INSPIRATIONS – Dianne Hofmeyr

Piet Grobler's exuberant illustration for our new book FIDDLE DEE DEE

Hopefully your celebration of the New Year was similarly robust. 

What’s not to like about the year 2018? Such a splendidly round number – plump and ripe and if you believe Chinese numerology, also very lucky with its 8, and the 2 for double or twice lucky, the 0 for limitless and the 1 for a beginning. New beginnings, limitless energy and twice lucky.  Sounds like a good year for writing.

What motivates or inspires us to write?

For me, so much seems to come from tiny, bright sparks of childhood experiences, a scene embedded way back in the brain, a sentence, a word, a room, a face. Slim, ethereal snippets that are somewhere in the subconscious. My cork-board, is not strewn with yellow ‘post-it’ notes of plots… but with pictures. Visual reminders of something I can’t quite place.

I’m like someone about to embark on building a house. I collect designs and ideas from magazines and photographs and put them in a folder. My end-product – not being as clear-cut as building a house – means I'm swamped. Some pictures go back more than 30 years.

Girl dancing with crocodile by Niki Daly on a note he once sent me more than 20 years ago. 

A metal sculpture, with in tiny print below November 1984

When I’m about to start working on a new picture book, the cork-board becomes my memory palace. The one below of an ice cave... probably stemming from a childhood visit to a cave in Africa not with ice but the same idea of darkness and light... went up for my next book, TIGER WALK.

On the board is a girl dancing with a polar bear juxtaposed with a picture of a watching tiger. 

The pictures are there for me to draw on. But when finally the story (without my pictures) is handed over to the illustrator, she or he will have their own memory palaces of ideas that are different to mine. And so the two meld and if the meld is strong, a wonderful book emerges that belongs neither to the writer or the illustrator but to something that is quite ephemeral.

A cave spread by Jesse Hodgson for our new book TIGER WALK

And in the making of the book, just as in the pottery studio where an accidental fingerprint on an otherwise perfect pot, adds its own dimension, so stories acquire shaping through the personal touch of both the illustrator and the writer.

In 2018, dream more, look harder, don’t judge yourself or others, do things that make you laugh and hopefully new beginnings, limitless energy and twice lucky will fall into place. 

www.diannehofmeyr.com

Twitter: @dihofmeyr