So You Want to Write a Picture Book

So you want to write a picture book? I am just into my teens as a picture book writer. Still spotty, gangly and slightly awkward in writerly terms. I’ve been slogging away, learning my craft, for about thirteen or fourteen years and I consider that time to be my apprenticeship in the business. It was about ten years in before I got my first picture book acceptance, although along the way I had stories published in magazines and e-mags. I have a picture book on the shelves now, (The Big Beet, Scholastic, 2013) and a book due out next year (Sally Snickers’ Knickers, Walker Books, 2014) but I’m still learning and I guess I always will be. However, I am happy to pass on a few things I’ve gleaned from my experience. Writing for Children is Easy. Yeah, right. Picture books may appear to be a cute, quick exercise for the would-be writer. I’ve heard people say, ‘I want to write. I think I’ll just write a kids’ book first because that will be easier.’ Hmmm, good luck with that. Writing for children isn’t easy and, though surprising to some, writing a picture book is particularly difficult. Word Count In general, picture books are no longer than 1000 words, though more often between 500 to 700 words. A good picture book can even be 300 words or less. The Big Beet is 650 words. The Story Your picture book should have a beginning, middle and end, just like any other story. The challenge is to fit all that into 500 words or so. For that reason, every word must count. You need to audition your words, make them earn their place in your manuscript. If there is a better word out there, find it, pay it whatever it is asking, and employ it in your manuscript. You need the very best cast if you are going to direct your picture book onto the publishing stage, get past opening night, and enjoy a long and successful run My advice is to start off by writing your story, put in everything you want to say, and then cut most of it out  • Amputate all unnecessary adjectives and adverbs. • Extract the unnecessary descriptions. Remember, this is a picture book, description is pretty much the illustrator’s job. • Pull out two or three words if they can be replaced with one. Be succinct. The Three Rs Picture books should have RHYTHM. They are the Rock ’n’ Rollers of the book world. Sometimes, they might also have RHYME, and most times, like a great rock ’n’ roll song, they will have REPETITION. If you research ‘getting a picture book published’ you will probably find warnings, in big red letters, with a skull and crossbones (well, maybe not the crossbones) that say EDITORS HATE RHYME – Rhymers will be prosecuted (or unpublished, whichever comes first). And there is actually a good reason for these dire warnings. Bad rhyme sucks. And good rhyme is difficult to do. There is a lot to learn about rhyming and I certainly can’t give even my limited knowledge of it here, but the most important thing to remember is: DO NOT FORCE YOUR RHYME. Rhyme is like a stubborn teenager. If it doesn’t want to fit, don’t try to make it. Don’t jiggle the words in your sentence around just so that they rhyming word ends up at the end. It will sound stilted and forced. And do take into account where the emphasis falls in a word. Handle doesn’t rhyme with expel. Similar endings, sure, but the emphasis in handle is hand and the emphasis in expel is ex. It would be like putting a lion in the giraffe’s pen simply because they have similar tails. Where to Start? Where should your story begin? The beginning of course, I hear you say. You did say it, I heard you! But…once you’ve written out your story you may find that the action starts in the middle. What comes before it may be simply ‘set-up’. You can’t afford too much set-up in a picture book. Your readers are 3 – 8 year olds. If they don’t see something interesting by page 3, you’ve lost them. In the first sentence or paragraph, or at least the first or second spread, GRAB your reader by the lapels, shake him and say “Look! How cool is this book? You’ll LOVE it!” Point of View What about who is telling the story? Is it a 3rd person narrator? Would your story benefit from being told by one of the characters instead? Whatever point of view you decide upon, stick with it throughout the story. Don’t change about and confuse your reader. Tense Another thing you shouldn’t change (unless you’re doing flashback segments – unlikely in a picture book) is the tense. Choose the tense that works best for your story (try different ones if your story isn’t quite working) but keep it consistent throughout. Ideas Ideas for picture books can come from anywhere – a snippet of conversation overheard at the bus stop; a funny or poignant image you witnessed; even a few words of text that pop into your head and stubbornly run around until you write them down. Ideas are plentiful, but using them in a unique and exciting way is the challenge. Back off! Step away from the manuscript. Put down your pen. Lay your keyboard at your feet and slowly back away. Put your manuscript in a virtual (or literal) bottom drawer and work on something else for awhile. Of go and have a life outside of your manuscript for a bit. Give yourself a week or two, or even a month or two, and after you have let your masterpiece brew for that time, pull it out and pretend you are a judge on MasterChef. Is your manuscript risen like proudly puffed-up dough, full-bodied and ready for the publishing oven? Or is it a flat, uninteresting pancake, lacking in flavour and in fermentation? It is more than likely to be somewhere in between these two extremes. Tweak what needs to be tweaked. Read it ALOUD. Have someone else read it ALOUD to you. That’s when you will hear the clunks in your text. And if you don’t hear any clunks, but only sweet, rhythmic sounds that caress your ears and your heart? Then, send it off to a publisher and start work on your next book.