This is probably a good time for looking back. Someone suggested I revisit all the unsuccessful picture books I’ve worked on in the last three years, and see if I could figure out why they didn’t work. Maybe I could figure out if it was possible to make one––and only one––of them work.
After scouring two laptops, and about half a dozen notebooks I came up with ten abandoned works-in-progress, and the interesting thing was that I could see very quickly why each of them didn’t work.
1: Some of them weren’t funny when they needed to be.
2: Some of them were too complicated.
3: Some of them were too dark or weird.
4: Some of them didn’t really have enough of a story.
The next stage is simple: pick one and make it simple and funny.
“Simple” is of course very different to “easy” and, as I’ve discovered from teaching, “simple” usually involves taking a complicated piece of work and applying a process of elimination.
As one of my professors said (Kathi Appelt I think)…roll it down a hill and see what falls off.
The surprising thing about this process is that I took a complicated 500 word story, I eliminated everything that wasn’t essential, and I ended up with a simple 2000 word story.
How can that be?
Picture Books That Didn’t Work…
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