What Goes Into a Picture Book Manuscript?

I've been working on drafting another picture book, and found myself contemplating all that goes into the piece even before it's ready to be polished and sent looking for a home. Like many others, I once thought - foolishly thought - that writing a picture book was easier than writing a novel.  It's certainly shorter, I'll admit to that freely, but easier?  Not really.

It starts with the matter of scope.  Novelists see things in terms of the Big Picture - sweeping settings, complex and developing characters, conflicts and plot twists and story arcs.  A good picture book can have all of those things, of course, but where a novelist has several thousand words or a few hundred pages to allow their story to take shape, a picture book is for the most part bound to the 32-page format, and an ever-dwindling number of words as the hypothetical attention span of young readers diminishes in bits and bytes.  So, easier?  Not really.  Just shorter, which can be its own obstacle to surmount.

But what goes into a picture book, really?  What thought processes are at work?  Well, for my current work in progress, working title Constellations on Vacation, my mental workings looked something like this.

1.  The Title.
The title came to me fairly easily for this manuscript.  Sometimes a whole slew of drafts goes by before I find a title good enough to pin on the piece, but in this case, the title came first.  I was looking up at the sky, thinking of the constellations I might be able to spot, and the rhyming phrase Constellations on Vacation popped into my head, and suddenly I was off and running.

2.  Which Constellations?
When I decided to google it, I was amazed at the wide variety of constellation characters I'd have to choose from.  There are the classical groupings, of which the twelve zodiac constellations are a part - Leo, Aquarius, Pisces, Cancer, and their ilk.  A good many of these are also human in form - Perseus, Orion, Andromeda, Cassiopeia.  Then there are the more modern shapes, which didn't seem all that useful, for the most part, as they're rather obscure.  The Air Pump and the Microscope might be interesting as a possible Jeopardy question, but I really couldn't see them vacationing much of anywhere.  I opted to go with the classical constellations, and focus on realistic-looking animals and people... Cancer the Crab and Leo the Lion were in, Capricorn the Sea Goat and Sagittarius the Archer centaur were out.

3.  Where Would Constellations Go On Vacation?
At first, the story unfolded in a series of mental "screenshots" - constellations lounging on a beach, exploring the plains of Africa, taking a sight-seeing tour of New York City.  But it needed to go further than that... and it needed refining.  Should I go with a general series of locations - beach, forest, city?  Or should I think specific - the Great Barrier Reef, Muir Woods, New York City?  Should I attempt a mixture of the two?  And should I focus on American locations, or try for a more global view of things?  That last question is still bugging me, though my first draft opted for specific American locations.

4.  Who is the Main Character?
This stymied me for a bit.  A book needs a protagonist, or at least a character to focus on.  In the book The Day the Crayons Quit, the story is told via letters written from the crayons to their erstwhile owner.  I'd already decided that the story would be told through a series of post cards from the constellations on vacation... but who would the post cards be sent to?  And why would that "someone" be interested in those post cards?

5.  What's the Problem Here?
And this question, my bete noir, kept hounding me on the heels of the main character question.  I tend towards sleepy, calm, sweet picture books - "going to sleep" books that progress softly from one scene to the next without much, or any, conflict.  Unfortunately for me, that's not what agents and publishers are looking for.  They WANT conflict.  They want the main character, your protagonist, to struggle with something and eventually achieve that goal.  Gone are the sleepy-time books I once dreamed of writing; it's all about the conflict. 

So... what could be the problem here?  I'd tentatively decided that the protagonist of the book would be the constellation Canis Major, the Big Dog.  I wasn't so keen on the name, but dogs are almost universally appealing (pardon the pun), and I thought he would make a decent protagonist.  As for the conflict... what if Canis wants to go on vacation, but can't decide where?  What if he's afraid to leave his spot in the sky?  What if he wants to go EVERYwhere, and just can't decide where to go first?  One of those, I thought, would surely fit.

6.  Formatting the Story
As I already mentioned, I'd decided early on that the story would be a correspondence story... a series of post cards to Canis Major from his starry friends as they vacation on Earth.  I still needed to play with that format, however... Canis would need to respond to the reading of each post card, introducing the conflict (that this wasn't the place he would choose to vacation) and move the action along.  I decided that each post card would be followed by a single sentence, showing Canis Major's thoughts on the location.

7.  Time to Draft!
And this is where I am right now... with my prewriting done, I'm free to draft and revise, draft and revise, draft and revise.  This is also where the 32-page rule and the limited word count come into play; I may need to make a dummy copy of the text on the pages to see how this is going to fit together, page-wise, though strictly speaking, that's the job of the editor and art director.  I've also got to keep that word count in mind.  Right now, two drafts in, I'm running at just over a thousand words, a shade long for the modern picture book.  Some trimming will certainly be in order. 

But drafting, editing, and revising is a topic for another blog post!

Social Media Platform vs. Writing Time

It's been about two months since I started trying to build my social media platform, as advised by an article in the 2019 Children's Writer's & Illustrators Market.  My feelings are definitely mixed.

On Facebook, I have an "official author's page" which isn't all that different from my personal page, except that all posts go public.  I try to post two or three times a week.  On average, the only people who interact with those posts are my family and friends who "liked" the page to begin with.  Some people might wonder why I bothered with an author's page at all, as I was already active on Facebook before I created it.  The answer is that I prefer to keep my writing/ author posts separate from my personal life posts; I don't particularly need the world to hear my every thought or insecurity that I share with people I actually know.

On Twitter, I've been working to build up the number of followers I have, but doing it in a very methodical and cautious way.  I don't want just ANY followers; I want people who, ideally, have read my books and like me.  Barring that, I'd prefer they be fellow writers or agents in the children's book field - people I can network with.  I'm on Twitter pretty much every day, just as I am with Facebook, and I try to retweet or tweet at least one thing each day.  On the whole, I don't care for Twitter as much as I do Facebook; it feels very much like a zillion voices shouting into a void, and while I have been making an effort to become part of the #WritingCommunity there, my own posts don't get much notice at this point.

The thing with social media, though, is this: it's addictive.  I come home from work, shed my work clothes, and flop down into my favorite chair with my iPad to check the platform and see what's new.  On many days, it's a bit of a chore to think of something to post - as I said, I don't want to post just anything, and there's only so much I can say about my writing.  And yet, I find myself glued to the screen for hours at a go, reading other people's words, and telling myself that I'm doing all this to better my own writing self.

Only I'm not writing.

Writing and holding down a full-time job like teaching is difficult to begin with; on many afternoons, I'm just not at a good place in my head to try to write.  I'm tired, both physically and emotionally, and doing the social media thing is a lot less exerting than actually sitting down and trying to think of something to write about.  That's a dangerous place for a writer to be, though.  Social media is a time-consumer, something that FEELS like you're being productive... only you aren't, because every minute spent on social media is a minute you're not spending actually writing.  Too much of that, and you wind up becoming one of those people who's a writer only in their own mind - talking the talk, but producing little to nothing in the way of proof.

I'm really going to need to assess my use of social media.  It may get my name out there, yes... but it won't, at least as far as I can tell, help get me published.  Neither will this blog, of course, but at least when I'm updating this blog, I'm forcing myself to do some real writing.  Social media can be a wonderful thing, I think, when used correctly... but it's also a La Brea Tar Pit of self indulgence.  Put more than an exploratory toe in, and you risk getting mired and sucked down.