Working at an aviation museum during university taught Kate Beaton how to keep readers engaged in her storytelling.Illustration by Katarzyna Sawejko
Cartoonist Kate Beaton, the bestselling creator of Hark! A Vagrant and Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, has perfected the art of succinct, spunky text. In this week’s How I Spent My Summer, the writer and comic artist tells us how a summer of bland aviation history taught her to quit rambling and get to the point.
I thought I was going to go into museum studies, so I always worked in museums – first as a teenager at An Drochaid in Cape Breton and then at Shearwater Aviation Museum in Halifax during university. My roommates and I were scouring the job bank when we found it, and because I had two summers of museum experience and I was studying history and English and anthropology, my résumé was stacked.
As the summer archivist, I made $11 an hour compared to the $5.50 I’d made before. I had dollars in my eyes the whole time, like Scrooge McDuck. I spent most of my time in the archives with the real archivist – who is still there, by the way, her name is Christine – basically doing data entry and eating chocolates. Christine always brought in chocolates for the guests, but I couldn’t stop myself so I stole one every time she left the room.
The summer Julian Brave NoiseCat got his first taste of storytelling
Every time a new item arrived – papers, books, uniforms, paraphernalia – it had to be put in the system in a specific way. I had to learn certain archive programs, but this was, like, 2002, so computer programs were changing so fast that we couldn’t keep up. We were trying to move information from index cards to the computer, but by the time we finished that program would be obsolete. Surely every one of them is long gone.
The museum had all these old vintage planes but it wasn’t the Maritime Museum and it was kind of out of the way, so there were mostly two kinds of visitors: keen people who had some military connection, like a grandpa who flew planes in World War One, and bored kids from summer camps on field trips.
I have two kids now, aged three and five, so I understand museums can be frustrating places for kids. At Shearwater they obviously want to get in the planes and touch them and pretend to fly them, but they weren’t allowed. We had a single flight simulator game – an old one from the 1980s which no one would be interested in except it was the only one – and the kids would fight each other to play it.
Whenever I had a break I’d read one of the museum’s many books, so soon I knew enough about planes to give tours. You’d think the military people were harder to give the tour to but no, it was the kids who were tough customers. Whenever they were getting bored I’d have a little fun with them. We had some mannequins dressed up in uniforms so I’d say, “Sometimes we arrive in the morning and all these guys have moved.” Then you’d have their attention.
Kids were obviously bored, but adults are just the same. I’d watch closely and I became especially interested in the way the public interacted with the information. If you go into a museum and it’s just a bunch of plaques on the wall, you’re probably not going to be too interested. Even for the people who are super interested, most don’t have 60 hours and the attention span to read everything.
Most of the time, you have one chance to say what you need to say and as quickly as you can before the person walks away. I realized it’s not just what we say but how we say it that makes a huge difference.
I took this lesson with me when I wrote Hark! A Vagrant. I had basically the same task: Take a subject, find what’s interesting, jump in immediately and get to the point.
This is especially true when you’re writing for kids, because you have to work hard to get their attention and make and keep the material engaging. As soon as they’re bored, you’ve lost them. As soon as you lecture or talk down to them, they’re gone.
As told to Rosemary Counter