It is wonderful to have Johanna Bell returning to the blog (see previous post here) to share insights into her latest book What is a Splat? and how its development aligns with her life and passion for writing. The spontaneity between Johanna's words and Amelia's illustrations is delightful and full of joy.
Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of university visits with creative writing students and they often ask about my career into writing. I wish I had a neat answer but my pathway looks more like this illustration by Amelia Luscombe our recent book What is a Dot? (which was a 2025 CBCA Honour Book 😊 )
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What is a Dot? - inside spread (illustrations © Amelia Luscombe)
My first career was in social research and program evaluation but when I was in my early thirties I decided I’d had enough of research and I quit my job to start a community arts studio called StoryProjects. For the next decade, I spent most of my time working on projects that elevated new voices and stories from the Northern Territory. Because I believe the form should fit the story and not the other way around, I ended up producing all kinds of works – live performances, short animations, podcasts, audio installations, public art projects, poetry collections and picture books. Alongside the community cultural development work, I was writing picture books and working on a novel called Department of the Vanishing which came out in March this year. Shortly after, my newest picture book, What’s that Splat? illustrated by the wonderful Amelia Luscombe was released.
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What is a Dot? - What’s that Splat? - cover images
It’s the first time I’ve had a book for adults and a picture book released in the same period and it’s got me thinking about multiplicity and how separate the children’s publishing industry is from the world of adult fiction.
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What’s that Splat? - inside spread (illustrations © Amelia Luscombe)
When Walt Whitman wrote I am large, I contain multitudes I’m pretty sure he wasn’t referring to a 21st century ‘portfolio career’ (AKA a professional mixed bag of lollies AKA ‘a multipotentialite’ AKA someone who still can’t decide what they want to be when they grow up). It used to make me nervous, having so many fingers in so many creative pies, but since moving to Tasmania, I’ve become more comfortable with the idea that I’m never going to stick to one lane. Even though I’ve narrowed my practice down to writing, I’m still working across poetry, short fiction, children’s picture books and novels. And I still have hopes of strengthening my visual arts muscle and one day illustrating my own words.
There’s something about regional cities that supports multiplicity. Perhaps it’s because we don’t have the population size to allow for specialisation (and perhaps that’s true of Australia more broadly when compared with larger literary markets like Britain and the United States). Or perhaps it’s because ‘isolation breeds innovation’ and there’s no shortage of opportunities to isolate in Tasmania.
Some would say that to survive as a writer, it helps to be a polymath. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’m skilled in many areas but I am a dabbler (or some might say a dilettante). I get bored easily. I thrive on novelty and I seek out new things. I’m that person who wants to order the weirdest thing on the menu even though the wait staff give raise their eyebrows and ask ‘are you sure?’ But I’m also good at sticking with something until it’s done. That’s not to say that I pursue everything. I’ve stacks of notebooks with half-drafted children’s books which will never be published. Most of them won’t even be finished. I’d say that 90% of my written work ends up on the cutting room floor. That’s something I’ve been talking about with the uni students at UTS where I’m the 2026 writer-in-residence – the realities of writing. I get annoyed by writers who say that an idea just comes to them and they sit down and write it fluidly in one go. I know it does happen but for most of us it’s much slower and less linear. For example, What’s that Splat? which has less than 150 words was revised so many times I lost count. Amelia and I both love playful mark making and we wanted to create a sister book for What is a Dot?. I can’t remember how the idea for our second book came to us but we were both pretty excited about creating a Rorschach-like book for kids. Amelia and I are the kind of people who are constantly seeing creatures in the clouds or animals in the knots of tree trunks. I was found a piece of bark that looked like a Doberman and a Bulldog having a perplexing conversation. 😊
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Piece of bark (image credit Johanna Bell)
But I digress. The first version of the What’s that Splat? manuscript was scores of rhyming couplets. Most of them were pretty awful but the ones I liked I sent to Amelia (who lives in Rubibi/Broome) and she started on the illustrations. This is my favourite part of the picture book making process because it inevitably leads to surprises and playful conversations. I should say here that Amelia and I co-created the book. This is quite different to the traditional picture book publishing approach where an author submits a manuscript and once it’s complete it’s then sent to the illustrator. In the latter, the author often doesn’t see the illustrations until they’re complete. With co-creation you back and forth a lot informing each other’s work.
It’s always a privilege to work closely with an illustrator and I find the process improves my writing as I get to see how my words are working (and not working!) with the images. During the development of What’s that splat? some of my favourite rhyming couplets didn’t work because the concepts were too abstract or the difference in visual scale was too great. Amelia and I worked out that even though the couplets described antonyms, the illustrations had to be part of the same world for the spreads to cohere. For example, the below spreads worked because while they were opposites, they were also of the same world.
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Spreads from What’s that Splat? (illustrations © Amelia Luscombe)
And then there were couplets that I wasn’t that excited about until Amelia brought them to life through her illustrations. Like this spread
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Spread from What’s that Splat? (illustrations © Amelia Luscombe)
And this one!
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Spread from What’s that Splat? (illustrations © Amelia Luscombe)
But we both knew this one was always going to be lots of fun.
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Spread from What’s that Splat? (illustrations © Amelia Luscombe)
Like its sister book What is a dot? this book ends with a provocation for the young reader to create their own artwork.
And now, what will
this next splat be?
It’s up to you.
What can you see?
We hope it will spur children and grownups to enjoy some splatty silliness because ‘sometimes a splat is just a splat but sometimes a splat is much more than that!’
Find out more about What’s that Splat?
Find out more about the illustrator on Instagram
Johanna Bell
Tasmanian author
W: https://www.johannabell.com/
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