Here we are again... just over a week on from experiencing the cartographic foolery, we're back - this time, exploring the world of children's writing and illustration, and I am going to share this experience of going to a children's writing event with you all.
So, Writing Children's Literature Day was an event that took place at the Hold in Ipswich on Saturday, the 2nd of May. The event revolved around children's and young adult literature, illustration and publishing, and was hosted by the Darley Anderson literary agency, in conjunction with Suffolk Archives, as well as Dr Lindsey Scott from the University of Suffolk's creative writing ranks. Event attendees were able to purchase tickets to attend the entire day at a cost of £20, while those who only wanted to attend individual talks, could purchase individual tickets at a cost of £8.
We didn't have long though to contemplate about the football, because it wasn't long before we went in to the auditorium to get settled in to the first event - children's illustrations with New York Times bestselling illustrator, Claire Powell. I was anticipating before the event that there would be some drawing exercises to come, hence the reason I had brought in a sketchbook... but instead of illustrating, we were treated to a very interesting journey through Claire's life - the illustrator's den in the understairs that made her parents think that she's completely vanished from existence, the discouragement of the careers adviser at the school she went to (which happened to be the same school that Shirley Hughes went to), and her hatred of graphics design (the career that she initially pursued for over two decades), followed by a 15-minute long animation project that took five years to put together - although her work ended up winning awards, her hatred of animation seemed to be visible there too.
It wasn't long after the full extent of Claire's hatred of other careers became visible that the illustration dream had started to come alive - a trip to the British Library to attend a children's picture book exhibition (Wind in the Willows being her favourite picture book out of the exhibition), getting to know Martin Salisbury, an MA arts lecturer at Anglia Ruskin, and eventually sending out five drawings to all sorts of agents and getting signed on as an illustrator at the age of 37. The dream was well and truly alive - Claire eventually went on to illustrate a whole catalogue of picture books, including Octopants, a story about an undersea emporium, and Marty Moose.
Following on from Claire's beautiful expression of her life events, here came her top three tips on how to stand out as an illustrator - and some of these tips were very highly relevant to my illustration ideas.
First. Make sure that your illustrations clearly stand out from others - but don't be too gimmicky in the way you design your portfolio.
Second. Find a design style that really suits you. In fantasy mapping, I think that this is the most important tip that you are ever going to need - you're going to want to create beautiful map designs and terrains, but you don't want to make it too difficult on yourself. My own inspirations come from others in the fantasy mapping community, such as the Shortvalleyhiker YouTube channel, as well as the Cartographer's Guild website.
Third. Start with the characters and how they are going to behave, walk and interact with others in your world. That is the beginning of a picture book story.
Tips now known, it was time to get my first taste of children's writing with a 15 minute writing exercise, based on a wide range of themes - animals, personalities and props, just to name a few. While Claire did think that my story was a beautiful story, the story that I wrote followed characters from a distance - it turns out that children's writing focuses on following one character very closely, and as a result, my story on cows also ended up becoming a perfect example throughout the day of why we need to work extra hard for our books to suit the children's literature narrative.
Anyways... here is the cow story for you:
With the writing exercise out of the way, Claire decided to go on to take questions, which happen to be quite diverse - some related to advice about taking multiple illustrative ideas (best advice is don't do them all at once!), as well as digitising hand-drawn works, to which Claire responded that she would use a good old Epsom V600 scanner and post-processing in Photoshop to get the job done.
After that, the illustration talk come to an end, and while I ultimately didn't need to utilise my sketchbook to draw things, having come all the way to the Hold with a portfolio case full of maps, I decided not to waste the opportunity that I had in front of me to speak to Claire about my map work. It is the first time that I had ever gotten to speak to an illustrator in the 40 month business journey, and so I felt that it was really valuable to have a conversation with someone who is already working and pursuing their ambitions. The responses that I got from the Darley Anderson panel in general about my map work appeared quite promising - the maps are decent, there is still a viable market to be able to illustrate maps in books, and most importantly, gave an opportunity for me to go away and see where I could improve my portfolio pages.
Having gotten some illustrator feedback, the first event of the day was over, and it was time to head out of the auditorium to tuck in to my lunch - lunch was not included in the ticket price, and so there were many choices - some brought in their lunch from home, others went to the cafeteria, and a few decided to brave out the last of the football crowds to get their food supplies. Halfway into the lunch break, the Ipswich vs QPR game kicked off, and surprise, surprise, Ipswich were up to 2-0 in the first ten minutes of the game - Hirst scoring the first goal three minutes in, followed by Philogene six minutes later.
While the Ipswich fans were soaking up the early lead against QPR, it was on to the next event of the day - writing children's literature with Jacqui Rose, or JP in children's spheres. Like Claire, JP was also doing something different professionally - she started off being an actress, but was getting very frustrated in the parts that she was asked to perform in, and saw writing as a safer space to express her feelings, especially during particularly difficult times of her life. These experiences led on to the beginning of her writing career - starting off as an adult crime writer and getting around to publishing over a dozen books over the course of 13 years, she then went on to submit a children's manuscript to Darley Anderson, where after a lot of questions about her motive, she was taken on, and gone on to publish two YA books with the agency - Haunting of Tyrese Walker and more recently, Birdie, a story about befriending a pony in the Yorkshire countryside.
JP's story of how she got to be a published writer flowed along quite nicely to the next topic, as it served us all with a reminder that a writing career is not just a hobby, but rather a business idea, and that we have to ask the right questions at every stage of the book writing process. Inspiration from others is good, but you need to demonstrate that it's you, rather than someone else writing. The way you describe characters matters. Where you are setting your story and why are you setting it there matters. The tense matters too - Birdie for instance, is written in third person and has elements of intimacy here. But no matter what you do, don't get too far from the action (the cow story of mine from earlier coming into play again).
JP then managed to get round to the "fun" writing concepts - starting off with the "what's in a child's pocket" concept, which is about showing the beauty that objects can reveal, rather than telling what they are, which led on to a two minute writing exercise. In this exercise, I was writing a little poetic story about a boy who is interested in anything to do with forests and conkers, and to my surprise, JP actually ended up really liking it. Here is my take on the exercise:
The next concept that followed on from child's pocket exercise was really fun - it was called Plotters and Pantsers, where plots create scaffolds for stories and pantsers chase the sparks down, which in turn, led on to a writing concept that I had never heard before - the beginnings, the middles and ends. I felt that this was an important point for JP to bring up because unfortunately, far too many writers will start off by writing a story with a beginning and an end, and bypass the middle, skewing the flow of the story in the process. The examples that were used to demonstrate the BME concept were full of humor - one of them was about a boy who thinks that a knee bag is evil and that we should get a superhero to destroy it, and the other was about aliens that hate each other, and end up shooting each other in the foot; the ending tamed so that the aliens end up getting along after all.
To finish off JP's part of the talk, we then returned to the traditional theme of asking questions along the way - grabbing the reader with that first line, and trying your darn hardest to break yourself away from your favourite line of text that won't interest them. What's the point of having something like Birdie published if you can't take criticism? And remember, it is always a very bad idea to talk to a rigid group of people who will always praise you and never give you any kind of constructive criticism.
After JP took her set of questions, which included fantasy literature and its relationship to middle-grade literature, as well as overuse of the word "said", the event was interrupted for a 30 minute tea break, before moving on to the final talk of the day, which relates to finding a literary agent. While the talk gave precise information about what to submit to agents - covering letters, opening lines, tensions, synopsis, et cetera, we're not going to spend too much time here diving into the gobledygook.
Instead, we're going to skip ahead to the most fun part of the day, which was the live pitching session. Participants in the event were given the opportunity to submit a 30-word pitch of their children's novel or picture book idea by the 20th of April, and five submissions were chosen to be read out live in front of the audience, with feedback on the submissions to be given by the Darley Anderson panel.
Overall, I have to say that the range of children's ideas that were read out in front of the audience were very wild and diverse in nature - first, it was a children's story taken out of Beauty and the Beast, followed by a mythical, high stakes adventure story about the amulet of Flamoria, then vampires, then a picture book about the Nibbles hamster that went through wild behavioural transformations, sparking a great deal of humor in the process; and finally, Kadzo James, a story about an aspiring girl footballer that has to battle unsupportive parents in order to reach her dream. The last pitch being quite ironic given that this event was taking place in the midst of a football game.
Last questions about the literary agency process taken, the event had now drawn to a close, and I still needed to get through the crowd of football fans as I was making my way home. To understand why there were so many fans on the Waterfront and elsewhere in town, we need to rollback in time - by the time the 2pm tea break was over, Ipswich Town ended up scoring another goal, and ultimately won the match 3-0, securing a return to the Premier League next season. It was a very similar atmosphere to 2024, when Ipswich beat already-relegated Huddersfield to get promoted to the Premier League for the first time in two decades.
Conclusions from the event
I have to say that the Children's Literature Day was without a doubt a very beautiful presentation from the Darley Anderson team overall. The event overall achieved its intended goal of helping set us up for success in the literary world - the writing exercises, and the live feedback sessions, were very collaborative environments, that were full of encouragement and constructive feedback (the cow writing of mine in Claire's session being the best example of that being put into action). Furthermore, Claire and JP had showed a lot of charisma with regards to how they shared their journeys into the world of children's illustration and literature respectively.
In relation to my dreams to create and build fantasy worlds, I felt that getting the opportunity to speak to an actual illustrator about my map designs was a highly valuable experience, giving me hope that illustrating maps is still an option that I can pursue, three years later; it now makes me think that I wished that I had that opportunity right at the very beginning of my business journey, as opposed to this far in. The literary agent presentation was also right on point in terms of the material that needs to be included in submissions.
To encourage other people who were not able to make it to the event to find out more about the authors who took part, I am going to leave you all with JP's website and Claire's website at the following links: https://jprosewriter.com/ as well as https://www.claire-powell.com/, and for anyone who wants to get in touch with Darley Anderson with regards to the next bestselling children's idea, the link to their site is thataway.
Anyways, I hope you have enjoyed my take on the children's literature event, and I hope I will see you somewhere else in the fantasy galaxy. Wolsey Writers, another fantasy map, who knows?
Signing off now,
Jakub
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