Jubilee Books: You've just had a new picture book entitled Snow Bears published by Walker Books. What is the process of writing a book like Snow Bears and typically how long does it take to write a picture book?
Martin Waddell: It's very difficult to specify that. When people talk about the process of bringing a book out they think that you suddenly have the idea and then write it, you don't. What happens is that ideas come together that you've had from way back. I remember playing with my own children, which is the genesis of this book, when I was a house daddy looking after the three kids for a number of years. After that I began to write these very young books and I remembered this business of pretending that they're not there, everyone's played that game with their kids. The art of a picture book is to take things that children can identify with and form a story for them.

The catch of working with an artist is that there are dozens of people out there producing beautiful pictures but you need to have a story which will tie the pictures together. People buy a picture book because of the pictures, if they take the book home and the kids look at the book and nothing grips them or it doesn't relate to their lives it goes on the shelf. The book they can feel relates to them in some way is the one that gets taken out, chewed by the dog, kept under the pillow and battered. To do that you have to have something at the heart of the book that children can identify with.

In this particular book I'm aiming at two things. One is the idea of together, something they share with the parent. I'm also aiming at this idea of pretending not to be yourself. From my point of view I think it was that idea that came to me first and I was thinking of a situation I could use that idea in. I think I went through 15 draughts and then we've been fiddling with it for about a year and a half. I set up a book to the point where the story is clear, the basic lines are clear, the illustrator then draws. I don't have input into that and it's very important that I don't.

Does the story ever change after the illustrations have been finished?
No, the story doesn't change but the detail of how that's portrayed and worked on the page, where the words go and how many words you use changes. You often loose words because the illustrator would have picked up the emotion you're trying to get.

When I write a 60, 000 word teenage novel, which takes a lot less time than a 500 word picture book, I'd have had plenty of room to expand upon all the background lives of the characters. When I'm doing a picture book I've got 400 or 500 hundred words, I've got to have a beginning, middle and an end. I've got to have what I call the Wuthering Heights moment which is the moment children can identify with.

In this book the smallest bear has been manfully trying to play these snowball games and getting colder and colder. She finally has to say I can't play and I want to go home. That's actually the Wuthering Heights moment because children can identify with that, they also can identify with the older children who are a little bit irritated by that. It's an emotional situation. So a picture book needs a beginning, middle and an end, identifiable characters, a Wuthering Heights thing and a chorus line that kids can pick up on.

I object to the idea that picture books are used as a pushy education tool, but it should come naturally. If you're reading that book and you run your finger along 'we aren't here mummy bear' the children are seeing those words repeated and the children will repeat that line and that's the beginning of reading, so the chorus line is there for that purpose.

The example I would use if I were talking to kids is 'the little girl cried in the Grandmothers chair'. Now if I said that to you, whether you loved your granny or hated your granny you'd probably instantly have some picture of your grandmother’s chair. Say your grandmother supported Glasgow Celtic and she drank Guinness all the time and she bet on the horses, there'd be a racing post by the chair and a pint of Guinness on the table beside and so on. Where if I say my Grandmother sat on a red rocking chair by a second floor window of a room that looked out onto a tree with birds on it, that's what you would draw for me, but there'd be no life in it. If you draw something in your own conscious you will create a world that has depth.

If you look at the pictures in Snow Bears for instance, there's three little spoons hung up on the fireplace. The illustrator has thought her way into those bears, there's no mention of spoons in my text. I need to send very strongly the emotional setting of the story, what the turning points will be and the artists then interprets that and I go back and reinterpret the pictures in words. I spent three days in the last fortnight arguing about two, three word sentences, in the end we had to take four pages to pieces and reconstruct them to get these few little phrases in.
There's a line in Owl Babies 'And she came. Soft and silent, she swooped through the trees to Sarah, Percy and Bill.' But one of the first drawings Patrick Benson did was a magnificent illustration of an owl in full flight which is very powerful and very comforting for the children and requires the full spread of the page, and if you put the full line of text on the page you would destroy the effect the artist has created. So we simply had the words 'And she came' on the page and created another page for 'Soft and silent, she swooped through the trees'. There was no reason to believe you'd need to structure the book in that way until you'd seen the spread.

You also write books for teenagers. What are the main differences between writing for teenagers and younger children?
I write for teenagers the same way as I write for 3 year olds. The only difference between writing for children and writing for adults is that when you're writing for children you are writing for minds that you know are unformed and will, in part, be formed by what they read. A picture book is the first experience of many aspects of the world. As they grow older and they experience more things you're writing against a backdrop of knowledge of the world, but it's a limited knowledge and a limited emotional ability to respond to it, so you cannot offer despair in a book for children. This is the borderline between books for children and books for adults. If you're writing for children there must always be an element of hope in the story. When you write for adults it's an open door, you take it that the people are capable of responding to the text and analysing what it's about. When you write for a seventeen-year-old you're not quite so sure of that.

A lot of teenagers will already be reading adult books although there are children's writers, Melvin Burgess for example, who do appeal to a teenage market. In that context do you find teenagers a difficult audience to write for?
I don't find it difficult to do, but I don't necessarily know how well children respond. The only indication I have is if the books sell well or not and happily mine have gone on selling. We talk about the innocence of children and there's a great hoo-ha when someone like Melvin Burgess touches a difficult area, and we sit down the same children, who are supposed to be so innocent, in front of Eastenders, which depicts a world of no real consequences. Real life isn't like Eastenders and someone like Burgess or myself will spend several years working on a small scenario where the consequences do play out and people are hurt. This is a window of real life and then you get criticized for being serious about it. How this can be done in a society that quite likes to sit children down in front of Eastenders is beyond me. The truth of the matter is that we are facing children with huge adult problems in silly contexts.

Fantasy writing is a very popular genre at the moment. Why do you think this is?
I think people like big adventures. People have always liked swash buckling stories, nothing new there. This is a particular turn of the fashion wheel and I'm delighted that it's taken the form of books.

One of the big problems is that people will take a serious slow moving novel like mine to a child who is not remotely interested and has never had the idea that books are interesting. I think that to get children interested in books you first of all have to go to their interests. If you've got a ten year old who won't read but spends all day with his bicycle, then get him a book about bicycles, a book that demonstrates how to fix it. That way he associates the book with something valuable, after that he may associate the book with fun, and then with a deeper understanding. People are drawn into books often through something they like or enjoy.

I don't really like fantasy writing but it really doesn't matter if it gets kids interested in books.

How did you become a writer?
I suppose I never really wanted to work for a living, I wanted to be a professional footballer and I came over to London and got signed into the Fulham Youth squad but I got chucked out at the end of the season. That meant I had to work for a living and I got a job on an antique stall.

I'd always loved stories and come from a family with a long theatrical tradition. So I started to write then and I tell children I talk to now that you should always write something that really matters to you.

So in my case I had left my girlfriend back home and I wrote about being back home in Ireland. The stories I was writing were of reasonable quality but weren't of publishable quality and I had an agent who said to me that you're writing these gloomy Irish books about being 15 in Ireland and in fact you're 22 and living in England and you're telling me hilarious stories every day about what you did at the market, why don't you write me a book against that background?

At the time spy stories were quite popular and he suggested that we write a spy story combined with my experiences at the antique market. I wrote a book called 'Otley' and it was like a dream debut. The first book I write a film company came in and bought it and I made enough money to go home to Ireland and start writing. I wrote a few books with the same character without really getting anywhere. Then I wrote a book which was completely different called 'In A Blue Velvet Dress' in 1972 which is almost a pastiche of a Victorian Ghost story and that was my first book for children.

It's what I want to do and I'm happy when I'm writing and not happy when I'm not writing. It is an obsessive thing, no sane person would do it.