'Write your own adventures, too'

 

“I wrote about a bird that cleaned a crocodile's teeth. The story was so good that my teacher could not believe that a ten-year-old could write that well. I was even punished because my teacher thought I'd lied about writing it! I had always loved to write, but it was then that I realized that I had a talent for it.” –  Brian Jacques

 

Born in Liverpool, England on June 15, 1939 Jacques was reading by age 5, devouring  novels like Kidnapped and series’ like The Wind in the Willows.  His vivid imagination combined with his love of animals and study of their habits led to him regularly write about them by age 10, creating pieces like the one noted above.  Ultimately, he became a full-time children’s book writer.

 

Jacques authored nearly 50 books in his lifetime (he died in 2011) with 31 of them in his multi-award winning Redwall series.  The Redwall books portray an intricate animal-based world, ranging from peaceful mice, badgers, voles, hares, moles and squirrels to “bad guy” rats, weasels, ferrets, snakes and stoats – often caught up in battles for survival.

 

Barely alluding to the surrounding human civilization, the Redwall books are populated with animal “heroes” who write their own literature, draw their own maps, and share a world most humans might envy.

“Sometimes, I get ideas from dreams,” he said about his animal world.   “But mostly my stories are based on adventures that I, or my friends, actually lived.  Write yours, too.”