As a storyteller, I love retelling origin stories. I go
looking for stories in my own culture and others where the nature is explained
in a story full of wisdom. How the sun came to be or why the stars shimmer?
Such stories are also full of emotions and life lessons.
When I wrote You’re Safe With Me, that was my underlying
objective – I wanted to explain thunderstorms in a poetic way while also making
it scientifically accurate because science has come a long way since origin
stories. Teaching children something wrong like the earth is flat will backfire
when a 4-year will demonstrate to me why I’m wrong.
But the science between rains and rivers (the water cycle),
the thunder and lightning didn’t require much research, I was born in the land
of monsoons and I grew up near rivers and oceans.
But when I came to write “You’re Snug with Me” which will be
out in November 2018, the second book in the series, the story was set in the polar
regions amidst a polar bear family.
Here are the five things I learnt while writing a story that
will not present any facts, but still needs to be accurate:
a)
The science of description – I needed to understand
the colours of the polar region through day and night, through winter and
spring. What trees might grow there and what colours do they exude? Otherwise
even the simplest of descriptions would ring false.
b)
The science of sensory details - I needed to
understand the touch, smell and sounds of the land above, the oceans beneath
and the den in which these cubs spend their first few months. What does snug
feel like for a cub that knows only the den?
c)
The science of habitat – who else lives along
with polar bears and what is the food pyramid? What would be the little bears
be afraid of and who will be afraid of them?
d)
The science of climate change – what are the
threats to the bear cubs? What do they need to know about their world and in
protecting their world?
e)
The science of growing up – when do the cubs
learn to swim? When do they hunt themselves? And when do they leave their
mother and lead an independent life? Because it’s a scary world out there and
one day these cubs will have to find food and start a new family too.
Where did I go for research?
- I read a lot of original research literature about pregnant polar bears in dens, how they hibernate and what they do inside.
- I watched videos of simulated dens that some zoos have created.
- I watched innumerable number of youtube videos and BBC Nature videos of polar bears and their cubs
- I contacted scientists and researchers who work with these magnificent beasts to ask about their specific facts.
Here is a little treat - watch the apprehension of polar bear cubs emerging out of their den for the first time.
What was my approach to writing the story itself?
a)
Do initial research about the topic – that would
take me two days of solid reading, getting completely lost inside Google and
wandering into research rabbit holes.
b)
Then I’ll write a storyboard to see if I know
the scenes based on my research. Especially for this book where there is a
pattern based on the first book, it was critical to know how many call and
response patterns did the Mother and cubs have?
c)
More research to fill in the gaps if I don’t
have the 15 spreads I need. (12 if UK books, but because Lantana Publishing
targets UK and US simultaneously, they prefer 15 spreads)
d)
Then I will start writing the story. If I don’t
know a detail, I will make a note and keep going. This is the stage where the
rough draft of the text will happen and the structure will slowly emerge.
e)
Over the next two stages I’ll get the structure
right – when is the refrain happening – every two spreads or three? Where do
page-turns happen? Will I have sounds or specific patterns of text for each
group of spreads?
f)
Then I go back to do specific research – I need
to know about the specific animals I have used in the story or the colour of the
sky or the sound of the snowdrift. This will help tighten the words and cut as
many adjectives and adverbs I can.
Then finally when I’m happy, I send it to
the editor, who then after a few edits, will send it to fact-checkers and her
own science testers to make sure we have the facts right before we will
finalise the text for illustration.
When you read the story you will hopefully
not notice any science protruding like a jagged rock in the story. The aim is
to create a seamlessly joyful story that works because of the science but the facts
are woven into its fabric just like nature itself is.
Do you research for fictional picture
books? What kind of research do you do? And how much of that is procrastination
and how much of that is essential?
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