My Quest for a Contract • Lynne Garner

My first picture book

My first picture book was published way back in 2007. I was lucky, it was my second submission to a picture book publisher. My first submission was rejected but the rejection letter they sent was the nicest I’ve received in the twenty odd years I’ve been writing. Although the editor didn’t like my story, she liked my writing style and ‘voice’ and asked if I had any other stories. I didn’t but I had an idea I’d been working on. After tweaking, adjusting and tinkering with it I sent it off. A few weeks later I received further positive feedback and although I had to rewrite the story six times ‘A Book for Bramble’ was eventually published.

Over the next few years the same publisher took a further three stories. During that period my editor moved on and the publisher was sold and purchased several times. This meant I no longer had direct access and have re-joined the thousands of picture book writers fighting for attention in a very competitive market. For a couple of years, I sent out the odd story here and there whilst I concentrated on my collection of short stories. But last year I decided it was going to be ‘my’ year and I was going to get a picture book contract. My plan had two parts to it.

My second picture book

Part one:

I decided I’d invest in my writing. I chose my five favourite stories and sent them to the Hilary Johnson Authors’ Advisory Service. Each story was reviewed and sent back with positive feedback and helpful advice. I reworked three of the stories and sent them back for a second review. A further tweak here and there and I had three stories that were the best I could possibly make them. Then came the research and submitting process and over a 12-month period each story was sent out to at least 13 publishers. 

Part two:

Whilst I waited (and there is a lot of waiting - often months), I researched agents and submitted to 11 agents. 

Sadly, all that work, and finger crossing came to nothing. I either didn't receive a response (not unusual) or received the 'thanks but no thanks' rejection.

My last picture book but first collaboration

At the beginning of this year I began to wonder if I should forget it. Perhaps I’d had my time. Maybe my best is no longer good enough. However, I love writing picture books. I have a library of stories that with a little help I could improve. I have a stock of ideas screaming to be written down. So, I’ve decided I’m going to give it another go and repeat the process. With fingers crossed I have a little more luck this year.

P.S.

Picture book writers - I’d like to know your experiences. Is it me or is it that much harder than it was a decade or so ago?  

P.P.S
Writing this post and pressing publish must have woken up my muse. 5am this morning I woke up with an almost entire picture book story buzzing around my head. I've not written anything new for a few months, so I'm hoping this is a good sign and 2019 will be 'my' year to complete my quest and get the contract. 
  

Thanks 

Lynne

It's not only the pictures that give picture books their power... by James Catchpole of The Catchpole Agency

There are many good things about working in children’s literature. 

One of them is how frequently you find yourself having earnest, reasoned conversations about not entirely reasonable things, like whether, if anthropomorphized fruit have arms and legs, cheese and eggs should too. (A reasonable conclusion turns out to be yes, but not sausages or frozen chickens – that would be weird.) 

Another good thing is how that precious, childish, ragged edge of fantasy does – somehow – find its way from an author’s pen, via the stewardship of an agent, right to the top of one of those great glass cliffs in London (into which all but a few of the smaller publishers have now been subsumed), so that still, when you sign in at the desk in the sterile, corporate lobby and take the lift to the 14^th floor, the clean-lined, pale-toned, open-plan office that greets you nevertheless bears its happily incongruous traces, in shelves upon shelves of beautiful, colourful, anarchic and fantastical books.    

But maybe the best thing about working in children’s literature is simply the range of storytelling. True, not all subjects and not all human experiences are covered here (no sex, most obviously), but the power and breadth of children’s fantasy – fantasy as real for them as reality is for us – more than compensates. And subject isn’t everything. Think of the range of ways a story can be told, and must be told, in order to enthral someone almost fully grown, and someone so small they’ve barely begun to be.

So this range and variety might be the best thing of all, I think: to be able to work on a picturebook in the morning, and a novel in the afternoon. And probably best in that order, because there’s something special about picturebooks that sharpens the tools of storytelling (and in my case, editing).

Picturebooks are how our agency began. Celia studied to be a visual artist – a sculptor – and has used that trained eye to spot talent in illustrators, and help them develop it. I hope I’ve inherited some of her instinct in that regard, to compensate for a lack of formal training in the visual. 

My training was in words, and in music, a useful diversion so I later found, because it helps hone a sense of narrative in the abstract. Composers think of narrative structure in abstraction, ABACA. Writers often conceive of structure more instinctively or superficially, but the deeper, unconscious structure of storytelling is there all the same, hidden beneath the surface flow of paragraphs and chapters.

Picturebooks, like the simplest musical forms, impose a rigorously explicit structure on narrative. Thirteen and a half spreads to do all that a story (or a piece of music, in fact) has to do: establish a home, complicate matters, leave, and then resolve and return. And somehow that little journey has to intrigue and absorb us, carry us along, move us and then finally satisfy us. 

Novels, like symphonies, may go here and there, may slow to a crawl then tear ahead to the finish, but picturebooks have no room to meander. As with poems, in the best picturebooks, every word earns its place. Picturebooks are the art and the science of storytelling distilled to their essence. 

And maybe, after all, that’s the best thing about working in children’s literature: that ideal alchemy of wild, ragged fantasy, and the formal discipline of narrative, which picturebooks in particular mix and brew so well.

 If you want to find out more about what Celia and I do, the link to our website is www.thecatchpoleagency.co.uk 

(though you may have to wait a day or two while BT chases down a cyber-gremlin that appears to have chewed through a cable, somewhere out in the ether...)