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Re-Imagining Your Picture Book

Workshop by Harold Underdown

written by Jennie Chan

         Look under, down and deep, even into your character’s underwear.

If you need better advice than that, then you should invest in Harold Underdown’s The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Children’s Books.  To my surprise, although he had every opportunity to hawk his own book, Mr. Underdown started the workshop by encouraging us to get what he described as “The Bible”: Ann Whitford Paul’s Writing Picture Books: A Hands-On Guide from Story Creation to Publication.  If you can’t decide whether you’re approaching children’s book writing more as an idiot or zealot, then you should check out www.underdown.org for sample chapters and detailed reviews.  Or, you can read the rest of this article to get a sense of what Mr. Underdown personally offered at the June 2012 NJSCBWI conference.

As a former teacher, I was impressed by how Mr. Underdown ran the workshop.  Efficiently yet gently, with the highest form of technology being a hardcover picture book, Mr. Underdown guided us through a 5-step routine 5 times:  He read an excerpt.  Pointed out a perspective or strategy.  Asked questions to help us apply what we’d learned to our own picture books.  Gave us time to write.  And listened to us.

If you have a picture book manuscript that could use some re-imagining, here are the 5 writing exercises (in parentheses are the titles and writers of the books that Mr. Underdown read from—in addition to illustrating his points, they are recommendations for the best picture books):

1)      Character—Do you know your character?  Can you fill a page with your character’s likes and dislikes? What is character’s room like? What is character’s favorite ice cream and why? What is character’s favorite book and why? What interesting quirk does your character have?

(Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are)

2)      Underlying emotion—What is your character feeling? Does the feeling change? How does your reader know what your character is feeling? Can the feeling be intuited or is your text telling it? Are you telling a feeling because it’s easier or because of a better reason, such as a rhythmic refrain?

(Ezra Jack Keats’ The Snowy Day)

3)      Language and voice—How would your story change if you were to write it from a regional dialect? A jargon used by a particular group, such as parents or firefighters?  A style that has a different degree of formality than you’re used to?

Think of a voice you’d like to adopt and rewrite a couple of your manuscript’s sentences in this voice.  Even if the results don’t work for your story, developing this skill would be useful in broadening your appeal to a variety of markets.

(Cynthia Rylant’s The Relatives Came)

4)      Point of view—This is not just about a first, second or third person narrator; it can also be about revealing story and character through a different form, such as letters.

If you were to write a letter from your main character, which character inside or outside the story would it be addressed to? What would the letter focus on?

(Sarah Stewart’s The Gardener)

5)      Setting—How does the setting impact your story? What would happen if you changed the setting? What else would change?

(Vera B. Williams’ A Chair for My Mother)

If you want to try a “whole other workshop” on your own, here’s a sug