A picture book, if you let it, will tell you how long it wants to take. Mostly it wants to take longer than you would like. There is no good way to hurry the part where a book becomes itself — the part where the cover and the inside agree, where Clara stops being a sketch and starts being a presence in the room. That part has its own weather, and you can either sit with it or you can ruin it.
I have tried to ruin it. I have tried the version of this work where you push, where you say by Friday, where you decide the book will be done because the spreadsheet says so. The book politely declines. Then it goes quiet for a fortnight and refuses to look you in the eye, and you have to come back and start again, more carefully this time, with the door open and the kettle on.
Slow-made, on purpose
Clara has been three years in the making. Not three years of full-time work — three years of carrying the thing around. Three years of waking up with a line and writing it on the back of a receipt. Three years of putting a spread away because it was almost right but not quite, and three months later opening the folder and seeing, suddenly, what was wrong with it. The slow ones are the ones that stay.
The picture books I love best — Mem Fox, Bob Graham, Jeannie Baker, Stephen Michael King — read as though nobody was in a hurry. They read as though somebody sat with the work long enough that the work got comfortable. You can hear it on the page. You can hear when a book has been allowed to breathe, and you can hear when a book has been finished on deadline. There is a small, particular sadness to the second sort.
So Currawong, on purpose, will be slow. One or two titles a year, when they are ready. Sometimes none. The press goes at the pace of the watching, not the pace of the calendar.
The pace of the watching
The watching, here, mostly means Sofia. She is two. She does not know she is helping. But she is the reason I keep finding out, gently, which parts of the book are working and which parts I have been forcing.
She watches what she watches. She is interested in the wattle, and the small fairywren in the corner, and the moment Clara turns her head. She is not interested in the spread I worked hardest on — the one with the most ink in it, the one I would happily show another adult. She has no idea this is a verdict, but it is. She is showing me where the warmth is, and the warmth is the whole point.
So I watch with her. We walk down to the river and she stops, and I stop with her, and we look at whatever has made her stop — a piece of bark, a beetle, the way the light is doing something on the water. I do not always know what she is seeing. But I have learned, slowly, that the things that hold a two-year-old still for thirty seconds are the things a picture book is trying to find. Stillness, in a small child, is the rarest currency there is. You learn to follow it.
Trust the process, even when it is boring
The hardest part of slow work is the middle. The beginning is easy — beginnings always are. The end is satisfying. The middle is mostly waiting, and re-reading, and looking at the same spread for the eighteenth time wondering whether the sky is too purple. The middle is where you are tempted to push, or shortcut, or call it done. Don't. The book is still ripening. It will tell you when it has stopped.
Patience, in this work, is not a virtue. It is a craft skill. You practise it the same way you practise anything else, and on the days it is hardest you remember that the books you want to make are not made any other way.
— James