ATL

Words and pictures

Children's Laureate Anthony Browne extols the virtues of picture books and explains how he creates one

The reading of picture books is not like any other experience we ever have. There is something very special about the relationship between pictures and words, and I do feel that picture books are becoming more and more marginalised. It seems there is a strong pressure on children to move away from picture books at an earlier and earlier age, as though education is partly about leaving pictures behind as we grow into words.

The illustrations in picture books are the first works of art most children see and so are very important. In the best picture books, these tell much of the story, often far more than the text does. The words don't describe what the pictures already show us, and the pictures don't illustrate what the words have already told us. There's a gap between the two - a gap that's filled by the reader's imagination.

For me a book always starts with the idea. The most successful ideas are those that come to me organically, and I have learned that to consciously try and pluck an idea from nowhere is futile. Often several fragments of an idea stay latent in my head for some time before they mature, gradually coming together to form something more coherent and reachable.

Once cultivated, the idea is rarely in the form of a short story, or a poem, or even a series of pictures. The best way to describe it is like an idea for a film. The 'book' is played out in my head in a series of frames and scenes, and rather than there being a divide between the words and the pictures, the two components are forever inseparable. Throughout the formation of the idea my mind operates in much the same way as a film director.

When children ask me how I make a picture book, I tell them to imagine they have a video camera filming a day in their life. The film would cover every banal detail of their existence during this period: every meal; every routine; every bodily requirement; every social exchange, not to mention eight hours of sleep. It would be interminable for everybody, except the most ardent of Big Brother fans. What a film director does is reduce this material into a reasonable length, keeping the highlights and discarding the dross. To do this, the filmmaker creates a storyboard: a series of rectangles each containing a rough drawing that represents a frame in the film to provide a visual map of the entire movie at a very early stage of production.

I do the same thing when I plan a picture book. I draw out a series of 24 rectangles (representing the 12 double-page spreads that form the main part of a typical picture book), and fill them with very rough drawings and scrawls of text. In my mind there is a kind of animation to the idea, and I view my storyboard almost exactly as a filmmaker would. Rather than the fixed pictures they will eventually become, I view the boxes as frames or scenes from the story, with a clear sense of progression through time.

Using this method, the pictures and the words are devised together. The relationship in a film between the visual images and the verbal dialogue is crucial to its success, and I consider this relationship to be of equal importance in a picture book. 'Playing out' the book in this way ensures the visual and the textual come to me at the same time. Although both are sketchily laid down in the storyboard and will be changed before the final publication, it is important they are laid down together, and remain a combinative force throughout the creative process.