How Love-a-Duck was Born

Love-a-Duck is my tenth published picture book. Like others before it - Windhover and Old Hushwing are good examples - my first inspiration was of a character or title. The task was then to build a story round that central point.

It's not easy to think of strong and original picture book stories. A quick search on Amazon will often show that what seems like a hot idea has already been done, sometimes more than once. I have more than eighty picture book texts on file that have gone nowhere for various reasons.

But plots can be recycled. I wanted Love-a-Duck to be quirky and funny, so I realised early on that this would be a plastic bath toy. I had written several stories about a boy who wanted to be helpful but got everything wrong. One of these was published by OUP as Billy the Hero. An unpublished sequel featured Billy and his baby brother, inspired by the old Popeye cartoons in which baby Sweet Pea crawls through factories narrowly avoiding disaster. In my story, Billy and Baby Brother crawl out of the bedroom window on a plank. After hair-raising adventures, Baby is posted back through the letter box without Mum knowing that he ever left the house.

This is essentially what happens to Love-a-Duck, who falls out of the window and is brought back much later in the jaws of Buster the dog, none the worse for his adventures. The thoughts and emotions of the characters are, of course, what drive the story and give it charm. Appropriate dialogue helps to keep lightness of tone.

Several versions later, adding sound effects and giving the narrator a more storytelling voice, and Love-a-Duck was ready to be illustrated and published. The publishing process took four years, five editors, and two changes of ownership of the publishing house. Only when a US co-edition deal was signed was I confident that Love-a-Duck would ever appear in the shops.

Love-a-Duck is a good example of the part that luck and peristence can play in the fate of a story. The text published in 2010 is not that different from the first version I sent to my then agent in 2001. There were nibbles at that time but no takers. Over the next five years I tinkered with the story and now and then brought it to my agent's attention. In 2006 Caroline Walsh of David Higham Associates thought it good enough to include in a bundle of my work that she submitted to Alison Ritchie of Gullane Children's Books. Alison picked it out from what were to me equally good stories. She liked it and her colleagues in Gullane liked it, and together we made it even better. Francesca Chessa contributed brilliant illustrations. The Love-a-Duck that is now doing so well is the work of this talented team.

"Squeak, squeak!"