Just look at this - Naughty Bus - and just when you thought one would never come along! Here's more tips for budding writers from my friend Jan Oke, read on...
Naughty Bus by Jan and Jerry Oke | When I was a child I loved writing my own stories, which always had a picture on every page, because those were the sort of books I preferred to read. My stories were often about ponies and I must have drawn hundreds, all with very funny legs, but the stories I read were usually adventures, in which the heroes were about my age, and they took place in forests, or on islands or in spooky old houses. The illustrations were very important. Sometimes they’d make me laugh. They might even give me nightmares. The best ones fuelled my imagination and made me read on…. When I wrote Naughty Bus I got an ordinary school exercise book and used a black pen to describe what the picture would be like on the page. Sometimes I did a little sketch. But I’m not a very good artist, so I was relying on my husband, Jerry, to make photographs from my descriptions. He’s a professional photographer so he had his own ideas about what the pictures should be like, and what would work. Some of our picture ideas didn’t work – for example, we tried to make our pet rabbit nudge the bus with its nose, but instead it kept attacking and biting it! So I had to write the rabbit out of the story. Each picture, even the most straightforward, took several hours to do, and we usually made a few different versions, and then chose the best picture once they were all developed. Our friend Tony Swinney drew the face of Naughty Bus using some computer software called Photoshop, which was also used to make the bus look like it was speeding along when really of course it was stationary. When Jerry took the pictures of the flying food, he threaded each baked bean and chip on to fishing line, and used the software to get rid of the lines in the finished photograph. Some of the pictures were taken in a studio and some were taken at our home in Devon. |
I chose to make the story about a toy bus because when I grew up on the edge of London, our family didn’t have a car so we travelled in buses just like the one in our book, and I always liked them. When I left home and went to work in the middle of London, my first son and I used to travel on the number 88 to get from our home to his nursery. We would always rush up the stairs at the back of the bus to the top deck and hope the front seats were free. From up there we had a great view as we crossed over the River Thames and rumbled passed Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, Trafalgar Square and Oxford Street and all the most famous sights in the capital.
Jerry and I have six children between us: three boys and three girls. Our youngest son, Jack, is the boy in the story and most of the toys in the photographs were his, or his brothers’ or sisters’ before. I think lots of children want to do the sort of naughty things the bus does in our book, but their sensible parents always tell them no. I hope children who see Naughty Bus will get lots of good ideas for play of their own – not necessarily for mischief – and enjoy the words and pictures together with the adults who read to them. We had lots of fun making the book and I hope you’ll have as much fun reading it.
Review - This picture book for younger readers tells the adventures of a ‘naughty’ double-decker London bus. The stunning photography in the book illustrates perfectly the dramatic adventures of this little red bus mixing real and imagined worlds. The text adds to the action, sometimes told by the bus and at other times by the narrator. The different fonts and graphics used provide another visual representation of the action in the story. This book could be used in many ways within a literacy session: Another adventure could be added into the story and the text written for it. Different fonts and ways of altering the print could be explored and discussion could focus on what these different techniques add to the text/story.
The book ends with the bus waking up during the night, extending the story with the night time adventures of the naughty bus could be another discussion and writing opportunity, drawing on the print techniques used in the original. Typing the text, would be an ideal way to explore what print techniques are possible and digital photographs might then be added to the text to make an electronic book, even adding sounds could be investigated. If nothing else, this is a great book to share with children as text and pictures create a visually stimulating read that would prompt many opportunities for talk. The authors of this book are local and have published the book themselves.