What happened when? The challenge of writing a companion book

I wrote Out of the Way! Out of the Way! in 2010—that makes it thirteen years old this year. The book is illustrated with the brilliant palette and the whimsical, lively art work of—yes, yes, the illustrator and I share a name.*

*From the jacket of the Tamil edition, Out of the Way! Out of the Way!

There’s one tiny spelling difference in our last names, but only in English. As the Tamil edition of the book, published by Tulika Books, shows, we really share a name.

Last year, I started writing the text of a possible companion book to Out of the Way! Out of the Way! with a focus on water and with a girl as protagonist. I saw a contrast here to the earlier story about a boy and a road and a tree.

I thought I’d written a tidy picture book text, stayed true to my young character, followed more or less the shape of the previous story, while allowing this one to follow its own path—as water does, right?

Only when Uma started work on the art did I see the problems in my text. I had written three scenes in a row that made poetic sense, escalating a single action. But visually, they’d end up looking altogether too much like one another. The page turns wouldn't work.

The kids had found a stone slab in a field, but they had no tools to work with, so how could they dig it up to see what lay beneath? The action in those scenes didn’t make sense.

I had to rearrange my text and rework several transitions. I spent a few days reading the whole thing out loud over and over. That’s how picture books grow. As you back away from the text and hold the entire story in your mind, you want it to grow in the space between the words and the images.

Look! Look! is that companion book, to be published next year by Groundwood Books.