Deleted Scenes

The truth about The Truth About Penguins is that almost the entire original manuscript was deleted in the course of the long rewriting process.

When I originally wrote the manuscript it was not in the form of a story but rather a series of connected vignettes, along the lines of:

The truth about penguins …

is they don’t all dress like that, not always.

When they’re at home, they wear spots and stripes, and hula skirts.

Sometimes they stay in their pyjamas all day.

The truth about penguins …

 is they don’t even like the cold. The ice is slippery and the wind makes their beaks hurt.

 Every chance they get, they escape to tropical beaches, and lie in the sun, wearing cunning disguises.

The truth about penguins …

is they’re not really good at swimming. When they have to go in the water, they use floaties and kickboards.

Some of them won’t even put their faces in.

Although I really liked what I came up with, it had some problems. Firstly, as I noted above, it wasn't really a story. There was no narrative to draw the reader in and no real forward movement. Also, it played off the assumption that child readers already knew the 'facts' about penguins, that these were common knowledge, and this would not necessarily be the case for the age group that forms the picture book audience.

I didn't think about these things at the time. I just liked what I had. So I sent it to my editor. And every now and then I poked her a little and asked her whether she had read it, and what she thought. For such is the stuff of the author-editor relationship. And she said things like they were still looking at it, still thinking about it and so on. Which is not necessarily a good sign. But then one day we had a conversation in which she confessed that every time she picked it up, it made her laugh, and so she would put it back down for another look, rather than going ahead and rejecting it. There was something there that she liked and that was enough for her to hang onto it, pass it around the office to various people, and eventually come back to me with some suggestions which were instrumental in making it the story it is today.