Tag: Anastasia Suen

Posted in Picture Books

Friday Five: Thoughts on Picture Books

Posted on by beckylevine

Before I get started on my Friday Five, don’t forget to stop by and read my interview with Martha Engber, author of The Wind Thief. Leave a comment at that past, and I’ll enter you in the drawing for an ARC of her novel.

I am writing a picture book. Honestly, I wasn’t sure, as a writer over the past few years, whether I would ever do this. There is a magic in this genre, and I–like most people–have been captured by a certain special books that have stayed with me (and on my shelves) all my life.

I’m the person who spent her graduate years studying Victorian novels. Hello? 700+ pages? And this was decades BEFORE Harry Potter. I love novels, I love trilogies, I love series because when you fall in love with a world, or with a set of characters, you get to stay with them. When I was twelve and finished The Hobbit and found out there was more…!!

But I went through the mother years of being surrounded by picture books, by rereading and rereading my son’s favorites and managing to get in a few rereads of my oldies & goodies, as well. And when I got started with my own kids’ writing, the picture book thoughts were there as possibilities–the ideas that were right for that genre, not right for a novel.

So November 1st, in tandem with NaNoWriMo and Tara Lazar’s PiBoIdMo, I dug out the one idea I’d really been thinking about, opened up Ann Whitford Paul’s new book, Writing Picture Books, and got started.

So, for this first week as a picture-book writer, here are five thoughts:

1. I love the rhythm that Ann talks about, and that Anastasia Suen also discusses in her book Picture Writing—the rhythm of the threes. It is a beautifully simple structure and, while I know I’d be crazy to assume that meant simple writing or a simple book, it’s something I can work with. My brain likes patterns, and I like the one I’m finding here.

2. I am learning, all over again, to focus on the hero as impacting his own life. A young child, or a young bunny rabbit, can’t always solve their own problems, but–in a picture book–we’d darn well better see them trying and making a serious difference in the way the plot goes. It’s not just a matter of pushing the adult characters into the background; it’s bringing the child into the foreground. Still working on that one!

3. This thing about leaving room for the illustrator’s ideas is tricky. Critical, I know, but tricky. My gut is that, for this first pass I’m doing, the effort is sort of “blanding” my story out more than I want. That’s okay. During revision, this is something I’ll look at, how to make the words sharp, crisp, and energetic, while still leaving space for the art.

4. Tesseract. Remember that–a wrinkle in time? Something of the sort goes on when I work on the picture book. Time twists in a strange way, reconnecting with word count from a whole new angle. It’s not a switch I can explain, but I feel it. Ten words, which fly from my fingers when I’m working on a novel, take longer for this book. I had some idea (fear?) that I would sit down on Day 1 of this month, shoot off the 500-600 words of the story, know they were bad, and then have no clue where to go next. Instead, I’m still somewhere around the 400 mark, know quite well that’s too many for where I am in the story, and am watching the same kinds of thoughts, questions, and reactions mull around in my brain as I do when I draft 3,000 words of a novel. Cue Twilight Zone music.

5. I’m finding a freedom, for me, in writing a picture book that I don’t always feel when I’m working on a novel. This freedom may mean that I still don’t quite believe I can/will do this, so its more of an experiment than a commitment. (Don’t worry, I’m trying very hard not to let it become that!) Or it may mean that picture books are not (still? yet?) my greatest love, so that I’m putting less pressure on myself than I do for the novels. Or maybe it’s just that, even with the time warpage, I can see the end of the first draft only a day or two away, with revision (which I love) being right around the corner.  Who knows? For this month, anyway, I’m just going with it.

What are your thoughts on picture books? Reading or writing?

Posted in Form, Picture Books, Plot, Structure, Uncategorized, Writing Books

Form: Learning It

Posted on by beckylevine

Years ago, I read a writing book by Lawrence Block. I’m pretty sure it was Writing the Novel: From Plot to Print. The advice I remember most from this book was that the best way to learn plot was to go out and plot a book. One you liked. By a good writer.

At the time I was working on a mystery novel (for grown-ups), and I did dig a few of my favorite mysteries off the shelf and re-read them and look for the big plot points. I probably didn’t go as far with this as I should have, but (in forgiving hindsight to myself) that book turned out to be the one that dragged on way too long and did nothing to make me happy, and I put it in a drawer when I made the jump to kids’ fiction. Someday, who knows…

Anyway, this week, I’m reading Anastasis Suen’s Picture Writing, and she’s basically giving me the same advice. In her book, she asks writers to storyboard out a few picture books–ones with strong characters. So I went to my shelf.

And just in case any of you are anywhere near being as much of a kids’ book addict as me, I’ll show you my list, so you can ooh and get all nostalgically syrupy for a moment.

Now, obviously, when I talk about form, I’m not talking about a formula. There is no formula, as much as we would sometimes like. But there is form. There is a common structure upon which every book in a genre is built–even if doing the building means taking the familiar shape and twisting or even breaking it.

An example: Suen talks about a big story problem, then three small problems that show the big one. One of the books–Bread and Jam for Frances did have the three problems, although I had to read pretty deeply to identify them to my satisfaction. Another book, though—Miss Spiders Tea Party uses eight small problems to illustrate what’s going wrong. And they both work. Between the identification of the big problem and the ending climax & resolution, the authors give the hero a strong or increasingly bad problems to deal with.

And–here was another fun difference. The Hobans and Kirk handled the last, most critical problem in two very different ways. Remember, this is the problem just before the Climax, so it has to be big, and it has to have impact. In Frances’ story, the Hobans deliver several scenes of Frances not getting any other food than her bread & jam. The authors took their time over the first two problems, but they deliver these scenes in quick succession, not giving Frances–or us–any time to recover between them.

Kirk has taken the opposite route. He gives the first seven problems a two-page spread each (one page of verse & one full-page illustration). The last problem, though, he spreads out over eight pages (four verse and four illustrated). He’s drawing out the problem, raising and dropping Miss Spider’s hopes, and seriously increasing the tension…again, to get us to the climax.

Now, I would never say that writing a picture book is easier than writing a novel. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s harder, & you’ll probably hear me say that plenty of times in the next year or ten.  But…it is, I think, an easier form to study in this way–simply because there are fewer words in which to hunt for the structure.

Why am I doing this? For the same reason we should all be doing it in whatever genre we’re writing. No, we’re not out to learn that mythic formula. No, we’re not out to play “Copycat the Rich & Famous.”

We’re out to learn everything we can about the form we’re writing. We’re out to make our own books in that form the best that we can.