I’m thrilled to be a part of the FCBG Children’s Book Award Blog Tour sharing a guest post from Howard Calvert, author of one of the shortlisted books for younger children – The Fastest Tortoise in Town!
The Children’s Book Award is the only national award for children’s books that is voted for entirely by children. It is owned and coordinated by the Federation of Children’s Book Groups and is highly respected by teachers, parents and librarians. It has brought acclaim and strong sales to past winners such as J.K. Rowling, Patrick Ness, Andy Stanton, Malorie Blackman, Anthony Horowitz and Michael Morpurgo, who has won a record four times. The award has often been the first to recognise the future stars of children’s fiction and has the ability to turn popular authors into bestsellers.
The Fastest Tortoise in Town
by Howard Calvert
There are a billion blogs about coming up with ideas.
Where do they come from? How do you tell a good one from a dud? Does an alien zap it into your head? Have you heard the one about a deer with no eyes?
Do I have anything new to add?
No.
There’s no magic formula.
But hopefully I can provide some inspiration to help you have inspiration.
Judith Kerr’s best-selling Mog, for example, is famously based on her own cat at the time, also named Mog, who liked boiled eggs and could go out through her cat flap without too many problems, but always forgot how to get back in.
Dr Seuss came up with the idea for Horton Hatches the Egg after two sketches he’d drawn were caught in a gust of wind from an open window and blew on top of each other to create an image of an elephant in a tree. “‘What is an elephant doing in a tree?’ he asked himself. ‘Hmmm Obviously hatching an egg.’”
And John Burningham wrote Avocado Baby based on his youngest daughter, who as a baby had a passion for avocadoes, which as well as helping her eczema, they made her – he believes – “physically strong, as is the baby in the story”.
I have journals and notes on my phone overflowing with ideas, 99.9% of which are terrible. (“Balloons!” Too vague, must try harder. “Greatest GOAT of all time.” Three-year-olds don’t know what a GOAT is, etc.)
My first two picture books stemmed from hearing someone say a particular phrase that stuck in my head, specifically “Box of frogs” (which became Lots of Frogs) and “Mighty bite” (The Mightiest Bite).
The Fastest Tortoise in Town, meanwhile, began when I clocked an usual sight while strolling with my daughter in a nearby park.
A man walking a tortoise.
It struck me as not the kind of thing you see every day. Sure, who hasn’t seen someone taking a cat, a rabbit or a stoat for a walk (or is that just me?).
But a tortoise? That famously ponderous creature. It would take forever to do a lap of the football pitch.
I quickly made a note on my phone: “Taking the tortoise for a walk”, put my phone away and didn’t think anything more about it.
But those six words were a spark waiting to be lit.
They sat there patiently, in my ideas list, for a while. Months, perhaps. Until I plucked the words out and thought let’s give this a whirl. And so I wrote the title ‘The Day I Took my Tortoise for a Walk’ in my notebook.
And from there:
Today, I took my tortoise for a walk.
We overtook 1 slug. 1 snail. My great great grandad. A sloth. My brother on his way to school. My neighbour on her way to the dentist. A milk float.
The foundations were laid (and if you have read The Fastest Tortoise in Town, you may even notice that this scene kind of exists in the final version).
I still had a plenty to work out. Why would someone be taking their tortoise for a walk? For the man in the park, it was likely because they lived in a flat with no garden, and wanted to provide their tortoise with some lush green grass.
But that would make a dull story.
What about if the tortoise had discovered a map with the location of buried treasure?
Or the tortoise was trying, and slowly failing, to make a break for freedom?
Or the tortoise’s owner was training her for something, like a running race?
Bingo. A story was starting to form. Like Barbara Hendricks (the leopard tortoise in the book) in her race, we were off.
Ideas can be hidden in plain sight. Phrases you hear. Keep your eyes peeled. Make your ears prick up and listen. Ask questions about these unusual sights and quirky phrases. You never know where it might lead you…
Who Will Win?? FCBG groups are voting within their group and non-members can vote online via the link at https://fcbg.org.uk/cba-2024/. The deadline for voting is Friday 18th May. The category winners and the author of the best children’s book published in 2024 will be announced at a ceremony in Birmingham on 8th June, attended by representatives from all our local groups.
Scope for Imagination 