part 2, the story

picturebook process. The past year I’ve been working on my 2 debut picture books. On my blog I’m giving you some insight into my process. Zuhause auf der Klippe (The House high up on the Cliff) is a story I wrote and illustrated. Herschel (The Ghost Dog) was written my Thomas Meyer and illustrated by me. Both books will be out middle of March in 2025.

from Herschel, der Gespensterhund (2025)

I am a book lover. When I was a child, I wanted to be a writer, often carried a notebook with me, making up stories about fairies, horses and adventures. But somehow, the older I got, the harder it got to access that part of me. When I started studying illustration, coming up with stories was always the hardest for me.

For a long time I thought that there just weren’t any stories inside of me anymore.

The French illustrator Charlotte Parent wrote in her blog:

“Writing stories is like cooking snail soup. First, you notice a little thing that seems beautiful or true or interesting to you - you pick up a snail. Then, you notice a few more and carry them around in the back of your mind - you gather snails in your little wicker basket. Finally, in a sudden jolt of inspiration, everything comes together and you spew out a draft.” 

It wasn’t that quick for me, not at all, this story was more of a forceps delivery, A “Zangengeburt” as we say in German. No quick slipping out, but a lot of labour and exertion. But I really resonate with the thought of having one little thing that interests you, and building a story from there.

For me, it ended up being this painting I drew for peachtober.

Somebody commented “It feels like the house is hesitating to dive in the water.”
I was touched by this way of looking at that scene. I turned the idea into a poem, about a house high up on the cliff, that looks at the sea everyday, wanting to swim in the water.

Writing stories is never a straight forward process. If you know the movie Surf’s Up (if you don’t know it, you have to watch it, it’s a great movie about penguins and surfing. just believe me), there’s this one great scene that I think about often. The main character Cody wants to carve his own surfboard out of a block of wood. He’s impatient, and it goes wrong. Then his mentor says: “Remember, the board's already inside there, see, somewhere. And what you're doing is you're trying to find it. - Reveal it. All right?”

This is how I now think about stories. In some universe, they already exist. I just need to find them. This takes trial, error and a lot of patience.

My story went through so many changes throughout the process, from the house turning into a submarine to it drowning in the water. At many times, I felt really desperate, because I just couldn’t figure out the right ending to the story. It feels so difficult to push through the uncertainness of where a story is going.

For me, the writing process wasn’t finished for a long time. But I wanted that, I needed to keep the story fluid in order to make it the best it could be. What I love about picture books is the interplay of words and images. So working on the story and the images was a simultaneous process for me. Ideas come through drawings. Drawings inspire words inspire drawings.

For this, I worked a lot with small dummies, storyboards, quick sketches that allowed me to change around the story quickly. This I will cover on my next blogpost, this time over on my Patreon. There I’ll also talk about the start of Herschel, how I started illustrating a story written by somebody else.