On the tenth of November I conducted a workshop for Packaging Your Imagination, a one day conference for children’s writers and illustrators. It’s part of CANSCAIP, the Canadian Society of Children’s Authors Illustrators and Performers an organization I joined at the very beginning, to learn the craft of writing.

Oh what a journey it’s been!

How many years did I attend, nervous beads of sweat breaking out on my upper lip as I listened rapt to all the authors I admired, hanging on their every word, wishing that I could be in their position.

Back then the conference was held at Victoria College, a small building within the infrastructure of University of Toronto. It was an old building, with limited capacity.

And the breakout sessions were in classrooms.

But here I was, in a huge auditorium with the maximum number in my session, ninety people. And what rather alarmed me was that many of them were established authors in their own right.

At one point I told myself, “That can’t be Barbara Reid in that row!” But it was!

I’ve been a fan of Barbara’s from the very beginning.

She works in Plasticine, and she’s absolutely brilliant!

Before I addressed the normal elements of story: beginning, middle and end, I tackled the idea that picture books are not a monolithic entity. There are different kinds of picture books!

And many of them have little to do with story.

My own King for a Day is about the experience of a boy in a wheelchair who has one day in the year that he rules, Basunt the day of the kite festival. Basically the reader is vicariously sharing his experience.

I call books like Picture a Tree,  King for a Day  and The Snowy Day EXPERIENCE or DISCOVERY BOOKS.

Because there really isn’t always a complete story in it, it’s more a moment in a child’s life when they’re discovering something. Or in the case of Picture a Tree the reader themselves is taking a closer look at trees. The Snowy Day is where the reader shares Peter’s snowy journey, smiling to themselves when Peter puts the snowball in his pocket to save for later. The reader knows what will happen even if Peter doesn’t.

Then there are concept books, and multicultural showcase books vs multicultural social justice books and meta books as well.

I call books about Ramadan like Under the Ramadan Moon or books about Kwanzaa or any other festivity, ‘multicultural showcase’ books because they’re not usually stories either. They showcase a cultural practice and they’re more like non-fiction information in the guise of fiction.

Whereas books that actually do have a story but also deal with social justice issues like refugees for instance, are books I call multicultural social justice books. Because these do have a story.

To see the whole presentation you’ll just have to see me do it again.

At the end I talked about story books and  how important it is to use word play and layers to your narrative.

And I ended up using Ruler of the Courtyard as an example of story structure.

And I ended the entire session with of course Big Red Lollipop.

Really had them laughing!!!

It was intense! I thought I’d have time for questions at the end, but I ended up rushing through the last bit to get all the concepts I wanted to share in.

The coolest thing was that Barbara came up to me afterwards and said how she’d learned so much from me!

I said, “You learned from me???”

And for the rest of the day I had the goofiest of grins on my face. I rode a high and people came up to me at various intervals telling me how much they’d enjoyed and learned from my session.

It was incredible.