568 - Make Finishing Strong Fun, Where to Find Ideas & Create an Influence Shelf w Sophie Blackall

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0:41Stock up on Welch's Fruit Snacks, made with whole fruit, and now made with no artificial dyes. It's a snack kids already love, and one you can feel good about giving them. Go back to school with Welch's Fruit Snacks, now made with no artificial dyes. has finishing the work become a chore for you that happens to me sometimes i i got really into like plotting and planning and that sort of like working backwards from an end that sort of creative energy and unfortunately sometimes that puts me in this place where i can see it so clearly in my head that it just seems unfun to like execute this thing feels like i'm just taking dictation from past me or something.

1:26It doesn't feel like that juicy creative energy that I love. Luckily, today on the show, we have author illustrator, legendary author illustrator, Sophie Blackall, who gives me an incredible solution for this, as well as a whole bunch of other stuff. If you don't know Sophie Blackall, well, guess what? You definitely should. She's won almost every great picture book award under the sun that you can think of. She has so many gorgeous books that she has authored and illustrated. And I just had an absolute blast chatting with her. We talk about how to find that fun again in a project where you've, you've kind of lost it or it's become a chore or it's more predictable in your mind of where it's going to go.

2:07We talk about where book ideas come from, some prompts to kind of figure out where not just book ideas, but like authored ideas, like coming up with a creative project from scratch, like what kinds of creative projects you should think about exploring for yourself. We talk about the creative energy of critique and how that can be a prompt. All kinds of really, really good stuff in this episode. It's jam-packed. If you are someone who maybe is used to waiting for projects to come your way, this is a great episode to get you motivated and unlocked to start your own things and then control your creative destiny ultimately.

2:45Stick around to the end. I'm going to come back with a CTA. It's a call to you adventure something you can do with this episode. It's called find your shelf, find your shelf. And it's inspired by the last thing that Sophie says in this episode, the thing that she said has most positively contributed to her creative journey more than anything else. And it's gonna be juicy. So wait for that. But for now, here's my chat with Sophie Blackall. On the creative journey, it's easy to get lost, but don't worry, you'll lift off. Sometimes you just need a creative pep talk.

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6:00I'm super pumped to talk to you today because I want to talk to you about authorship. Now I'm right in thinking that you were an illustrator first before you started writing. Is that correct, right? Yes, that is correct. And do you think of yourself more as an illustrator or have you now been like, okay, I've written a bunch of things. I'm kind of both of these things. I am both of these things and And it's such a complicated thing and it really shouldn't be saying how to identify ourselves. And I share a studio with other children's book authors and illustrators. And I think some of us feel similarly.

6:42As an illustrator doing school visits, if there was a welcome sign, it would invariably say, welcome author Sophie Blackall. and in the Q &A with kids, they would inevitably say, where did you get the ideas for your book? And so there would be, as most illustrators have, this constant, oh, well, I didn't write the book and oh, I'm the illustrator. And then sometimes we might say, oh, I'm just the illustrator. You know, and that word just, that kind of qualifying, demeaning word, just. so I've been really trying to change all of those things and I love it when there's a bookstore and they alphabetize their picture books by illustrator for instance we do that at Milkwood our picture books are all alphabetized by illustrator and I'm so pro illustration And yet sometimes I find myself saying when somebody says, what do you do?

7:49And they don't know our world at all. I'll say, I write children's books because it's a shortcut. And Ed, my husband, has called me out on it a few times. He's like, what are you doing? What are you saying? But I think in my defense, it's also because I have only fairly recently really thought of myself as an author. um for some reason it felt I just had felt like an imposter for so long uh as a writer so um but I have written a dozen books or so now so I'm thinking I think it you know at this point I'm just going to embrace it yeah yeah that's great that's great and you know coming from illustration first and then getting into writing later I am always curious when I see a book I really enjoyed your new book story rug i have an early copy here hooray thank you and uh and i'm always curious what what the circumstances are to where you end up writing a book that you don't illustrate so i don't know if you could kind of explain yourself there it's really it's a really cool collaboration and i love um i love phoebe wall's work too um so it's really cool to see that but it's it's kind of an unusual thing is this the first time you've done that is this the first time and it is so exciting and so much fun.

9:09And funnily enough, in a studio, one of my studio mates is Brian Flocker. And at exactly the same time when I was thinking about this story, and I will tell you about it in a second, he was also thinking about writing for someone else. And he wrote a story for Sidney Smith to illustrate, which is called Island Storm. And that came out last year. And so we both had this fascinating experience of being primarily illustrators and then writing something and handing it over to someone else. And for me, it came about because I had written this story called Story Rug. It's about kids in second grade who are obsessed with braiding, as my kids were obsessed with various things over the years of their school life.

9:56I was going to say, this is something that happens to a class like they all totally something and then something they're all and I remember it from when I was a kid and and I wanted to do this story about uh rag rugs I love the I love them visually I love the way that they incorporate old fabric from clothing and each one has the story of the person who wore it woven into into this collaborative thing and the idea that the fabric would come from these different kids and that it would all take place in a classroom and that it would build to something and that it would not only weave their own stories but the stories that they were listening to while they were braiding so that the teacher is telling them stories and then they start reading each other's stories.

10:43And it took me a while to write it and I'd been thinking about it for a long time. And a little bit what we were talking, hearkening back to what we were talking about before in that whole arc of process of making a book from the first courtship, our sweet little idea, to the messy, difficult stuff of wishing we could be more experimental and then having to knuckle down and do the thing that we can do. Somewhere in that process, I love the uncertainty of it. I love the mystery of it. I love trying to solve the puzzle of what that book is going to be, to not be able to see around the corner, to set out on this unknown, uncertain path and the thrill of ending up somewhere unexpected.

11:29But for whatever reason, I could see the path clearly for this book. I could see exactly how I was going to make these drawings. And I felt like I'd already done it. And there was none of that mystery and uncertainty and puzzle solving. And I wrestled with that for a little while. And then I said to my editor, Susan Rich, how would it be if someone else were to illustrate this? And she was so excited, almost to the point where she's been waiting for me to illustrate all of these. Yeah, I know. I was like, wait a minute. She said, I've been waiting for this day. And then we had the very exciting thing of talking about illustrators.

12:11and I'm such a fan of illustration and I have such a long list of people I admire whose work I love and Phoebe Wall was was for both of us was was right up there so and she said yes so it was it was just so exciting and then this experience that other authors have told me about and I've been on the other side of it of of seeing your story come to life through someone else's drawings. Oh, so much fun. Very, very cool. And it's an interesting sort of takeaway for me where when I get into that place with a project where I have over plotted that a possible way to shake it up is to be like, well, could you just bring someone in with a different vision and it'll, it'll kind of change how you think it could come together.

13:01That's really cool. I love that. One of my favorite little bits was this moment that feels like, oh, this is written by an illustrator because it really creates a space for the illustrator and i don't look i mean it's a picture book so i feel like it's okay to spoil it a little bit it's the yeah yeah you know uh but i really like this part at the end where the text just says that class 201 and class 202 which are the other classes are silent and at first you're like okay i don't know what that means and then you go look in and you're like oh the braiding has been contagious and now the other classes are to be into it.

13:39And so I love that moment where, you know, the pictures and the words have to come together and it feels like, oh, this is someone who thinks, thinks like an illustrator. Yeah. Real to you. Totally. And, and it was so great that, that Phoebe just got it immediately and has done things with this book. I love the specificity of her work. Me too. I think I thought exactly the same thing. And I always do with her work. I always think, man, there's so much of like this family you're showing feels like families I know. This family you're showing, and I don't naturally gravitate towards that because I think a little bit more, I'm a little bit more in like an aesthetic style approach.

14:27And sometimes that gets in the way of being specific. So I'm really glad you said that. Yeah. As you said, you can look at this family and they feel real. They feel true. And you look at the stuff that's on their breakfast table, Noah and his dad and his little sister at the table. And the little sister in the high chair has got half-eaten stuff everywhere and her foot is hooked under the tablecloth. And it's just they're alive. They're so alive. In the classroom, you could just spend, you know, so long or repeat readings looking at those pictures and the details of the crafts made out of toilet roll holders.

15:10And it's toilet paper rolls. Yeah. You know what I'm trying to say. Yeah. It's brilliant. I love it so much. And I, you know, hadn't fully been conscious of this. I knew I loved the specificity and I knew that she was better at that than me and that I sometimes avoid that because I want the style to kind of feel the same-ish or something. But it's challenged me. And I – but I didn't think about how much it's a great example of how that makes them come alive to where the dad that's only in one frame, you're like, I know this guy. I've got a heart for this guy. Like, you know what I mean? And I just really, it does really make you feel like, oh, I know these kids and they are real.

15:53It's really cool. One of the things that I think is what makes a book good is this specificity. I was thinking recently about how so many of us are thinking about AI and how it affects children's books and the future of all creative endeavors. And I think this is key. This what Phoebe is doing and what we should all aspire to, this careful observation of human life, of social interactions, of how kids play, how they move through space, how they interact with each other and the world around them in really specific, personal, hilarious, funny, fallible ways is what is going to save us. and I was thinking about, did you ever read as a kid A Wrinkle in Time?

16:50Do you know that book? I read it as an adult, actually. Yeah. Oh, then you probably remember it more vividly than I do because it's been decades since I read it. Well, I read it to my kids, I guess, so not decades, but the end of that that is deeply ingrained in my brain and I would be so interested to go back, I will go back and read it because I think it now resonates so much with what we're talking about now with AI and everything, is at the end where Meg and her little brother Charles Wallace and Calvin, they're in the whatever that weird places where Charles Wallace has been hypnotized, right?

17:31And he's under the spell of the brain, the disembodied brain called it and the red-eyed man. and they're trying to break through and Meg can't. She tries all the different things and then ultimately it's love that breaks her through. But it's not just, oh, love, a big red heart and a cheesy kind of, you know, love will save us all. It's really specific what she thinks about her little brother and how she loves him. And it's genius and it's the same thing. It works because it's true. And that is what I think makes a good book. And so often I think we see books that are trying to be everything and trying to please everyone and they become a little flat and a little generic.

18:21And then the thing that breaks my heart is seeing an illustrator who's really talented, who can make beautiful compositions and do lovely, gorgeous work, will reuse a file. from one page to the next. They'll maybe flip it or maybe change the colour on something. And I just think, why? Why? You have this opportunity to do these drawings, and it's not really that many drawings. It's maybe 40 pages, 32, 40, 48. It's going to be around for a long time. Hopefully thousands of kids are going to pour over this night after night at bedtime. do another drawing you can do it you've done it on all these other pages it just I don't understand it I just don't understand it and it breaks my heart I completely agree and I and I thought I loved where you went with that and because I forgot that part but I thought you're going to go to um there's a point where Meg is given a gift she doesn't know what it is and when she ends up needing it it's her faults that she's yes i thought that's also just really speaks to that idea of like what not just i i get tired of us saying what ai can't do it's not about what it can and can't do it's that we don't care that it can do that we i don't care i care yeah i care so much more when you've done it and it's yours because of the you know your limitations and your mistakes and all of that as well.

20:00But I love how you brought up about that specificity. I think it's totally accurate. And it's also really at the heart of what I wanted to ask you about, which is like authorship and really like in the AI conversation, when you hear tech bros talking about what it's going to take to make art in the future when you don't have to do it. And you, you know, I love the conversation. I loved the conversation around taste. It's something I've thought about a lot. But for me, taste is so much ingrained in the process because you're tasting as you go, you're tasting as you're making, you're listening to your body as you're creating stuff, you know?

20:34But they talk about it like, yeah, you got to have the great ideas and the great taste and all that. I'm like, and it's, and then you're combined, and then they think of creativity as purely just combining what already exists, which is a part of it, but it's missing this huge part of specificity of your lived experience. What I wanted to ask you about was authorship because I remember telling somebody recently, yeah, and then I really had to like, got really serious about learning to write. And they were like, why did you do that? And I, as an illustrator, I was like, oh, it's because I didn't want to wait for people.

21:09I wanted to be able to like kind of generate things on my own without people handing them to me. So I got really interested in authorship. How do you have your own, create your own directions? And I think what you're getting at is really connected to that of like getting into your specifics, getting into your experiences. Did you, was that a big hurdle for you to move into like writing and authorship and not waiting? Cause illustrators are like actors in that they're often like waiting for someone to give them the script and then do the thing, you know? Right. I was being sent lots of manuscripts that I didn't think were all that good.

21:52That's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. And it was so surprising to me because they'd been acquired and I thought, how? Like, what? And they were fine, but they just lacked that little thing. And I thought I would have to do so much of the heavy lifting to make this interesting. Going back to what you said, they lacked that, what makes a book good for you. Yeah. Yeah. And that sounds incredibly, you know, arrogant in one way. And I'm sure the books were made and somebody else illustrated them. And that was exactly how it should be. But they didn't work for me. And I realized I could be writing my own.

22:41and I had an editor called Nancy Paulson who said that to me one day. She said, why aren't you writing your own? And I sort of mumbled something about feeling like an imposter. And she said, would you like to? Oh, yeah, I'd like to, but I don't know if I'm any good. And she said she gave me this fantastic gift. She said, let's put a lunch date in the calendar. How long would you like, a month from now, two months, and bring me two stories. Better still, bring me three stories. So we made right then and there, made the lunch date and I wrote three stories and she bought two of them. And it was, I feel, you know, grateful to her in so many ways, because that was such a gift, such a vote of confidence.

23:29Like you can, you can, you can do this. Why not? You want to do it? Just do it. And it was also realizing I can pursue something that I'm curious about, something that fascinates me, something, a world that I want to spend time in. Because it is, when we illustrate a book, it's a lot of time. We immerse ourselves in that world and it can be a year, it can be three years. And then once the book is out, we live with it for a lot longer. So we should feel passionate about it. We should want to immerse ourselves in that world. Which is not to say I don't still love collaborating, because there is the things that we talked about before, there is something liberating about having restrictions, as contradictory as that sounds.

24:17And there's also that surprise element of working with somebody who has a different brain. And the people I love collaborating with, Annie Barrows and Kate DiCamillo, you know, I will want to make books with them for the rest of my life. Yeah. Should I be so lucky? You touch on two things that I think are really powerful when it comes to trying to figure out what ideas you can author yourself. The first one was, I think the critical impulse, it's not about, it's a subjective thing. It's not about these are good or bad. It's about what's good and bad to you. It's about what does it for you and what doesn't.

24:57So that critical impulse, I think is such a huge part of authorship. It's literally being like, there's something, I don't like what, and for me, I don't know if this is true for everybody, but for me, that critical impulse didn't happen until I was much further in my, like, I still had taste, but I was much more enamored with other illustrators for a long time in my journey where I was like, oh, just like, oh man, this is so cool. So cool. And then eventually you get to a point where like, I love this, but I don't like that. Or I would have done that differently. And that critical impulse is telling you something about what you can bring to the table or what would more suit your tastes.

25:37And then the flip of what you don't like is the second thing you spoke about, which is the, what fascinates you, what's, what, what you're curious about and letting yourself pull on that. And that being what kind of drives what you write about. How, how did that work out in these first stories? The push and pull of that. Yeah. Just, and also just like, how did you, this is where it gets kind of obsessive and granular for me, but I, I like listening to people kind of like do this. So I'll, I'll push you on that. Like the three that you brought to her. Yeah. How did that like curiosity turn into writing something?

26:19Right. Uh, Uh, you know, in the end, those two books were, were anomalous in terms of the books that I've written. Uh, one of them was the baby tree and that was a book about where babies come from. And it was, uh, my kids were fairly small. I felt like there was a gap to be filled that a book that was factual, that was funny, and that was hopefully beautiful to have the trifecta. There were funny ones, there were dry factual ones, and then there were sort of very lyrical ones that didn't really tell you the nuts and bolts of it. Yeah, I wanted to try and do all three. And we got there, but I hadn't written it yet.

27:13And it was so long ago. I don't remember. I remember it being fairly, a fairly smooth process writing that one. And I'm proud of that book. It's in, I think, 16 different languages and it's still in print. And it's amazing. It's a, it's a lovely, lovely thing. It's been banned in a few schools because not schools, districts, whatever, because there are questions in the back of, you know, what if I have two moms and, and things like that. And these times. But then, then, then the second book, I, I, it was so long between doing it and between selling it and then doing it that I lost enthusiasm for it.

27:59I lost steam and it was a little bit like we were talking about that ADHD brain where you want to do it right now. And it felt like I'd ordered something off the menu that had become a little congealed and yeah so then it became a different book altogether and it became negative cat yeah yeah yeah yeah uh so it all worked out but it was just a different yeah they were they were sort of funny slightly different processes for writing those but as you move through doing this now it often takes the form of finding fascination in something and then using writing to kind of explore it. Is that what you're saying?

28:37I think it is that there are those ones that I have this deep abiding curiosity, like how do lighthouses work? What would it be like to live in one? I need to write a book so I can fully explore that obsession and, and, and fascination. And this, in that category, I would also put farmhouse and the house that I'm, the book that I'm working on right now, another house book, which is called House on Wheels, which is about a cross-country trip with a trailer. But then there are these other books that maybe are a little bit more like what you're talking about, where my stepson, Jack, when we were in Iceland, was asleep in the back of the car, woke up, looked out the window, saw the Icelandic ponies and said in a dreamy sort of way if I was a horse I would gallop all day and I wrote that down and it took 10 years before it became a book but that became a book and seeing a bunch of kids in the park and all on leashes you know like like um daycare and then a dog walker with a bunch of dogs and realizing, oh, these kids and dogs have a lot in common.

29:56And that led to if we were dogs and then, oh, can I show you something? This is a visual thing on a podcast. We're on YouTube too. So if they want to check it out, they can see it is this little wooden guy. Yeah. So sometimes it's for me, it's a visual thing and it is really an excuse to indulge my passion for flea markets and yard sales and antique shops and things. I have to go and look at them because there might be an idea for a book. But this little wooden guy jumped out at me and I bought him because I knew he had a story. And I've written this book about this guy, which Doug Salati is going to illustrate.

30:47Oh, cool. when he gets to it it'll be congealed by the time he gets to it cold and congealed because it's a couple of years away but he will make it so beautiful and i'm so excited i like the way go ahead sorry yes no no well in that case i kind of the whole time i was writing it i kept seeing his drawings so it was a little bit different than the than the story rug um yeah sorry go ahead no i was just gonna say i like the way that you you said it almost like i was your family you're like that's why i have to go to the flea market okay it's for work who knows this could be enough this could be college money you know well you don't know