CAN YOU WRITE A PICTURE BOOK WITHOUT WORDS? by Clare Helen Welsh

 

Back in June, I wrote a blog post that asked if it was possible to READ a book without words. Now, here’s the sequel you’ve all been waiting for! Can you WRITE a picture book without words? Absolutely! You can! Can a story be told entirely through images? Can a picture book exist without words? Even if you’re the author only and not an illustrator? YES! Wordless picture books offer a unique and powerful way to tell stories. But for aspiring picture book writers, the prospect of creating a wordless story may seem daunting. In June 2024, my (almost!) wordless picture book, Moon Bear, published with Frances Lincoln. It’s about a girl called Ettie who is afraid of the dark. She meets a magical moon bear who is afraid of the light. I was not the illustrator on the project. I was the author only - my co-collaborator was the awesome Carolina T. Godina. Creating this book was an exciting and creative challenge, and because of that, I'd like to suggest to other writers that it's worth exploring. What I learned when writing a wordless picture book, is that all the usual picture book ingredients are needed – a strong hook, an interesting concept, compelling characters and a satisfying plot.  In this post, I’ll explore how to approach writing a wordless picture book as a writer only and offer some key tips to guide you in the process. Tips for Creating a Wordless Picture Book: 1. Plan the narrative arc A wordless picture book still needs a clear narrative structure. There needs to be just enough threads that the reader can interpret and co-create the story, and re-create it on subsequent reads, without there being so much going on that it’s impossible to pin down and follow one controlling idea.  To create a clear beginning, middle, try writing a mini synopsis, then write or sketch a storyboard of  key scenes like a film director would.  Here’s the short synopsis I wrote for Moon Bear. 2. Let the illustrations convey emotion In a wordless book, emotions need to be conveyed through facial expressions, body language, and colour. You'll need to dramatise the storytelling - show it, not tell it. Consider how you will emphasise the emotional highs and lows of the story in pictures alone. For example, maybe you’ll use darker tones and close-up compositions for scenes of sadness or fear, in contrast to bright and open happier and energetic moments. It might help to imagine an illustrator you'd love to work with. I imagined Briony May Smith when working on Moon Bear.  3. Create tension and resolve conflict Every good story needs conflict and resolution. Whether your story is about a lost animal, an exciting adventure or self-discovery, there should be a sense of tension that propels the story forward. The challenge in a wordless book is making sure that this tension is visible. Of course, much of this will become evident when an illustrator comes on board, but consider what you can do to strengthen tension and resolution in your written submission. When you present your wordless picture book, it will look like a collection of detailed illustration notes. Can you see how I helped my agent and editor visualise tension through the character's action? 4. Use repetition and pattern Repetition can be a powerful tool in a wordless picture book. By repeating certain visual elements, you can create rhythm and shape that helps the reader feel grounded in the story. It also encourages them to anticipate what comes next, adding depth and engagement to the reading experience. For example, in Moon Bear, Ettie’s bedtime scenes are repeated at the start and at the end. The first time she is afraid – she doesn’t want Mummy to leave. The second time, when she is no longer scared of the dark, she pushes Mummy out the door!   5. Play with page turns In a wordless picture book, the moment when the reader turns the page can be used to create suspense or surprise. Consider how you can use page turns to heighten, reveal, surprise or engage the reader at important moments. Here's a page near the end of Moon Bear that I think keeps the reader engaged and encourages them to predict what will happen next.  6. Use visual details to deepen the story Wordless picture books allow for rich layers of detail. Include scope for visual details that hint at backstory, character development, or future events. For example, have you spotted the cat in the opening spread of Moon Bear? And the clock that shows Ettie’s bedtime? It shows 7pm when Ettie is stalling, and 3:30pm when she is excited to meet Moon Bear again. These details invite readers to engage more deeply with the book and make new discoveries with each reading. 7. Share your story with critique partners One of the best ways to ensure that your wordless story works is to share it with critique partners. See if they are able to follow the plot. Do they understand the themes? Is anything unclear? Their feedback will be invaluable in refining your narrative. Wordless picture books are a challenge, a joy and a wonder. They can help children feel happy and confident to read at their own pace, making them an active participant in the storytelling.  Why not challenge yourself to write one? It’s a great lesson in showing, not telling. You’ll learn about pacing and what’s realistic in terms of page layouts and illustrations and the art of a telling a focused and satisfying tale. You can always try a version with words at a later date, and it might make for an interesting starting point.  There’s no right or wrong way to read a wordless story, and no right or wrong way to write one either. But hopefully the tips above will help.  Can you write a wordless picture book? Absolutely! You can! Clare Helen Welsh is a children's writer from Devon. She writes fiction and non-fiction picture book texts - sometimes funny, sometimes lyrical and everything in between! Her latest picture book is called 'Moon Bear,' illustrated by Carolina T. Godina and published by Frances Lincoln. You can find out more about her at her website www.clarehelenwelsh.com or on Twitter @ClareHelenWelsh . Clare is represented by Alice Williams at Alice Williams Literary and is the founder of #BooksThatHelp.

Mindful Picture Book Writing by Chitra Soundar

As a writer and with someone who learnt meditation as a child and had forgotten its benefits until recently, re-visiting the basic concepts of mindfulness has been very useful. Especially as a picture book writer – paying attention to the story and words, using a word with intent and not judging our own work critically until it is ready to be judged are all mindful things we do and we can do in our writing practice. 

So what does it mean to be a mindful picture book writer?

a) The first step is always showing up – setting aside a time for the writing and actually showing up. Regardless of the incessant chaos of our lives, we show up to write. 

b) The second step – especially useful for writers – is to be mindful of your own self and the surroundings. Most mindful practices start with mindful breathing. You quietly say In and Out as you breathe in and out deeply. Then observe the surroundings and try and write the five senses about the surroundings – from your noisy keyboard making clickety-clack noises to the smells from the kitchen or how cold or warm you are. What can you see – colourful posters or a bland white wall? Acknowledge all of those mindful observations.

You must wonder how this can help. It helps because the more you do this, the better you get at observing spaces around you and consciously remembering the five senses about those spaces. What can be more useful to writers than training your brain to consciously record details of life to use later in the writing?

c) The third step – is to imagine your characters mindfully in their space. Deliberately allow them to wander in their space. Even if you’re not an illustrator, you might have an idea where your character is at any point in time in the story – consciously wander and add sensory details that you have been accumulating by doing step (b).

It is easy to get distracted – your character might go off to different places, go with the flow. Perhaps the story might be led in a different direction. Or you might get distracted about what to cook for dinner or which book you’re going to read next. When that happens, bring your character back to where they were before your mind wandered off and start again. 

Step (b) and (c) are really hard to do when you actually begin doing them. Start with 1-minute exercises and build up your stamina to do longer durations. 

d) Now when you write your story or rewrite – channel all those experiences your character had with all their senses into the words. Because you travelled with your character into those spaces and felt what they felt, smelt what they smelt and tasted, watched and heard everything, perhaps your verbs will be active, your nouns specific and the emotion strong. 

Picture books especially with a smaller word count are acts of intention. 

You have a specific shape to the story. You have to choose precise words that invoke visuals and emotions in the editor / illustrator’s mind. And when you pay attention and do it with intention, you will slowly start seeing much stronger text on the page. But it is going to take time. Entering this space without judgement is the third aspect of mindfulness. 

Writing is often like the critic and doubter in us trying to wrestle control from our creative energy. As most writing books will say, and I can vouch for it as a writer myself and you can too, there is a place and time for everything. So when you’re writing mindfully, park the critic and doubter outside. Pay attention to the task, do it with intention and without judgement.

Then when you have got your draft on the page, bring the critic in and again pay attention, edit with intention and without judgement. Just because you can’t wrestle a story into shape doesn’t mean you’re a bad writer, it means this particular story needs more time – thinking time, imagining time, resting time and maybe rewriting time. If you get judgemental about it, it will cloud your intention of making it better and try to reject the writing.

So, the critic must be mindful as well – they are critiquing the words, not you the person. They are doing it with intention – this morning they are only critique structure, maybe a few days later, the critic can return to review just the words. Put intention into your edits. 

And you will end up repeating this process of mindful writing and mindful editing over and over again for the same story. But as you keep practicing the mindful way, perhaps you might not need that many rounds. 

I first combined meditation and writing in 2010 when I went on writing retreat run by Natalie Goldberg because her book Writing Down the Bones had brought me back from “not writing at all” to writing. It had a profound impact on me and still is my go-to cure for I can't write conditions. 

Nestled in the mountains of New Mexico, inside a Buddhist monastery, we did silent practice, sitting for meditation and writing with intention. It may not be connected, but in 2012, three of my picture books got accepted. 

I don’t always remember to be mindful, for sure. Especially as a children’s author, I’m doing events, I’m writing and working on multiple things and I have 100 different new ideas I want to write. But when my mind is busy and I feel like I’m hopping from one lily-pad of obligation to another, I find a quiet day just to sit with myself and my notebook. 

Also, when we were all confined inside when the plague hit us again, I started Write30. A bunch of us gather together every Friday (most Fridays), virtually, for 30 minutes and write to a prompt. The writers who join have already done the first step – finding the time to write. Then we pay attention to the prompt and we write. We write with intention on the prompt – but still engaging our individual creativities. I’m sure that even with a single prompt, all of us would have come up with different stories or passages or poems. Then we are non-judgemental. We talk about the experience of that writing, but we don’t read anything aloud, we don’t mock ourselves, we don’t criticise ourselves if the prompt didn’t work. We just reflect. If you want to join our #write30 meetings, email me and I will add you to the invites. 

If you want to delve deeper into mindful writing, then I’d recommend another book that will guide you step by step through the process and also provide exercises. Check it out. 

I realise this mindful practice of writing is not just for picture book writers. But personally, I feel picture book writers have a bigger need to be purposeful and intentional with their words and pictures. They need to pick their words with intention to tell the story and what can be more mindful than that?

If this resonates with you or if you try mindful writing, then do share your thoughts with us in the comments. If you want to join the weekly #Write30 session, do message Chitra directly.

Colours as a Picture Book Theme, by Pippa Goodhart

 

Colours! 

                  Colours are one of those concepts that young children learn early, along with numbers and opposites and shapes. We adults have a natural instinct to tell and reinforce colour labels in order to teach children these things. I’ve just been sharing books with my one-year-old granddaughter, and observed myself asking her, ‘Where is the blue elephant? Can you see a pink bird?’ even when the text of that book makes no mention of colour. 

    For that teaching reason, colours as a theme are a natural match for a very young audience. But of course they are also visual, and perfect for picture book treatment.

                  Picture books focussing on colour play with colours in different ways. There are those simply naming and showing coloured objects. And there are those which use colour within a story context. I’m going to show two of my favourite examples of colour-based stories, but first of all I want to show off my own new board book, Colours of Things! 

                  My text is a simple rhyming one –

‘Red cherries, a red door, red jam and a parrot.

Orange bunting and T-shirt, marigolds and a carrot.

Yellow banana and crayons, and bright yellow hair.

Green grass, a green dress, green grapes and a pear.’ … And so on through blue, 

purple, pink, brown, silver and gold, to …

‘White mittens, a kitten, a snowman, a cup …

And all sorts of things that just mix colours up!’

 

But its Emily Rand’s gloriously rich array of coloured objects in her illustrations which offer so many everyday examples and so much to notice and talk about. 

 

 

 

                  ‘Wow!’ Said The Owl by Tim Hopgood is a beautiful board book story in which a curious little owl stays awake during the day, and sees colours she hasn’t experienced at night. 

A pink dawn sky, a yellow sun, blue sky, green leaves, red butterflies, grey clouds and rain, all seen from her tree, and all eliciting a ‘Wow!’ reaction. 

 

Then, best of all, …

 

And the night has ‘Wow!’ wonders too. Such a lovely book.

For slightly older readers, and in paperback rather than board book format, is The Colour Monster by Anna Llenas. With wonderful, almost 3D seeming, collage and scribbly oil crayon artwork depicting characterful characters with energy and humour, this is a story that equates colours with moods. 

Colour Monster is very confused, and doesn’t know why, so the capable girl narrator of this story takes him in hand and sorts him out. 

 

He needs to recognise and separate his colour moods. Happiness ‘shines yellow like the sun and twinkles like the stars.’ Sadness is ‘gentle like a blue rainy day’. And so on.

 

Look at fear …

 

All get firmly sorted. But then another colour appears that the fierce know-it-all narrator girl is confused by …

 

Profound, beautiful and funny. A brilliant book. Perfect as a starting point for children to make their own mood colour collages. 

 

                  How else has colour been used in picture books? Do, please, add and share examples in the Comments below. 

Rejection and Rubbish Are the Essential Stuff of Creation • by Natascha Biebow

I have been reading this book:

 

How to Fly A Horse: The Secret History of Creation,
Invention and Discovery by Kevin Ashton

 

Ashton is a technology pioneer, whose own personal journey as an inventor proves his point. It was only as a result of tens of thousands of hours of work, filled with failures, mistakes and flashes of inspiration, that he was able to build ‘the internet of things’.

 

He debunks the myth that creativity is the remit of the few and that geniusus create in a dramatic moment of ‘eureka’ inspiration. According to Ashton, there are no tricks or quick fixes, just hours of ordinary to reach the extraordinary.

 

The title is intriguing, isn’t it? It comes from the story of the Wright Brothers’ process of inventing a flying machine. They were the first people to fly, not because they were the first to build an airplane (many people had similar ideas!), but because they problem-solved how to make it fly step-by-step, rather than in one big leap. They observed how birds flew, but when they tried to replicate this, they noticed their contraption moved erratically like an 'untrained horse'. Solving the problem of air gliding plus balancing when dealing with a ‘bucking horse’, required failure, lateral thinking and resilience until they eventually put all the parts together.

 

The Wright Flyer airborne during the first powered flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, United States of America, 17 December 1903. Orville Wright is the pilot while Wilbur Wright runs alongside.

What does his have to do with being a picture book writer? Lots!

Here are some of my take-aways:

 

Ahston argues that creativity is innate, as much part of being human as walking, talking or eating. People are not equally creative, just like we are not all equally athletic or mathematical thinkers, but everyone can do it.  

 

• Creation is the result of many small incremental steps: when we look carefully, we can see that every innovation has been built on the foundation of what has come before us. So, we are building on the sum of the work of authors and illustrators who have preceded us, across generations, continents and cultures. There is always room to innovate further.

 

So, when we look at the competition and feel overwhelmed by all the amazing books already out there, or when we think someone else has already covered a topic about which we'd like to create a picture book, we can take a deep breath and continue.

 

• Everything you start with will probably be rubbish: what we first produce will not be as good as what we can create once it’s been reviewed, fine-tuned, refined, or even thrown out and begun again. So, start we must.  

 

“Good writing is bad writing well edited”  Ashton writes.

 

 

So it’s important to just start, repeat and repeat again. Stretch ourselves to power through the nay-saying voices in our head and the temptations to get way-laid by interruptions (coffee, email, researching randomia, the washing, the dog . . .). Just work!

 

• Rejection is essential: everything is created by the process of failure to foundation.

 

When we look around and admire others’ amazing work, we often do not see what was thrown away, what failed and what didn’t make the cut. Rubbish is the foundation for innovation. Something to remember, too, when we receive those rejection letters when submitting - it's an opportunity to try again and do better!

 

“Innovation is whatever remains when all our failures are removed.” 

 

In every picture book I’ve ever edited, there is a whole process that unfolds behind the scenes, but you wouldn’t glean any of the frustrations, micro-decisions, re-thinks, and amends that go into each spread from looking at the finished book. Which is how it should be! Here is just one example of this:

 

From Cotton Cloud Refuses to Rain by Elizabeth F Hill and Hannah George (published by Five Quills)

 

Figuring out how to show this turning point moment where Cotton Cloud is upset, thinking her rain might have made people sad was tricky. To give it more impact, we suggested zooming in and deleting the detail on the ground. The editor, designer, author and illustrator collaborated closely to solve this problem. (From Cotton Cloud Refuses to Rain by Elizabeth F Hill and Hannah George)

 

The final artwork highlights the characters' emotional turning point with much more impact and draws in readers into the moment. (From Cotton Cloud Refuses to Rain by Elizabeth F Hill and Hannah George)

The next spread needed adjusting too. (Picture books have an annoying habit of when you fix one thing, another unravels, but ultimately the end result is so much better!) Here, we see how Cotton Cloud's rain has brought joy and growth to the parched landscape, animals and people. This early rough was a great starting point, but we wanted to add more expression and emotion to this key moment. (From Cotton Cloud Refuses to Rain by Elizabeth F Hill and Hannah George)

 

 

In this new rough, the characters are more prominent and Hannah's signature and delightful details draw in the readers with their stories. The author and I discussed amending the text to accompany the revised image - see final artwork below. (From Cotton Cloud Refuses to Rain by Elizabeth F Hill and Hannah George)

 

(From Cotton Cloud Refuses to Rain by Elizabeth F Hill and Hannah George)

We each bring our point of difference, our unique ‘us’ to our work. It’s important to create prolifically, building on each other’s creativity in order to innovate.

 

“There are more people creating, so there are more tools in the tool chain . . . so we have more time, space, health education, and information for creating.” Each creator is essential – and there’s room for all of us.

 

I found Ashton's book fascinating and I’d highly recommend it for the curious creator.  More importantly, reading its stories provided me with an uplifting sense of the possible in what I might create, renewed confidence and hope. 

 

_________________________________________________________________

 

Natascha Biebow, MBE, Author, Editor and Mentor

 

Want to level up your picture books? I am launching a new course!

Natascha is the author of the award-winning The Crayon Man: The True Story of the Invention of Crayola Crayons, illustrated by Steven Salerno, winner of the Irma Black Award for Excellence in Children's Books, and selected as a best STEM Book 2020. Editor of numerous prize-winning books, she runs Blue Elephant Storyshaping, an editing, coaching and mentoring service aimed at empowering writers and illustrators to fine-tune their work pre-submission, and is the Editorial Director for Five Quills. Find out about her picture book webinar courses! She is Co-Regional Advisor (Co-Chair) of SCBWI British Isles and was awarded an MBE for her services to children's book writers and illustrators. Find her at www.nataschabiebow.com

The Picture Book Tigers (with Mini Grey)

The Picture Book Tigers

A few months ago I made some tiger bookmarks for the Bookmark Project, and then I did a tigermark giveaway on Twitter (formerly known as X) asking for favourite children’s tiger tales. I got a lot of suggestions, and discovered that Picture Book Tigers are simultaneously many things. 

One of my Tigermarks

So I thought I’d give you a quick tour of some of the things Picture Book Tigers can be.

Tigers can EAT YOU UP!!

These are tigers who are just plain dangerous and just want to eat you all up (like a shark or a monster might want to). These Tigers tend to get outwitted.  

 In Whatever by William Bee – our boy who cannot be impressed by anything gets entirely eaten - the worst actually happens. 

In I am a Tiger (by Karl Newson and Ross Collins), Mouse is either masquerading as a tiger or genuinely thinks he is one. 

The embattled tiger gets a bit belittled by the unphaseable Mouse.

 

 

The controversial Little Black Sambo is all about outwitting the tiger. It was publishedin 1899, and Helen Bannerman wrote it to entertain her daughters. 

But through the 20th century, the characters' names and the depiction of Little Black Sambo came to be seen as offensive. For more about the history of this, see The Complicated Racial Politics of Little Black Sambo. 

But it has interesting tigers in it: they are obsessed with eating Little Sambo, but also proud and vain and boastful - and pretty stupid.

 

 

I came across it as a child, and what impressed me was how the outwitted tigers spin so fast round a tree that they melt into butter. Could tigers become butter?

The Sambo tigers wearing Sambo's shorts and shoes, looking very marvellous.

At the end, Sambo's mum makes pancakes with the tiger butter: "And then they all sat down to supper. And Black Mumbo ate Twenty-seven pancakes, and Black Jumbo ate Fifty-five, but Little Black Sambo ate a Hundred and Sixty-nine, because he was so hungry." 

Tigers can get their own back

Tipu's Tiger left, and on the right a moving carboard one I made from a kit.

As a child, I hated tigers being portrayed as the baddies. So I loved Tippoo’s Tiger – the tiger getting the upper paw. Finally the tiger wins. It was my favourite thing at the V&A. And it's a gruesome automaton - the betigered European gentleman waves his arm and makes a wailing sound, and the tiger's inner workings roar, powered by bellows.

Wild Tigers

In The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, Aslan the lion is not a tame lion. Mr Beaver says " 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King, I tell you." Mr. Tumnus also says, "He's wild, you know. Not a tame lion." OK, that's about lions, but it also applies to tigers.

Take Mr Tiger Goes Wild by Peter Brown: in a Victorianly dressed world of repressed animals, Mr Tiger rips off his clothes and returns to the jungle. Of course, there's always the moment where he goes too far, but then he helps everyone else to embrace their wild side. 

 

 

Mr Tiger gets wilder...

...the moment when he goes a little too far.

Tigers who are really toys or maybe cats

A total favourite is Tigger from Winnie-The-Pooh: a toy tiger come alive, with irrepressible bounciness. 

In There’s a Tiger in the Garden  by Lizzy Stewart, Nora looks again at the ordinary and discovers the extraordinary and that there is a tiger in the garden. Maybe it is an imaginary friend tiger. Maybe it is a cat transformed.  "I’ll believe in you if you believe in me," it says.

 Here is Stripey the House Tiger (also know as Pepper my cat) trying out being on a cheeseboard.

 

 

When I made this Picnic Tiger for AF Harrold's Book of Not Entirely Useful Advice, I didn't realise that I was subconsciously channelling Pepper. Note the Proud Chest.

Incidentally, domestic cats and wild cats all have a pretty similar body plan. This may be because cats are pretty much perfect. For more about this have a look here with Professor Anjali Goswami (14 minutes in):The Speed of Life: A Deep-Time Perspective.

Carpet Tigers

Tigers are bright, stripy and dangerous – but this bold patterning also means that they look like they’re wearing pyjamas or a big furry onesie. This means they can masquerade as soft furnishings.

 

 

In The Tiger Skin Rug by Gerald Rose, a thin scrawny tiger spots a job opportunity as a rug in the Maharaja’s palace. But then eating leftovers makes the tiger a bit too three dimensional to carry off the rug impersonation.

 

 

 

The Lying Carpet by David Lucas contains another carpet-tiger. Is anything it says the truth? A statue of a little girl wants to know what she is; the carpet invents endless possibilities - but what's the truth, what to believe? A bit more about this here. 

 

 

Life of Pi - illustration by Andy Bridge

 

 

 

Stories and the Truth and what to believe are also at the heart of another tiger tale - Life of Pi by Yann Martell...

Tigers also lose things. In The Tiger Who Lost His Stripes by Anthony Paul and Michael Foreman, a gentlemanly tiger has to solve problems to have his stripes returned. 

In Augustus by Catherine Rayner, it's a smile that's gone missing.

 

The missing smile has returned.

Mysterious Strangers

 

The most famous Picture Book Tiger has to be that one who comes to tea. It's a surprise visit from the unknown and untameable. And I think it's about longing. Longing for something exciting to happen in a day stretching dully ahead, a surprise knock on the door. 

 

But also longing for something big and strong and wild - look how Sophie strokes the tiger's tail as it licks up all the water from the tap, just like your cat would:. 

 More about The Tiger Who Came To Tea by Judith Kerr here, and also here.

Longing for tigers, imaginary friend tigers, tiger avatars

Who do you want to be your perfect imaginary friend, your best ever protector and guide? It has to be a tiger.

Illustration by Dave McKean

 Even better, a magical tiger. Tyger by SF Said takes me to the fearfully symmetrical Tyger of William Blake, staring balefully and burning bright.

 

The Sea Tiger by Victoria Turnbull: underwater we find a heart’s desire Protector Tiger, a big brother guardian sea-angel for a little mer-boy.

 

 

(I'm also here mentioning Jim’s Lion, (written by Russell Hoban and illustrated by Alexis Deacon) even though it's a lion. Jim is very ill, and he he needs an avatar to fight fiercely for him, a finder to come for him in his dreams and pull him back to the world when he has a terrifying operation.)

 

 

Tigers can also be the thing that grown-ups can't notice. Look at the magnificent top-hatted tiger reading a comic book in There’s a Tiger on the Train by Mariesa Dulak and Rebecca Cobb. 

Such a big tiger...

 

I mean, a tiger who reads a comic book couldn't possibly hurt you, could it?

I love seeing from the tiger's point of view here.

More here: the author Mariesa Dulak interviewed by Pippa Goodheart.

  In Tiger Lily by Gwen Millward, Lily's imaginary tiger friend gets the blame when, as all tigers seem to do, it eventually goes a step too far into wild rumpus.

The Tiger at the Zoo

My favourite moment from The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell is when young Lucrezia strokes the tigress in her father's menagerie. "The tigress didn't so much pace as pour herself, as if  her very essence was moltten, simmering, like the ooze from a volcano." The tiger's fur is "pliant, warm, soft as down."

The nearest I’ve ever got to a real tiger was at London Zoo. The tiger was just an inch of glass window away. I was baffled by its vivid stripiness, its huge broad head, its colossal paws. And what I really wanted to happen, was for the glass to disappear, and for the tiger to let me, and only me, bury my arms and head in its soft fur, and give it a wild hug.

Tigers seem to be simultaneously avatars, wildness personified, pyjama-wearers, gobblers-up of small boys, mysterious strangers, your heart's desire, your date with destiny, completely unpredictable, jewel bright. Something wild, something longed for, danger just contained, something you dream might love you back – and probably the only place that can really happen…is in picture books. 

 

 

 

Mini's latest book is The Greatest Show on Earth, published by Puffin.