My mission to get pictures back into fiction

Author Cathy Brett tells us why she is passionate about telling stories in pictures as well as words in her books for teenagers and young adults

I love telling stories. When I say stories, I don't mean that I tell lies (like my latest character Verity Fibbs, a fifteen-year-old who is addicted to an online role-play game and gets into very hot water when she plays roles for real). No, I mean I love being a writer of fiction. Writing fiction, as I frequently inform people, is the best job in the world - creating characters and sending them off on amazing adventures. The odd thing is that I'd never considered writing as a career until a few years ago.

For as long as I can remember - probably since finger painting at nursery school - I've been a doodler, a scribbler, an artist. My career destination was set before my teens: the creative industries via art college. That's where I'd fit in, I thought, with other people like me who 'thought in pictures'. Brilliant though art college was (and full of other passionate doodlers and finger paint enthusiasts), I soon discovered I was expected to specialise in something. I chose fashion (because it sounded cool) and learned to design, cut patterns, make toiles and landed a job as a designer in Italy. A succession of glamorous and even cooler design jobs followed as I travelled around the world, but I knew I hadn't yet found my niche. I'd get bored or disillusioned or distracted and move on, again, to another job - shop window display, photographic styling, packaging design, teaching (I still do that one).

Then I discovered an occupation where it's impossible to be bored - creating books! Having always been a voracious reader, and having a brain that was easily distracted, you might think I would have considered being a writer a bit sooner. But no, not until I began illustrating other people's books did my head start to over-flow with my own stories and characters. Even more exciting then discovering I was a storyteller, was encountering the 21^st century Young Adult reader - the most visually sophisticated reader ever.

I remember my horrible disappointment on discovering that books for adults had no pictures. Poor adults, I thought. How dull these books must be. But they weren't dull. They were thrilling and powerful and poignant and heart-breaking. They just didn't have that added element that I craved - illustrations. In the past, books for adults did have pictures. In the nineteenth century, enormously popular authors like Dickens and Conan Doyle published their stories episodically and illustrated with haunting and evocative engravings. Now, in the 21^st Century, it's rare for adult books to have pictures. Children progress, without question, from picture books to weightier works with more (smaller, closer-together) text and fewer illustrations. Young readers are encouraged to feel immense pride and achievement when finally reaching the dizzy heights of books with no pictures at all. You have reached the citadel, entered adulthood. After all, pictures are for children or people who have trouble with the words, aren't they? Not according to Dickens and Conan Doyle, two of the greatest writers in the English language.

I've made it my mission to get pictures back in to adult fiction. Forget the myth that the pictures you make in your head are better. It's a worn-out cliché and simply isn't true for modern readers surrounded by a pervasive and stimulating visual culture. Young adult readers, in particular, understand and appreciate the juxtaposition of text and image and how they can work brilliantly together to tell a story. Even a serious one.

The illustrated novels that I write for teenagers often begin as drawings. I might imagine a key scene or create a character, do a sketch, then construct the whole plot around it. The text, illustrations and page layouts are then created together so that 'reading' one of my books becomes a multi-media experience, like watching a movie or playing a game. And, of course, I can see the potential for taking my stories into other formats. The idea of being able view my characters on screen, to add sound, animation and interactivity is totally mind-blowing. I can't wait.

PS. My one top tip for aspiring illustrators:

Draw.

Draw everyday, as much as you can.

Being an artist is a little like being an athlete. You must train your hand-eye coordination, get fit, keep fit until drawing is no longer hard work but feels easy.

Draw everything and anything - your friends, your family, your school, your house, yourself (in a mirror). Even if you find yourself alone in an empty room, you can still draw your shoes or your non-drawing hand (I have many such drawings in my student sketchbooks).

Draw everywhere - on the bus, in your room, on the sofa in front of the telly, at the shopping mall, skateboarding, bungee-jumping, in your sleep! (I keep my sketchbook beside my bed just in case I dream something cool and need to scribble it down)

Eventually, drawing will become as automatic as breathing and that's ALL you need to do if you want to be an illustrator!