I was thinking about how I could maybe have one kind of storytelling pictures and working in with the other main kind of storytelling you usually have in novels, which is words. What I ended up doing was I went back to the story I had been writing straight through and I took out big chunks of text whenever I found places that I thought I could tell the same section of the story visually. For instance when the book opens and I had originally three pages of written text about Paris and the city of lights and the train station and a boy living in the train station, but I took out all three pages of words that I wrote and I replaced them with a list of what I wanted to draw.
I came up with a list of 22 drawings that would basically tell that same story, but visually. Because every drawing in the book is a double page spread, those 22 drawings meant it is going to become 44 pages in the book. Sometimes I would take out one line, like “Hugo followed the old man home,” and then that one line became 12 pages of pictures as we actually followed Hugo through the streets of Paris following the old man. The book went from what I thought was going to be like 150 page, you know, “regular novel” to a nearly 600 page, you know, gigantic book that would have these bursts of miniature silent movies throughout them.
The book’s published by Scholastic and from the very beginning they were completely supportive of making the book longer, making it larger, making it this weird format because I’m very interested in graphic novels. I like graphic novels. But I don’t think I could do that many drawings because on every page, there are sometimes dozens of drawings. The other thing is that you read a graphic novel very much like a regular novel where you start on the upper right hand corner of the page and you work your way down both pages till you get to the bottom of the right hand corner.
Well, you start in the upper left hand corner, then you go down to the bottom of the right hand corner, and then you turn the page just because you ran out of story. But in picture books, you turn the page often because of what’s happening in the plot. When I went back and I was thinking again about the visuals of the movie and thinking about what happens when you turn the page in a picture book, I wanted the page turns in my book to be closer to a picture book than to a graphic novel.
I think of my book as kind of like a cousin to graphic novels and a cousin to picture books, and a cousin to the cinema, like it’s definitely related to the cinema and the way cinema tells its story, but it’s not quite any of these things. I don’t really have a good term for it so I’m up for suggestions.
