Making money from artistic work is difficult. In a recent survey by the Australian Society of Authors, creators make, on average, 11,000AUD from their creative work. That’s not much to live on. I’ve written before about where an artist’s income comes from, and why it’s probably possible and, at least for me, preferable, to balance a ‘normal’ job with creative work. Essentially, it boils down to a supply and demand problem. Too many artists and not enough people seeking their work.

But, the other day, I was thrilled to wake up to an email letting me know that one of my books, Eric The Postie, has been pirated. Available to people to download, for FREE! The person on the other end of the email wasn’t as thrilled as me, but I couldn’t help but be flattered. Why? Because people are spending their time and energy seeking out my work. In a world where people are being offered billions of choices a day about what to read, watch or listen to, the fact that one of those things is little ol’ Eric is amazing to me!

Tim O’Reilly, CEO of O’Reilly Media, famously once wrote that the greater threat to authors or creative artists is obscurity not piracy. The question he ponders is what’s the value of being read against what’s the value of selling a book?

What’s being pirated worth?

Piracy is a difficult value to calculate because it’s trading in attention, not money. For argument’s sake, let’s say someone buys Eric the Postie for $20 and I end up with about $1 of that in royalties. That’s one family, one sale, one dollar. They may like or dislike the book. If they like it, they may seek my name out on a bookshelf at some time or another in the future. They also may not because, let’s face it, there are millions of alternatives. I don’t know how many customers walk past a shelf in a given bookstore in a given week, but it’s likely in the 100s, and that’s being generous, and in most cases, it’s likely the same hundreds of people every few weeks or so because they live or work nearby.

Now, let’s say someone uploads a ‘free’ copy of Eric the Postie. Let’s say that it’s shared on a modestly-populated online forum that sees, maybe, 1000s of people per day. Suddenly, my work is in front of 1000s of different people so, from an exposure point of view, I’m already winning. But, none of those people are buying it. Assume I get 1% of those people downloading it – that’s 10 people. Those 10 people read my story. Some like it, and some don’t. But, I’m working with 10 people now, not just one from the bookstore. And, they’re actively asking for the book, so chances are more people already know they will like it than those who won’t.

The people downloading Eric are probably not the people who walk into bookshops and buy books. Maybe they shop online – Booktopia and Amazon – but they’re probably not the book romantics I would love them to be. But, they’re reading my book. If you look at it through the attention-economy lens, there’s value in that. Shouldn’t I, as someone who is trying to get my message out there, enjoy the fact that more people are reading, even if they’re not paying?

But it doesn’t stop there. Once I’m winning in the attention economy, just like when Coca-Cola plasters ads everywhere – people become more aware of my name and my backlist. A stronger association between “good books for kids” and “Matt Shanks” is generated in their brains. We can’t really measure, in concrete terms, the power of that, but we know that there will be a certain percentage of those 10 people per day, when they’re tasked with looking for a present for their nephew or niece, or happen to be in a mall and need to entertain the kids for a bit so they dump them in a bookshop (like I was when I was a kid of parents who never read very much), there’s a greater likelihood that my name, or my books, will be the one that will be interesting to seek out over and above “people I’ve never heard of”. I’m a safer bet.

When I was younger, using Kazaa to discover music because I had no money, I found and listened to some brilliant bands. I’ve since formed life-long connections with those bands and their music. As I’ve become more affluent, I’ve bought CDs, LPs, attended live concerts and bought more merchandise than I know what to do with. Had those bands not been found on something like Kazaa, I would’ve spent all of that money on different bands, the former ones fading into obscurity. In the long run, and in my specific relationship to them, it’s been commercially beneficial for those bands to have been pirated. I won’t be the only for which that’s happened.

I’m not saying piracy isn’t a problem, but I don’t think it’s as problematic as we think it is for an artist’s bottom-line. As far as artists go, if people are finding the need and motivation to seek out your work specifically, or share it with others, it’s a really strong signal that you’re making the right work. There’s no strong correlation between making good work and economic success anyway, but that’s not necessarily why artists do what they do. If we were after economic success we’d stop making art and have a job on Wall Street. To produce true art is to work to answer the burning questions inside of ourselves. The miracle of piracy, or, put another way, free-sharing at a scale never before achieved in human history, is that it shows the artist that there are others like them, people who are struggling to find answers and who believe that maybe you’ve done the work to find them. That, in many ways, is just as comforting and flattering, if not more, than having a few extra dollars in the pocket.

One of my favourite reent quotes from Seth Godin is “If you want to ride a bike, don’t watch a video, don’t read a book.” There are just some things that you can only learn by doing, over and over again.

When I was a kid, I loved comic strips. Our school library had a lot of Garfield and Snoopy and I remember spending many hours there poring over the drawings, watching how the writing and the panels interacted with one another to produce yet another brilliant punchline. Of course, as a kid, I didn’t know that’s what I was doing, but as an adult it seems so obvious now.

Like with many young people who had an interest in art at primary school, when the ‘reality of the world’ began to take hold in high-school, I made choices that would set me up ‘to get a job’ and not ones that involved any sort of art-making. I never really returned to comics (or art) for about 15 years. You might think, ‘Oh, what a shame’ but there’s a silver lining to all things.

Re-discovering comics

I’m not sure when or how it happened, but I’ve been re-kindling my buried love of comics over the last few years. I unashamedly love reading them and I think the shame often associated with it has something to do with how we preference text literacy over visual literacy from a very young age. I’ve got a growing comics collection, including my treasured set of Calvin and Hobbes, and I’m slowly understanding my preferences for genre and subject matter (as well as artists like M.Sassy.K one of the colourists from Isola).

But, I’ve never made a comic, not one. I’ve read books on how to make them – most famously, one I had since childhood, but also Understanding and Making Comics by Scott Mccloud. I’ve watched videos on them, too, and there are some lovely resources online to help one get their head around what’s involved in making comics. But, as Seth Godin says, “If you want to make comics, don’t watch a video, don’t read a book.” I know the theory: good characters, panel arrangement, layouts, colour palettes, joke writing and pacing, the art of lettering etc. I’ve studied it all, but there’s nothing as helpful as, like I say a lot, just doing the work.

Meet Pip and Pop

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about true art-making is that its purpose is to help me answer questions. In Queen Celine, I was trying to understand what I thought of change, good leadership, and bio-diversity. In Eric The Postie, it was about exploring tenacity when even in the face of lost opportunity, if you think creatively it’s possible to find a way through.

A question that’s been bubbling away in my brain for a while has been the one about intergenerational conflict. Seeing the rise of phrases like “Ok, Boomer” have been deeply worrying to me because it shows that we’re inventing ways of closing conversations, not opening them. Pip and Pop gave me a way to explore this. They’ve taught me that each generation has something to learn from one another. We’re all imperfect, and we’re all just doing our best. No one is truly right or wrong, there is no right or wrong, and to be honest, in the cosmic scheme of things, a lot of it is humourous.

So, who’s Pip? Pip is a young’un. He’s living in a fast-paced, connected world – part of a global community. He’s a ‘digital native’ – part of a generation that has never known a world without the internet. Pop, on the other hand, Pip’s grandad, remembers simpler times. Times when nature was the primary entertainment. Times before the internet where one read the local paper, engaged with the local community, worked hard, built a life step-by-step, and looked forward to and enjoyed retirement. He struggles to engage with this highly connected world, the gig economy, political correctness, mental health and trauma – it’s changing too fast and it’s difficult to keep up.

Pip and Pop, as it turns out, have complementary strengths and weaknesses. They have a lot to learn from one another, but the only way they can both benefit is if they create a space to listen to one another.

Lessons from Pip and Pop

It is remarkable what I’ve learned so far in my exploration of Pip and Pop, and it’s all stuff that books and videos simply cannot teach you. Some lessons are just re-affirming what I already knew, but others were complete surprises that only revealed themselves to me because of the practical nature of the learning method.

I know these ‘final’ images have broken a lot of the rules of comics. The contrast isn’t great, the colour palettes could be better, the drawing isn’t as crisp as I would like. The list of imperfections goes on. But getting them perfect was never the point. Going through the process of writing a comic – construction of humour and timing, panelling it out, gridding and inking, attempting typography, understanding the value of traditional and digital approaches to colouring, it’s all contributed to giving me a more profound appreciation of the professionals I admire, but also a desire to keep pushing myself to understand the medium through practice, not theory.

Beyond the practical understanding of what it takes to create a comic, Pip and Pop are still helping me answer questions. Not just on the page, but in life. Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes, talks about how he doesn’t feel that he’s making Calvin or Hobbes do anything, because they have a life of their own. Pip and Pop are giving me a similar feeling. They are with me in every conversation I have with people who are younger than me and people who are older than me. In some cases, I hear Pip and Pop speaking, not the person I’m speaking to. That’s a profound shift in cognition based on a bit of time spent with pencil and ink.

It’s something that most people won’t notice, but Pip and Pop have shifted, in subtle ways, the way I think about and create my picture book work – mainly about the way I think about colour, but also the way I think about visual storytelling. This experiment is unlikely to end up anywhere, and I’m OK with that. That was never the point.

The most important lesson I’ve learned from all of this is that learning anything new is an exercise in vulnerability. It seems that we’re more open to that as children, and less so as adults. As adults, we’re supposed to have ‘figured it out already’ right? What makes it hard is that we have to admit to ourselves (and more importantly, others) that we don’t know something and that the most likely outcome is that we’ll stuff things up. Over and over again. In a culture that rewards and celebrates winning over failure, that’s hard, at least at first. But the universal rule seems to be that those who find a way to be comfortable with failure are the ones that end up winning in the long run when winning just means answering the most important question we’re here to answer – understanding who we are in a deeper way which, when you think about it, is the whole purpose of making the art we need to make.

When we think creativity, we seem to envision a stimulating mess. Piles of papers and colours and art supplies, post-it notes of ideas on the walls, a ‘creative genius’ scribbling furiously as their meagre hands try to keep up with the speed at which the brain is making new and exciting connections. And yes, there *are* moments of this, but in order to make the most of the moments, what’s required is absolute organisation and rigour.

I can no longer count the times when I’ve been in creative flow, pretty much the scene I’ve just described, and I go to reach for the next tool I need to take my idea further – a particular brush, just the right colour, or an eraser – and I’m suddenly stopped in my tracks. I can’t find it. I dig under the piles of papers, scan the desk (and the floor), look behind the stuff I’ve got stacked on the shelves but sure enough, I have to stop. I have to step out of the flow. The momentum for the idea goes on hold and, sometimes, it’s difficult to get back.

In order to make the most of those rare moments of flow, I’ve learned to keep things organised. Everything in its place. The layout of my space is changing regularly, but the important thing is that I know where my tools are when I need them. I can rely on them to be there. When things are organised – jars labelled, items consistently positioned and put away after every working session – it’s far easier and quicker to get into flow and stay there. Maximising the hours spent in that flow state means that I’m also maximising my chances of capturing the weird and wonderful connections that my brain makes on the fly, and that tends to lead to better work, work that even I didn’t expect, and work that seems to make others smile.

I once read some advice from an author that said, “Writers are too busy writing, what they need to do is just write as they speak.” I think it was an attempt at helping writers find a more ‘natural’ voice, one that wasn’t shaped necessarily by the ‘idea’ of ‘writing’. You know, using words you’d never speak because they sound smarter and make you look more like a writer who has a command over vocabulary or something. I’ve always been told that I’ve got a natural tone to my writing, but it wasn’t until I attempted to speak my own writing that I learned a lot more about the unconscious bias between my brain, mouth, and fingertips.

What’s with writing?

I journal weekly because I’ve found that the practice of writing helps to clarify my thinking or consolidate some ephemeral ideas I’ve had floating around my head. Journal writing is different from creative writing, of course. Where creative writing, or writing fiction, requires that I entertain and ‘bring a reader along a journey’, the audience for journal writing is me, mainly. I publish it publicly in the off-chance that someone may find something I write helpful, but it’s not the goal.

As an experiment, I’ve recently started audio-transcribing my journal. Again, this isn’t for anyone but me, really, because if people don’t read my writing, they’re even more unlikely to enjoy the sound of my voice. No, I started this speaking-practice to see whether, like writing, it contributes to clarifying my thinking. The short answer is yes, it does.

Write like you speak?

In fact, what I’ve realised by speaking my work is that any act of consumption or creation of art and literature has a similar effect. I love reading and watching films – the consumption bit – because they pose questions, wrapped in narrative, about important things to the makers of those films. Princess Kaguya, for example, one of my favourite films ever, grapples with concepts of control, life, death, and patriarchy. The Memory Police, a book by Yoko Ogawa, unpacks the value of memory and what it really means to remember. These ideas sit and swirl in my brain, helping me understand my own view on these things and, more abstractly, my place in the world.

Like writing this journal, drawing, as it turns out, is critical in helping me think through problems. Whether that’s drawing boxes and flowcharts in my work as a software designer, or inventing characters that act as a medium to explore things I never even thought to explore until I see them emerge on a page in the form of a tenacious echidna. It turns out that if I then try to speak the words I’ve written in this journal (like very recently), I re-interpret my own words and find new connections I never knew existed. It’s exposed the difference between the way I write and speak, which, according to the unnamed writer above, should make me a better writer.

Those four things – Reading, Writing, Speaking, and Drawing – is a very privileged set of skills and each begets the other as a way to unpack and examine the world in which we exist today, and the actions we can take to shape the one we want to exist tomorrow. Using them together, consciously, is not something I’ve ever noticed the power of before, but here I am, writing about it, so I suppose it worked.

We need a more complex discussion about that word – Diversity – and how those of us with a platform in literature can shape a more equal world. As humans, we’re pretty lazy, so we like short words that can stand in for complex and difficult-to-articulate things. I’m concerned about how I’ve seen it used, particularly in publishing, where we refer to people as ‘diverse authors’ when what I think we mean by this is “Authors that are members of groups who have been historically under-represented in our media or historically discriminated against.” Why is it so hard to just say what we mean?

When thinking about how to represent “diversity” in my own work, children’s literature, it’s no less complex. I’m often paralysed by fear and uncertainty about how I’m supposed to represent under-represented groups or those who have been historically discriminated against, especially as someone who isn’t from those groups and has a whole lot of privilege baked into my life.

There is no silver bullet here because it’s about culture change – whether we like it or not, that takes time. We need efforts at systemic and individual levels, working together over time, to listen to one another, learn from one another and, ultimately help one another.

I’ve noticed a few different approaches to how people are including diversity into their work, or how they’re talking about it. “Randomness” is one way – the idea that if we ignore social and historical context, notions of power and hierarchy, we’ll move to a world with more equity more quickly. There is of course the ‘representing reality’ thing, where we use data and research to inform our choices and remove ‘unconscious bias’ about how we represent the under-represented. And yes, while these are good ideas, they’re not good enough because it doesn’t reckon with how culture change actually works.

Diversity as ‘randomness’

Life is chaos, but we don’t want it to be. True randomness unsettles. It means things are unpredictable, unstable, uncertain. Instead, we wrap narratives around randomly occurring events using abstract correlations misinterpreted as causation to make sense of it all. We seem to call that narrative a life.

When the iPod first came out, it’s ‘shuffle play’ wasn’t acting like we wanted shuffle to act. It began as a truly random selection of songs, not ‘expected random’. This meant you would sometimes hear the same song two or three times in a session. What was truly random was seen as repetitive. We don’t *expect* random to repeat, so when it does, something feels broken. What we think we want when we say random is variety; a sort of controlled-random. That’s more difficult in programming terms, but it’s how we expect the world to behave. This phenomenon is the same with everything, especially diversity in literature.

Whenever I’m making a picture book, the characters don’t come from nowhere, they have to be designed. How much diversity should be in a country town that I’m designing? I could generate, at random, characters with certain attributes; skin colour, hair colour, eye colour, body type, clothing, etc. If it was truly random, it’s quite possible that in a country town, I would end up with a town of black people with blond hair, a bull-fighter, opera signer, french pastry chef and a class full of kids from Asia and Africa. By the same token, a truly random town could just as easily turn out to be an all-white, Christian, meat-and-potatoes eating population.

Whilst these are truly random, just like life, they don’t feel ‘realistic’.

What is realistic diversity?

The world we live in didn’t just appear. It has thousands of years of biases and discrimination built into it, at all levels – political, social, economic, religious. Whether it’s right to have done so isn’t what I want to focus on. Rather, we have to recognise we are grouped and categorised by where we live, how much money we have, how able-bodied we are, the colour of our skin, and plenty more. A ‘random’ approach to diversity, then, or, in other words, one that ignores these factors of segregation and inequality, isn’t the solution. We need to see the inequality in order to address it.

The other complicating factor is that my version of diversity will be different from another’s – especially a publisher, or a co-creator. Our own lives are biased by the factors I’ve already mentioned and that means we’ve interacted with certain groups and not with others across those political, social, and economic spectrums. For example, the primary school I attended was very mixed in race: Chinese, Italian, Greek, Vietnamese, Lebanese etc. But we were all able-bodied. We lived in the same group of suburbs, and so we had similar economic contexts in which our parents operated, also. In some ways, we were very diverse, and in others, not so. One or two suburbs over and those kids are living completely different lives.

If bias is baked in, something that’s completely unavoidable, then trying to increase the representation of historically-discriminated groups in our literature can’t just come from within us. We need objective data. Well, as objective as we are able to get.

What is data-driven diversity?

Just pause for a moment. Try to answer the question: how many people in Australia live with a disability?

Chances are, if you grew up in a place that had one or more people with a disability, you’ll guess a much higher percentage than if you didn’t. My guess was about 2-3%.

According to the Australian Network on Disability, 4.4 million Australians have some form of disability. Just to be clear, that’s 1 in 5 people, or in percentage terms, 20%. A far cry from my paltry biased number of 2-3%. My entire upbringing was around able-bodied people so, of course, I’d expect that there are less of them in the world.

Now, when you think “disability”, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? For me, it was “wheelchair”. Well, it turns out that only 4.4% of people with a disability in Australia use a wheelchair. 4.4%! But it’s the first thing that came to my mind? I expected at least upwards of 30%. Included in the definition of disability are hearing loss (30,000 people), vision loss (357,000 people), depression/anxiety, and arthritis amongst other conditions. source

So, there’s a lot going on here, but here are a few of the important points we need to consider:

1. There are many minority groups in Australia. At 4.4m, disabled people are one of them but that’s just one of many, and it depends on how you cut the data, just like in my primary school. For example, according to census data, 30% of Australians are foreign-born. So they’re a minority, too. So, too, are our indigenous Australians within that context. But then, when you break any group down across race, politics, religion, and so on; you will find a majority and a minority in every facet of our lives.
2. Not all minorities have been historically-discriminated against, nor have they been under-represented in our media. What I mean by this is that humans are pretty clever at creating a context that ensures we can identify as a minority group if it suits us. For example, Pentecost makes up 2.1% of all Christians in Australia according to 2016 census data. By that measure, they are a minority. But, in a National context, where Christianity represents 52.1% of the total population, they are part of a bigger religious majority. This is especially important when you consider the laws that govern us have been informed by Christian values more than any other – there is a significant advantage to being a Christian in Australia right now, whether a Christian person knows that or not. No, it’s better to ignore the idea of quantitative comparison when we say ‘minorities’ because what we really mean when we say minorities are groups that have suffered significant, perpetual, & historical discrimination based on gender, colour, religious beliefs and physical ability: women, people of colour, and disabled people are good examples.
3. We don’t live according to data, we are the data. Our messy day-to-day experiences shape our view of the world. Because of this, we are inherently, unavoidably biased. For example, in doing research for this article I discovered that there is a greater population of Nepalese people in Australia than American. I’ve never met a Nepalese person in Australia, but I know plenty of Americans, so it’s a surprise to me. That doesn’t make me a bad or judgey human, it’s just my experience. But also, because I’m aware of my narrow view of the world, it’s also unsurprising that I could be wrong. It doesn’t make me an inherently bad human, it’s just a factor of the life I’ve led.
4. We have an existing social, political, economic, and moral landscape that we’ve inherited and it will continue to shift with culture over time. Our world is shifting gradually and constantly based on our actions and events we participate in everyday. Yes, it’s difficult to ‘keep up with what’s politically correct’ but it also provides an opportunity for us to exert effort toward making a more equitable world.

So, in place of a truly random approach to including ‘diversity’ in my country town, the easy solution would be to take a purely data-driven approach to creating it instead. I could look up stats: economic and racial breakdowns of residents in a typical country towns of Australia, and draw what I find. After all, that’s just real, right? It takes my own personal bias out of it so doesn’t that make it better? But, here’s where stereo-types and existing inequity become problematic.

The value and danger of stereotypes

If I take a truly data-driven approach to creating my country town, I might get some diversity, yes: I could draw a Nepalese family (but maybe not two?). I could include some disabled people (maybe a blind person instead of one in a wheelchair?), probably a fair few white people. But, given this is a country town, when you look at the data, they’d probably *mostly* be of a certain economic disposition and class, which isn’t very diverse. That’s all well and good, but then I need to work out how to portray all of this to the reader. And so we arrive at stereotypes.

Picture book makers rely on stereotypes. If I need to tell the reader that a person is a doctor, I’ll probably give that character a stethoscope. If I want to tell them they’re a plumber, maybe some overalls and a wrench? Jobs are one thing, but what about ethnicity? What are the visual signals for a person from Nepal? Or America? What about economic class? Do people in this country town eat ‘healthy’ food (salads etc) or do they consume ‘junk’ (chips and pies). What cars do they drive? What sort of houses do they live in? Is there a rich part of the town and a poor part? How ‘nice’ is the main square: clean and pristine or dirty and trash-filled? What job should the black person have – the town sweeper or the School Principal?

Each and every visual signal we provide to the reader communicates the racial, economic, social, religious, and political class of the people who inhabit this made-up world. Will the reader even recognise that it’s a country town if I don’t use some stereotypical imagery? How many people should wear flannel shirts? Should wildlife roam the streets? Should the roads be tarred or dirt? Do the kids wear blazers and boaters to school or polo shirts and shorts? Do they have blackboards or smartboards there? You can see the problem. Representing ‘reality’ while considering the world we ‘want’ to exist is tricky. The good thing is, we have the Overton Window to help us.

The Overton Window & plausible diversity

The Overton Window, named after Joseph P. Overton, is the range of ideas accepted in the mainstream population at any given time. New ideas that are introduced to the culture are often considered ‘unthinkable’ when they first emerge. For example, the idea of international flight in the early days of airplanes that could only travel a few kilometres was ‘unthinkable’. Over time, that same ‘unthinkable’ idea moves through a spectrum from unthinkable to radical, then acceptable, then sensible, then popular. And here we are flying around the world with ease.

A more political example of The Overton Window: the growing acceptance, in some cultures, of homosexuality. Once an unthinkable, punishable ‘offence’ in some cultures, over time it has moved toward something acceptable, most obviously with the recognition of gay marriage in some countries.

What’s this got to do with picture books? Well, it’s that diversity and equality in picture books (or any literature) isn’t an overnight fix. Ideas that move from the ‘outside’ into the mainstream, take time.

When I think about portraying diversity or equality in my books, I’m not attempting to cram each page, or scene, or country town full of as much diversity as possible in an either truly random way or somewhat controlled data-driven way. I’m not trying to make each and every character it’s own political statement. To do so fails to reckon with The Overton Window. A country town without a single white-person, or one that’s full of fancy cars where everyone eats salad is, to a reader, ‘unthinkable’ or unrealistic, because it’s not what their biases tell them is a ‘country town’. When fiction is living in that ‘unthinkable’ part of the spectrum, it’s far more difficult for a reader to build empathy with the the environment that we’re trying to create.

What we need to shoot for isn’t ‘unthinkable’, but ‘plausible’. We need to continue to shift The Overton Window, book-by-book, publisher by publisher, in subtle but meaningful ways. An accurate representation of the world we have right now is not the answer because we know it’s full of inequity already. The role of books, and literature in general, is about helping us grow as a culture, not stay the same, it’s to help us picture a world, literally, that we want to head toward. Once we make that world, the data follows.

Depicting diversity in practice

So what does good diversity look like in an Australia country town? Well, I’ve arrived at a few principles to keep in mind when I’m designing these worlds. They’ll continue to evolve as a I talk to more people and grow as a human, but perhaps they’ll be helpful to others, right now:

1. Depict at least one historically-discriminated-against or under-represented group in every book. It doesn’t need to be a single character, and a character may be a member of multiple groups.
2. Ensure that the character/s from number one are doing meaningful work. This means they aren’t a background character but, instead, they are in a position of power and they inherit everything that that comes with that: self-determination, authority, social importance, and influence.
3. Consider economic, social, political, religious, and ethnic domains of diversity. Accept that my view of diversity is itself biased. Ask questions of your characters and environments across all potential facets of discrimination, power and hierarchy:
   1. Economic: What clothes do they wear? What sort of house do they live in? Do they eat ‘healthy’ food or ‘junk’ food?
   2. Social: What gender are they? Who are they friends with? Where do they socialise?
   3. Political: What do they believe? Which side of politics do they lean on? What activities, iconography or visual aids denote left-leaning versus right-leaning in our current culture?
   4. Religious: What do they believe? Do they ‘wear’ their religion? What do they carry? What do they read? What’s in their house?
   5. Ethnic: What colour is their skin, hair, eyes? What clothes do they wear? What cuisine do they enjoy (and don’t enjoy)?
4. Consult the data, don’t be driven by it. We are biased beings. If we’re going to include ‘diversity’ into our books, we need to make sure we’ve got an objective view of what diversity is. What does ‘disabled’ mean? What does ‘foreign’ or ‘multi-cultural’ mean? What does rich and poor really mean? These questions aren’t exhaustive, there are many others, but they’re incredibly important to consider to ensure we’re challenging ourselves and using the platform we have in the most positive way possible.
5. Listen to ‘the other’. Here I am, yet another white person telling the world what I think of ‘diversity’. In the end, I’m not the Nepalese person, or the Tamil refugee. I don’t actually know what it’s like to inhabit this world as someone who isn’t me. So what’s the answer? Simple. Ask. Seek counsel from people who aren’t you. People outside of your social circle. Collaborate and elevate their voices. The world is a big place and the under-represented want every opportunity for better representation. All we have to do is listen.
6. Ask yourself, but more importantly, ask the people from the worlds you’re trying to represent, is it plausible and not unthinkable? It’s OK to make your main character white, rich, and Christian if that’s who they are; but that’s the thing, do they need to be? Is it plausible not unthinkable that your School Principal Character could be a black person? Could your plumber be non-binary? Could your doctor dress more like the visual stereotype of a farmer (flannel and dungarees) because, in many country towns, they may not wear white coats and stethoscopes, anyway? Maybe your country town baker is Muslim and makes the most beautiful middle-eastern inspired cakes?

Like the questions I pose, these principles aren’t exhaustive, but they’re a start. They’ve served me well so far and if you’re clever, you’ll find them in my books from the very beginning, even if you may not have noticed them before.

A final example: Round and Round The Garden

I have a new book coming out in February, it’s an addition to my Classic Aussie Nursery Rhyme Series. It’s not a seminal master-work, nor is the idea of if it particularly innovative. It is, at it’s most basic, just a cute nursery rhyme story for 0-3 year olds. Banal. But having consulted the data and listened to disability advocates about the support they need in the world for normalising their condition by people like me – banal, it turns out, is an immense catalyst for change. If there’s ever a time to introduce young minds to the reality of the world we live in where 4.4 million Australians have a disability, it’s through a book like this.

Yes, she’s white. But I ask, could I have put a black female in a wheelchair without making it ‘unrealistic’? Could this character have been from 3 historically-discriminated groups simultaneously? Maybe. But I’ve got the The Overton Window in mind here. For what it’s worth, I had to fight relatively hard for even this representation of diversity. In the end, I’d rather have the book in 10,000 homes because what it’s about is two siblings having a great old time on their wheels, than have a child and parent walk by it in the store because it’s just another obvious political statement or attempt at ‘token diversity’. And anyway, the book doesn’t indicate whether she’s permanently disabled or not… what did you assume?

Links to important voices

The only way we’ll begin to see through our privilege is if we listen to people from marginalised groups. These two talks, which I was lucky enough to see in-person, have and will continue to shape the way I view the world. They were massive influences for this book and my purpose as a tall, white, male author/illustrator of children’s literature.

It’s easy to look back on the decisions we’ve made or the life we’ve led and think about all of the possibilities that could have been. What if I had chosen a different path? If only I made this decision instead of that one. Every single choice we make, in hindsight, has had consequences in shaping who we are and the life we’ve led. We’re proud of some of those decisions and not so proud of others. The people we call friends, the jobs we’ve taken, the places we’ve chosen to live – all of it accumulating to shape who and where we are now. There are some choices, though, that we remember as being more significant than others.

In my case, when I was in Year 10, Mr Jordan, my art teacher, strongly encouraged me to do art for my senior years. I distinctly remember the conversation we had and his comment, “I see something in your work that I think we should develop.” Instead, I chose science – Physics, Chemistry, Biology – because it would ‘scale better’ to get into University. Once I was in university, I could do anything, right? Well, as it turns out, I went to University, stopped doing art completely, and focussed on a degree in Design (which is very different from Art, by the way). To make matters worse, Mr Jordan passed away just before I got my first publishing deal.

I can look back on that decision in two ways.

I can regret it. If only I had listened to Mr Jordan. What if I had pursued the artist’s path? What if I spent 15 years honing my craft and training my brain towards that of an artist, rather than a Designer. If only I discovered my love of watercolour in high-school. If only the world didn’t push us into tertiary careers in science and maths instead of using art to discover who we are. If only, what if.

But the other way to look at that choice is not by what it may have taken away, but what it has provided. Following the path I did led to steady work. Steady work led to a solid financial base for myself. I met some wonderful people in my Design career (including my partner) who taught me so much I would never have learned. My years in the ‘corporate day job’ taught me skills on negotiation, compromise, the importance of deadlines, it gave me the critical thinking skills to analyse new situations and make better decisions – decisions which I use everyday now that I’ve found my way back to art and, let’s be honest, have to manage a business.

The what-ifs and if-onlys in our life are the things that make us who we are. The difference between regret and thankfulness is controlled by the story we tell ourselves about those decisions, not the decisions themselves. What’s encouraging is that the way we shape that story of the life we’ve lived also works for the decisions we haven’t made yet. This means that no matter the choice we have to make tomorrow, we’re in control of the story of our lives, it’s just up to to us to write it, just the way we want to.

I painted 3 paintings yesterday, and when I look at them today, I can’t help but see they’re all terrible. But, they are less terrible than the ones I did the day before yesterday. And when I compare the ones I did the day before that to the ones I did 3 months before, or 6 months before, or 5 years before, I realise that the older the work, the worse it is. But using this logic, it also means that the work I’ve just done today, the work that, right now, I think is my best work, won’t be my best tomorrow.

Maybe feeling ashamed of old work is the point. If we don’t look back on our work and see the faults or feel embarrassed by them, then maybe we haven’t learned anything by doing that work. And really, in the end, isn’t that the whole point of this art journey – to learn with every attempt and apply those lessons to the next work? The treacherous and wonderful thing about it is that it’s an infinite game – we play to play, not to win, because tomorrow-Matt will always be a slightly better artist than yesterday’s one. All I have to do is keep making the work.

I love the Hilda graphic novels by Luke Pearson. The drawing style, the colour palette, the layouts, and the writing all work together so beautifully to create a gorgeous and engaging narrative. When I’m in the mood for pure pleasure-reading, I’ll often pick up a Hilda, never mind I’ve read each book over 10 times already, and find something new to discover, or something to linger over a little longer than before. It, to me, is a beacon; an example of what’s possible if I just worked a little harder. The curious thing about Hilda is that it’s so good it destroys my ability to create.

Maybe it’s because it shows me how far I’ve got to go with my skills in visual storytelling. It certainly increases my sense of imposter syndrome as a visual artist. It makes anything I’ve made, in comparison, look like an amateur did it. It ignites all the guilt I feel for not having gone to art school. It, in so many ways, is terrible inspiration. I love Hilda, but I never read it before I’m about to do some illustration work. It makes me seize up and takes a good day or so to recover.

Calvin and Hobbes, on the other hand, is a different story.

I love Calvin and Hobbes just as much as Hilda. It’s one of my go-to pleasure reads – over and over and over again. Like Hilda, the colour palettes, the layouts, the writing in Calvin & Hobbes all work together so perfectly that it’s another beacon of what’s possible if I just worked a bit harder. The curious thing about Calvin & Hobbes is that, for all its similarities to Hilda, it has the opposite effect on my motivation to work. After about an hour of leafing through my collection of Calvin and Hobbes, my hands get itchy for a brush. I can’t help but sketch out a few ideas I’ve made but have been too lazy to put to page. I look for an old sketch that I can spend time colouring. With Hilda, I stop making, with Calvin, I start again.

I don’t really know why any of this is. It’s not like Bill’s masterwork is any more achievable for me than Hilda. I’m still the same, clunky illustrator reading either one. I know that reading Hilda is making me a better writer and artist. And I know that Calvin and Hobbes is doing the same. As they say, to be the best, read the best. What they don’t say, however, is to spend time understanding what effect these brilliant works have on you and adapt your work habits to take advantage of them. The opposite could be catastrophic to your ability to create. And that’s the last thing any artist needs.

There are two ways to approach a person with whom we disagree, dislike, or with whom we’re storming.

The first way is to assume they’re stupid, or dumb, or toxic, or all of the above. In this mode, the easiest and most productive course of action is to walk away because, with this view, it’s the other who has to change, not us. No one enjoys being around people they detest, and life’s too short to live it in conflict. After all, there are plenty of other people in the world to spend time with who will agree with us on anything, and everything we think is true.

The second way is to assume that everyone is just doing their best. That everyone we interact with has had their own unique and diverse set of experiences that have shaped their values, their view of the world, and the relationships that they form. It requires us to believe that most people are not inherently stupid, dumb, or toxic, but that we learn behaviours based on our experiences. It requires open-mindedness and curiosity to seek the context of each other’s existence so that we can understand where the other is coming from and why. It’s only through understanding this that we can seek to change the only thing that’s under our control – our own behaviour – so that we can form relationships that are positive and beneficial for ourselves and others, no matter who the other is.

Any business, product, or service, no matter if it’s a global corporation or a sole-trading illustration freelancer, needs to solve one or more problems for someone else to keep trading. After all, that the thing that people pay for – the removal of their problems. Uber solves the problem of finding a ride home. Airbnb solves the problem of finding accommodation. Panadol solves the problem of a headache. But what problem is an illustrator solving?

At the most basic level, an illustrator may be solving an aesthetic need. Maybe a publisher or commissioner of work needs a very specific style to complement some text or create a certain mood in a public space or publication. In this case, style (and medium) is pretty important. But how does a publisher choose between two or more artists’ work whose style may create the same (or similar) mood? Maybe the commissioner has a few other problems to solve?

No one likes to work with people who make their lives harder than they need to be. After all, work can be tiring and stressful, even at the best of times. So maybe the way to differentiate is to be looking at other problems that people in publishing have. Most editors I’ve worked with juggle many books at a time, all of them on their own high-pressure deadline. Trying to keep track of things is difficult. Can an artist differentiate themselves beyond their work to help make that problem go away? What if emails were written clearly? What if expectations were set well in advance? What if things were consistently delivered on or ahead of time? What if it was easy to share progress at sales meetings? What if it was easy to print the work out when it needed to be? What if we saw art direction as a way to learn and grow rather than a controlling overlord? What if we were more transparent in our practice?

When one looks more deeply at the lives of the people we collaborate within the business of illustration, we find there are a wealth of problems to solve beyond creating the final artwork to fill an aesthetic need. Maybe the work isn’t just in creating the art, but helping the people who commission it to have a stress-free, enjoyable, and collaborative experience along the way.