Writing a children’s picture book
It has been a dream of mine for several years to write and publish a book. The problem was, I had no idea where to begin, or whether I was actually capable of writing one haha. It wasn’t until the Van Adventure that the inspiration hit my husband and I like a flash when we were driving around Portugal and our main character was born!
If you’ve read any of my previous blogs, you’ll know that after being made redundant from my teaching job in Germany and giving birth to my daughter (within about two weeks of each other haha) my husband and I took some time off, to go travelling in our van (the Big Orange Beast) around France, Spain and Portugal. We did local trips at first, starting from when Amala was about 6 weeks old; ‘woofing’ on a farm in Wales and various other local-ish camping adventures. When she was 5 months old, we set off on the Grand European Tour. Life was ever so simple and easy, and I think that’s why our creativity was able to flow so much more.
When inspiration hit
It was on this one particular drive, to the campsite shown on the insta post (Ponte da Barca) that we wrote our very first book. The ideas started flowing and we wrote the story going back and forth between each other as if we were playing sentence table tennis. I was frantically typing the story down on the notes page on my phone as the ideas flowed. I think we probably wrote the main basis of the story in about half an hour. Funnily enough, the plot structure hasn’t changed much at all from the very first rough draft – it’s just become slightly more polished and adjective-y (for want of a better word).
The main character!
Of course, the main character is huuugely important for a picture book to be successful. I’m sure no one is shocked to hear that our main character is an orange camper van named Bob. The story unfolds as Bob learns valuable life lessons as he journeys around, hence the title, Bob’s Road to Enlightenment. My husband and I are both into Buddhism and practise Nichiren Buddhism, which is where the ‘moral’ of the story kind of stems from.
I can’t draw campervans
Once we had written the book, I attempted to draw some campervans, but I was absolutely atrocious at it! It was then I realised you can’t illustrate your own book unless you have some serious skills. Because I had no idea where or how to find a children’s book illustrator (and thought it would be totally beyond our budget anyway) the book went on the back burner for about two years after first writing it!
Discovering an illustrator!
It was only when I discovered one of the parents of two children we childmind and homeschool is an absolutely incredible illustrator, that the dream came alive once more. I firstly asked Lemon Disco Designs to illustrate my website images, and once she completed these I asked if she would be up for doing our picture book. It turns out she always had an ambition to illustrate picture books, so it was a done deal!
Back in March, Hazel brought round a ‘first draft’ of illustrations for the book, which filled me with so much excitement! I think it’s actually the most excited I’ve ever been about a ‘project’! I took the first draft on holiday with me – my extended family and I were going on a long weekend break to Cornwall – and we spent some time each evening reading it aloud and editing/adding to it.
The editing process
Once we were as happy as possible with the text, I sent it out to a few of my teaching colleagues to get their feedback and make any alterations based on what they thought. By the end of the weekend, we were pretty satisfied that there wasn’t much more that could be done to it, text-wise. Over the next few weeks I also read it to some of the home-school children and our Truependous Tots! It went down well.
Publishing the book
Over the next few days, I read the Children’s Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook 2022 from cover to cover to decide which route we were going to go down to actually get the book into the world. It seemed like a no-brainer to go down the KDP route. One, because it’s practically impossible as a ‘debut’ author to get anywhere with a publisher, and two, I didn’t want someone to take away the control from our piece of artwork. I also didn’t realise how much I would enjoy text formatting and laying out the pages until I started doing it. It’s really made me appreciate picture books on a whole new level!
Now we are at the point where Hazel is perfecting each image for each page. It’s been such a fun creative process – from sharing my vision of Bob and the other characters, to seeing Hazel’s absolutely genius artful mind bring everything to life, somehow making it 100 times better than I could have ever have expected.
The Sequel!
Last weekend, Ben and I travelled to Germany for a friend’s wedding, so had quite a lot of time to kill on the train to Bristol airport. We ended up writing the sequel to Bob’s Road to Enlightenment! haha. Fun times.
If you’d like to keep updated with our progress, follow Truependous Travels for updates!
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