Writing right, part the second

Where we talk to people who know what they're doing.

This is the second in what will probably be three issues of Random Orbit where I’m wondering about writing. Specifically, writing picture books. I’ve been struggling lately with a story about a bug, and a toad, and maybe a snail and a grasshopper, and this struggle has led me to reexamine the way I go about it. It’s led me wonder if I’ve been doing it wrong all this time.

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I’ve written eight picture books. These books include the three big, busy Everything Goes books, three books in the Tinyville Town series, and two standalone books, The Space Walk and My Hero. Each of these projects were very different from one another. Everything Goes is almost an activity book, and the story, about a kid named Henry and his parents is just an excuse for us to drive through a town, or walk through an airport, or take a ferry across a harbor, and see as many vehicles as I could stuff into the books. The Tinyville Town books are more traditional picture books, about how a community works together as a new bridge is built, begins the first day of a new school year, and learning what happens behind the scenes of a firehouse. The Space Walk follows an astronaut as he leaves his ship to venture into space, and is meant to be and analogy for a kid wanting to go out and play. And lastly, My Hero, which is narratively the most complicated of these. My Hero is about a girl named Abigail who believes she’s a super hero. Or maybe it’s about a super hero named Awesome Girl, whose father thinks she’s just a little girl. The story is told via Abigail’s imagination in parts, in more straightforward narration and dialog in others, and with eight comic-book style pages in the middle.

What these eight books have in common is that they were all written the same way: they were written to the pictures. What I mean by this is that when I first conceive of a picture book, I am thinking of the images first. Usually, it’s one particular image that I want to draw. Maybe this is an astronaut floating in space, surrounded by stars and planets.

a scene from The Space Walk

Maybe it’s a busy Richard Scarry-style scene loaded with cars and trucks. It’s always something that seems fun to draw, to me. I keep drawing, and at some point a sequence of these images begins to reveal itself. I start seeing a story. Usually there aren’t many words, yet. Maybe a little piece of dialog, or a clever phrase that might connect two otherwise disparate images. Around this time, I begin the second step that these books all share, which is writing to the page-turn. I write exactly enough to fit on my already-designed-in-my-head page. If I need more, or fewer words, a fatal domino-sequence often begins where I have to start rethinking the imagined illustrations, which pushes over another domino, and soon the whole thing is stuck and sounds wrong and I wish I had an editor to help me. I have several manuscripts in various states of this stuck disrepair, all brought down by the same problem.¹

I don’t actually start thinking about a real narrative with a beginning middle and end until much later, and I don’t usually sit down and write the actual words of the book until the very end. This process is almost exactly how I wrote the first two stories I ever had published, Frederick & Eloise and Dear Julia, back in the 1990s. Basically, one could argue that my picture books always begin as large-format comics, and when I think of writing each of them, I know there were times when I thought they’d each work better as comics. It’s no accident, for sure, that all of them except the three Tinyville Town books actually use comics to tell parts of the stories. That’s just the way I think, I think.

Now, don’t get me wrong. While I’m having big trouble with this new story, I think my books are just fine. Some of them are actually, if I might say so myself, pretty good. I’ve learned to lean into this janky way of telling stories over many years, and I’ve worked with editors who, I think, recognized that this is what worked for me and allowed and encouraged this process to play itself out.

But as I struggled with this new book I began wondering if I am doing it right. Do other author/illustrators go about this process the same way? And if they do, how do they make it work when it doesn’t want to? I decided to ask a few of my author/illustrator colleagues about it, and I thought it might be interesting to take it further and ask some authors as well. (I think these writers, the authors who write picture books but don’t illustrate them, are the biggest conjurers of all. The illustrations are the flashy stars of picture books, but it’s the words that are so often the structure that hold it all together, and without pictures in their heads, I don’t know how they do it. I love illustrating books where the author clearly loved writing the words, and these authors tell stories that I, as a drawer of pictures, would never have thought of. They allow the words to go where they want to go without worrying about what drawings will go here and what will go there. Can I do that?

I don’t know.

I emailed a few authors and illustrators asking about their process.² Some of the authors are also illustrators, some of the illustrators have also written books that they didn’t illustrate themselves. I asked whether the pictures come first or the words. I asked if they’re writing to these imagined pictures, or to some hypothetical page-turn. I asked if their process is different whether they plan to illustrate the book or not. What I wanted to know was whether these writers, especially the ones that don’t draw pictures themselves, think about the illustrations and the mechanics of the book as much as I do when I am illustrating their story.

Of course, the answer is sometimes, yeah, but not always, and probably always differently.

For good measure, I also talked to three editors,³ to get their take on what makes a good manuscript. I’ve read scripts where the story clearly shows the author is thinking of the illustrator. And I’ve read scripts that read like abstract poetry. And I wonder how an editor knew this work was, in fact, “done.” when they took it. I used to think that the scripts where the author was writing with me, the illustrator, in mind, were “better” than the others, but now I’m not so sure.⁴

The plan was to write this issue in a way that would sort of show my findings, giving each person I talked to a lot of individual ink. This author says this particular process works for him, and that editor does this thing that works for her. But that’s not really how this went. Instead, it was pretty cut and dry, and pretty much everyone said the same thing:

Typical author, paraphrased:

“Nope, Brian, I don’t do that thing you’re describing. What I do is write the story, and I wrestle with the way it sounds, the way it plays out, not really thinking of the pictures. As I write, as the story is revealed, I become aware of the rhythms, and I can see where page-turns might land. But it’s not what drives things. That comes later. Sometimes it doesn’t come at all.”

Bob Shea added there isn’t a wrong way to do this. And while I agree, I also don’t.

Typical editor, paraphrased:

“When I read a manuscript, a good manuscript, I can usually tell whether the author understands the picture book form, and I often immediately know whether it will work or not. There are places where page-turns obviously land, sure. But it’s not divided up into 32 parts or anything. And while I do consider word-count, the book needs to feel like a complete story with a beginning, middle and end. This might happen in 250 words, or it might be 950. Authors often include art notes, and often I take those out before I send the script to an illustrator.”

Tamson Weston made me feel a little better about my being held captive to the page turn. She wrote:

In poetry there’s the line break, in picture books there’s the page turn. It’s a good place to start when editing because it will often dictate what needs to be cut or (occasionally) added.

And I agree, it’s a very good place to start editing. But I’m not so certain that it’s a great place to start when writing, or even conceiving of a story.

I want to give extra special mention to Carrie Finison, who wrote the book I most recently illustrated.

Pigs Dig a Road, Putnam, out this September

Carrie makes takes it up a notch by writing in verse. Her process was by far the most interesting to me, and possibly the most convoluted, because her stuff has to rhyme, but still she’s only focused on the story, the story, the story. In fact, Pigs was originally about a duck, and a truck, and she began asking herself what was the truck doing, and why, and she let that go where it might. If it were me, I’d have fallen in love early on with drawing a duck, and would never have allowed pigs to even get in the driver’s seat.⁵

I’ve got one more issue (maybe two, maybe) in this series, where I want to break down a couple of my favorite manuscripts, as well as one of my own.

But what I really want to do is just write about writing this bug story, and tell you all about how this happened and where it’s going, because (since you asked thanks) it’s going better. Heck, the moment I began working through this stuff it started going better. I’d like to just paste in the whole not-working dummy and compare it to the now-working-pretty-well script. But this isn’t the time, this isn’t place. If the script gets finished, if the story gets bought, if the book gets published, you’ll know all about it. So, now, pardon me while I get back to work, where I put a stinkbug and some wrens and a frog in the same room and see what happens when the story tells the story.

Stay tuned.

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Cat content! Sorry. Not sorry.

1. But I think maybe I know what’s wrong, now. I think I get it. Maybe they can be saved. More on this in part three.

2. Responses from Adam Rex, Bob Shea, Jacob Souva, and Carrie Finison. Thanks you guys.

3. Several back-and-forth emails with Sylvie Frank and Tamson Weston, and a 45-minute zoom chat with Stephanie Pitts. Thank you thank you thank you.

4. This is a topic for another issue, for sure, because it’s fascinating to me how my regards for these scripts have changed over the years.

5. She does make a dummy, which surprised me, and which I want to write about more, probably in a few months around the time our book is published.