Jay Penn writer/illustrator

Writing picture books for children is tough. You probably wouldn’t think so, but I can assure you it is. There’s a simplicity to picture book prose that takes serious skill and effort to do well.

To effectively write a picture book, you have to take into consideration the words your target audience will know, which ones they definitely don’t know and the words you can use that might stretch their vocabulary in a positive way. You have to be economical in your word count – too many words and your audience will be intimidated, too few and your target audience changes. Then you have to think of cadence, flow and pacing. And all of that is an aside from the actual story you want to tell and all of the considerations involved with that side of it!

Like I said, it’s tough.

As somebody who has a healthy stack of picture book story ideas piling up in my head, I’m in the process of taking some of those stories and turning them into proposals to submit to agents.

One of my favourite ideas entails a young cloud called Clara. I first came up with her story about five years ago, and her time has finally come to take centre stage (Mary Unfairy had that particular spotlight on her for a good number of years).

I thought it might be fun to show you how I’ve gone about developing Clara’s story in a series of posts.

In this first instalment, I’ll reveal how the story idea came to me and my first few steps after that.

The Day Job: Where the best ideas happen

Working at a bookstore during the Covid Pandemic was strange, to say the least. In the span of a year, it went from business as usual to a big stretch of time doing absolutely nothing, then being back in the bookstore but the store was closed (though a couple of customers decided that the huge ‘Closed’ signs and physical barriers were mere obstacles to be overcome in their pursuit of literature), then being open, but with strict guidelines about mandatory masks and hand sanitiser use before gaining entry to the store.

At that last stage, we used to take turns on who would stand at the front door and ensure entry guidelines were being adhered to. One day, that task fell on me. Thankfully.

Ideas Like Popcorn

As I stood there, checking for masks and getting people to use the provided hand sanitiser (and looking sternly at those people who had their own hand sanitiser that definitely wasn’t just plain water…), I started thinking about stories. Specifically, children’s book stories. At this point in my creative life, I felt I was finally skilled enough in both my writing and illustrating abilities to be able to seriously approach the publishing industry with my work confidently.

All I needed was some story ideas.

That day, standing in the late summer morning light, the ideas started coming. First, just one story idea, about a medieval King who lost ‘his’ beard. Then a story about a butterfly with delusions of grandeur called the Betterfly, then one about a flying mushroom.

The ideas were popping into my head almost faster than I had time to write them all down. It was the most extraordinary spell of pure creativity I had ever encountered and the effect it had on me was profound. In the span of a few hours, I had a decade’s worth of creative output ready to go. It was crazy nuts.

Enter, a cloud

One of the ideas from that almost manic creativity drop was the story about a cloud called Clara. This is what I wrote down that day with my trusty two-colour pen:

That particular story stood out from most of the others. While some of the ideas were not much more than vague concepts to be explored in more detail at a later stage, this one appeared in my mind almost fully formed. Looking back at that initial concept to where I have the story now, I would say that 80% of it came to me in that one moment. I have no idea how a brain can form an almost entire story in the blink of an eye, but it did it, somehow.

Shape

Over the next few weeks, I started putting shape on not only the story, but also Clara herself. Several drafts of text were attempted and abandoned, so too some early character designs.

I’ve long since discovered that the road to a project outcome I am happy with involves plenty of false starts, wrong turns and occasional breakdowns. I also think this is a good thing. On the rare occasions that I’ve completed something without much trouble, I’ve found the work to be lacking later on.

Mistakes make the end result stronger. Once I acknowledged that, the mistakes I made along the way started holding a different meaning entirely. It’s at the point now where mistakes are quite welcome in my workflow, because I know they’re there for a reason.

In the next instalment…

I’ll discuss the early pitfalls of a project, why rhyming in picture books is a fool’s errand, and how even the best of intentions can be derailed.