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Billie’s new adventure: Sally Rippin on writing picture books

Sally Rippin’s latest two picture books, Billie’s Great Desert Adventure and Billie’s Underwater Adventure (illus by Alisa Coburn, Hardie Grant Egmont) will ‘stir the imagination in all sorts of colourful ways’ writes reviewer Sarah Coull. She spoke to Rippin about the process of transitioning the popular character to picture books.

What made you decide to write a younger ‘Billie B Brown’ series—and for the preschool market in particular?
I have always had a great passion for picture books, being an illustrator myself, so was thrilled when my publisher suggested this might be an area we could explore with Billie B Brown. I have quite a few friends with young children who like to carry around the Billie books because their older siblings are reading them, so it felt like a natural progression to create a picture book series for them.

How do you find the transition between writing junior fiction to writing picture books? What are the challenges working with the picture book format compared to chapter books?
The two areas couldn’t be more different. The original ‘Billie’ series is a read-alone series whereas the picture book series is a read-aloud. In the original read-alone series the vocabulary is limited with the intention of only including words emerging readers can decipher for themselves and the sentences are kept very short. The type is large and there are only a few words on each page. The end result is that the young reader feels like they are reading their very first novel complete with complex plotline and character development, but essentially they are not much harder to read than a basic school reader.

When I began to write the picture book series, I admit it was a joy to be able to stretch my writing vocabulary to include words of more than two syllables and sentences of more than five words! In a picture book text, the author can be quite lyrical and playful as the book is intended to be read aloud and the child is able to pick up any gaps in the meaning through the illustrations. The challenge, however, in writing a picture book is to allow enough room for the illustrator to create their own interpretation of the text and not crowd out the pages with unnecessary words.

Alisa Coburn’s colourful illustrations throughout Billie’s Underwater Adventure really help to tell the story and engage the reader. Was this a very collaborative process between writer and illustrator, or did you already have a clear vision for each illustrated page?
I had a very clear vision of the role the pictures would have in telling the story as most of the action happens in Billie’s imagination. I knew I wanted the illustrations to be drawn literally to create a very real world, similar to the way that Max enters the world of his imagination in Where the Wild Things Are (Maurice Sendak, Random House). However, when it came down to the details of the art direction, I was happy to leave it up to the editor and illustrator. The more an author can step back from this process, the more the illustrator can be allowed the space to create their own vision.

Now that you have a young Billie, could you see yourself creating a ‘Billie B Brown’ series for older readers—perhaps tweens or even YA? Are there other areas (TV adaptations, computer games, merchandising, etc.) you’d like to see Billie B move into?
I’m taking a little break from Billie this year as I have been completely dedicated to her and Jack since the beginning of 2010, and will have published 56 books about them in less than five years! This year I am looking forward to stretching my writing wings further to delve back into the luxury of writing a novel for slightly older readers with no deadlines or expectation. After that, who knows? It would be hard to give up Billie completely. There have been murmurs of a Billie television series as well as apps and other merchandising possibilities, but this side of things is very much my publisher’s domain. I am happy just to write the stories.

You’ve spent quite some time with Billie over the last few years. Do you think you share any personal similarities with her?
Um … everything? Almost every emotion, event, trial and tribulation Billie experiences comes directly from my own childhood. I am fortunate to have a very vivid memory of myself at that age and there seem to be infinite number of stories to draw from. I find if I use my own childhood experiences for the essence of the story this creates an authenticity that is harder to achieve than by merely observing children around me. When I teach writing for children to adults, this is the first thing I encourage my students to do: to draw their material from within.

What was the last book you read and loved?
I just finished reading We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler (Serpent’s Tail) and loved it! The story was clever, funny and heartfelt and I loved the voice it was told in. I loved the insight into the psychology of child-rearing and complicated family dynamics—all my favourite things to read and talk about. Without giving too much away, there was also a very clever twist halfway that I certainly hadn’t seen coming!

 

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Category: Features