Somehow October’s chorus about using our books in the classroom didn’t come everyone's way on the guitar until November, so kindly bear with me for a minute while I wrap up my part of this song with one last verse.
I hated history when I was a kid. The way we were supposed to learn everything was by memorizing a bunch of boring names and dates and battle sites. To me, the people in history were a lot like George Washington on the dollar bill; old and green and wrinkled and dead.
What a waste! The real George Washington wasn’t anything like that portrait. Just between you and me, our boy George was a stud. He was so tall that most other men only came up to his shoulder. He was a great athlete and his hands and feet were enormous—what a basketball player he might have made! This terrific horseman, dancer, and card player was also so fearless in battle that even when his horses were shot out from under him and bullets ripped through his coat, he never left the front lines. You can’t make this stuff up; it’s all true, and if I had known things like that about the dead people in my history books, well of course I’d have wanted to hear more.
So how can teachers make history spring to life for kids? Here are three of the ways.
1) The Storyteller’s Voice- One of the main reasons that so many stories from history are still around is that they’re really the best stories of all time. I hated history because all those moons ago, my own teachers didn’t know how to tell a great tale. But if teachers can teach by using a storyteller’s voice, you can bet your boots that kids will beg to listen in. The best nonfiction books can show you the way and can add in fabulous pictures to boot. (And forgive me for mentioning that our INK THINK TANK has these books in spades.)
2) Tie-Ins- If you can get kids to relate directly to something in a book about history, you’ve got it made. Here are some examples from my book talks—no reason why with a little extra imagination teachers can’t do this kind of thing too. In one school, the students put on a wonderful play about Lewis and Clark based on my book How We Crossed the West and invited me to watch. When I visited their classrooms the next day, I surprised each actor and actress by telling them some incredibly happy and sad and funny things that happened to their own characters after the journey ended. This new information was a huge hit. When I presented the same book another time, we were able to bring a real Newfoundland dog (like Seaman, the one Meriwether Lewis brought on the journey) into the room. Bingo! I got to tell about all the funny and even life-saving adventures the dog had on the trip. Trust me—dogs are attention grabbers all the way. And during a previous Presidential election, an older group did a great job of comparing the gigantic role propaganda played in promoting George Washington vs. King George III back in Revolutionary times with the role propaganda played in that particular presidential election.
3) Lights, camera, action!- Younger audiences like nothing better than to sing, laugh, make funny noises, and wear costumes. As it turns out, these qualities are great tools for teaching history too. I love to use my book The Old Chisholm Trail; A Cowboy Song as a fun intro to those famously difficult cattle drives from the wild west. Very Short Version of how this works: I dress up as a cowboy and briefly explain how hard that trip must have been. Then I invite 3 volunteer cowboys onstage, where they don huge paper moustaches, and I give 3 more volunteers stuffed longhorn cattle to hold. As I (badly) sing funny verses from the real song, the cowboys and cows make appropriate cowboy and cow sound effects when I point to them after each verse, and the audience sings the chorus in their turn. It is hilarious, it’s the BEST teaching tool, and it all comes from a book. Try it!
Ladies and gentlemen, in my book you CAN tell a book by its cover. In fact, it’s imperative. Covers can grab your attention by acting as their own little posters. The artwork on the best ones obviously looks terrific, both from close up and from far away. But art has other uses too. It can showcase the title....unless you’ve cleverly left your title out and decided to let the art speak for itself. And it gives a tantalizing hint about the story inside.
In my last blog, I set out a whole assortment of ways illustrations work overtime to enhance nonfiction. Today I thought it would be fun to pick a specific nonfiction cover and walk through the thought process behind developing the art. Well, the very first time I wrote a serious book of nonfiction, I wanted to give it my best shot. Hmmm… I always try to give things my best shot. But this book presented a special opportunity for me, and besides, I loved the subject matter. The book in question was How We Crossed the West: The Adventures of Lewis and Clark. Maybe you’d like to follow along and think up your own ideas for this cover.
By my own set of rules, a title should always be prominent and easy to read. That would be pretty easy if my title had been short. But why do anything the easy way? I had somehow managed to come up with a very long title, so to make it stand out, I thought I’d hand letter everything on a banner in the style of the early 1800’s. Here ‘tis. (In those days I didn’t have the greatest camera to shoot the following pictures, but if you click on each shot, you can blow them up a bit.)
Also by my own set of rules, a cover should be simple and powerful enough to be seen from far away. For example, a big close-up of the protagonist’s face can always work well. But far be it from me to do something easy. Besides, a book about Lewis and Clark means that there are two main characters and a supporting cast of all those hearty members of the Corps of Discovery. I decided to include as many of them as possible.
And how could I write this story and leave Sacagawea and York off the cover? You’ll more of these folks in a minute.
I also wanted to give a big hint about the tale of adventure inside the book. It occurred to me that just as Lewis and Clark were seeing most of the Indians along their route for the very first time, these same Indians were seeing a set of oddly dressed strangers with white and black skin for the very first time too. So I picked a specific day in the journey, drew the scenery the Corp passed and the boats they used and Indians they saw as accurately as humanly possible, and added them all into the mix. Try making that look like a strong, simple image. Not easy, but my rule does say to keep it simple. Here’s the full wrap-around cover with the back of the book included:
And this is the front cover the way you’d see it on the shelf, assuming the bookstore placed my book face-out and didn’t simply squeeze it onto a shelf with just the spine showing.
Every cover has its own story and they’re all different, so have a blast—take a closer look at some covers one of these days and try to figure out what the artist had in mind for his or her own little poster.
We rarely focus on the artwork in our picture books, but I admit it; for me, this part of the job is the most fun. And whether my story has 500 words or 12,500 words, it’s also the most painstakingly researched and by far the most time consuming element of every nonfiction book I write. The right pictures work like magnets to draw readers in, and they often tell more about a story than words could ever do. Today I thought I'd explore some of the reasons why.
In the first place, artwork can show you all kinds of things you could never see any other way. Take illustrations about history for example. Even if you were to travel to every historical site on the planet, you could never see the action that made those places famous back in the day. Case in point: In my book HOW WE CROSSED THE WEST; THE ADVENTURES OF LEWIS AND CLARK, I got to paint the landscapes the way they really looked in 1804; populated by leaping pronghorn antelopes, black with buffalo as far as the eye could see, and dotted with lively Indian villages of every description. And the people! I could depict each explorer smack dab in the middle of his or her real adventures and I could show the same Indians Lewis and Clark wrote about in their journals too. Here are some details from a couple of bigger paintings:
York plays with Arikara kids; Mandans out hunting
With labels this shows how Colonial Government worked
Click on picture to see larger version
It’s hard (but fun) to figure out exactly what people wore at different times in the past, what a famous person looked like at a certain age, how a specific sailing vessel was rigged, what kind of saddle and bridle a horse wore in, say, Colonial America or Eastern Europe, or what medieval Paris used to look like. But we're talking about nonfiction here, so the artwork has to be just as accurate as the text.
Medieval Paris maze; click on picture to make it big
If we do our research right, boys will know at a glance that if they had been around during certain historic eras, they would have had to wear ruffles and silk tights, and girls would know that in certain societies they would have had to shave the top part of their heads or tattoo blue goatees on their faces. Kids would find out instantly what it was like to slog through mud and hail in a covered wagon or what kinds of strange contraptions miners used to find gold. In other words, each illustration can become your own private magic carpet that transports you directly into the pages in a picture book and lets you fly straight through some very real and truly amazing scenery.
Roz, You are so right about a cover. It's an invitation to step inside the book and should be enticing.Often authors do not get a chance to approve a cover. But when we do have a say, it's a challenge and a lot of fun, as well. When Sandra Jordan and I wrote The Painter's Eye in the early 1990's, I wanted to use Roy Lichtenstein's POP Art painting ART, referring to the word in the center of his red, yellow, black and white Ben Day dot canvas. First I had to get permission from it's owner, the art dealer Leo Castelli. I remember calling him up at his New York Gallery. "Leo, " I said, "I'm calling about your painting ART." "No. NO, Jan," he said. "That work by Roy is not for sale. Don't even think about it." When I told him what I really wanted, he was so relieved that he sent me permission and a transparency at no cost the next day. The painting jumps right off the cover and it's still one of my favorites.
Post comment is from Jan Greenberg..I must have pressed the wrong key.
Terrific post, Roz. I couldn't agree with you more about keeping it simple. Usually one strong image is enough to call to the reader: "Touch me, Read me, BUY ME!" Your cover certainly does all three. I love the movement in your Lewis and Clark cover drawing. One can actually feel the rapids and smell the pines.
Terrific post, Roz. I couldn't agree with you more about keeping it simple. Usually one strong image is enough to call to the reader: "Touch me, Read me, BUY ME!" Your cover certainly does all three. I love the movement in your Lewis and Clark cover drawing. One can actually feel the rapids and smell the pines.
Nice cover, nice story, Roz--I rarely get any input into the covers, except sometimes helping choose the selection of photos that might be used. It's too bad most authors don't have that opportunity, as we have things we could suggest that the designers may not know--after all, they didn't write the book!