The Wrong Shoes: A Blog by Tom Percival

Sometimes I get asked what inspired me to write The Wrong Shoes, but as with most things in life, answering that questions isn’t quite as simple as it might seem. There was no singular ‘moment’ that led to me deciding to write this book, or to explore the subject matter of childhood poverty, it’s more a case of multiple overlapping situations, experiences and passions that eventually led to it feeling almost inevitable.

When I was young, we lived in a caravan for a few years and there were times as I was growing up when my family didn’t have much money, so I can relate to some of what Will feels, but having said that, The Wrong Shoes is in no way autobiographical—Will is a fictional character living in a very contemporary setting that’s far removed from the 1990’s, when I was Will’s age. Back then, I received a grant to help me attend university, there were no tuition fees, libraries weren’t being closed, and housing and general living costs were all FAR smaller slices of a family’s monthly income. Today’s situation is worse in all these areas, and children from financially insecure families run the risk of sinking under the weight of the pressures they face. Over the last 14 years I’ve watched an already bad financial situation for millions of families get steadily worse under austerity, and support systems that were in place, which I personally benefitted from were eroded or completely removed. That’s heart-breaking to me — I can easily imagine how different my life would have been without the support and assistance that I received, and that is exactly what is happening for young people today. So yeah, sure I was creative, driven and keen, but all the drive and perseverance in the world is unlikely to work on its own—we ALL need a helping hand from time to time, and I believe that as a society we should be striving to help support all young people achieve their potential.

I think that it’s important to cover topics like this in children’s books, to sensitively illustrate challenging situations like this because books can act as both windows and mirrors. Books enable us to see into lives we have no awareness of, and they also can reflect our own situations back at us, making us feel seen and validated. I hope that any child who read this book and is currently struggling in any way, will take Will’s resilience, determination and hope to heart and will keep going, keep working as hard as they can to do the best that they can, despite the obvious unfairness of life. It’s also my hope that any children who read this book and don’t have any personal experience of Will’s situation might be able to reflect upon the additional challenges that Will faces, and by extension, the situations that some of their peers will be struggling with.

The major influences in my work tend to depend on the project that I happen to be working on. Over the course of my career so far, I’ve created work that is fun, lively and frivolous as well as work that starts with whatever message I am trying to communicate. Both routes are totally valid and will engage readers in different ways at different times. But having said all that, I do feel that the best work is that which can combine both things. Bearing all that in mind, I think the one thing that’s inspired me to try to create work that is accessible, relatable and has a depth of emotion and ‘truth’ to it is the comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes, by Bill Watterson. From the first moment that I picked up one of those comic books, I LOVED it! The depiction of Calvin’s vivid imagination, the wild energy in the illustrations, the sense of fun, optimism and adventure just totally gripped me and what Bill Watterson is able to do in sometimes just three small panels can equal works of far greater volume for human truth and emotion. In short, I love Calvin and his tiger Hobbes. Although I have to say that somewhere along the line (I’m not sure exactly where...) I started to see myself more like Calvin’s Dad than Calvin. That’s time for you, I guess... Anyway, if you’ve never explored these comics then I would urge that you do.

In terms of choosing what subjects to write about, again, it depends on the individual project. With the Big Bright Feelings picture books, I always start with something that I can see as being an emotional challenge that a child is likely to come up against, and I choose themes that are likely to be as broad as possible so that the books will be useful to whoever picks them up. That was why in Ruby’s Worry I choose not to specify that she was worried about starting school, or an argument between her parents as that would have turned the book into a single-issue book. We never find out what Ruby was worried about, because fundamentally, it doesn’t matter to the story. The book is about the concept of worry as a whole and how to deal with that feeling. So yes, my picture books often start with a ‘problem’, but with long-form writing, like The Wrong Shoes, the theme develops slowly. It sometimes feels a bit like archaeology, as if I’m uncovering something that’s’ already there and eventually the idea reveals itself and then becomes fully apparent.

I have to say that I spend a lot of my ‘writing’ time, NOT writing—a lot of that time is spent walking my dog, or going to the gym, or just getting on with my daily life, while all these thematic points bubble around in my head until I arrive at something that I feel DESPERATE to write about and explore, and that’s when I sit down and start typing.