Plant the seeds and hope for Spring by Anne Booth (and Happy Birthday Shirley Hughes)

It's the 21st again and I don't know if I have much to share, apart from saying to my fellow writers, 'courage!' and  'don't despair!'  and 'keep on keeping on!' and 'we do make a difference!'.

I find I have to remind myself that if the day to day job of writing was worthwhile before Covid-19, it is still worthwhile now. Sometimes I feel a bit useless and wish our job had more immediate effect - that I could somehow write something for children now that  would immediately help right this moment, the way that doctors and nurses and paramedics and teachers and teaching assistants and social workers and all the other people out there are helping directly RIGHT NOW - but that isn't what this writing business is about - it has a delay built in - it takes time. I have written picture books recently which, even if they are accepted,  I know already won't be published  books for years. I am so grateful that my last picture book, one I wrote a year or two ago, 'Bloom', was published during lockdown and has been a help to the teachers and children who have been using it, but there was no guarantee when I wrote it that that would happen, that it would ever be accepted and turned into a book. I am very lucky and glad it was published by Tiny Owl and illustrated so beautifully by Robyn Wilson-Owen, but I had no idea that would be the result.  I had to write in hope then, and I still have to write in hope for books to come.


I think it's great really that as writers we have to be people of hope. We have to plan ahead, we have to somehow focus on the future just to keep going - even if it is only in hope for a contract and some pay!

And something we write today might not make an immediate difference, but if we don't write it today then it can't make a difference in the future.

It's a bit like planting seeds or bulbs. I keep forgetting to plant bulbs in September - and then I don't have the daffodils I love in the Spring.  We have to plant the seeds and hope for Spring, even if we cannot see it yet.

When I was researching my first novel 'Girl with a White Dog', I went to research in The Weiner Library. I saw an exhibition of children's books published by the Nazis. Later I read in social histories that very very sadly, during the 1939-45 war, the most fanatical soldiers, the ones who wouldn't surrender,  the ones who would not see the evil nature of Hitler and Nazism, were those who had been exposed all their life, right from early childhood, to Nazi propaganda, in school and in the Hitler Youth, and in childhood games and books and films. The Nazis deliberately published children's books for the very littlest ones upwards full of antisemitism and fascist ideas, as part of their quest to end up with fanatically loyal, unquestioning, Nazi adults. Now, that is a depressing thought, but it is one we need to be aware of - what children's books tell children now, will have an important impact on how they see the world when they are adults - and if the Nazis , with their totally evil world view, could see what power children's books have, we can also see their potential  and remember that they also have amazing power for Good.

If we keep hoping, if we keep the faith, if we write the best books we can now, and tell the loveliest stories we can now, if we write and celebrate now,  stories which value what is good and beautiful and lovely and truly funny, and interesting and different and kind, (even we do that in a dystopian novel or in stories which also recognise (but don't celebrate)  suffering and pain) then, if these stories we write now in uncertainly but in hope, eventually DO become books, and  children in the future read them, they will then hopefully be encouraged to look for love and justice and truth and humour and good things in their lives outside, and  recognise their absence when they are  not there. If we put in the effort and take the risk and have the faith to write in hope now, if we work to give children books which introduce them to and help them value people who are not like them, if our story telling now can encourage empathy in the future, rather than fuel fear, like the Nazi books did,  then that is worthwhile work which  WILL make the world better. We just have to do our bit now and hope.

And we can look at and be inspired by people like the AMAZING Shirley Hughes, whose birthday it was this month and whose books are FULL of kindness. The writer and illustrator James Mayhew encouraged everyone on Twitter to share their favourite pictures by Shirley Hughes, and it was flooded by beauty and lovely tributes.  Shirley Hughes has brought so much goodness and beauty into the world,  done so much good by her work and brought so much happiness and inspired generations. She would have had no idea when she started decades ago,  just how much joy and happiness and comfort  her books would give to generations and how much loveliness she would give to the world and how much difference she would make. She just simply got on, every day, with writing and illustrating. So that's what I am going to try and do every day,  and that's what we all need to do , even in these uncertain times. But I'm sure I'm not the only writer to really really hope I get a contract soon too - so good luck for that to us all!!! And thank you and Happy Birthday again, Shirley Hughes!