Sunday, November 1, 2009
Mem Fox with ideas for writing a Picture Book
So you want to write a picture book…
Quick-and-snappy advice, in case you’re in a hurry…
Okay: so you’ve already written a picture book without reading the pages and pages of advice on my website. Tut, tut! May I kindly and warmly suggest that you do read the hints I’ve posted below, after this ‘quick-and-snappy’ section. I made many bungles in my attempts to be published and I’d hate you to waste time by making the same silly mistakes.
In order to write, first you have to have lived. Only in the rarest of circumstances will young writers be published. So if you’re still at school, or even under 23, think hard about doing something else for a while until you’ve experienced many more people, events, situations and emotions than you will have at, say, 18.
In particular, you need to readandreadandreadandread to learn as many different ways of using language as possible. You also need to read in order to build inside your head a massive bank of lusciously different words that you can choose from at any time.
Remember that a picture book is 32 pages. Half of those pages are pictures, so try keep the word-count under 500. When you’re drafting a picture book it’s useful to make your own mock-book, copying from a real book all the features like endpapers, the title page, dedication and publishing information page and so on. It also helps to put the text on each page to see how is pans out.
While you’re writing, your best friends will be the ‘cut’ and ‘delete’ keys on your computer. At any one time you can probably cut most of what you have written. The biggest fault of wannabe picture book writers is to write too much.
Unless you’re an art-school trained illustrator don’t even think about doing the pictures yourself.
It’s pointless finding your own artist. Don’t do it. The publisher chooses the illustrator. The publisher will probably reject the art done by your friend, but may love the story. And then who rewards the artist for the time he or she has wasted doing your book?
So, get to it. And best of luck!
Mem Fox
___________________
Books for young children are usually short. Young children themselves are usually short. This leads to an assumption that children have small brains and that writing for them is easy. The reverse it true. Young children have large, active brains, and writing for them is enormously difficult. It is even more difficult than writing for adults since only the best is good enough for children—the best words in the best places, and the best characters in the best stories. Where do we begin?
We need to read children’s books ourselves
Before we begin it is useful to familiarise ourselves with bookswhich are on sale and are currently adored by children. If we do not, we might find ourselves writing books similar to those we ourselves read long ago when we were children, most of which are now out-dated, out-moded and entirely forgotten. It is also extremely useful to read and re-read the books which have passed the test of time—books which remain popular today, fifty, twenty, ten and even five years after they were published. These are classics and they have much to teach us. It is also useful to recall the stories and folktales we listened to and loved as children, the stories which we have remembered into adulthood. What do these classic stories have which otherbooks lack?
A good picture book for the young child has most of these qualities:
- Trouble
- One of two themes: ‘the stranger comes to town’ or: ‘the quest.’
- Characters whom readers care about deeply
- A universal theme that speaks to any child, anywhere in the world
- Perfect words in perfect places
- The delight of happiness
- No preaching
- Subtle signposts to living in a social world
- An impact that affects the heart of the reader or listener
- Strange, original, or unexpected use of language
- A complex story that requires the mind to be attentive to detail, to be active in problem-solving, to roll through tunnels of prediction and meaning-making, and to tumble down hills of emotion and up again
- Or for very young children, an original pattern created by rhyme, rhythm or repetition
- Children saying: ‘Read it again! Read it again!’ when the book is finished.
Where do the ideas come from?
The above list is all very well, but the question most often asked of writers, as if it were a deep secret to be dug up and displayed for all to see, is: ‘Where do the ideas come from?’ The best ideas, in my experience, do not come from our heads. They come from our immediate lives, or from memory, and then they are molded by our imaginations into grand stories that affect the hearts and minds of others. Stories created solely from the imagination have a flatness about them. They are usually about things that don’t matter much. They are here today and gone tomorrow. No one remembers them into adulthood.
However, when we read the classic stories that make us laugh aloud or cry, or shrivel with fright or hug ourselves with happiness, it is my hunch that we could, if we tried, track the main idea down to a pivotal moment in the writer’s life—or several pivotal moments. These classic stories have the quality of ‘difference.’ They are here today, and here tomorrow, andhere the day after, since children’s books and folktales which are loved and remembered do more than entertain for a while: they move children profoundly, and having done so they take up residence in their hearts and stay there. They are remembered affectionately, sometimes word for word, into adulthood.
To find an event that could be a good basis for a story it might be useful to write down, or tell a friend, or other people in a writing group, about a strong emotional experience remembered from childhood, and start writing with that event in mind. This way, the first draft will not be drawn entirely from the imagination, which will mean getting off to a good, heart-felt beginning.
Can you suggest some story lines for the class now?
