How to Really Leave Room for the Illustrator
in a picture book
Something you hear a lot if you’re writing picture books but not illustrating them is: make sure you leave room for the illustrator. And then often there’s an example like: “don’t describe your character; there’s no reason to write ‘Becky was a small girl with pigtails and freckles.’” (Also no: “Becky greeted the day with a grin. [art: Becky is a small girl with pigtails and freckles.]”)
And definitely don’t describe Becky, but Not Describing Becky is a PB 101 method of leaving room for the illustrator.
What if you REALLY want to leave room for the illustrator? What if you want to give the illustrator enough space to include a parallel story in the illustrations? Maybe the story in the illustrations underscores the text, or maybe subverts it. The illustrations might take the world of your text and build an additional rich world around it, like your text is a boat with all the characters on it and the illustrations are the ocean and the land that’s just visible on the horizon.
Does there always need to be a whole other story happening in the illustrations? No. The illustrations and the text can work together to hold each other up, each telling the same story. That’s totally fine! And great! (Again, as long as you’re Not Describing Becky.)
But what if we do want to write a picture book text that allows the illustrator to totally run with it and draw illustrations that show additional, unwritten story?
One possibility is spare text and extensive art notes, as in the famous example of Linda Ashman’s Rain, illustrated by Christian Robinson. I always point to Ashman’s helpful info (under the “Extra—For Writers” at the bottom of the page) about how she did the art notes for Rain when people ask me how to format a low-word-count text.
Leaving room for the illustrator is something I think about a lot,1 but I’ve been thinking about it even more because I just read (and bought) We Were Tired of Living in a House by Liesel Moak Skorpen, illustrated by Doris Burns (thanks to E.B. Goodale for the recommendation). In the book, four siblings leave their house to live in a variety of other places. I’m not going to say much more in case you haven’t read it, but the book could have been illustrated in an entirely different way (a way that would more directly show what the text was saying), and it would have been another book. So how do you write a book like that? (Besides just: write a great book.)
You might start by writing a story and then taking out anything that could be illustrated.
So maybe you have a first draft that describes a lot, like this:
Froggy woke up and stretched. He looked out the window of his little dwelling, which was made out of the stump of a tree. It was a good day for his trip to the market. He packed the brown satchel he had made out of an acorn, took three pebbles for good luck, and started out on the path to the market.
You look that over and can picture it all, since you described it. But you don’t need to use your precious picture book word count describing things. This is the first draft, and you wrote it for yourself, and now, to make it a picture book and leave room for the illustrator, you take out all of the description (as you realize that, by describing Froggy’s house, you are just about Describing Becky).
It was a good day for a trip to the market. Froggy packed his satchel, took three pebbles for good luck, and started out on the path to the market.
Better, perhaps.
There is also the option I call “illustrator draws perfect ending.” That’s where you’re more obviously handing the baton to the artist, saying, “hey, I trust you to fill in these blanks.”
That might be something like:
Froggy packed his bag, including this.
And this.
And this thing he would surely need.
And started on the path to the market.
The path did not look like it normally did.
But some of that gets tricky, if you, the author, need those mysterious bits in order to build your story. As tempted as I am sometimes to write words that would casually put the entirety of the story-making in the illustrator’s hands, I do, in fact, want to have some idea of what my book even is before I send it out.
Taking Out Things That Could Be Illustrated and Illustrator Draws Perfect Ending are, let’s say, PB 201 and PB 350 in the curriculum we are making up to become excellent picture book authors. But if we really want to leave room for the illustrator, we need to move on to PB 502, Poetry and Feelings (or maybe it’s just PB 502: Vibes).
You can write a story, one where the words are poetic and evocative, and where the text is, in many ways, a bucket of feelings. I’ve talked plenty before about how good writing is a transference of emotion, and so it makes sense that when you’re writing a picture book, you will need to first transfer that emotion to the illustrator before you both hand it to the reader. (A bonus is that poetic language is fun to read aloud.)
So, if we rewrite Froggy’s story to be all poetic feelings (and this is colored by the way I write—OBVIOUSLY there are thousands of ways to write a poem):2
Froggy dreamed of rain. He always dreamed of rain before a market day.
But he awoke to the scent of cinnamon and the subtle hum of a breeze.
It was a perfect day to go to the market.
He packed his bag and his three pebbles for good luck. He patted his statue for good luck. He winked at himself in the mirror for good luck, and then felt strange about it. Did he really need all of this good luck? Probably not. He would have to share some of his luck with the others he met on the path that led to the busy, jumbled market stalls.
A flurry of wings here, a tinkling of bells there, and he could see the canvas roofs in the valley below.
Froggy took a deep breath. It was time.
Ok. Is that great? No. But it is better than the others. I will confess that I did not preplan any of these Froggy stories but just wrote them as they came (from a superstition of not wanting to use any of my actual story ideas in an essay like this, even if it’s one I haven’t looked at in years). Certainly it could have more poetry and more emotion in it, but I found, while writing, that the story kept showing itself to me, the next line presenting, since I had accessed that vein of poetry and emotion. Here is a Froggy who thinks he needs good luck, and is also a little embarrassed by adding that last good luck ritual, so maybe this is something he’s never done before. He needs good luck on this market trip. But that’s about the story. What have we left for the illustrator?
Well, first of all, what smells like cinnamon?
What does the rest of his house look like, if he has a statue, a mirror, and three pebbles?
Is the flurry of wings one bird? Many birds? Butterflies? Children wearing costume wings?
Where are the bells? Is someone wearing them? Is it a marching band? Are they the bells on the door of a shop, that ring when the door is opened?
Let’s try another, without all of the iterations (and without Froggy). Just poetry and feeling.
One strand, then two, a point here, and then there.
A spider builds a web.
But this is not a good place.
Alas.
She tries again. This will be a good place, with this post, and this beautiful hulking shape.
A line here, and here. A web.
Oh dear.
What about here?
Gosh, no.
Here? Heavens.
What about? Yes. This is the place. One strand, then two. A line here, and then here.
A spider builds a web.
Just right.
Perfect.
And now she waits. The breeze blows her gently. She is patient.
Theoretically.
She knows she is supposed to be patient.
But it has taken a long time to get this web built, and now, she is hungry, and has nothing to eat, not yet.
What if?
Yes, there is a snack. There are other ways of getting dinner, besides catching it in a web.
Delicious.
There is a story in the words here, yes, but a lot of space for something else to be happening in the illustrations. I can picture generally where this spider is making a web and why they seem like good options but turn out to be terrible, but I don’t know, really, where she’s building her webs. The illustrator could show me.3
Now is a good time to tell you that the way my brain works is that I get extremely wrapped up in the musicality of the words, in the story, in the characters, and in the jokes. I do not tend to think about the illustrations until much later. My process is to get the story down first, with maybe a dim thought balloon hovering nearby reminding me that this will be illustrated. And then, once I have the story down, I go through and think about what could possibly be happening on each page.4
It helps to remember that my job, as the author, is to create a story that has room for layers. Given the format of a picture book (fewer than 800 words, plus illustrations), it doesn’t make sense to build all of the layers of the story into the text alone. The parts—text, pictures, page turns, endpapers, cover, size, paper quality—need to work together to create the entire work of art.
My job is the words.
It would be unprofessional to write a story that didn’t trust that the illustrator would do their whole thing with the second half. The trick is to write it until I can feel the whisper of another story underneath it all, and then stop before I write what that whisper is saying.
It’s always such a magical gift, to write words and then have someone else create pictures to go with them. That moment when I get sent sketches and get to see what the full story is (or, in the case of Snappsy the Alligator (Did Not Ask to Be in This Book), who the narrator is) is one of the best parts of writing books. Take it seriously, and have fun. And don’t describe Becky.
Thoughts and Links
For the past two years, we’ve done the Short Story Project as a way of playing around with story and picture book creation. I am creating a different challenge this year, mostly because I think we’re all feeling the need to get further away from our screens. So, coming next month for paying subscribers, there will be a new writing project about playing around with story, but one that won’t include reading short stories on the internet. I’m excited about it!
Did you hear about the fox stealing shoes in Grand Teton National Park?
Author Amie McNee went on Jay Shetty’s (huge) podcast and it didn’t affect her book sales at all. I think this is good news, actually. Don’t worry so much about trying to market yourself into a big break, and just focus on writing great books.
Pardon me for linking you to Instagram, but maybe, like me, you’ll feel better after watching (and rewatching) comedian Kyla Cobbler telling us to get furious and jacked.
Books I read recently and loved
Disclosure: book links in this newsletter are affiliate links to Bookshop.org, a site which supports independent bookshops.
Cranky, Crabby Crow (Saves the World) by Corey R. Tabor gets major points for surprising me. I didn’t expect THAT.
Nose to Nose by Thyra Heder is a masterpiece. No surprise there. All of her books are. Who knew dogs were saying quite that much in their pee? Thyra did.
Two books for grownups I read and loved this month: Disappoint Me by Nicola Dinan, and The Road to Tender Hearts by Annie Hartnett.
as part of my regular everyday Thinking About Picture Books
picture book idea: There Are Thousands of Ways to Write a Poem
This story is brought to you by the spider who built a web across my back steps, so I started the day by inadvertently walking through it and apologizing profusely, and the spider who built a web between my steering wheel and radio, which was perhaps a lovely place to make a little web, but was almost as distracting as using a phone while driving, so I had to gently relocate that spider.
to avoid another PB 101 mishap: text where the illustrations would essentially be the same on every page, like characters talking, or a flower alone in a field contemplating its existence
As an illustrator, I can't tell you how much I appreciate this post! Gratuitous art notes are my biggest pet peeve (and can even turn me off a manuscript entirely). I love that the author is passionate about their story and has a vision, but once I read an art note I can't unread it. They're like a big giant wall that's been put up preventing me from bringing my own ideas to the table.
Great tips in here (and some lovely book recs)! Thank you