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This month the Snappsy team (me, illustrator Tim Miller, editor Joanna Cárdenas, and art director Denise Cronin) delivered a series of webinars for the Inland Northwest region of SCBWI. It was incredibly interesting for me to see the process from everyone else's points of view, and it all reiterated the fact of publishing that I've always known: worry about the parts you can control, and trust that the rest of your team will do their part.
As part of the webinar series, I did some picture book critiques for participants. I love critiquing! There's so much you can learn from looking critically at other people's stories (one of the reasons I believe critique groups are so crucial to growing as a writer). Doing a bunch of picture book critiques in two weeks got me thinking about common issues in manuscripts.
Plot: Usually you want the action or tension to progressively get worse (or more tense, or more chaotic) as the story progresses. The pickle your main character is in should go: oh no, that's bad, that's even worse, oh boy that's really super bad, how will they ever get out of this, phew it all worked out. That "how will they ever get out of this?" part is probably the hardest, and the one that will make your story go from good to great. Figuring out a conclusion that is unpredictable but totally satisfying is important. For an example of a ramped-up plot done to perfection, check out Greg Pizzoli's Good Night Owl.
Character: In novels, you want the character to grow and change by the end of the book, but that doesn't always apply to a picture book. Sometimes it does, like in Horrible Bear! by Ame Dyckman and Zachariah OHora. Whether your character goes through a fundamental change by the end of the book or not, you want your main character to be relatable. Sure, your character might be a worm or a pigeon, but they should have a temperament, emotional structure, and predicament that readers will see themselves in. Make sure your main character is full and real. If your story takes place during one bedtime in June, what led up to that bedtime? You don't have to write that into the story, but it's important you know what it is. Sometimes something as simple as "This wasn't the first time Timmy had tried to sabotage the bedtime routine" can hint at what's come before we turn to page one.
Read-aloud-ability and Voice: Yes, it's awkward to read your manuscript out loud to your ficus. Yes, you have to do it. There are plenty of phrases which make sense in a grownup book but sound like you're Mistress Primweather if you read it out loud to a 4-year-old. And while I will always shout that kids can handle big issues in their books, they are kids. Have you ever had a kid tell you a knock knock joke that she just made up thirty seconds ago? Kids don't talk or think like adults. Which is awesome. Don't talk down to kids, but acknowledge their kid imagination and outlook. Look at a book like This is Not a Valentine by Carter Higgins and Lucy Ruth Cummins for an example of writing in kid language. Make your book stand out by making it uniquely you. Don't be afraid to play around with imagery and extreme silliness. This isn't a legal brief, it's a kid's book.
Tone: Sometimes the tone or theme of a manuscript can seem all over the map. Is this story about Callie the Cat or Blurko the Robot she meets on her morning walk? Is it about trying to find your very best friend, or about always being true to yourself? Inconsistency is a totally normal place for a draft of a picture book to be, and the advice I always give is the one given to me by my writer pal Elizabeth Stevens Omlor: write a pitch for your story. Write a few sentences to pitch your story, paste them right into your document, and refer to them to see if everything in the story matches that pitch. This technique has saved many of my early manuscripts. I made a whole video about how to write a pitch, if you want more info or want to watch eight minutes of me talking about pitches.
Lessons: I was doing a Skype during World Read Aloud Day and a boy asked me "will you ever do a 'Lessons Learned' book?" Once I figured out he wasn't talking about a series of books I'd never heard of, I answered, strongly, "No." There are plenty of great books that teach about sharing, friendship, kindness, and love. But I think if you are writing your picture book specifically to teach kids the importance of brushing their teeth, kids might not like it. If you're trying to make them laugh and they learn some tooth knowledge along the way? Then you have Open Wide! Tooth School Inside by Laurie Keller, and you are awesome. I'm not talking about non-fiction here, I'm talking about fiction. I see a lot of stories that start from the premise of "every picture book should have a lesson" and then the story is not very fun. If a lesson comes along for the ride? Sure. But start out first telling a compelling, relatable, excellent story. No one wants to be didactically lectured to, and especially not kids.
Art Notes: Sometimes I see a picture book manuscript with a lot of art notes in it. Most of the time, all of them can be deleted. Even if the first note is "art note: Buster is a cat," and that's important to the story, you can always incorporate that information in your query letter pitch ("Buster Flies to Mars is the story of a cat who builds the perfect space ship out of tuna" or whatever). But if you have an art note after most or all of your paragraphs, you're going to look like someone who will have trouble giving control of the illustrations over to the illustrator. I think one or two art notes that clarify an element crucial to the story but not clear in the text are fine, but no more. Agents and editors get hundreds of submissions every month. You want to look like someone who understands how the process works. Delete your art notes. (Side note: if you're a non-illustrating author who has an idea for a very spare picture book, how do you convey what you see happening if the only word on the page is "BALL!"? Linda Ashman has an incredibly helpful document that shows how she submitted her amazing book Rain, which was illustrated by Christian Robinson. But that's a totally different scenario than a 400-700 word picture book.)
Remember also that picture books can take so many forms. Some barely have any words, and some are poems with no specific story, but which evoke a feeling. Some show what happens in one morning, and some show what happens over a year. The most important thing you can do to understand picture books and picture book structure is to read one hundred picture books, and then read one hundred more. Read picture books that have been published in the last five years. Think about what you like and what you don't. Read books out loud. Copy the text of a favorite picture book in your notebook, by hand, to get a sense of how the words play off of each other.
Read enough and you will absorb the elements for what makes for a successful picture book, and then you'll be able to do the most important thing with your own writing: trust your gut. When you first write a picture book draft, your feeling will probably be, "This is the best thing I've ever written!" (It might also be "this is maybe okay" or "this isn't working but I need to at least finish this draft"). Then you put it aside and think about it for a while. Come back to it a few weeks later, and treat it like one of your critique partners wrote it. What's working? What's not? And, most importantly, what does your gut say? Does the story feel too long? Is your main character too bratty? Does the language seem clunky? Pay attention to those feelings. Yes, it'll be work to fix them, but that's what writers do. You may need to mull it over and come back to it a few weeks later. Some stories come quickly and some take years. Sometimes you end up putting a story away for a year or two until you're a better writer who can tackle that particular manuscript. Trust the process, and trust in your ability to make the story the best it can be.