Oscar is an owl; a COOL owl. And cool owls DO NOT fly – they RUN. ZOOOOOOOOOM! So when snowy owl Reggie comes along, swooping and swooshing through the sky, Oscar’s not impressed at all. But when Reggie crashes into a tree, Oscar discovers that maybe they are not so different from one another after all…
A funny and heartwarming story about how being different is cool. It introduces the burrowing owl and their spectacular legs and beautiful burrows to small children.
Guest blog post from Timothy Knapman
Timothy Knapman here, hello! I’d like to tell you a bit about my new book, Owls Are Cool, which is illustrated by the mighty Jason Cockcroft.
Ideas for picture books can come from anywhere, but it’s often
something visual. I talked to a friend about stories, and
she showed me a picture of a burrowing owl. There was something proud but
vulnerable in the owl’s face, and at once, I could hear a voice in my head that
seemed to fit him. Getting a fix on your main character is a good start, but
you still need a story. Stories aren’t just a string of events that happen for
no reason, they’re like a machine in which each moving part works in harmony
with the rest, and they need a motor to drive them. That motor is usually a
problem that the main character has to solve. So I needed a problem to power
my story. I wondered what this proud animal would feel if he saw an owl that
could fly – admiration, yes, but underneath it also loss as he watched
something he couldn’t do. How was he going to deal with that? That’s when I
knew I had a story.
Research is an integral part of the process of writing
picture books. If I’m writing about a particular animal, I’ll read as much
about them as I can before I start. It’s an excellent way to get ideas, and I think
stories feel richer if they include a few particular, telling details. But I’m
not bound by the facts when I tell my stories because – and this is a big
secret, so don’t let it get around – picture books about animals aren’t really
about animals.
Take my new book; its hero is a burrowing owl who admires/envies, and then makes friends with, a
flying owl. Does that sort of thing happen in the wild? I have no idea. Because
I’m not really writing about animals at all, I’m writing about how a friendship
begins. The heart of my story – the
hero’s mixture of admiration, showing off, and vulnerability – comes not from
any biology textbook about burrowing owls but from my memory of trying to make
friends when I was a little boy.
Writing a picture book is like writing a song. Like songs,
picture books can’t go on very long; they need some kind of quirk or novelty
that hooks you, and, most of all, they have to be something you’re going to want
to hear over and over again (young readers love repetition). I’ve been lucky
enough to write a few songs and even luckier to have written them with some
very talented composers, and it’s in the collaboration that song- and picture
book-writing are most alike. I don’t try to do everything in my lyrics – lyrics
are not poetry, they are not meant to stand on their own; music carries at
least half of the song’s meaning – and it’s the same with illustrations, such
as Jason Cockcroft's glorious images for our new book. I would
never tell Jason what to draw; I have no fixed ideas about what my characters
and their world look like, as long as they fit the story. I want to be surprised.
And the result is always far better than I was expecting – a book that sings.
This is a picture of my desk, where I’ve written many
books, including my latest. I’ve
given up trying to keep it tidy because I realised recently that the chaos is
good for work. Yes, I know I have to dig under piles of papers to find a pen
that works, and I’ll be snatching time where I can to read five books on wildly
different subjects all at the same time, but the sense of urgency – of so many
deadlines, and so little time – is a great spur to get working. If you have too
much time to think about a project, you often find yourself thinking about it
and not writing it. And I’m lucky enough to work on a great variety of
different projects. Going from a picture book to a non-fiction book to an opera
adaptation to a musical means that if I get stuck on one thing, there’s always
somewhere else to go. And the answer to a problem in project A often presents
itself after I’ve given up and gone over to work on project C. During the first
lockdown, I had no deadlines, a nice tidy desk and time to read widely for
pleasure. And I didn’t write a single usable word.
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A special thanks to our guest this week, Timothy Knapman!
Owls Are Cool is now available from all good booksellers.
