind to do what it wanted. The outcome? A semi-interesting answer to my own question to myself (about my current work in progress) but something else, too. It brought to mind a manuscript I’d written paying homage to another book many years ago but that couldn’t be published at the time (for copyright reasons), so I’d changed it and changed it until it was hardly recognisable. But now, seven years later, I suddenly remembered that I’m free to go back to my original one! And I’d completely forgotten its original form until that session!
The final take home was about ACCOUNTABILITY. I already have an accountability partner with whom I meet once a week on skype -and this year she was at the retreat, too. When it came to writing our postcards to ourselves for six months’ time at the end (we all write down on a self-addressed postcard what we hope we’ll have done on the writing/illustrating front in six months’ time and then the organisers -which included Picture Book Den’s Clare Helen Welsh!- collect them in and send them to us in six months), we addressed them to each other rather than ourselves so that the other person will hold us accountable to what we’ve said we’ll do by that time. But the accountability didn’t stop there. On the way to the station, I was chatting with a few retreatees and we were talking about experimenting, playing and being less precious about our work and how we should just get more written, quickly. And we decided that we’d each commit to writing (and in some cases, illustrating) two really rough stories per month with a monthly deadline and online meeting the next day. They would have to be new stories each month (no editing and resubmitting the same one) and we wouldn’t critique them but we’d all have a quick read before we met and say one nice thing about them -but no critiquing). The idea is that if we get less precious about our writing/illustrating and our ideas then we’ll free ourselves up and write/sketch quicker and that at least some of our new ideas will be ok. We’re not thinking we’re going to create 24 good stories in a year -but there might well be some good ones in there that may never have happened were it not for this new process.
I even did some (relatively) early morning outside writing on holiday in Orkney just recently, including sitting on my mum’s grave
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at Weyland Bay at the end of my mum and dad's old road
After getting
a little nervous last week that I was losing my taste for the early mornings
before discovering I actually had covid and my body just needed a lot of rest,
I’m excited to start back again in a couple of days’ time. Although I’m better
with quiet than I was before the retreat (which means I’m having more
interesting thoughts and ideas, too), I still play birdsong as I write, but that
all feeds back into recreating the retreat early morning soundscape anyway.
It's a retreat I'll remember for a long time (huge thanks to organiser Paul Morton, who spent months preparing. It was great to meet fellow 'Denner, Garry Parsons at last, and it was great to be in the company of loads of lovely and interesting creative people). I know everyone will have come away with different 'take homes' but here's to listening
to ourselves, being accountable and having fun!
If you have
any tips or stories about being more creative, getting more done or trusting
yourself in your creative practice, please do share them below in the comments
section. Thank you!
Clare is
a children’s author of more than 35 books and is now on a mission to have a
playful year of writing…
www.julietclarebell.com
