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(Continued)
When you read the book School, you find out that the main character is called Jojo. But when Ginette Anfousse first wrote the book L'École in French, she called the little girl Jiji. Have you noticed that the word "Jiji" sounds more like a nickname than a real first name? It also sounds a lot like "Ginette". That makes sense, because when Ginette Anfousse was a child, and even after that, she was called Jiji! I'm sure you know other nicknames, pet names that we give to people we love…
After she looked at her daughter and drew little Jiji or Jojo, Ginette Anfousse imagined what Marisol could be imagining while she played. She remembered her own childhood and what she thought about quietly, in her head. "Sometimes," she used to say to herself, "I feel like adults have the idea that children don't think." Then Ginette Anfousse put her own memories and her conversations with her daughter Marisol together. They became the words that her new character Jojo would say. She wrote bits of sentences and these wound up as a story! Maybe you know Hide-and-Seek. That's the first book that Ginette Anfousse drew and wrote.
What's interesting is that Ginette Anfousse does the opposite of what many authors usually do: first she makes the drawings for her books, then she finds the words for the story. That way, she doesn't need to describe in words what the picture already shows.
It is not easy to be both the writer and illustrator of a book. Very often, there is one person who creates and writes a story and another who illustrates it. That means that you have to find someone to show in pictures what the author has written in words. That's what happened with the other book on this site, Zoom Upstream: its author is Tim Wynne-Jones and the artist is his friend Ken Nutt (Eric Beddows).
You could say that Ginette Anfousse found the idea for her books by using her eyes. First, she LOOKED at Marisol, her little daughter, very carefully and with a lot of love. Then, the idea took shape through her fingers, because she always liked to draw. The words came later, just like the story.
If ever you wanted to be like Ginette Anfousse, you would have to start by carefully looking around you at all kinds of little details -- colours, people, what's going on. Would you like to try that?
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