16. Illustrated stories

When I think back to the books I loved as a child—for example, The Cat in the Hat, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Winnie-the-Pooh and Coles Funny Picture Book—I realise that I loved the illustrations as much as the stories. One of the reasons I love making books with Terry Denton is that he continually gives me great pictures that spark my imagination and inspire me to write stories to match them.

Illustrations can enhance and improve your stories in many ways. They can show where a story is set (e.g. the Treehouse series).

The 26-Storey Treehouse

Illustrations can show the action of the story (saving you the trouble of having to describe it).

The narrator of The Big Fat Cow That Goes Kapow (and his dog) being chased by Mike on his big spiky bike.

The journey taken by the head belonging to the boy who forgot to screw his head on (The Very Bad Book).

They help show what the characters in a story look like. And you can also use them to add funny incidents or characters that are not in the actual story (Terry does this a lot in the margins of the Just series and in the Treehouse books).

A little horse dining on some punctuation marks in Just Macbeth!

These rabbits are complaining about their pizza order, oblivious to the action of the story going on around them (The 26-Storey Treehouse is whizzing through the air above their heads).

Another important function of illustrations is to help make stories funnier through exaggeration.

The Bad Book

Also, illustrations can be the starting point for a story, rather than something that is added later. Once, when trying to get ideas for stories, I asked Terry what he liked to draw and he said, ‘I really like drawing cows,’ so I wrote the poem ‘Big fat cows’, which is how the book The Big Fat Cow That Goes Kapow came to be written.

Terry loves to draw cows (The Big Fat Cow That Goes Kapow).

TRY THIS

Write an illustrated story

Ideas for illustrated stories:

•   Retell a simple fairy tale or nursery rhyme

•  Base a story on a recent school excursion

•  Do an illustrated guide to your family

•  Retell an incident from your childhood

•  Base a story on something you like to draw

… OR THIS

Illustrated autobiography

Create an illustrated autobiography. In the example below, Terry has focused on the disgusting aspects of his life. You might like to write your own disgusting life story or you could pick another aspect of life as your theme, for example:

•  My musical life story

•  My action-packed life story

•  My annoying life story

•  My stupid life story

Terry's disgusting autobiography from Just Disgusting.