Story time with David Shannon
David Shannon is the author of well-known books such as “A Bad Case of Stripes,” “Good Boy, Fergus!” “No, David!” won Shannon a Caldecott Medal and launched a series of “No, David!” books.
Photos by Katherine Rountree
One is never too old for story time, and yesterday illustration students gathered at the May Poetter Gallery to hear David Shannon talk about his experience in working as a children’s author and illustrator. A natural born storyteller, Shannon had both students and professors laughing at his illustrations and side comments.
He began his talk with how he first started as an illustrator. He told the students that as a young boy, he had always liked to draw and make comic books. Eventually he enrolled in an art school where he “learned to draw really important things…like fruit.” After graduation, Shannon went to New York City and worked on illustrating editorial cartoons for publications such as Rolling Stone.
As he went through his earlier work, he advised students to work for Sunday magazines. “It’s a good way to get your foot in the door,” he explained, and added that those magazines had “meaty subjects” to choose from.
His first illustration was for a book called “How Many Spots Does a Leopard Have?” He enjoyed the process and began receiving more and more manuscripts while still illustrating editorial cartoons.
Eventually, he was inspired to write his own work. His first book, “How Georgie Radbourn Saved Baseball,” was a combination of his love for baseball and his use of a dark palette.
His next book, “The Amazing Christmas Extravaganza,” had a much lighter palette but a darker story. Shannon based the character off his real neighbor, who liked to decorate his house extravagantly for the holiday season. He was nervous he would hurt his neighbor’s feelings, so he made the character more sympathetic. “That helped the storyline,” he said.
The subject of Christmas brought up Shannon’s second piece of advice for the students: “Don’t do a Halloween book,” he told them, and explained that the selling period was only three weeks long.
Shannon is best known for his book “No, David!” and its sequels “David Goes to School” and “David Gets in Trouble.”
He was inspired to write those stories by a book he had made when he was eight years old. At first he drew realistically, which made the story “lose character.”
“I drew it like a five-year-old,” Shannon said. Whenever he felt stuck, he would go back to the original copy that he had made as a little boy for reference.
The lecture focused on Shannon’s experience in writing for children and how he got into illustration.
The book won him his first Caldecott Medal, which “skyrocketed” him and his work onto more bookshelves.
Aside from sharing his inspiration and the technique behind his works, Shannon also talked about the effect books had on children and their parents. The children especially responded to his books because, he joked, “girls love seeing boys get into trouble.”
David, the main character of “No, David!,” also epitomizes all the naughty fun children have done or wished they could do.
“There’s also a psychology behind the word ‘no,’” Shannon said. “‘No’ means ‘I love you’ more than yes, because it provides an argument and it also means that I care about you to fight about it.”
He added that not only has he received letters from children and librarians, but from parents as well who wrote about their love for the books.
“Put a few things in your book to keep the grown-ups entertained,” he told the students. “Because their kids will ask them to read it again and again and again.”
One of the last slides of the presentation was “Duck on a Bike,” another book that both children and parents loved. Shannon explained that there were three layers to the story of a duck riding a bicycle around the farm.
The first layer was a “call and response.” The younger children who read the books associate the animals with the sounds they make and repeat the sounds to their parents. The older children who read the book understand that “people don’t always say what they mean.” For the grown-ups, “they see how people can respond to a new idea,” Shannon said.
Despite its success, Shannon did not receive a Caldecott Medal for “Duck on a Bike” because he forgot to draw the bell on the duck’s bike. He shared that many children have written to him asking about the bike. But he has prepared a response to those letters by illustrating the bell as a sticker and sending it back to the children so they could stick it onto the bike.
“I plan on calling it the No Bell Prize!” he said.
