It has been both fun and challenging to tell the Spaceheadz story across media. Print is a controlled, linear form of storytelling. As the author, I control the pace of the story by its position on the page. In contrast, digital storytelling is a whole different form; different parts of the story can be accessed at different times and in different ways.Guest Blogger: Jon Scieszka
It has been both fun and challenging to tell the Spaceheadz story across media. Print is a controlled, linear form of storytelling. As the author, I control the pace of the story by its position on the page. In contrast, digital storytelling is a whole different form; different parts of the story can be accessed at different times and in different ways.
So I’ve been asked to talk about an element of writing my book, The Emerald Atlas, that I struggled with, and honestly, it’s hard to pick just one thing. I could talk about the number of times I pulled my hair out for imagining that I could write a mind-twisty time travel story. Or I could talk about the difficulty of working in a genre as well-established as children’s fantasy, a genre in which I would be using characters and tropes that readers had seen a thousand times before and it was my job to figure out how I was going to breath new life into those dusty conventions.
Growing up in Mexico, I learned to speak the language of color at a very early age. “No dar color” is a popular expression that, translated, means an inability to give off color or emotion. Using color and texture helps me to express my identity, my heritage. I've also learned that color is the most direct (emotional) route to the children (and families) who turn the pages of the books I’ve illustrated.
By now I’ve written a number of books and have enough distance from them, to see patterns emerge. Looking back, I’ve realized that so many of the children (or mice or other animals) who populate my work use imagination—as play, as an escape, as a tool.
At the end of last year, the UK media reported the pretty disturbing fact: nine percent of British children are leaving primary school with the reading skills of a seven-year-old. As it happens, I’ve met seven-year-olds who are well into the novels of J. K. Rowling, Roald Dahl, and even J. R. R. Tolkien, but the media was talking about thirteen-year-olds—and boys are the worst offenders, naturally—who can’t struggle their way through much more than a tabloid newspaper.