by Geoff Fox
On Monday morning, June 23, kids in the Adventures in Friendship program at Martha’s House got to learn how a local author and illustrator created Remi the Dino.
Hannah Wolfe of Needmore sat in on the camp telling the kids how she came up with the dinosaur. She also took questions from the youngsters.
After answering the campers’ questions, Wolfe read the short book to the kids, and then posed for pictures with the kids.
photo by Geoff Fox
Wolfe said she really liked writing when she was younger and considered it a hobby. She also entered writing contests at her school as well. There were only 18 kids in her grade.
“It wasn’t really a contest, but winning those kind of gave the edge of ‘oh, we’re decent at this, we can do this. Maybe this should be a hobby’,” she said.
One of the contests was a scholarship contest through Mellott Company where students had to do a senior project to interview for the scholarship.
There were five or six different pillars, with one being respect. Wolfe thought she could expand on that.
That started her thinking of how to incorporate the concept into the whole scheme of things with younger kids as her fellow classmates were gearing their projects to kids their age and adults.
“I don’t vibe with them quite as well,” Wolfe said. “So I decided that I would do something with our elementary school students.”
At some point, Wolfe decided to turn the concept and the project into her own book.
While Wolfe had written poetry before, this was her first book and it only took about a month to a month and a half to write the book and have Amazon publish it.
The writing part, she said, was the easiest part, but being close to the deadline to have the book completed, Wolfe said she hustled to get the book done.
She said she started putting pen to paper, writing a vague outline and drawing everything first.
“If I wrote it first, the pictures weren’t going to align the way I wanted them to and we were going to have too many pages,” she said.
Once the pictures were drawn and finalized, Wolfe said she did sketch notes of what each page would have. Afterwards, she went back and typed everything.
Wolfe said she only rewrote the words two times rather than the normal 20 times.
The book is called Remi the Dino. It was her interest in dinosaurs that led Wolfe to use dinosaurs.
“I never grew out of whole the liking dinosaurs thing,” she said.
It seemed like there was at least one kid in each classroom that likes dinosaurs, she added.
Wolfe finds it easy to draw dinosaur compared to other animals, she said.
The book’s story features Remi, a dinosaur who struggles in school with other dinosaurs making fun of him for being different. He’s also autistic and is attempting to make friends when a new dinosaur – Lilo — moves to the neighborhood.
Lilo gets along with Remi as she, too, is struggling, and they help support each other in an environment not meant for them.
Wolfe said there are ideas for follow up books.
Wolfe offered a bit of advice to kids or anyone else who might be interested in publishing a book.
“Just do it,” she said. “There’s no point in pushing it off.”
She said the first draft is supposed to be the worst and that’s its entire job — to make the book exist. You can always go back and make it better.
Remi the Dino is currently available on Amazon by searching for the title or Wolfe’s name.
It may be available in Hancock stores in the near future.