She is two. She does not yet edit a manuscript in the way adults mean the word. But she does, in her own quiet way, edit a book — by the pages she turns back to, the pages she will not sit through, the small fingers laid flat on a thing she has noticed.
We were reading the Clara proof, which is the closest thing in this house to a finished book — a stack of A4 spreads, ring-bound, soft at the corners. Sofia knows it has pages. She knows that Clara is the bird. She has a favourite spread, which is the one where the wattle puffs up gold along the bottom of the page, and she stops there every single time, and she pats it. Sometimes she carols at it, in her two-year-old way.
That, in this house, counts as an edit. This one. More of this one. The wattle spread will stay, more or less as it is, because of her.
What I keep relearning
Children's books are not for adults. This is a thing every children's book editor will tell you on day one, and a thing every author will spend the next decade slowly, embarrassingly, internalising. Adults read picture books the way adults read everything else — for the prose, the rhythm, the meaning. Children read them for the picture. The picture is the whole book. The words are the part the picture stands on.
When Sofia reads Clara, she is not reading my sentences. She is reading the wattle, and the colour of the sky, and whether the bird's eye is looking back at her. The words are a kind of music underneath. If I get the music wrong she will still love the book. If I get the picture wrong she will not.
So I watch where her finger goes. I watch what she turns back to. I watch which page she will not let me skip, and which page she will not let me linger on. None of this is articulate, and none of it is meant to be. It is the truest feedback a picture book has ever received in this house, and it costs her nothing to give.
The wattle spread, again
It is one of the smallest decisions in Clara's production, and probably nobody will notice it except, perhaps, another two-year-old patting the page with a small flat hand. That is exactly the right reason for it to be there.
— James