Guest Post: What if…?Julie Lawson on Bear on the Train
Julie Lawson is the author of White Jade Tiger, A Blinding Light, Out of the Dark, and many other books for young readers: eloquent expressions, each one, of the worlds of her young protagonists. Her picture book, Bear on the Train, has a wordier text than we’re used to seeing in pictures books now, yet how delicately drawn its relationships are: boy and bear, bear and landscape, landscape and train. The train is the moving target of the reader’s attention and the boy becomes a stand-in for the reader. I have admired this book for years. I once had a copy that walked away from my bookshelf (maybe it took a train somewhere), so I was delighted to find a replacement copy at Russell Books, Victoria’s wonderful used bookstore. I was further delighted to find out that Julie is the friend of a friend, so I asked her to reflect on the making of this book, which is sadly out of print now.
What If…?
by Julie Lawson
From an early age, my dream was to become a writer. I was convinced that one day an idea would come to me, but not merely an idea—a complete story: beginning, middle, and end, with characters, plot, setting, everything tidily organized in my mind. This has never happened. I discovered that I need something concrete as a starting point: a bit of dialogue I’ve overheard, a historical event, a family story, a unique object that sparks my imagination— like the shadow puppet of a dragon that led, surprisingly, to my first novel White Jade Tiger. Once I have a starting point I begin to write and my imagination takes over. The more immersed I become in the story, the more my imagination reveals.
Photo © Patrick Lawson
Bear on the Train began as someone else’s story. My husband and I were spending a few days one fall at a mountain lodge in the Rockies. I was writing “Midnight in the Mountains” while Patrick was off photographing CPR freight trains. Each morning we’d get to our respective projects and meet at the lodge for lunch.
One day he was late getting back. So late, I was beginning to worry. When he finally burst into the lodge he exclaimed, “Have I got a story for you!”
I immediately thought, picture book!
A bear, smelling grain, ventures close to a train which has come to a stop. It climbs up onto the platform at the end of a grain car (hopper) to eat some. Two crewmen spot the bear and start shouting, assuming it will get off. Instead, the bear climbs inside the hopper. The men throw stones against the side and continue to shout but the bear stays put. They radio the engineer and he starts up the train. Forward a bit, then back, with enough jostling to jolt the bear out of the hopper and off the train.
Now the What if…? question took over. What if the bear stayed on the train? Over the next few days, a different story began to take shape. It started as a poem.
Bear on the Train, rough draft, rhyming version, 1993
The train was heading west a little ways past Lake Louise
When it stopped for a check near some trembling aspen trees
Jack the trackman walks along to do his routine check when he stops and he stutters, “What the—what the heck?
There’s a bear on the train! He’s sitting in the hopper and he’s eating all the grain!”
“Well, get him off!” said the engineer…”
The poem continues as more and more bears clamber on board.
I read the finished poem at a Children’s Literature Roundtable meeting in Vancouver, 1994. Everyone loved it. Editors? Not so much.
“I love the writing process. Words. Sentences. Punctuation. The rush when my brain takes me in a direction I’d never considered. ”
Over the next three years my rhyming tale (“too many train and location details”) morphed into a story in prose (“too much about the train and not enough of the bear”) and ended up as a combination of the two. “One fall day, deep in the mountains, Bear smelled grain…” The book was finally published in 1998 by Kids Can Press and is now, sadly out of print.
Manuscript with editorial comments, the old-fashioned paper way
I love the writing process. Words. Sentences. Punctuation. The rush when my brain takes me in a direction I'd never considered. The excitement when telling a story in a completely different way makes all the difference. The OMG thrill when a character suddenly dictates what it is they want to say or do and my fingers are flying across the keyboard trying to keep up. How does that happen? Ahh, the creative process! Even if a project takes many trials and errors, curves and obstacles, and threatens to derail completely, it’s always a learning experience, a challenge. Hard work? Yes, but when you let the creative process take over, it’s more like hard play.
Trials and errors, yes indeed. So often, you just don’t know what that spark of an idea will grow into. Thank you, Julie!
