SHORT AND SWEET

In the back of my mind these past few decades, and obviously too far in the back, has been the notion that somewhere inside of me is a novel germinating just waiting to be brought to life. Unfortunately, nothing has burnt a big enough hole in my brain or awakened a big enough passion to spur me on to complete any of the umpteen shelved stories which seemed like a good idea at the time. So I’m taking a different tack.

If I can’t sustain a storyline over a long period of time with myriads of characters and plot twists then I’ll keep it simple. Great Grandpa Percy’s Garden is 499 words long, and Where’s Grandpa? 524 words. There you go, two complete stories printed out ready to be critiqued and pulled apart at this week’s Adult Ed ‘Writing and Illustrating Children’s books’ course. One main character, very little dialogue, simple story, sounds like a breeze. A children’s story may not take an eternity to write, but if the intention is for it to be a picture story book, then the road ahead is littered with as many obstacles, if not more, as a regular book with no pictures.

Finding a publisher willing to even contemplate your little offering can take an eternity in itself, giving your story to an illustrator can be like handing over your children for someone else to raise, and waiting the three years or more for the whole process to come to fruition if you are fortunate enough to be published, takes a monumental amount of patience. Not to mention the determination to see it through to the end. With a $40,000 price tag on a first run for a children’s picture book, no publisher is going to do you any favours unless there’s a profit to be made down the track.

My reactions when I scour the shelves in any book store are a mixture of awe and discouragement. Awe, that so many people have managed to actually complete something considered worthy of publication, and discouragement that as a late starter I may never make it that far. Maybe I really have nothing worth saying that will make a dent in the market, and the thought of pouring my blood, sweat and tears into a lengthy tome, only to have it gather dust after countless rejections, makes me not want to even bother beginning.

So the same conundrum keeps coming back to haunt me. To reach the desired outcome you have to make a start, you have to put in the hard yards, and if, and it’s a big if, you do actually manage to complete something, you then have to go right back to square one to begin the next cycle of sending the thing on its way as it negotiates the rocky road to publication. But, if you don’t start, you don’t get there. A bit like the old Northern Territory tourism advert.

You’ll never never know, if you never never go.