Mel’s Tips on Writing Picture Books (Fiction) for Efrat

Things to Consider Embracing

Advice and tips are just advice and tips. Sometimes they are helpful. Sometimes they can be ignored. Sometimes they are controversial. Here are my own. Feel free to choose.

A picture book that children fall in love with will accompany them all their lives. Madeline by Bemelmans has been a part of me since I was three or four. I want to have that effect on just a few children. You should want that to.

Have reasonable expectations. Very few people make money writing children’s books and a lot of people lose money. Don’t dream of making money. Dream of writing the best story that you can.

Read hundreds of children’s books. Seriously. Don’t be afraid of getting ideas and inspiration from other people’s books. We all do.

Embrace revision. Manuscripts often need to be revised dozens of times. If your manuscript seems perfect the first time you write it, it isn’t. Wait a few days and read it again.

Read your story aloud. It’s meant to be read aloud. Consider how the words sound, as well as what they mean. Have someone read the story out loud to you and take notes.

Kids love humor, exaggeration, irony, silliness, nonsense and general ridiculousness. Get lost in your old five-year old self. Have fun. If you’re stuck, make funny faces in the mirror. Do a little dance. Bark.

Stories should go from A to B. Some great stories go from A to B and then back to A’. Not all stories have a classic plot. But still, something should happen.

Leave room for the readers to interpret your story and make it their own. Leave room for the illustrator to make the visual magic happen.

Discover and reveal the empathy in your main character(s). If you do, then perhaps the reader will as well.

Surprise the readers. Think between the boxes. Make unexpected connections and twists. Kids love them.

Create a fictional world and then live within its boundaries. Practically anything can happen in a children’s book if it’s consistent.

Write from your heart. That’s where your passion is. That’s where your strength is.

Try combining two stories into one. Try breaking one story into two or three.

Try flipping, one parameter at a time. If the main character is a duck, try making her a hunter. Consider changing point-of-view, tense.

Things to Avoid

Avoid writing to teach somebody something. Kids resist books that preach them to them, or those that try to teach them a moral or lesson with a thinly-veiled plot. Do you think that kids are smart? They are even smarter.

Avoid short term expectations. Most of the writers who are finally ‘discovered’ have spent years and years developing their craft, reading, taking lessons, courses, attending seminars, querying, pitching, revising, swapping manuscripts. Many writers can’t take the strain and the disappointment and give up along the way. It’s a long haul from your pen to the shopping mall.

Avoid rhyme unless you can do it really well. Musicians often can, writers seldom. It’s not just finding the word at the end of the line. There has to be meter, a rhythmic pattern. Sometimes in order to find a rhyme you have to go off topic. Remember that Julia Donaldson started out as a songwriter.

Avoid commercial concerns. Don’t write because you think that some publisher is looking for a book on a certain subject. Write because you’re enjoying yourself.

Avoid tricking the reader, for example by a dream sequence that doesn’t actually happen.

Avoid being long-winded. Chop out all the excess words and unessential characters.

Avoid going outside convention if you are not an established writer. Convention dictates no more than 500 words (for a fictional story). You can write practically any story in 500 words.

Avoid writing about the way things are. That’s for the non-fiction folks. Try writing about the way things aren’t. There are lots more possibilities, and the weirdest ones are the most fun.

Avoid writing a story that bores you. If you’re bored by a manuscript, the reader will be too. Wait a few days, weeks or months. If it doesn’t ‘speak’ to you, it’s not ready. It may never be. Most stories aren’t.

Avoid writing about things you haven’t experienced yourself provided you can write from your own background, culture and experience.

Here is an e-book I’ve written on this general subject.

Do you need a checklist for analyzing a story you’ve read or written? Here is mine:

Story checklist:

Strong Title

Gets going quickly

Interesting Setting

Empathetic Main Character (and name)

Main Character has a problem/question/threat/desire

Great page turns

Save the Cat moment

Wonderful story (something happens, for example main character is challenged)

Keep it simple – The one sentence test

Only as many characters as you need

More showing, less telling

Humor, irony, exaggeration

Satisfying and surprising ending – Does it turn back to start?

Main Character learns a lesson

Moral only in the background

Rhyming only for ‘pros’.

Each word is important!!!

If you need inspiration, here are videos of children’s books you can watch.

Here are even more….

Do you need help with ideas for wacky stories? Try 48 create.

More writing exercises?

Here are ten.