Double lenses, double pens
How ‘Mendel’s Greenhouses’ grew — part #4
Part #1 Head-to-tail and with a blank cheque
Part#2 A nice little project ‘on the side’
Part #3 Visible — with or without a shell
The intimicy of the Swedish residency had Mendel’s Greenhouses come about in the very best way imaginable: as a result of total teamwork.
As a writer, I had been used to working alone for three decades. Writing tends to be a deeply solitary occupation. The characters I encountered and shaped, were always precious company, but never the kind of friends who could challenge me, enrich me or surprise me like real people do. I had never given it a second thought.
When Jurgen and I teamed up, I was invited to shed this old way of working. I had no previous experience with writing stories that would come with illustrations, and I had never seriously collaborated with other artists on a mutual project. I didn’t know what it would be like to share my creative universe with someone else.
Jurgen, in turn, had had enough of the typical role of servitude often bestowed upon illustrators. If your job is to create images to a text the content of which is completely set by the time you get to read it, you might still be able to add a nice extra layer, but the lines between which you have to color have been firmly drawn.
This collaboration would be different, we felt and wished for it to be so from the onset. Our work together would be co-creation, neither of us bending the knee in favour of the other. Jurgen was therefore free to come up with ideas to his heart’s content and pitch anything that interested him, often by means of images. On my part, it meant the text would have to relinquish its supremacy over the story.
It happened quite spontaneously, the pieces of the puzzle falling into place from the very first Sapling we ever made. It is an approach that fits us both like a glove, and it was the mindset we brought with us to Sweden to work on De serres van Mendel. That turned out to be something of an extra challenge, however.
The initial, miniature version of the story had flowed from my pen in its entirety before Jurgen had had a chance to read it, but he had been at leasure making the images, for which I had already helped collect a lot of documentary material in advance. By the time we were in Sweden, a year-and-a-half of Saplings had transformed our creative dialogue into a broad, powerful current, by means of which we sometimes ventured into the other’s territory, too.
I have notions of image-making and lay-out — enough at any rate to have an intelligent conversation about it with him, and to be able to read his work in detail. He, on the other hand, is a lot better with language than he will give himself credit for: strong titles and cartoonesk play of words are his specialty (besides stupid jokes, but that’s another story altogether).
Now, we were going to think this book through, within the confines of the story as already marked down by the miniature version, even I could not fiddle with anymore. The ending was set. But within those boundaries, there lay an entire world to explore.
It started out with a small writer’s block on my part. Because here we were, in this precious residency, with the explicit intent of making this book. It had to happen now, this was the time. No pressure, right? Usually, I tend to write blind, like I explained before. But now I had an ending I had to stick to, forget about writing blind. On top of that, I had to make sure that all the white spaces left in the bigger story as I saw it were adequately fleshed out in a truthful and believable way — all together more than half the novel. I am perfectly capable of tying myself in knots mentally, and that is exactly what happened, resulting in something resembling complete paralysis.
“You’re stuck?” Jurgen looked at me with a mixture of suprise and concern. “Hold on, we’ll draw a mindmap.” In the blink of an eye he had pasted three big sheets of paper together and perched with a pencil, ready to take notes.
“What do we have? Characters. Mendel, Reya, Robin. Locations. The greenhouses… What are the different halls that we know already? The dome of mirrors. The basement. The vault domes. We can of course come up with more… And what do we know about the characters, exactly? What are their personalities? What are they good at? Where do they come from?”
Just an aside: I never make mindmaps. I usually consider them unnecessary and bordering on childish. But Jurgen was sincere, and we had been each other’s tried and tested safety net during previous moments of crisis. His initiative was both an outstretched hand and a lifebuoy, so I took it.
He talked me through everything we had so far, and before long, we were coming up with all kinds of associations, brainstorming freely. The writer’s block melted like snow in the sun, uncovering both interesting and amusing ideas for us to revisit in the future.
The mindmap lay on the coffee table during the entire stay, a constant presence and source of inspiration. In an early stage, I managed to spill a full glass of red wine over it, which only made it more interesting.
In the days that followed, we kept on brainstorming. We discussed, deepened trains of thought, (funny) connections, anecdotes and logical sequences during walks through the forest, along the lake or simply over breakfast or lunch. Next, we set to writing and drawing. At first, those two didn’t have all that much to do with each other: I write chronologically, and Jurgen started on a drawing of a location that appealed to him and upon which we had agreed that the characters would go at some point (the library). We didn’t have any idea how exactly they were going to make their way over there, but that wasn’t a problem.
As we were there longer, the treads we were working on grew more and more entwined. Visual suggestions I made found their way into Jurgen’s images, plot ideas of his crept into my text, a full-fledged two-way collaborative highway.
Then, something unexptected happened, that would prove to be incredibly important.
During one of the workshops at the SmåBUS Children’s Book Festival, the attending illustrators had been challenged to come up with a short story on the basis of a handful of words. It was an exercise that had surprised Jurgen somewhat, moreover since he had produced a couple of nice story ideas.
When, in need of a change, I wanted to do some lay-outing for the Saplings we were currently working on, I had to use his laptop to do that. He immediately took possession of the sofa where I was usually writing, stretched out on his back until he filled it, and took his sketch book. “So that’s what it looks like from here, being a writer.”
“Go ahead”, I laughed. “By all means, write a chapter. You learned how to do that, didn’t you?”
It was part challenge, part joke. But for quite some time there was nothing but the gently scratching of a pencil as it moved across a sheet of paper, and less than half an hour later, he read a complete, brand-new scene out to me.
I heard at once that I would have to adjust the language and the style. But the content and construction of the scene were well done, and I really wanted to use it for the book. There was, however, one — not exactly small — problem with Jurgen’s scene, and that I already knew while he was reading it, as well: he had totally reversed the narrating perspective.
We had of course discussed the other main character, Robin, how he acted what he was thinking, his strengths and weaknesses and in what way he was the counterpoint of Reya, the girl living in the greenhouses. But the short story version was written entirely from her perspective and I had simply continued in that line. We had never mentioned a possible thread of narration from Robin’s perpective. And now, here we suddenly had a strong, valuable scene that only made sense if seen through his eyes.
In a technical writing sense, something like that poses a problem. You can’t just change perspectives for the duration of a single chapter, or at least not in this way, halfway through the novel, without any clear reason. So I was presented with a sudden choice. I could tell Jurgen: nice job but this is impossible, so sorry but we’ll have to get rid of it. Or I could receive the scene like the gift it was, and embrace the challenge it brought along. For if I wanted to embed it in the existing text, I would have to flesh out and integrate Robin’s perspective in a believable manner throughout the whole story. That meant: coming up with new scenes specifically suited for his perspective, rewriting or moving others, introduce a full-fledged second narrative focus… Basically, overhauling the entire structure of the book so far.
A few years earlier, I would probably have balked and buried the whole idea. Now, all I thought was: interesting. Reya was my creation, but with his spontaneous ghust of writing, Jurgen had suddenly given Robin a face, and a voice.
Could this work? It very likely would. Contentwise, there was also a lot of added value to it.
Could I write it? I was entirely unprepared to write chunks of this story from the boy character’s perspective. But I reckoned I would manage, if I succeeded in getting into his head. And Jurgen had just provided me with half a chapter worth of assistance.
And what could be more beautiful, I mused, than the story of a friendship told by two characters, just like this book is being made by two people, looking through doubles lenses, writing with double pens?
Alright, I thought. They can do it together. Just like us.
In September 2019, ‘De serres van Mendel’, a children’s novel (10+) in words and images, a joint project of writer Kirstin Vanlierde and illustrator Jurgen Walschot, will appear with Van Halewyck publishing house (Belgium). For the time running up to the publication, a blog will appear every month on how this book came to be.
