Amanda West Lewis
Writing my first graphic novel: Looking at the Sky
Looking at the Sky
When I went to Vermont College of Fine Arts to do a Masters in Writing for Children and Youth, I entered the program as a novel writer. My novel September 17 had come out and done well. My novel The Pact was in pre-production. I was ready to make a commitment and dive into improving my skills as a writer.
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It had taken me a long time before I was comfortable writing fiction. I had written some craft books and co-authored a middle grade, and assumed I would spend my Masters focused on writing YA books.
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However, my first semester advisor, Kathi Appelt told me that I should take the second semester Picture Book Intensive. “Why? I’m never going to write picture books?” Kathi smiled her wry smile and said that the skills I would learn would help in whatever I did.
That semester was probably the most life-changing and challenging learning experience I’ve had. I was forced to try different styles and approaches that I had long avoided. I did deep dives into poetry. (That emphasis resulted, eventually, in my picture book A Planet is a Poem, but that’s another story.) I learned about Picture Book Biography as a genre, and decided to focus on that for my thesis.
Picture Book Biography is a fairly new genre. It is a way of introducing children to a person by distilling their life into an aspect or two that will appeal to a child reader. Unlike a middle grade biography, a picture book biography is not laden with facts and dates. It is unfettered from chronological sequence. It is creative and, at it’s best, an inspired gem that gives a young child a vision of a fascinating person or idea. I’ve included a list of some of my favourite PB biographies below.
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However, the problem with PB biographies is that most people become famous or worthy of a biography for something they did in their adult life. But a child is not interested in adults. A child, particularly a young child, wants to see the world from their perspective. How do you write a biography that will capture the interest of a child, yet the important part of the story is about an adult?
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That’s the problem I struggled with as I set out to write a biography for young people on the Polish Pediatrician Dr. Janucz Korczak (18xx – 1942). Dr. Korczak was the director of orphanages in Warsaw between the First and Second World Wars, a writer of numerous children’s books and books on children’s education, and first and foremost, a friend to children in need. He was also a Polish Jew who was murdered in the Holocaust.
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Korczak’s important legacy changed the way that people thought about children. His work focussed on respect and empowerment at a time when those were in short supply. He saw the world through a child’s eyes — could I bring his perspective to life for a child? It was a large life and these were huge concepts to try to get across in 32 pages.
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But over the course of the next year I fiddled with what I knew, learned more, wrote upside down and backwards and tried to find an angle from which to write his story. I developed a picture book in which I tried to get to the heart of what he was trying to do. When I thought it was ready, I submitted my manuscript to my editor at Kids Can.
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Her initial response was, I’m afraid, what my inner voice had been telling me. “There’s too much material here for a picture book.” But her next sentence took me totally by surprise. “Have you ever thought of writing a graphic novel?”
Truth be told, I never had. I had hardly read any! But I leapt in and started researching how on earth to write a graphic novel.
It turns out, writing a graphic novel is like storyboarding a film script. Not that I’ve written a lot of film scripts either! But I’ve done a lot of theatre, onstage as an actor, off-stage as a director, producer and stage manager. I knew this story — I’d even produced it as a play! I knew the characters and the arc of the material. It didn’t take long for me to envision scenes. I created “camera angles”. Close-ups, distance shots all came naturally as the “movie” began to play out in my mind. I discovered how to create tension in pacing by working with the size and frequency of the panels.
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And best of all, I had room. I could show more details from Korczak’s life and philosophy, aspects that will, I hope, intrigue young readers.
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Not all publishers would go out on a limb and develop a graphic novel with a writer — most graphic novels are written and illustrated by one person. But Kids Can decided that the story was important enough to take a chance on.
What I learned, in all of this, is that there are many different containers for stories. As a writer, it is always important to search and try new things. If something isn’t working in one genre, try changing containers. You stretch yourself, you learn, and you’ll discover whether your story has “legs” or not. Perhaps most importantly, you’ll find out what it is you really want to tell in this story. And why it is important to you.