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Isabel Greenberg's brilliant illustrations |
Ever since I began writing stories, I’ve imagined the illustrations
that might go with them. They’ve remained imagined, because I can’t draw and
it’s taking enough of my time to improve my writing without starting from
scratch with visual art, too. Papercuts are the closest I’ve got (you can see
the results here). I’d rather given up on the idea that my stories would ever
be illustrated by a proper, talented artist, since it’s not the done thing to
illustrate fiction for adults. I find this baffling, personally – illustrations
can do so much more than just repeat the words in pictures, and who doesn’t
like to pause and linger over a patch of colour, a feast for the eyes after all
that text?
My chance finally came with a project I’ve just completed
for Microsoft. They threw me together with Isabel Greenberg, whose brilliant
graphic novels are published by Jonathan Cape, and asked us to come up with an illustrated
story in two weeks – using ideas we were supposed to glean from Twitter. You
probably won’t be surprised to learn that, when asked for suggestions for, say,
a character’s worst habit, Twitter mostly responded with nose-picking and
toe-nail biting. Luckily there were enough weird or wonderful ideas that trying
out all the combinations of my favourite character, setting and habit
suggestions was a bit like playing a fiction fruit machine. E.g.:
Character
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Habit
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Setting
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Webbed hands
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Hiding other people’s things
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Left luggage
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Museum store room
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Inability to say no
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Clockmaker’s shop
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By the river
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Mars
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Character
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Habit
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Setting
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Medieval herbalist
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Murderously clumsy
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Over the hills
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Refuses to say sorry
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Small wood at midnight
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Inability to say no
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By the river
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Museum store room
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I wrote story ideas for as many different variations as I
could. A misfit working in left luggage who swaps people’s belongings with odd
consequences. A medievalist let loose in museum storage, trying out new recipe
concoctions from ancient ingredients to dire effect. A folkloric creature with
webbed hands, who lives by the river and cannot refuse wishes made on the
objects dropped there…. Luckily Isabel and I are both drawn to folklore, so picking the
favourite was easy.
I did write differently, knowing the story would be
illustrated – mostly by missing out some details in the hope that Isabel would
fill them in from her own imagination. This was really the most gratifying part
of the experience, seeing how the mud-witch and her world looked to someone
else. Illustrations and words from different heads can make intriguingly
complimentary combinations, rather than repeating each other, and the mud-witch
became a more sympathetic character in Isabel’s hands. I envy her amazing ability to do both words and pictures, and hope I can wangle working with an illustrator again. Grown-ups deserve pictures with their stories, too.
You can read the finished book online here, and watch the making-of video below!