No longer second fiddle
“The visuals are central, because they set the mood for the entire book,” Hsiao explains.
“A good illustrator is also a thoughtful, sensitive reader.” In seeking out new talent, Papa doesn’t factor educational background or technical mastery as highly as the ability to tell a story, and to tell a story you have to be a good reader. “You need to have a feel for literature, to intuit the feelings that remained implicit in the text. Actually, the visual and the verbal are simply two approaches to storytelling.”
Many illustrators are diamonds in the rough that an editor has to have the discernment to recognize and the skill to polish until they shine.
Lee Yiting’s Let Me Play a Bit Longer had been in the works for three years before publication this year. It started out as the story of a bear cub that doesn’t want to go to sleep, even when it comes time to hibernate. The sleepy Momma Bear has had enough. She goes online to find out why bears need to hibernate, but by the time she’s discovered the answer the cub has drifted off.
Hsiao liked the premise, but felt there were too many books about sleep aversion. Lee was willing to revise, but pretty soon they both got stuck in the revision process. One day Hsiao asked Lee to put the visuals aside and focus on the story. Lee agreed, and the story they ended up writing was about a cub that didn’t want to put away its toys.
“Reading the draft we were both anxious, but also excited: we felt we’d finally gotten everything just right—the story, the pacing, and the visual design.” Hsiao’s face fairly glows as she recounts the magic moment when the revision came together.
Hsiao never asks artists to imitate. When they deliver something different from the original design, she won’t immediately reject it or tell the artist what to do next. The first question is always: “Why’d you do it this way?”
Papa is all about helping the illustrator find the core creative idea.
Papa refuses to do translations. Every book is crafted from scratch. Editor-in-chief Barkley Kuo has hoped since Papa’s founding not just to create good books but to offer local illustrators a stage, a platform. “It’s not easy to do it all yourself, but it’s necessary if you want to take Taiwan’s editorial game to the next level.”
Insisting on doing its own books from scratch, Papa Publishing House has become a stage for Taiwan’s illustrators to shine on.