Tag: Picture Books

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Monday Mentions

Posted on by beckylevine

A quick post today, just a few reminders of things you might want to know about.

1. If you haven’t heard yet, Lisa Wolfson, known by her author name of L.K. Madigan, died last week from pancreatic cancer. Lisa was the author of Flash Burnout and The Mermaid’s Mirror, and was deeply loved in the kidlit world. There have been tributes all over the blogosphere. I didn’t know Lisa personally, but she was helpful and generous when I interviewed her for an article about online critique groups. Every tweet, every Facebook update, every blog post I’ve looked at this week, about Lisa, has reminded me how hard life can be, how bravely people face it, and how much love is out here on the Internet.

I want to just put up the address for a trust that has been set up to help Lisa’s son, Nate, go to college. If you are interested, you can donate to the trust by sending a check to:

Becker Capital Management, Inc.
Attn: Sharon Gueck/John Becker
1211 Fifth Avenue, Suite 2185
Portland, OR 97204

Lisa’s husband has posted about this on her blog.

2. On a lighter note, I am still running my contest for a copy of Megg Jensen’s Anathema. Leave a comment at the contest post, and I’ll draw a winner this coming Wednesday.

3. Martha Alderson, The Plot Whisperer, is on Step 22 (The Beginning of the End) of her YouTube Plot Series. There are a few more steps to come, but I thought I’d link you to Step 1 in case you haven’t heard of the series & want to get started. Plus, for those of you still stuck in the cold of winter, Martha’s background of Santa Cruz, California, will give you hopes for spring.  To see Martha’s series from the beginning, go here.

4. Whether you’re a picture-book writer or not, you shouldn’t miss this Has Your Picture Book Already Been Published? flow chart that Tara Lazar posted at her blog. Warning: Many roads lead to “Yes.”  🙂

5. If you know (or are!) a teen writer, don’t forget about Capital City Young Writers’ literary journal. The journal is in its first year, and submissions are open for another two weeks–until March 15. The theme is “the undiscovered,” and teens can submit in many genres–all listed here.

Posted in Uncategorized

The Picture Book: Using Word Count as a Revision Tool

Posted on by beckylevine

The last couple of days have been a whirl of productivity for me. And, you know, the good kind–where you’re actually happy-ish with the work.

What happened?

Short story: I chopped the picture book in half.

Long story (Because you know I never use just the short story):

Like I said on  Monday, I’ve got a couple of events coming down the line that will give me a chance to get the picture book critiqued. I’ve known all along that it had way too many words (anywhere between 700 and 900, depending on which draft you opened up). I was okay with that, because I know that I am good at cutting and trimming and sharpening, turning a long scene or story into a much shorter one. It’s not a natural talent–I developed it over the three years I worked as a closed-captioner, taking TV and movie dialogue and editing it down to a specific word-per-minute reading rate. Anyway, I knew I could do it, so I wasn’t worrying about doing it…yet.

Until these critiques reared their heads. Because what was the point of submitting a picture book that I knew was too long. That’d be the first thing the critiquer told me, maybe even the only thing. Which would be a total waste. Plus, for one of the critiques, I only get to submit the first 300 words. Before I started this revision, 300 words barely got the reader past the opening.

So I cut. I didn’t take a red pencil and mark up the words I had. Instead, I opened a new file and only typed in the words I thought I could keep. Note I did not say “the words I needed.” Because, honestly, I really didn’t feel like I knew which those were yet. And, yes, I played as I went and moved things around and fiddled with the story . By the end of the day I had a draft that was just over 600 words, with red placeholders where I knew I need something different from what I had. I was still feeling pretty muddled and not confident about what those something-differents might be, but I was pretty happy with that 600+ word-count. I figured that, give or take a very few, this was the number of words I had to work with.

What did I do next? What I always do when I’m trying to learn about a genre–I went to the experts. I hauled a stack of my favorite picture books over to the couch, and I read. I let myself reread some of the older ones, from my childhood–Millions of Cats, Choo Choo, The Story about Ping, but I knew that was more play than work–yes, they’re wonderful, but they don’t have the low word-count or the story form I was looking for.

So I went on to two books that are pretty fantastic and that were published in the last year or so: Linda Urban’s Mouse was Mad and Bonny Becker’s Visitor for Bear. I was looking for a few things:

  • What were the heroes’ goals?
  • In what way did the heroes actively try to reach those goals?
  • What were the obstacles to the heroes’ attempts?
  • What words (and how few) did the authors use to show these story pieces?
  • What words (and, again, how few) did the authors use to increase tension across the story?
  • What information did the authors include and what did they choose to leave out?

These are all questions I have been struggling with in the picture book. Questions that I had been trying to answer by writing and fiddling with too many words. As I read Linda and Bonnie’s books, I did get the starts of some thoughts about how to do it differently, thoughts I played with yesterday. I think the most important thing I got, though, was a reminder that this can be done. A good, strong, funny, what-next, complete story can be written with a very small number of words. And when it’s done well, it’s magic.

I’m not saying yet that I can do it. I’m not Linda Urban, and I’m not Bonny Becker. What I am, though, especially since yesterday–when I got new story ideas, cut more words and added some better ones, strengthened characters, and got my husband to say he could “see the illustrator having fun with this”—is a writer committed anew to this genre and to wanting to find my place in its market.

And did I mention, a writer who finally has a picture-book draft that feels like it might be getting there and that is…wait for it: under 500 words?

Posted in Picture Books

Picture Books and Me

Posted on by beckylevine

If you follow me on Facebook or Twitter, you may have–in the past few days–had your fill of this subject. I’ve been working on the picture book a lot lately and I’ve been posting random updates about it. If it makes you yawn, feel free to click away. 🙂

If you’re not sick of this yet, read on.

I’ve committed to a couple of things lately that come with critique opportunities. (To get, not to give this time!). I know that the YA is SO not ready for this stage, so–because I don’t want to pass up the chance–I’m going to be submitting the picture book. Which means I’m also going to be working on the picture book. No, I’m not deluding myself that I can get it Ready-Ready in time, but I can sure as heck get it a lot closer to Ready. That’s the (one?) advantage of working with a lot fewer words.

Anyway, because the posts here may be a bit picture-book-centric for the next couple of weeks, I thought I’d share a little of my reading/writing history, as it pertains to these shorter works. Just so you see what I’m in for and so you don’t wander around under any delusion that I consider myself an expert in this genre. I took this book on as a learning curve I wanted to tackle–I had an idea I loved (and still love, thankfully), and I promised myself I’d take it to the point where I decided it was ready for submission or that submission was not going to happen. Still working toward the first of those choices.

Anyway, let’s go back a few years. Okay, let’s go back a few decades. Picture me in high school, one with an “interesting” English department that sort of skipped over the standards of English & American lit and offered classes in Sci-Fi/Fantasy, “peasant” lit (I have no idea if that’s a real term or just one teacher’s label, but think Halldór Laxness), and–oh, boy–Russian lit. I read Michail Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don and I was hooked. In love. Skip ahead a few years to college. Somebody handed me a Dickens novel. Then one by a Bronte. Victorian novels–pages and pages of staying with the same characters. Days, instead of hours, in the same world. (I read fast). I fell in love again. And stayed there through grad school.

Now let’s look at something. A Victorian novel, British or Russian, has anywhere from 500 pages (that’s a short one!) to 800+. They have description out the wazoo–whether you’re talking about a place, a character’s physical appearance, or their familial (and often genealogical) background.  Action? Oh, sure, but you can sometimes expect a half-page paragraph to describe a couple of steps of movement. Dense is a good word for the Victorian novel. Lovely, beautiful, spectacularly flavored dense, but still.

Picture books, not so much. The word is spreading quickly through the genre that some agents won’t look at submissions longer than 500 words. Not pages–words. Description? Okay, you can have a word or two, but that’s what the illustrator is for. Background information? Not if you can’t get it across in a sentence. A sentence. (Can you hear Elizabeth Gaskell rolling over in her grave yet?!) My brain underwent a big twist when I started reading and writing YA, but this picture book thing is tying that twist into an increasingly tighter knot. A fun, challenging one that would be the delight of any boy scout, but still, quite the knot.

And here’s another layer of my history with picture books. I had my favorites from when I was a child, sure. And when my son was born, reading to him was one of the fun parts of mothering an infant. But…I could not wait until we could start reading the longer books. No, I didn’t force Great Expectations into his ears, but when we got to Ruth Stiles Gannett and Roald Dahl, I was in heaven.

What I’m saying is that, if you give me a novel to read, I’m happy. (And like the mouse with the cookie, I’ll be asking you for another.) I put down a lot more books now than I used to, but honestly–if you catch and keep me with voice or character or story, I’ll keep going and I’ll be content. I’ll escape into that world and I’ll be glad to stay there for as long as you let me.

If you give me a picture book to read, and you want me to come back, it had better be good. Really good. You had better give me everything–voice and character and story. This book has to snap me in and not let me pull out for even a split second. Which means, honestly, I have not spent anywhere near as many hours reading studying the picture-book form as I have the novel.

So, yes, I have a long way to go. I am working hard to get my 10,000 picture books under my belt (another plus for that fewer-words thing). I am looking at structure and young heroes with strength and word choices. Oh, yeah–word choices.

And I’m trying to plug it all into MY picture book.

Where is this project going to take me. To publication? Oh, we can hope and dream. And the premise of this story is good enough, that I think it’s a possibility. But I do know it’s going to take me deeper into this genre, into finding and reading more of those really good picture books out there that I have yet to read. Or that I will choose to read over.

And it’s most likely to take me those places, and more, on this blog. Lucky you. If you want to come along, I’m happy to share the journey.

Posted in Picture Books, Revision

What’s Harder about Picture Books—#4,385

Posted on by beckylevine

Okay, maybe I should have said “different” in the post title, instead of “harder.” As I work through my first picture-book attempt, I’m finding lots of things that do just qualify as different, and some that are actually easier than, oh, say, a historical novel. Did someone say *cough*, “Research?”

This week, though, I’m heading into some more revision, and I had a lightbulb moment about what exactly I’ve been struggling with.

When I revise a novel, I work in threads. Or chunks. Or arcs…however you want to describe it. Basically, if I know that a character’s arc isn’t strong enough, I’ll follow her story all the way through the book, tweaking her interactions with other characters, amping up her responses to events, making connections tighter and layers deeper. Or if I drop a new plot point in toward the end of the book, I go through and plant seeds for that point in earlier chapters, making sure (hopefully!) that they mesh well with the rest of the story. The nice thing about this is that it lets me pay attention to something specific and not bounce around as randomly as I would if I were just revising page-by-page with whatever I noticed not working.

The other nice thing is that I can spend some time around each of these threads. As I work, I do notice other things to play with on another revision pass, and I spend more time with my characters, themes, and voice–getting to know them all that much better. It’s not a fast process, but I think the hours are valuable and add to the quality of my project.

Here’s the thing about a picture book. Each “thread” has maybe a dozen sentences to it.  Even if I stare at each of those sentences and think (a la Winnie-the-Pooh) really hard about them, I’m not getting hours worth of revising time for any of them. I realized this was a problem, when I’d tried to revise about a half-page of text and hit overwhelmed. Because…yeah, I was trying to revise three character threads at once.         

I can’t DO that.

So, this week, I’ll be taking it a thread at a time. Which may sound easier, and–in terms of keeping my brain INSIDE my skull, will be. In terms of letting me dig into my story, though, really immerse myself in the characters and plot, I’m just not sure. Even if each revision thread goes quickly, I’m not sure that I can shift onto another and another that quickly. Still…if I spend a half hour or hour per thread each day, I should have another solid revision done by the end of the week, and that’s a goal I can live with.

How do you revise? And does it vary for you depending on the length (or other quality) of the manuscript?

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.