A picture paints a thousand words

I have a confession about the new book, by which I mean the one due out in the summer: it started life as a sketch for the cover design – indeed, the rather nasty-looking one I’ve used to accompany this blog entry.  I know it’s not the best bit of artwork you’ve ever seen but despite its extremely amateur look (complete with infant-level colouring in) it’s been very useful.

It can really help to draw something that represents what your book’s going to be about.  Stories and visual art can go hand in hand.  You just have to think of graphic novels and the storyboards for movies, which are closely related forms, of course – and realise how many of those graphic novels make it to the big screen.  The storyboard is pretty much already done, obviously, because the story is told in pictures rather than just words. 

 But back to novel writing.  As I’ve said before, agents and publishers need (no, they actually demand) a short and punchy pitch for your story.  Who’s it about?  What happens?  What’s at stake?  Why should we care?  But you have to boil it all down to a couple of sentences or some kind of movie-style logline that you’d see on a poster.  We all remember Alien: ‘In space, no-one can hear you scream’ and the ultra-short pitch – ‘Jaws in space’.

This is where an image can come in really handy.  I’d got the idea for the next novel (as you know, a rom-com set in Cornwall) and I knew that it would obviously need a cover at some point, so all I did was sketch my idea for what that might be, with all the essential ingredients.  As it turns out, it wasn’t only useful to focus my ideas – I was able to present the same sketch to my good friend Pierre Bamin, who happens to be an amazingly talented artist and designer (check out www.pierrebamin.com).  The sketch became the basis for Pierre’s cover design, in which he has already improved hugely upon my original even with his own first rough version.  I’ll reveal more about the process as we go on.  Pierre’s cover is going to be good – infact, the cover may be the best thing about the book!

Happy writing – and sketching!