A little whimsy, a little wonder, and a whole lot of heart.
How Not to Write a Picture Book
I can write a picture book. Easy. Famous last words!
Julia Lyn
10/23/20263 min read
Writing a picture book is wild. Wild in the sense that everything you ever learned about writing must be thrown out the window.
That’s right. Just take what you learned about writing and THROW. IT. OUT.
I teach 5th and 6th grade ELA. I teach writing rules on the daily.
I can write a picture book, I thought. Easy.
And so I did.
It was beautiful. Lyrical even.
I was on to something, or so I thought.
I spent hours editing it. When I thought it was ready, I sent out 10 queries. Maybe more.
All rejected. Of course.
Turns out, in the picture book world, my story was quite terrible. I had followed all the rules I taught. And broke all the rules of picture book writing. All at the same time.
Writing a picture book is so wild.
In my first story, I wrote beautiful descriptions. My words flowed onto the page. Adjectives and adverbs brought the story to life. I worked long and hard to vary my word choice. I saw rich parts-of-speech lessons in my head.
That was how I saw my story. I was proud of it. In hindsight, it really was quite terrible. Awful. Very bad. No good.
I could go on.
Then I took my first webinar, and suddenly I saw exactly what was wrong with it. All of it.
And I could not unsee it. I had made the same mistakes in my first five stories.
Where did I go wrong? I am actually embarrassed about how little I knew. More so, how much I thought I knew.
When writing a picture book, you get very few words to tell a complete story. This I knew. Under 1,000, I thought. At 800-plus words, I felt good about my stories. Detail is good—right?
Wrong. Picture books are expensive to print, and kids have short attention spans. I have a short attention span! This means I have about 300–500 words (600 if I am lucky) to tell a complete story—beginning, middle, and end.
To help you see what that looks like, at this point in this blog entry, I am at 350 already. I better wrap it up soon!
Since words are so limited, descriptions also go out the window. Completely out the window. Again, just THROW. THEM. OUT. If it can be shown in an illustration, it has no business showing up in the words.
“The fat cat sat” becomes “The cat sat,” then “The cat,” and better yet, if the picture shows a cat, it's just (.).
I had to unlearn everything I knew about writing. No adjectives. No adverbs. Sometimes no verbs.
At first, I was outraged. How is this writing? Why are people doing this? This is so hard.
After a while, I began to find a thrill in the challenge.
I can do this.
Another rule for picture-book writing: sentence fragments are okay. This one actually was an advantage for me. An avid journaler, stylistically, this is me to a T.
Same with repetition. Kids love repetition. Me too. Sometimes to an annoying degree (working on this in my stories).
Another rule came with the ending. I understood there had to be a resolution, some form of satisfying ending. The main character had to have agency and solve his or her own problem. I missed that completely in my first book. Things just happened to my character, and then the end…
Disappointing.
I thought being a picture book writer would be the easier way to start my career. I later learned that the picture book market is very competitive and one of the hardest to break into for a debut author.
Easier. Ha!
Like I said. Writing a picture book is wild.
Turns out I love the challenge. I want to be where the wild things are.
638 words… and counting!
Note: The picture-book writing rules mentioned above are not absolute. There are plenty of successful fairy-tale (or not) picture books with well over 600 words. These may be harder to get an agent or publisher to take on in the current market.
