by It’s the end of the month. Hooray! And congratulations!
If you’re brilliant, you have thirty picture book ideas, all of which can be transformed into stunning manuscripts. If this is you, stop reading here; take the rest of the day off.
If you’re like me, however, you have thirty sparks. Thirty scraggly shoots. Thirty teensy brown-paper-wrapped parcels of hope.
Now it’s time to test them for viability.
Here’s the image that always comes to my mind during this part of the process: I’m in a dentist’s chair. The dentist pokes and scrapes at a suspicious tooth, gently at first, then harder, then really hard. I silently pray, “Please don’t find anything wrong. Please. Ohpleaseohpleaseohplease.”
My ideas are my babies. I love them. But my ultimate goal is to get manuscripts out into the world. If an idea isn’t strong enough, better to let it go than to spend the next month banging my head against my desk.
So here are some suggestions as you begin your deliberations:
1) Check for competition.
If my idea hinges on a distinctive title, I Google and hope the title doesn’t turn up elsewhere. If it centers on an unusual animal or situation, I go to Amazon.com or Books in Print and search for similar books. If it’s a hook-y concept, and I can’t remember if I’ve seen it before, I ask around (a good children’s librarian can be your best friend for this type of thing).
2) Make sure the plot—or the concept, for concept books—is strong.
Sometimes I turn an idea over and over in my mind and come to the sad realization that it’s just not different or special enough. Out it goes. But if you have a great character drowning in a mediocre idea, toss him a life preserver; maybe you can find him another home.
3) Think about marketability.
We all know the picture book market is tough. If I have a choice between developing a high-concept story or a clever but obscure idea that will require a book with expensive flaps, pull tabs, and a triangular fuchsia mirror, I’m going to go with the former.
4) Don’t think about marketability.
Ha—fooled you! It’s good to be aware of trends.And if an editor says she’s looking for a book about platypuses, and you happen to have one (or think you can write one), you’d be silly not to give it a shot.
But.
If you have a potentially hard-to-market idea that you really, truly love, an idea that floods you with energy and fills you with joy, here’s my advice, courtesy of Admiral Farragut: Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.
We simply cannot allow our creativity to be controlled by conventional wisdom. I know everyone’s saying picture books need to be—what is it now, less than seven words long? Maybe it’s six this week.
You know what? I’d bet good money that in the next year or two, some brilliant, 2,000-word picture book will take the publishing world by storm. It will be a bestseller. It will be adored by both critics and kids. And it will exist because some writer had the courage of her convictions, and because some editor was gutsy enough to take a chance on it.
I adore Press Here by Hervé Tullet
Thanks Deborah,
for a firm, fun, fulfilling, fitting finale!
regards
Janeen
Number four did fool me. Ha! You got me.
We write because our ideas give us joy and we want to give the kidlets this same enchantment that we feel. What great thoughts. Thanks so much for this post.
Thanks for the inspiring post, and the great advice! It should always be our passions that drive the story, not the market.
Thanks for this advice, Deborah, about filtering through our ideas!
Deborah, what a perfect last post! Right now I have thirty pieces of gravel, but maybe there’s an agate in there…or a diamond. You can be sure I will be using your suggestions. Thank you so much.
And, Tara, one last HUGE THANK YOU for making November my favorite month. It has, once again, been so much fun.
Oh Deborah! I love that YOU wrote this post AND the Quiet Book! Because your book is exactly that… the exception to not writing quiet books! And I’ve even heard it said so at an SCBWI conference breakout session! The Editor was saying “Don’t write quiet books” and someone said, “but what about THE Quiet Book?” and yours was, of course, the example of how sometimes what they DON’T want is really what they DO want. So way to go! Glad to “meet” you! And love your book! Now off to play some “save” “use” or “toss” with my ideas
Thankyou Deborah, for giving me some very important advice, to help me go forward with all my ideas. Setting guidelines as to .. what to do next is most important to keep the momentum going. Thanks again for this.
Tara I also want to express my warm thanks for what you have done. The encouragement and informative posts (which by the way I have printed out into my folder) have been valuable and will help me work through my ideas as we head into 2012. A year for a lot of work, but doable with all these new tools I have gained from PiBoldMo. BIG, BIG, BIG Thankyou and Hugs.
I have longlisted 7 fiction and 5 non-fiction ideas to develop. Out of which, 3 fiction plots are well developed when I wrote down the idea. Busy year ahead, making this potential an actual reality.
Extremely helpful advice for taking our work to the next step. Thanks, Deborah!
Really good advice. Thank you. I always google my titles with my heart in my mouth. I’ve had to ditch some things I loved but they’re all recyclable… Do KEEP on googling them as you write and prepare to send your ms. out though. I had one that didn’t come up on google when I started writing it but two months later, just after I sent it off, I googled it again and it did. A couple of publishers were interested in it really quickly and we had to check out the story that had just come out and it was too similar so we couldn’t go on with it.
Really like the advice about taking out a really strong character from a story that’s not strong enough. I’m just trying to get the guts to do that now as I didn’t want to ditch this particular story -but I know that the best bit about it is the character -so I’m going to try him somewhere else. Thanks for a great last post and thanks, too, for tara for an amazing PiBoIdMo. Can’t wait till next year (in fact, I think I’ll carry on through December as I did last year). Good luck to everyone with their ideas turning into reality,
Clare.
What a grand finale to a grand month-Thank You!
Now to scrape and poke my sparks, shoots, and sparkles of hope!!!
Deborah, what a great blog post for the end of PiBoIdMo. It motivates us to go from ideas to screening of ideas. I think it’s a step that may often be overlooked. Thanks for the reminder to stick with it if we believe in it enough, no matter what may be the current trend. I was fascinated to hear that you co-write with Whoopie. What an great variety you have written. Much continued success! I plan to check out your website.
Thank you, Deborah ! Definitely food for thought ! I just wanted to add one more thing; sometimes it’s good to just write out the story, even if you think it won’t be original, strong or marketable, because sometimes a weak story can be the base from which you can build a strong story. Sometimes I start with a story and after round x with my crit group, it’s become a totally different story. But that story would never have been there, had I not started with my initial draft.
Love your books !!!
Ps i love The Quiet Book and i’m adding ‘A balloon for Isabel’ to my daughters x-mas list