The joy of creating your own stories, whatever your age - Ian McMillan

My five-year-old granddaughter Isla gave me a book she’d made the other day, because, as she said: “You like books, Grandad.”
The thing about the DIY book, or comic, or magazine or zine is that it requires no gatekeepers, says Ian.The thing about the DIY book, or comic, or magazine or zine is that it requires no gatekeepers, says Ian.
The thing about the DIY book, or comic, or magazine or zine is that it requires no gatekeepers, says Ian.
By Ian McMillan
Published 14th Aug 2021, 06:00 GMT

She’s right, I do. This one was written and illustrated by Isla and it was about a naughty koala and the adventures it got up to; I could tell that she’d been eager to move on to something else after a while because suddenly, about three-quarters of the way through, the story ended with a ringing and highly-coloured THE END.

It turned out that the thing she was eager to move onto was the making of another book, which she fished out of her bag and gave to me. This one also featured the naughty koala and I can feel a series coming on here.

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I find it so exciting and stirring when children, having been exposed to books, want to take the means of production into their own hands and start making books that, as far as they’re concerned, can sit on the shelves next to books they’ve bought from a bookshop or borrowed from a library.

As part of my West Riding junior education in the 1960s, the making of a book about whatever you were doing was an essential part of the school week. As my wife, who used to be a West Riding teacher, always says about those utopian days: “Draw it, paint it, make a book about it.”

Isla’s books, then, will take their place in the great unstoppable stream of literature being produced every day all over the world.

As we grow up, we carry on wanting to create: I used to make a comic called The Bright Spark and then I made a James Bond/Avengers spoof called Jaz and Big Shelley and then I made a science fiction epic called The Rise and Fall of the Lokan Empire and it never occurred to me that this wasn’t an eminently sensible thing to do.

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After a while, I got poems published in magazines that weren’t edited by me and eventually I got books published that I hadn’t laboriously typed out and stuck together myself but I still retain a soft spot for the home-produced volume.

The thing about the DIY book, or comic, or magazine or zine is that it requires no gatekeepers; there’s no middleman or middlewoman to edit the work you’ve created or to tell you that the plot is slack and the characters are made of the same cardboard as cereal packets.

I guess that it’s the difference between farming on an industrial scale and having your own carrot patch at the bottom of the garden. Sometimes this means that the writing could have benefitted from a bit of editing and that the production could have been slicker, but I don’t mind.

I still enjoy reading these home-produced efforts just like I enjoy home-made chutney.

So carry on making your books, Isla. Can’t wait to read what the naughty koala does next!