Picture Books - a Lifetime Love by Jill Atkins, Guest Blogger

 

I’ve always loved picture books, since my own childhood, when I was lucky enough to have a mother who loved children’s books; then sharing them with my own children and grandchildren, as well as enjoying sharing the pleasure picture books give when I was teaching. Some favourites have stayed with me. But what do these books have that make me admire/love them? I’ll try to explain.

Timothy Tabbycat written and illustrated by Cam is from my childhood. It’s about a quest to help a hare that has been captured by two witches called Mrs Longtooth and Mrs Snatchangrab. It was terrifying yet I loved it! Still do! It’s now classed on a certain website as an ‘Extraordinarily Rare Antique Children's Book’! That puts me in my place!

Dogger, written and illustrated by Shirley Hughes is a classic. It’s guaranteed to make me cry every time I’ve read it to my children, grandchildren, a class of children... or just treat myself to the umpteenth time on my own. It’s the part where Bella offers Dave her newly-won bear instead of his lost favourite cuddly, Dogger, that gets me. Her act of kindness is so touching. Dogger must be one of my favourites of all time!

The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson - Who could not admire The Gruffalo with its perfect rhythm, rhyming and scanning, its attractive illustrations by Axel Scheffler and the story of the clever, brave young mouse? For me, it’s a ‘wish I had written it’ book.

A more recent pleasure is Bonkers about Beetroot by Cath Jones. It’s about a wonderful zebra character that is determined to save the day when the zoo is scheduled to close. I love the bold illustrations by Chris Jevons, and the great twist at the end of the story... not forgetting the grumpy penguin, of course!! It’s a truly bonkers book!

Superheroes don’t get scared... or do they? This is a recently published picture book, Kate Thompson’s first. With an amazingly funny text and vibrant illustrations by Clare Elsom, it has a brilliant message – it’s OK to be frightened!

There are so many picture books that I have loved over the years and it’s impossible to name them all, but a wish has always been lurking in my mind: How fantastic it would be to have my own picture book published! I’ve tried, honest!

I began making up stories when I was a child, telling them to my younger brothers when they were in the bath! And I was praised for my story writing all throughout school, so I suppose this was the start of my desire to have a picture book published.

Then, having been a teacher for many years, most of the time in Reception Classes, I began writing simple reading books some years ago, purely because I didn’t feel there was enough interesting and stimulating material out there at the time to give readers the incentive and stimulation to learn the sometimes impossible skill of reading. None of my efforts was published then, but I kept writing and eventually, my first book came into being: Cooking with Rabbit.

That was the first of many and I’ve now passed 150 published books with a variety of publishers and at a variety of levels and a variety of genres, from a pre-reader with no words... through Early Readers that are very strictly based on phonics (very hard to write, but I love the challenge!); different levels of fiction and non-fiction ‘reading books’ for young children; Science and English workbooks; four historical books based on different periods of history; to books for reluctant or struggling teenagers and adults.

But none of these is a picture book!

During over 25 years of writing for educational publishers, I’ve attempted many times to write picture book texts to no avail. So, when yet another rejection email arrives in my inbox, or worse still, when there’s no response at all, I often ask myself, ‘Should I persevere with my attempts to get one accepted?’ Or...

‘Stick to what you know,’ is the advice many people give, so that’s what I’ve mainly been doing all this time. I’m fully aware that writing a picture book is a very different skill to writing that required for writing a ‘reading book’. The illustrations in reading books need to match the text, while pictures in a picture book add a new dimension to a story. 

So, I’m sure you can imagine the thrill and elation when the acceptance came! How it happened in the end was ironic really. I sent in a text for an early reader and guess what! My editor loved the story and wanted the text adapted for a picture book! Yay! My first picture book, Raccoon and the Hot Air Balloon, illustrated wonderfully by Kristen Humphrey, is being published on 28^th June!

Generating Ideas, by Abie Longstaff

I'm away on holiday so I thought I'd send you my post in visual form.

This is how I get my ideas - I'd love to hear how you get yours.

Different voices by Jane Clarke

Do you put on different voices when you're reading picture books aloud? I do. I can't help it.

I go for perky and interested when I read the Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle (the pop! is key to this narrator's voice I think - who doesn't love a good sound effect?)

I adopt a tone of total innocence when I read the hilarious Bottomley books by Peter Harris and Doffy Weir. These books are told from first person (or should I say cat) point of view with the text contradicting the pictures. Here's a page from Bottomley Cattery.

And I have a different voice for each animal in the Gruffalo, some scary, some scared, some soft, some loud, some hissy. Reading the Gruffalo aloud is a bit like acting.

a page from The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler

I have voices for all the characters I write in my own picturebooks and tones of voices in my head for the characters in the texts I'm writing. A few of my books have audio versions. It's strange, but wonderfully magical, to hear an actor voice them.

Knight Time read by Jane Whittenshaw, Gilbert the Great and Gilbert in Deep read by Dervla Kirwan, Stuck in the Mud ready by Cassandra Morris

Even for non actors like me, using different voices and making different sound effects when you're reading a picture book aloud helps the reader and the child listener enter the magical world of make believe.

It's fun to experiment using different voices when you read a picture book aloud, and it's fun to try out different voices when you're writing a picture book text. Narrator, first person, second person or third – every voice can be different and distinct.

What voices stand out for you? 

Jane's proud and excited to announce that her new picture book, Who Woke the Baby is published this month.

It's crammed full of yummy illustrations by Charles Fuge and there are plenty of animal noises to make when you read it out loud.

APTLY EVER AFTER: Why picture books need proper endings • Jonathan Emmett

Back in April, Natascha Biebow wrote a post for this blog about picture book openings and why it’s important to get them right. I think endings are equally important, so I thought I’d write a post about them.

When I was reading picture books with my own children we were always disappointed by stories that ended inappropriately. Perhaps most disappointing of all were picture books that seemed to have no proper ending at all. We’d turn the page, expecting to discover how the story finished only to find that it was already over and we were at the back of the book. I think there needs to be a satisfying sense of conclusion when one reaches the end of a picture book, whether the story winds down gently or ends with a spectacular flourish or unexpected twist.

Some of the best children’s storytelling in recent years has come from Pixar, the animation studio that created the Toy Story trilogy and several other modern classics. While Pixar’s films are always visually impressive, the company attributes its phenomenal success to its motto – “Story is King”. Here’s one of Pixar’s 22 Rules of Storytelling that’s also a great piece of advice for picture book authors.

Rule 7: Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front.

I’m a great believer in writing an outline before writing a story – even a short story like a picture book’s – and that means coming up with an ending before starting the first draft. I know that some authors dismiss outlines as limiting, claiming that they like to ‘discover’ the story as they are writing it. That might be true if the outline were a fixed document but, like most authors that use them, I’m constantly tinkering with the outline as I write the story. If a better ending occurs to me, I see if I can rework the outline to accommodate it. Writing a story with an outline is like going for a walk in the country with a map. You have an idea of what’s coming up, but you can always opt to take a different route and end up somewhere else if it takes your fancy. With a map, a walker is less likely to end their walk stranded in the middle of nowhere; with an outline an author is less likely to end up with an unsatisfactory ending.

I don’t know whether the authors of the following picture books use outlines or not, but here are three stories that all have satisfying endings that feel just right. I’ve done my best to avoid spoilers, but if you haven’t read any of the stories mentioned below and want to avoid any hints as to how they end, you might want to skip over that paragraph.

The Great Dog Bottom Swap

Peter Bently

Illustrated by Mei Matsuoka

This is the tale of a Dog’s Summer Ball that starts well, but ends in disaster. It’s a farcically funny story, deftly written with lots of amusing incidents throughout. And – as if that weren’t enough – the text on the final spread reveals a twist that makes the reader see the whole plot in an amusing new light.

Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose

Dr. Seuss

I can’t think of another picture book ending that made me and my children laugh quite so much as this one when we first read it. The story concerns Thidwick, a kindly moose whose generosity is exploited by a collection of creatures who set up home in his antlers. When a group of hunters arrive, the overburdened Thidwick’s chances of survival look slim. The image on the last page gives the story an incredibly funny, totally unexpected and somewhat shocking ending. 

The Gruffalo

Julia Donaldson

Illustrated by Axel Scheffler

I know that The Gruffalo has had plenty of praise heaped on it already, but that’s because it’s such an exemplary piece of picture book writing. After the mouse’s death-defying adventure, Donaldson ends the story calmly and quietly. Having repeatedly escaped being eaten himself, the mouse (and the story) comes to a stop as the mouse sits down to enjoy a meal.


What are your favourite picture book endings? Let us know in the comments box below.

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Jonathan Emmett's latest picture book is HERE BE MONSTERS, a swashbuckling tale of dastardly pirates and mysterious monsters, illustrated by Poly Bernatene and published by Macmillan Children's Books.
Find out more about Jonathan and his books at his Scribble Street web site or his blog. You can also follow Jonathan on facebook and twitter @scribblestreet.

See all of Jonathan's posts for Picture Book Den.

Competition winner - but is it ready for publication?

I was recently asked to look at a picture book text that had won a prize in a competition.

1st Prize

 The problem was that when it was sent out to editors it just came bouncing back, again and again.  The writer was understandably concerned.

So what was wrong with it?  I said I would look at it and see if there was an obvious problem, but I couldn't promise anything.

One of the problems with competitions is that they can raise expectations in unrealistic ways, often unintentionally.  This might happen when the entrants and the judges are making widely differing assumptions about the end result.


e.g. Imagine you enter a competition that says 'Write a story for under 5 year olds in 750 words.'

1.   Does that mean it is always a picture book text?
• If the rules do not specify this, then it could be a story in a different format, a poem, or a short story, and not necessarily a picture book. 
2.  Does it mean that the story is ready and fit for publication?
•  This is not necessarily the same thing as whether or not it is a well written or enjoyable story.  As presented for the competition it may not have an obvious route to publication.  The problem is whether the entrants understand that publication is a commercial decision based on a variety of factors i.e. in the right format, the right length and original enough, not solely on the merits of the actual story/writing.
3.  Does it mean the story is likely to be published?
• This is the tricky one. There is never a guarantee of publication for any story and for the reasons above it may not be right for publication. But, difficult as it is to admit, it might depend on the overall standard of entries to the competition, and whether the adjudicator has had to choose a winner out of the entries that were presented.

It is an achievement to win a competition but, however wonderful, it is not a sure road to publication.

It is often easier looking at someone else's writing to spot the problems as it makes you analyse what makes a book work, and also what can go wrong.  But I am always aware of how difficult it is to have someone read your work and tell you things are not right with it!
 
When I looked at this story I immediately saw that although it was an interesting idea and nicely written, there were several things that I felt were not working as a picture book. It felt more like a poem and I could see it was going to take quite a bit of (painful?) editing to make it work as a picture book.

Why was that?

Hamish McHaggis © Sally J Collins

If you read over some of the previous posts on Picturebook Den you will see how often people talk about the images, the importance of understanding how the words and the pictures work together over the 12 or 14 double page spreads.  Even if you are not an illustrator, and most picture book authors are not, you need to visualise the story.

I found I had no sense of how this story would be told over the different spreads. This is not to say that I was looking to have it marked as 'spread 1' and 'spread 2' etc.  But reading the text I felt that the writer had not 'seen' the story unfolding in her mind's eye. When I tried to imagine how it would look on the page I realised that too much of what was happening in the text would be the same visually, time after time.

The story was a lot of fun and had many different elements to it. There was counting, colours and lots of characters and in fact that was one of the problems. It had too much going on and most of it was repeated too often.

Repetition featured strongly in the actual words used, phrase by phrase, but each time it was almost exactly the same. In picture books every single word has to earn its place and repetition can work really well but it needs some variation within it, making it more interesting to read out loud.  Or perhaps with a catch phrase that is repeated.  Children love it when they can anticipate what is coming and can say it along with the person reading to them.

There were lots of characters (contributing to the counting and the colours) but they were all the same, no quirks or interesting features that would make me care about them, or what was happening to them.

The story was in rhyme and, as sometimes happens, it felt as if the story was being shaped by the rhyme rather than the rhyme enhancing the story.  It is one reason why it is often better to try and avoid rhyme and concentrate on the rhythm.

The ending- This is such a crucial part of any picture book and often the most difficult part to get right. It sometimes helps to think about how you would describe the book to someone else. The writer needs to be able to say what the story is about. 
If you are writing a novel you are sometimes asked to describe, in one or two sentences, the main theme of the novel. I think this can be applied to a picture book, too. By this I don't mean saying 'This is a counting book, or a book about colours.'  It's about the emotional journey, what do the main character(s) learn in the book, what makes me care about them and does the story end in a satisfying manner?


e.g. in the Gruffalo- A clever little mouse outwits the animals who want to eat him by persuading them he has a fearsome (imaginary?) friend. When the Gruffalo appears the mouse tricks him too, so that the Gruffalo ends up believing that the little mouse is truly the ' scariest creature in the woods'.


A picture book takes a child on a journey with the characters but there needs to be some kind of resolution that makes is feel there was a reason for the story to be told in the first place.

Reading all the changes I suggest, you might be led to think the original story was needing too much work. But I felt that it was a lovely idea that needed a bit of reshaping and a lot more visualisation before it could work as a picture book.  The difficulty for the writer might be letting go of the original and taking a fresh look at it with  images in mind.

There is never just one way to tell a story.  Nothing is every wasted, it is amazing how often a story or idea can be changed, shuffled about and reshaped into something new, often even better.

Competitions are great for writers, in fact I got my first encouragement to start writing when I won a local library short story competition.  Competitions give you a deadline and a challenge, and although they may not lead directly to publication they can help to take you another step closer.




Linda Strachan is the award winning author of over 60 books for all ages, from picture books to teen novels, and writing handbook Writing For Children.



Website   www.lindastrachan.com
Blog    BOOKWORDS

Stories with knobs on – Rebranding a picture book by Moira Butterfield

I don’t write every day. Sometimes I work with other people’s words. Recently I’ve been doing exactly that to a well-known picture book, and I thought you might like to hear about it because it’s a somewhat unusual area for the blog. It’s about things that happen to books long after they’re finished.

If you go to the children’s section of a bookshop, you’ll see that some picture books have been made into ‘brands’ and have their own shelving space. Their content has been taken and reshaped into new ‘formats’ – a word that basically means a book’s shape and size. The content of the picture book might be re-used - with flaps, pop-ups, gatefolds, touch and feel texture, sounds, and all manner of interesting page effects.

This kind of thing has happened a lot over the years with licensed TV characters, but it has recently started to occur with well-known picture books. A top seller may be deemed popular enough to extend into a brand, because parent buyers are familiar with the book. They recognize it, trust it as a good piece of work and are likely to buy others in the series.

That’s where I come in. Authors are busy people and their in-house editors tend to be very busy folk, too, so publishers occasionally ask me to come up with initial ideas for creating a new range. I’ve been asked to do this both for picture books and children’s non-fiction, too.

I start by getting a detailed brief from the publisher. Then I start thinking. 

How do people perceive this book? What does it do, exactly? Does it help to teach concepts, for example, or actions or feelings, perhaps? What can be done with it without stretching it too far and ruining the original spirit?

Then there are ‘price points’ to consider– prices that the public are used to paying for specific types of book.  It’s no use me suggesting anything too expensive. Equally, the publisher and the author won’t want anything that looks cheap and nasty.

There is safety testing to consider. There’s no point in me suggesting some clever-clever idea that is unlikely to pass the stringent safety tests for the age-group. 

I take a long hard look at the illustrations. Can they be taken out of the page to make individual ‘spot art’ – for an add-on poster, for example - or will the publisher need to get more illustrations?

I go shopping to check out what else is being made and sold, for what price, and how successful or otherwise the adapted books are. Some new versions work well, while some betray lack of thought for the end user and the spirit of the original material.

At last I’m ready to come up with a list of format ideas and some general suggestions for making the brand identity strong.

Why did I get asked to do this kind of commission? I once worked for a couple of companies who specialized in creating unusual formats, in the days before apps when the only way to make a picture move was to add some paper-engineering.  I’ve been responsible for creating in-house ranges for well-known supermarkets, who are extremely price-conscious and sensitive to the type of customers they want to attract. 

I’m also a consumer of children’s books and I hate a disappointing format that seems to have no purpose, gets damaged quickly and adds nothing to the experience of reading.

Most importantly I’m an author and editor myself, and I have spent all my professional life working with words and illustrations. That helps me to judge how successfully a new format might satisfy both the reader and the person who came up with the idea in the first place. In the case of a picture book with royalties attached, the author gets the final say about what they might or might not want for their work.

Some may consider that this type of branding devalues the spirit of picture book creation, but I say ‘the more the merrier’ because I strongly believe that very expensive one-off books tend only to reach educated families who read reviews and browse bookshops.  Expanding the range of a picture book, and sometimes bringing the price down, means it gets into the hands of more children. I’ve spent all my professional life believing that and I’m proud of it. 

It also helps the printed picture book market to survive by keeping publishers profitable, and it helps successful authors to make more from their work.

Of course, this all relies on one thing - Someone creating a wonderful book in the first place!