CREATING STRONG PICTURE BOOK CHARACTERS

If I had to pin down some of my all-time favourite picture book characters, Burglar Bill (Janet and Allan Ahlberg) and the girl from Rebecca Patterson’s My Big Shouting Day would be up there.

I think what I’m drawn to is the darkness and danger in Burglar Bill. He's certainly interesting and someone I want to read more about. Plus, he has a fantastic refrain that I used to love joining in with as a child - ‘I’ll ‘av that!

 

In My Big Shouting Day it’s the authenticity of the character that appeals to me. She's so well cast and familiar that I feel like I know her (Perhaps I do!) This spread in particular is fantastic and full of humour. Again I love the voice – ‘I CAN'T EAT THAT EGG!’

 

STRONG CHARACTERS

In more modern examples, I thought Yoyo from Emily Davison and Deborah Allwright’s Every Bunny is A Yoga Bunny was excellent – a fidgety, bouncy, can’t-sit-still-ever sort of bunny will be relatable to many young readers, making Yoyo's story easy to empathise with. 

 

And it’s impossible not to fall in love with Gertie, the littlest yak! (Lu Fraser, Kate Hindley.) She may be small but she has a big dream. It's the contrast between her tiny physical size and her ambition that make us root for her even more. Also, the weather and dangerous setting heighten the stakes, increasing the tension and how much we care.

 

Whilst the advice is usually to make your characters relatable, Catherine Emmett breaks the mould showing us how to make the reader care about unlikeable characters in her cautionary tale, The Pet, with David Tazzyman. In this story about spoilt Digby David who doesn't look after or respect his animals, we keep reading to see if the main character is going to learn his lesson... or not. (Perhaps he is a bit relatable too! Shhh!) 

LIke most of the books above, picture book creators are often advised to create child characters or characters that are child-like. But Catherine Emmett demonstrates that not all picture book main characters have to be children. In King of The Swamp, McDarkly is a grown-up monster character living alone in a swamp, but he has a clear plight that we can get behind and is very much likeable. 

 

ARE YOU A CHARACTER-DRIVEN OR PLOT-DRIVEN WRITER?

Whilst it depends on the story and the idea, on balance I consider myself more of a plot-driven writer than a character-driven one. I get swept away by funny starters, escalatory ideas for middles, devastating crisis points, climatic endings, or by theme, and then I choose the character to star in my story afterwards.

 

For that reason, I have to work a little harder to create strong characters. Here are three tips I’ve gathered since I started writing which might help you with your characterisation too. 

 

TIPS FOR DEVELOPING STRONG CHARACTERS

 

-     1. Quiz your characters: 

I knew in Sunshine at Bedtime I wanted the main character to be a human child. In the story, Miki’s external goal was to learn about the Sun and all the ways its light works. To develop her internal traits, it helped to imagine Miki in my mind’s eye and to ask her what questions she had and to find out how the extra sunlight was affecting her everyday life. It quickly became apparent there was NO WAY Miki was going to go to bed when it was still sunny, which became the opening of the book. Interviewing your character might throw up some interesting ideas to explore. 

-      2. Base them on someone you know or a celebrity :

In the Dot and Duck series, I’ve very much taken inspiration from my life. How Rude came from imagining my children at their worst. How Selfish was inspired by my time in Early Years environments. The third adventure, How Messy, was more specifically inspired by my marriage! Not that one or other of us is Dot or Duck – we have our moments as both characters – but it helped to imagine incidents and real life examples and to plough those details and emotions into the story.  Can you base your character on someone you know, or know of? Even if just in part? It makes them easier to visualise and makes it easier to predict how they will react in certain situations. 

 

 

-      3. Take the theme of your texts and cast the character/s that will cause the most conflict

In the Lenny series, I chose the characters that would provide the most 'story'. Who were the smelliest, yuckiest, slimiest animals on the planet?! These were the creatures I knew Lenny needed to meet. The smellier, yuckier and slimier the animals, the higher the stakes for the character and the more potential there was for conflict and humour. Have you got the worst combination of character and conflict in your story? An uncoordinated giraffe that wants to dance? An owl who is afraid of the dark?

DO CHARACTERS ALWAYS NEED TO BE DISTINCTIVE?

I think it’s also worth considering that sometimes it’s ok if your character is just a child. If your text deals with a big theme or has a hard hitting conflict, you might not need such an outwardly unique character. For example, in The Tide (Ashling Lindsay) and The Perfect Shelter (Asa Gilland), the main characters are just children – one who loves the beach and one who loves building dens. Written in first person they are intentionally quite generic, which I think works. There’s enough conflict going on in the world around them. One girl is learning to accept her grandparent's dementia and the other her sister's critical illness. The plot points and emotional themes are the hooks for the story,  not the uniqueness of the character.

Remember though, that even if you decide your human characters don’t need to be that distinctive, they still need to be clear. You could try cementing their personality in the early pages, with a line or two that tells us exactly all we need to know.

The good news is that where picture books are concerned, it’s not all about the words! Illustrations bring characters alive in a physical sense, of course, which for me is like meeting them for the first time! I don't ever imagine my characters in that much detail. But they also add to the characterisation in untold, magical ways. Like when Laura Barrett illustrated Scissorella and hid animals mentioned in the original fairy tale like lizards, mice and a cat adding to Lotte’s kind and caring persona. So if your characters feel a little flat, that might not be a bad thing - it could leave space for the perfect illustrator to breathe life into them and bring them into their own. 

WHAT ABOUT YOU?

I wonder if you have any top tips for creating clear, interesting, relatable, authentic, distinctive, like-able characters that we care about. Would you consider yourself a character-led writer or plot-led writer or both?!

 

Feel free to let us know in the comments below.

BIO: Clare 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 first book was published in 2015, and she currently has books in development with Little Tiger Press, Quarto, Nosy Crow and MacMillan. Her next narrative non-fiction picture book, 'Sunshine at Bedtime,' comes out in just a few weeks with Storyhouse Publishing and has been illustrated by Sally Soweol Han. It's a magical but educational adventure explaining why the sun sets later in the summer. You can find out more about Clare at her website www.clarehelenwelsh.com or on Twitter @ClareHelenWelsh.

And the moral of the story is… don’t write it for the moral. If you write a challenging picture book, do it because that specific story is the story you most want to tell right now and because you can tell it brilliantly. Oh, and (nearly) happy new year, by Juliet Clare Bell

I can't wait to read this book...

                                                (c) Jon Arno Lawson and Sydney Smith

Sometimes you read a blog post that feels like it was written just for you. This is how I feel about Brainpickings’ The Best Children’s Books of 2015, which I read earlier today –three times in a row, just to make sure all the recommended books look as enticing as they did first (and then second) time round… (and yes, they did).

Apart from the first, and second-from-last book, on their list, I’d never even heard of any of these 2015 picture books. But if I were to write a Christmas list for myself, those nine books I’d not heard of until today now would be the nine things on my list. This is a time of year for sharing so I would love to share this blog post with you and all its beautiful books, it’s such a treat.

Read it, read it now! Aren’t they beautiful?

This is going to be a short post as I mostly just want to share some beautiful picture books with you through the Brainpickings’ blog and these aren’t the most readily available books to buy in the UK so you may not have seen some of them, either…

I would like, though, to say how they’ve struck a real chord with where I am at the moment in my writing and in my life. The last few years have been at times quite personally challenging, but I feel that the changes in our lives have awakened something in me that has been lying dormant for a long time. I feel more excited about writing than I have for a long time and I’ve found that what I’m writing and what I’m thinking about and planning on writing next is quite different from what I was writing before. And it is definitely more challenging. But not because I’ve decided to write things differently. I am more engaged with what’s going on in the community, locally and globally, and that’s what I’m thinking about so it’s seeping into what I write.

I doubt that the beautiful books on the Brainpickings list have come about by authors and author-illustrators deciding that they’re ‘going to write a challenging book’. I don’t expect that Olivier Tallec randomly decided that he would like to create a picture book that has echoes of a psychology experiment from the early seventies by Philip Zimbardo, and then went ahead and wrote Louis I, King of the Sheep. I suspect that he came up with a great story that he was telling in the best way he could, and that it contains an underlying truth because he's telling it right and not trying to moralise.

                                                     

                                                                      (c) Olivier Tallac (2015)

It doesn’t take much to draw parallels between the prison guard experiment where Zimbardo told some students they’d be prison guards and others that they’d be prisoners (with shocking consequences: see footage from the experiment here) and things that are happening throughout the world at the moment. Only last week I was talking with another writer about the very same experiment in relation to something that I’m writing at the moment. But although I’ve always been fascinated by this and Milgram's experiment (see Peter Gabriel's song, We Do What We're Told, written about the experiment, with chilling footage from the experiment -I was a developmental psychologist for years before I had children and started writing for children), it’s only now –with the current media manipulation in the UK at a terrifying level- that I’ve found it sneaking into elements of a story I’m writing.

I could talk about why I’m excited about each of those books, but I won’t as you can read about them for yourselves in the lovely blogpost. What I’ll end with, though, is the idea of being true to yourself as a writer. In Enormous Smallness by Matthew Burgess and Kris Di Giacomo (the one book on their 2015 list that I actually have), they quote E E Cummings:

                                             (c) Mark Burgess and Kris di Giacomo (2015)

A writing friend once talked about working towards making your picture book undeniable. I think that we need to 'become who we really are' fully for that to happen. I feel like these writers have probably got there. I’m not there yet but that is what I’d like to work towards in 2016… So a toast to 2016: let it be the year where we become fully who we are (for those of us who are not quite there yet) and then write wholly as ourselves. And let’s support each other to have that courage. I think there are some incredible books waiting to be created…  and in the current climate, these books are needed more than ever. Let’s get being… and writing, truly authentically…

To a more peaceful, safe and loving 2016...

Do you feel like you have become who you really are and that you are writing wholly as youtself? Do you have tips for others who aren't there yet? And if you're not there yet, what would help you get there?

Juliet Clare Bell's latest picture book, The Unstoppable Maggie McGee (illustrated by Dave Gray) has raised over £36,000 in book sales so far (all £6 goes to charity), for Birmingham Children's Hospital's Magnolia House Appeal. www.unstoppablemaggie.co.uk. Her next book: Two Brothers and a Chocolate Factory: The Remarkable Story of Richard and George Cadbury (illustrated by Jess Mikhail) is out in March, 2016. And she's very excited about the stories she's currently working on.

www.julietclarebell.co.uk