Picture books are a wonderful, unique challenge. They’re almost more difficult than writing novels, I think. They demand an economy of language and of story telling that doesn’t exist to the same degree. It certainly exists, but not to the same degree in chapter books and novels. You have to convey your ideas, your relationships, your story in just so many sentences per page and keep moving along as quickly as possible and in thirty-two pages or less. Current trends in picture books are actually demanding that the amount of words or sentences per page are getting less and less and less.
It becomes almost like a haiku exercise. You have to really streamline when you’re writing. The other thing about picture books is that one doesn’t want to write what the illustrations will show. Ideally, one wants the art and the text to compliment each other. Not just to reflect each other and mirror each other, but to compliment each other so that the child that’s reading or listening is receiving new and different information from each of those things and putting them together. That is a unique challenge, as well.
I mean, we really find that when we write it’s more about the editing and the trimming after the writing than it is about the writing to begin with when it comes to picture books because we’re combing through it and going, “We don’t need to see that. The art will show that. We don’t need to say that, the art will show that. Can we say that in just two words less so that we can get to the next page that little bit sooner? Can we jump into the action without the exposition quite so much at the beginning?” I mean, there are all kinds of interesting challenges to picture books, I think, that are unique to that particular genre.
