Picture Book University: Week 1
Posted on December 6, 2009 by Big Universe in Uncategorized.
Week 1 Day 1: Who Are You Writing For?
Yourself?
Friends and family?
The world?
Writing for yourself is a joy. You write what you want, how you want, and everything’s good.
But if you’re writing for others, you need to keep in mind what appeals to them.
So if you’re writing for yourself, pick and choose from this course what you find interesting, and just have fun.
But if you want to write for others, especially if you want to publish, the more of this course you complete, the better the chance you’ll have of meeting your goal.
Assignment 1:1
Decide who you are writing for. Make a list of the things you think they want from a picture book.
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Week 1 Day 2: What is a Picture Book Anyway?
Pick up a picture book. How many pages does it have? Most picture books have 32 pages. Sometimes they have 16, 24, 40, 48, 56, even 64 pages — almost always a multiple of 8 because of the way they are printed.
Look at the front few pages of your picture book. How many pages are there before the story actually begins?
Look at the end of the picture book. Are there any pages after the story ends?
Most picture books have front and back matter, the title page, the credits, the dedication—so, of the 32 pages in your picture book 4 or 5 of them are going to be other material besides the story. That leaves you 27-28 pages for story.
Now, look at those 27-28 pages. How many scenes are there? Sometimes a scene will cover both sides of the page or the spread. Sometime it will just be on one page. Sometimes the scenes will even be in frames or spot piece illustrations allowing for more than one scene on a page.
How many scenes does your picture book have? If a picture is made up of spreads, there will probably be about 13-14 scenes total. If they are made up of individual pages there will be 27-28 scenes.
Assignment 1:2
Look at 10 picture books. Find the number of total pages, the number of story pages, the number of scenes.
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Week 1 Day 3—How Long is a Picture Book?
A spread will average about a paragraph of text, an individual page about a line or two. It will vary widely, but not too widely. You usually don’t want huge chunks of text followed by almost nothing. You want the story to pace well. To flow well. Your average story will have from 200 to 600 words. Some much fewer, some many more. How long should a story be? Long enough to tell the story and not a word more.
Assignment 1:3—Count the words in five picture books. Notice how much text there is in each scene.
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Week 1 Day 4—An Exercise for Getting the Feel of it All
A great way to get a feel for picture book language and pacing is to type up the text of a published book.
Assignment 1:4—Type up the text of a favorite picture book.
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Lesson 1 Day 5: The Invisible Collaborator
A picture book is more than just an illustrated story. It is a collaboration between text and illustration. With a good picture book, most of the time if you take one away the other cannot stand on it’s own. They need each other.
So, how do you collaborate with an illustrator that you will possibly never meet? It’s tricky, and will take time to learn how to do well. But a general rule of thumb:
Don’t put anything in your text that can be shown in the illustrations, unless there is an important reason that it be in your text. This includes setting, what the characters are wearing, what they look like, even their species. Responses and actions can be shown in the illustrations, subplots can be shown. Much of your story will be told by the illustrator.
Assignment 1:5–Pick a favorite picture book. Study the illustrations carefully. Compare them to the words. What is shown in the illustrations that is not show in the text? How important to the story are the things shown in the illustrations? How does the author suggest that something is happening while leaving exactly what is happening up to the illustrations? Is there anything in the text that could be shown in the illustrations instead? Is there a good reason that it was in the text? Take out the text that could have been illustrated and see if it makes the story stronger or weaker.
Next week: Where do ideas come from? Also, what’s with the sentence fragments?
Usefull