Further Adventures in Illustration

By Nick Cross

Vintage book cover from the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature

It’s been a whole year since I last shared my experiences as a budding illustrator, so I thought it was high time to inflict more of my art on you give you an update.

The submission process for my illustrated YA novel has been taking its toll (see my previous post for more about that), and my writing has been on hiatus recently. To the extent that I’ve started to dread that question you get asked at writing events: “So, what are you working on?” Anyway, to compensate, I’ve been devoting more time to my art and illustration work.

Since I started illustrating two years ago, I’ve found my slow progress frustrating. A reasonable person might say it takes time, effort and patience to learn a new skill, but clearly I am not that person. As a type A perfectionist who is starting to feel the sands of time running out, I want instant results and I want them now! This intolerance for imperfection is, frankly, not helpful when trying to learn a complex new skill.

Do I enjoy drawing? Sometimes, although I still find it very difficult. I remember a long period of writing where I couldn’t make the words on the page come out how I wanted them to, and drawing has been the same. Except with drawing, I felt extra pressure because someone else could look at the source photo and see just how far my representation had fallen short.

Because I wasn’t enjoying drawing, I also wasn’t doing the one thing that everyone recommends, which is to draw every day. I would draw half-heartedly occasionally but never with a consistent goal. It occurred to me that working in Oxford, I had all these fabulous museums on my doorstep, including the Ashmolean, Natural History and Pitt Rivers. I resolved to take my pen and sketchbook, and spend a couple of lunchtimes every week drawing stuff.

There were pros and cons to this approach. On the plus side, there are lots of things to draw - you can pretty much wander into the Ashmolean and find something totally new every time. On the minus side, there are a lot of visitors and tours - I would regularly look up from my sketchbook to find a group of people blocking my view! But I did learn some important things about my method. Take these drawings of the same statue as an example:



The sketch on the left was something I did very rapidly, just as a warm up. I found that once I had got some of the perfectionist anxiety out of my system, I could concentrate on really “seeing” the subject. The sketch on the right (though the proportions are a bit iffy) reflects that enhanced concentration.

Although I went museum sketching for a couple of months, the very public nature of the process started to grate on me. I’m intensely protective of my creative process, and didn’t like the fact that people could watch me as I worked. Rather than use it as an excuse to show off, I became intensely paranoid and my work started to suffer. It was time to pivot again - I started booking empty conference rooms at work during the quiet lunchtime period, and working in seclusion.

This worked a lot better for me, removing prying eyes and the pressure of working quickly. I decided to stay with similar subject matter, selecting photos of Greek and Roman statues to draw from. Here are a couple of my sketches:





I was much happier with these, though at the end of the hour, the desk was always covered with grey crumbs from rubbing out. However, I read a recent interview with the late, great, Judith Kerr where she said (after a very long career as an illustrator) that she still rubbed out more than she actually drew. So maybe I’m not such a weirdo after all.

I started to realise that I wasn’t interested in landscapes or architecture like I'd thought - I wanted to draw people! My wife and I were watching the Sky TV show Portrait Artist of the Year, and I was encouraged by the contestants who used gridding to transfer the dimensions of a subject’s face onto the canvas. I decided to attempt a portrait (something I had previously thought way beyond my skill level) with a grid built using a helpful online tool. The photo itself was something I found on Unsplash, which is a copyright free image site:

I found using the grid to be a revelation! By reducing the size of the problem, it allowed me to concentrate on just what was happening inside each square. Any preconceptions I had about the shape of a person’s face could be safely ignored - I just had to draw what was in front of me. Once the pencil sketch was done, I wanted to shade it using fineliners, but it was clear from my tests that it would take a long time. So I opted for Winsor and Newton ProMarkers, which I had used for my earlier illustration work. Here’s the result:



It’s good, right? I was a bit amazed when I finished it to be honest! It was the first time that the lines on the page actually seemed to match the photo.

For my next drawing, I resolved to do a bit of fan art, based on the noughties TV show Veronica Mars, which we were rewatching. Kristen Bell is totally awesome in that show, and it was fun to try to capture her likeness. With the gridded pencil sketch done, I made a photocopy to try out different ProMarker colour choices:




I’d recently bought some Bristol Board to try out, so I used it for the finished picture. As well as being fairly expensive, It’s also quite shiny, but the alcohol-based ProMarkers work on practically any surface. The best thing about Bristol Board is how easy it is to rub stuff out! Despite the cost, I may have found my perfect medium.




I was less satisfied with this final artwork than my earlier portrait of the butterfly guy. Although the likeness is recognisable, something about the face just isn’t quite right, though I couldn’t tell you exactly what! It’s definitely much harder to draw someone whose face you’re very familiar with. I also had a lot of trouble with the blonde hair - in retrospect the black hair of the previous subject was very straightforward.

I did start a third portrait, but had to put it to one side because I wanted to tackle the optional task for a recent SCBWI illustration masterclass called The Wonderful World of Non-fiction Illustration. I’m also writing a review of the session for Words & Pictures, so I’m working on both posts simultaneously to avoid repeating myself!

The task was to make an A3 double page spread showing a creature in its natural habitat. That meant museum time again - I went to the Oxford Natural History Museum and took photos of various specimens.



I decided to pick the Japanese spider crab, because I liked the bright colours and the way it would fill an A3 page. The brief made it clear that the research was as important as the finished work, so I made various sketches and an A4 dummy.

To mimic a lift-the-flap book, I made the artwork in two layers. The top layer was drawn on tracing paper:



So you could lift it away to see this underneath:



In order to get everything to line up, I scanned my pencil sketch, added the text in Photoshop and printed just the text on the tracing paper. Then I added the crab’s body and missing leg on the top sheet in ProMarker. This allowed me to keep the bottom layer drawing as just the pure artwork. Working on top of tracing paper was still quite difficult though - if I’d had more time, I think it would have been better to draw the body and leg on a separate sheet, scan them in and composite the top layer digitally.

The bottom layer was drawn on lightweight marker paper rather than Bristol Board, as I needed to roll up the drawing to take it to London.

Later, as I inspected the other illustrations at the workshop, I had to wonder why I'd picked something so terrifying to work on rather than a nice fluffy mammal. There were a number of occasions while researching spider crabs that I had to stop Googling them because the photos were putting me off my lunch! And yet, my chosen style and medium wouldn’t have worked half so well on something with fur or feathers.

I pushed myself really hard with the task for the masterclass, even working on it the morning of the session (by which point I was terrified I would screw it up). I knew that I wouldn’t be able to avoid comparing myself with the other illustrators, so I wanted to make a good show of it. Which I feel I did in the end, and I got some useful feedback from the tutors. I was pretty exhausted that evening, as you can imagine!

I feel that I’m slowly becoming better at illustration and that’s a positive thing. Honestly, all I’ve ever aspired to be is competent! I’ll keep you posted on where the muse takes me next...

Nick.

---

Nick Cross is a children's writer/illustrator and Undiscovered Voices winner. He received a SCBWI Magazine Merit Award, for his short story The Last Typewriter.
Nick is also the Blog Network Editor for SCBWI Words & Pictures magazine. His Blog Break column appears fortnightly on W&P.

What Next? Life After The Hook

By Nick Cross

Photo by Clare Helen Welsh

If you weren’t at the SCBWI British Isles conference last month, you might be asking yourself: “What is The Hook and why should I care about it?” Well, it’s a kind of X Factor/Dragon’s Den for children’s writers and illustrators. A bunch of attention-starved, approval-hungry lunatics stood onstage in front of four agents and 200 of their peers, and spent five minutes each pitching the hell out of their books. The whole crazy enterprise was ably coordinated by Zoë Cookson, with her presentational partner-in-crime Kate Mallinder.

Zoë and Kate

Anyway, I did it. I managed to get up on stage without falling over, kept pretty much to time and successfully synchronised my pitch with a complex animated slide deck. But (spoiler alert) I didn’t win - that honour fell to Catherine Whitmore and her excellent pitch for Too Big for Her Boots.

I could lie about it, but the truth is I was disappointed not to win. Desperately disappointed. I didn’t flounce off in a huff, but I did want to be alone in my defeat. I left the conference quietly and walked down the hill to central Winchester, the voice of my inner critic ringing in my ears.

I truly believe that these moments, the moments when we’re at our lowest ebb, are the ones where we really get to choose between winning and losing. I put in my headphones, put on my favourite music and by the time I was back at the hotel twenty minutes later I had a plan. Instead of sitting around my room, stewing in my own juices, I went out, got a coffee and spent the next hour doing some final edits to my book. That hour reminded me why my book is awesome and why my faith in it is well-placed. I got back on the horse.

No, no! That was a metaphor, you idiot!

The irony of doing something like The Hook, is that the five minutes when I was onstage pitching was genuinely the easiest part of the whole process. What the audience couldn’t see were the months of preparation that led up to that moment.

I first had the idea of entering The Hook back in February. I remember mentioning it in conversation at the Undiscovered Voices 2018 launch party, and again a couple of months later when I met Jan Carr (the original creator of The Hook) at a book launch. Jan cautioned me that even getting selected was tough, with the number of entrants increasing yearly. I took that information on board and began to evolve a plan about how I might deliver my pitch, sketching out ways to introduce the world of the novel. Even then, I knew that I wanted to do something ambitious with my slides, to maximise the visual opportunities afforded to me as a writer/illustrator.



In tandem, I was working on the book all through the year, writing and rewriting, designing and redesigning. Ideas for the novel and ideas for the pitch intertwined, in the same way that the writing and illustrating processes informed each other. I knew that the timing was right for me to be finished by November, or perhaps the deadline made sure that happened. Either way, I was itching to reveal the book to the world, but it seemed to be a long time before applications to The Hook opened.

Luckily, the previous year’s conference website was still live, so I was able to get all the entry details in advance. The length of the extract I needed to submit seemed incredibly short (600 words) and when I looked at my large format illustrated layouts I realised that would be less than three pages of content. So I made a smaller format (A5) version with six pages, especially for The Hook.

I was so ready that once the competition opened, I submitted everything a month before the closing date! But I still had to wait as long as everyone else to find out if I’d made it through. I was pretty confident, but I also knew that if I didn’t get selected, I wouldn’t have to tell anyone about it. Of course, I was selected (by a super-secret panel of Scoobies) and pretty soon everyone knew about it!

After the months of planning, I had just two weeks to finalise my slides. In theory, I had a further week after that to hone my pitch, but in practice the two were so interlinked that my pitch needed to be ready at the same time. I’ve calculated that I spent about thirty hours making the slides, which is an insane amount of time for a five minute presentation. Although I endeavoured to reuse as many of the graphics and illustrations from the book as I could, there was probably 50% new material that I had to create. And let’s not even talk about trying to make the animations work in PowerPoint!

But we shouldn’t forget that no-one was forcing me do all this work. And indeed, the number of slides presented had absolutely no correlation with who won the competition. But these kinds of opportunities don’t come along very often, and I wanted to embrace this one. Despite the work involved, I really enjoyed creating the presentation because I was able to tell a story visually in a very different medium, a bit like making a short film.

Here I am mid-pitch (photo by Marie Basting)

OK, I seem to have spent a lot of time talking about the period leading up to The Hook, thereby completely ignoring the title of this post! What has happened since?

One immediate side effect was praise. This doesn’t sound like a bad thing, but I’ve always struggled with taking compliments. I tend to deflect them by diminishing myself in some way. I got a lot of compliments in the hours and days after The Hook, some of them from people for whom the theme of my novel had genuinely touched a chord. And I managed not to respond with something like: “Shame it wasn't good enough to win though.” I just said “Thanks.” And that, for me, was real progress!

The “final” edits I needed to do on the book turned out to be more extensive than I expected, which necessitated another two weeks of writing and proofing. In parallel, I worked on reformatting the layout of the book based on a design review I’d had before the conference (but hadn’t had the time or headspace to put into practice). At last, it was all ready to submit, but I suddenly realised I had no synopsis.

If you're a sensitive writer type, you may want to stop reading. Because I'm about to make a SHOCKING CONFESSION.







Are you sure?







Last chance.







OK, here goes...

I love writing synopses!

I know that goes against all that is good and holy, but there you have it. I find the synopsis far, far easier than writing the actual book. Part of this may be because, by the time I get to it, I’ve been over and over the book hundreds of times in my head. Anyway, I polished off the synopsis in my lunch hour - one page, 660 words, job done.

So, was I finally ready to submit? You might think that, but what I decided I really needed to do was make a book dummy. This was using the skills I had newly learnt at this year’s SCBWI conference, involving several hours of printing, gluing and sticking. As a displacement activity, it was a good one, and the end result looks pretty awesome. I especially liked writing the back cover blurb and seeing the book as a real object, which makes it so much more tangible than pixels on a screen.

With all that done, the inevitable couldn’t be avoided any longer. I have started submitting to agents, or as I like to think of it, putting my baby into an email-shaped spaceship and launching it into the cold dark void of indifference (you know, like Jor-El in Superman).

Superman and Superdad (photo by marakma)

If I sound a tad conflicted about the process, it's because trying to get an agent and publisher was never part of my plan for this book. Burned by my previous experiences with the industry, I resolved that this book would be just for me - entirely self-published and what did it matter if I only sold 50 copies? To that end, I turned away from the market and just wrote whatever the hell I wanted, in the way I wanted to do it. And yet, here I am, neurotically chasing approval all over again. What happened?

Well, for one thing, people really seem to be engaging with the concept of my book, and the way it’s presented. If everyone had shrugged at my pitch, I might have retreated into my burrow for six months and finished the book just for me. But suddenly, people want to see this thing published, and I feel some responsibility to make that happen. Plus, it fits with my new mantra of trying to embrace whatever opportunities come along.

So, I will roll the dice with some carefully selected agents, and in the meantime I’ll continue illustrating and preparing the book for self-publication. Unlike my novel, the future is unwritten.

Nick.

---

Nick Cross is a children's writer/illustrator and Undiscovered Voices winner. He received a SCBWI Magazine Merit Award, for his short story The Last Typewriter.
Nick is also the Blog Network Editor for SCBWI Words & Pictures magazine. His Blog Break column appears fortnightly on W&P.

Should you go on a writing retreat? YES

by Teri Terry

Have you ever wanted to go on a writing retreat but weren't sure what you might get out of it? I love writing retreats! Especially the SCBWI variety. But the reasons why have changed over the years.

Back when I was unpublished and unagented, I wasn't sure I could justify the time or expense of a writing retreat...

It took me a year of thinking about it before I finally took the plunge and went to my first SCBWI retreat.

I didn't write at them very much the first few times - in fact, the first one I went to, way back in 2010, I spent all the scheduled writing time reading Jon Mayhew's Mortlock, which I'd brought along for him to sign, and having unscheduled naps and weird Mortlock-related-dreams. This was my very first retreat, and the last one in the midlands; one of the last few ably-organised by the very much missed Sue Hyams.

It still stands out in my mind all these years later: 

1. the sheer joy of being around other creative types for a whole weekend. I started to feel less alone. If other people out there talk to the characters in their heads all the time too, maybe I'm not completely bonkers?

2. a one to one with Lee Weatherly with a ghost story I still may go back to one day: she said my voice was just right for YA!

Lee's latest

3. a talk Lee gave also, where I still remember one of the things she said: that if you've had a full manuscript request somewhere - even if it's a no - it shows you can write; keep going, you'll get there. I'd been in just this position around that time and was feeling down about it, and she made me turn it around and see it for the encouragement that it  was.

4. a picture book talk with Pippa Goodhart! 
I wasn't sure why I was even going - I didn't want to write picture books - but I went along, and I still remember something that she said: that animals are often used in picture books because it makes it less scary than if it were a child. This is something I came back to in other contexts when I was thinking about the appeal of dystopian novels: put something in another world or in the future, and you can look at scary issues in a way that might feel too confronting in our world.

Retreats then moved to Dunford House in West Sussex:

I've been to every one, and even volunteered to organise it myself a few years. The reasons I went changed over time and the years merge together a bit in my brain:

my Dunford Houe library writing buddies in 2011:
Christian Colossi, Jo Wyton, Tina Lemon

1. writing time: more and more I was using the retreat to focus on my work in an intense way that can be hard to do at home with family & work commitments.

2. friends! Writing friends! No one else wants to listen to us agonise over a word or point of view choice or plot point like they will; no one understands the agony of rejection and dusting yourself off again like they do; no one else is quite the same cheer leading section.

3. it made me feel like a writer! Which can be elusive sometimes in those pre-published stages.

Then in 2011 I got a publishing deal, hurrah! Slated was published in 2012. Things were changing ...

Once I was agented and published, I wasn't sure I could justify the time or expense of a writing retreat...

Why go if I don't need one to ones, I'm less interested in going to workshops and talks, and now that I'm writing full time I don't really need the dedicated writing time away?

I kept going. I couldn't not go, somehow.

1. writing time! I still loved having this weekend to focus, away from home/family.

Writing buddies in Dunford House library, 2018

Dunford House

2. writing friends! I think I said it all above: they're the best.

3. Dunford House! more and more it was becoming a place I loved going to every year; an annual ritual; my favourite weekend of the year

Dunford House Conservatory one May

What about solo retreats?

Another point about retreats: I know authors who go away on their own for a week or two to write. This doesn't work for me; I've tried it. I get too morose being on my own 24 hours a day. The SCBWI retreats - also Charlie's residential retreats in beautiful Devon - work for me because I can write all day but have lovely chat with friends at meals and in the evening.

I almost didn't go to the SCBWI retreat this year: 

I've been travelling too much. I've got 

Scooby, the World's Cutest Puppy.
I did miss her dreadfully

some intense deadlines. We have a puppy. Lots of things were falling through the cracks and I didn't register for the retreat: it was sold out. I also didn't plan a book launch for Deception, the second book of my Dark Matter trilogy.

But Dunford House is closing soon so it was the last one there, and I found I couldn't stay away. Someone sadly had to cancel and I got their spot! And then I remembered my very first retreat, and Jon Mayhew bringing along bottles of bubbles after Mortlock was published ...

blurry Jon Mayhew pouring bubbles - back in 2010?
I think it was 2010

... and I had a cunning plan:

A book launch! Prosecco! a writing retreat!! What's not to like?

Prosecco! a glass! no free hands for the book,
but Susan Bain snuck in to help out

Thanks so much to everyone for being there! And thank you to Mel Rogerson and Alexandra English for organising everything so wonderfully. 
Thank you to editor Rosie McIntosh for coming along, and to Dom and Hachette Children's Books for the Prosecco, and to everyone at Dunford House for making this retreat - and my book launch - as memorable as all the others.

And thanks also to Candy Gourlay and Kathy Evans for making the trek, and for the photos!

Books! bookmarks!

from left: Kathy Evans, Nina Wadcock, me, and Candy Gourlay's selfie magic

Editor Rosie McIntosh saying lovely things

So cheers to SCBWI, Dunford House, writing retreats, and writing friends everywhere! 

Thanks to Sue Hyams, for talking me in to going on my first retreat.

the dedication page in Contagion

Please share: writing retreat happenings? things learned? writing retreat successes? haunted rooms? things forgotten/lost? hangovers?

Writing for Children - Bryan Collier on Inspiration, Passion and the need for Diverse Books.

By Kathryn Evans

 I've just returned from the SCBWI New York conference. I know - get me! Gadding about the planet. It's huge too - over 1100 people attend and it's packed with very well known American book people this Brit has never heard of. One of them was the first keynote speaker: artist and picture book writer and illustrator,  Bryan Collier.

Bryan Collier and Kathryn Evans

He spoke about his passion:

"Your dream's should scare you they should be so outlandish - hold on to them."

His inspiration:

"Pay attention to all the little things that happen to you, even if it's painful," 

One of his great influences were the quilts his grandmother  had sewn when he was a child.  At the time, he hadn't taken much notice, but the way the patchwork was created became a part of him and a part of his art.

This resonated with me. As a child, I lived so much in books, they are as important to my writing as the laughter and the tragedy I've lived through. They make the patchwork of my books - stories about relationships with a sci-fi twist and a spoonful of horror.  When I embraced that, I found my voice.

He talked too, of his own oddity:

"The things you feel awkward about are the things that are special about you. That's your unique gift. Let that shine."

As a writer of pretty weird books, I wanted to cheer at this. We all have our own oddities - let them breathe.


On why he creates for children:

" There's nothing you can't touch and talk about in picture books."

Bryan's latest illustrations are for Daniel Beaty's story, Knock, Knock -  an intricate tale of loss.

And his need:

Bryan first saw himself in Ezra Jack Keats " The Snowy Day." He was four years old and,

 "Peter was wearing my pyjamas".

Candy Gourlay has often said that she didn't think girls like her could be in books because she never saw Filipino children in books. It matters that all children see themselves in books. As Bryan said:

"Somebody is waiting for you to be courageous enough to say 'I have a story to tell' - that's what's at stake."

 You know, it didn't matter that I didn't know Bryan's work - his words brought me to tears and the entire audience to its feet.  And he finished with this:

 "Let's do this, lock the doors, get desperate."

Children are waiting.

Kathryn Evans is the award winning author of More of Me: A gripping thriller with a sinister sci-fi edge, exploring family, identity and sacrifice. She is Co-RA of SCWBI British Isles. Find her  on Facebook and Instagram @kathrynevansauthor and twitter @mrsbung  More of Me will be released in the USA, June 2017

A twin blog! Crystal Kite & all things Scooby, AND the Awesomeness of a double Carnegie-winning line up

by Teri Terry

Me, almost
over the jet lag

I haven't blogged in absolutely ages: sorry! There's been writing, editing and SO SO much travelling. In fact, I tried to do a google map of the last few months to show you, but google maps refused to cover it all on one map. But I'm staying put for a while, and promised Candy & the Slushies that I would do it this time, oh yes! But the problem is this: there are TWO things I want to blog about. I thought about clever ways to make them look like they belong together, but then just resigned myself to having twins.

Learning Story Structure from the Christmas Advert War

Festive Face!

Ahhhh, Christmas...mince pies, cosy fires, presents under the tree and the Christmas Advert War.
At their best, these adverts pull at our heartstrings and stick in our minds, at their worst they can leave us baffled or outraged  How do they stir up such strong emotions in such a short space of time? By using classic story telling - the tightness of the  structure, and some emotive tricks. Examining these tiny vignettes gives us a powerful insight into how story works.

The Fellowship of Writing

by Addy Farmer

Friends celebrate at the SCBWI conference!

A friend is a comrade, chum, compatriot, crony, advocate, ally, a confrere ( I like that word). The bond of friendship is forged by many and varied things - common opinions and values, humour, food, shared experience, even disagreement can bring us together as friends. Friendship can be lifelong or fleeting. We remember friends from when we were little - when everything was supposed to be a great deal less complicated but often was not. Then there's the primary playground where we fell in and out of love with our friends as quickly as the cloud moves across the sun. Then, in a teenage time of change we longed for or adored or hated our friends and most probably all at once.

What Writers Can Learn from Illustrators

By Candy Gourlay

Writing novels is an honourable way to make a living, but sometimes you can feel like you're so deep in the cave of your imagination there is no such thing as real life.

To stop my brain turning into a cow-pat from spending too much time in the writer's cave, I've been trying to diversify a little bit. Last year, I attended a graphic novel course where I made comics. That was such a success that I signed up to attend last weekend's SCBWI Picture Book Retreat for writers and illustrators of picture books.

We stayed at Holland House, a beautiful Tudor retreat centre 

Alexis Deacon (Beegu, Slow Loris) set us up with mind expanding activities and Helen Stephens (Fleabag, How to Hide a Lion) showed us her sketchbooks and talked about how she developed her ideas.  Maria Tunney, Senior picture book editor for Walker, and Sarah Malley, deputy art director for Egmont, came to talk to us about the publishing process.

 
Alexis and Helen

Throughout the weekend with my sketchbook-toting colleagues, I kept getting little epiphanies about writing.

Here's a little list of what I learned from my weekend with illustrators.

1. Teach yourself to see in a different way.
Alexis warned the artists: "If you draw like a camera with no engagement with your subject you will end up with nothing." Simply replicating what you see is not enough. What makes a drawing a work of art is the uniqueness of the eye, the illustrator's ability to engage with the subject on an emotional level.

We writers would do well to take heed. While mastering our craft is important, we should never forget that for a book to move a reader, it needs not only words but heart.

2. Keep going until you find something fresh and new.
How can you make your good idea a great idea? "Don't just stop at 'the good idea',"Egmont's Sarah Malley urged us. "Keep going until you find something fresh and new." A good idea is just the beginning of your journey. Turning it into a good book demands real graft. Said Maria Tunney of Walker: "Ask every question until you've distilled (the idea) to its purest form."

We writers are often guilty, once we decide on a high concept, of hurrying our books to their conclusion. A good book is not just plot and arc and all those things we read about in How To books. A good book only reveals itself after an author has tried to find the answer to every question that her story asks of her.

3. Are you using your own voice?
Helen Stephens began her picture book career creating baby books with cute, flat characters that sparkled. "I felt like I was in this weird happy world of brightness," she said. "It looked like I was doing really well, but a secret voice kept saying: 'You are not using your real voice!'" Sometimes, she said, it felt like she would have to hold onto her arm and force herself to draw in that style. She went back to the sketching that she had loved as a young art student and it is through sketching that she now evolves her stories.

Helen making herself draw flat and sparkly things. From my sketchbook.

When we are only beginning to write, it is natural that we try to evoke the voices of our favourite writers. But we must make an effort to find our own. This is what will make our fiction unique. It is said there are only so many plots in existence on which to hang a story. What makes each book special if everyone's using the same plot? The author.

4. What you don't see might be the story.
Helen told the story of how she went to the zoo to draw lions, in the hope of writing a lion story. Day after day, she sat by the lion enclosure. But the lions never showed themselves. Then she realised that was it. That was the story: how to hide a lion.

"The story came out of being in the moment," Helen said. "Seeing an object, an incident, a funny quirky thing ... and then asking the questions that lead to a story."

I really struggle to "be in the moment" when I'm writing. I have to get out of the house to put my head in the right space before I can get writing. Only then can I begin asking the questions that lead to the story. The world of distraction around us makes it hard to be in the moment and we must do what we have to do to put ourselves in the right place to write.

5. Go out. See things.

We authors and illustrators love our books. Unfortunately the result can be that our books are homages to the books we love. Other books become our references. "It's a bit like living in a city where everything is pre-digested by someone else," Alexis said. "It's as if there's only one way to live."

Alexis made us go out into the beautiful gardens of the retreat house to spend a little time looking at things, see and experience the world for ourselves. Then he asked us back to describe what our very own, unadulterated, unreferenced observations. Here's a page from my sketchbook where I jotted down some of the descriptions people came back with of the birds, butterflies and various creepy crawlies they looked at.

The top right bubble is my rather garbled note of what Alexis said before he sent us out: It will be a challenge but you will find the words. And we did. 

With heartfelt thanks to Anne-Marie Perks and Bridget Strevens-Marzo for organising a fantastic weekend. And to Holland House for their gorgeous hospitality and accommodation.