Gavin Bishop: Books for kids not child's play

By MARGIE THOMSON

So you think writing kids' books is easy? Don't be misled by the apparent simplicity - it can be as tricky to hone this literary form as any other.

Gavin Bishop is that rare thing, an equally accomplished writer and illustrator. He has been working at his craft for more than 20 years, the past three of them full-time since he took the plunge and gave up high-school art teaching to work at home, doing what he loves best. So far, it's a move that seems to be working out well.

"The amount of work coming in has filled up the space," he says modestly.

Not only is Bishop a pioneer in his field, one of the first to put New Zealand imagery into stories for children, but he is respected and sought-after worldwide for his illustrative technique. He has been invited to China to lecture on the subject and in the United States is considered one of the top illustrators for children's books because of his skill with technique and composition.

Bishop has produced about 27 books for children, including his latest, The House That Jack Built (Scholastic, $29.95), a finalist in this year's New Zealand Post Children's Book Awards. (He also illustrated Joy Cowley's The Video Shop Sparrow, another finalist.) He's won the Children's Picture Book of the Year twice, in 1983 and 1994, for Mr Fox and Hinepau; and the Russell Clark Award in 1982 for his second story, Mrs McGinty and the Bizarre Plant. In March, he was awarded the Margaret Mahy Medal by the Children's Book Foundation.

Yet even a book such as The House That Jack Built, which has been critically well-received, sells extremely well (5000 hardback copies in fewer than six months) and is being picked up by teachers who build school projects around its theme of colonisation, inter-cultural strife and integration, will never be enough to keep that old wolf from the door.

Bread-and-butter work from overseas illustrating commissions is welcomed (lump-sum payments in American dollars can make a real difference to the budget, Bishop notes). He also does work for educational publishers such as Shortland and Wendy Pye - writing or illustrating the small books that "emergent readers" bring home from school, where the words start by describing the pictures, but gradually become less directly related to the illustrations and more complex as the child's ability increases.

Such books do not rely on individual sales. Rather, the publishing houses gather them up into collections of 200 books and sell them as packages to schools, often internationally. Wendy Pye, for instance, spends several months each year travelling the world, most recently in Africa, creating new and often large markets for her collections.

The stories in these little books seem incredibly simple, yet because of the strict format - at the lowest levels a coherent story must be formulated in seven sentences, including an amusing or at least satisfying ending - they are challenging for writers.

Much of Bishop's writing process is paring down the original ideas.

"I write it down, then I think, 'What can I take away?' And because I work almost exclusively with picture books, it's a matter of getting that happy balance of a text that's interesting enough while setting up sub-plots in the pictures that are not referred to in any way in the text ... I really like working like that."

The House That Jack Built works in this way, with the main narrative in the body of the page while sub-themes dance around the margins.

Bishop's desire to publish books for children wasn't simply born of a delight in making up stories for his own children. While trips to the library and reading aloud were important aspects of bringing up his three children (now all adult), it was his own childhood delight in certain books - adventure, travel, Cole's Funny Picture Books - that sparked his interest. In fact, he says, "making up stories for your own kids is totally different to writing. Those stories can be poorly shaped and loosely formed. Really, they're just a communication thing you're having with the child, an oral form. But when you're writing for a specific shape, for instance, a 32-page book, it's a literary form you're entering into."

Of his own books, Bishop is perhaps most fond of Little Rabbit and the Sea, precisely because of its "deceptively simple" approach.

"It was deliberately written down for young children, but it has a lot of levels and layers. I worked on it with a very good editor at North South Books in New York and she helped me whittle it down. It was beautifully printed in Belgium but, although several hundred copies were imported and sold in New Zealand, it was never reviewed here and is now unavailable."

Those interested in Little Rabbit and the Sea can find it on the Internet, by searching under "Gavin Bishop" or by ordering it through amazon.com, but the book remains a slightly sore point for Bishop who, despite selling well in overseas markets, very much wants to be seen in his home territory.

Bishop's career as a children's book writer and illustrator began in 1978, when he heard that Oxford University Press was considering what at that time was a new thing: a collection of New Zealand children's picture books. He "leaped in," creating Bidibidi, a Canterbury high-country sheep who decides her life is dull and boring and sets off to follow a rainbow.

"I wrote this long, long story, posted it on a Tuesday and on Saturday got a reply saying they thought it was pretty good but needed some work."

Bishop had, he discovered, a lot to learn, and Bidibidi was reworked again and again with the help of OUP editor Wendy Harrocks, before being eventually published in 1982. He has since written two television series based on it. He remains extremely grateful for the lessons learned in that process, which effectively constituted his apprenticeship. Hard graft; not easy at all.