Instititute of Children's Literature

Rx for Writers

Writing Tips - Getting Ideas

SM Ford has sold five children's books. Three picture books will come out from Unibooks (Korea) in 2012. Her picture book Things Little Kids Need to Know was chosen as a 2000 Read, America! Collection Selection. Sue writes for children under her maiden name, Susan Uhlig. Check out more on her website, which has information about the writing life and children's book recommendations.

"Writing to Pictures"

by SM Ford

Create independent characters.

I recently had an unusual project that made me think of my students who choose to write fiction for Assignment 1. I know it can be tough to get inspiration from a picture—perhaps my experience will be helpful.

A publisher had a project where books for English as a Foreign Language had been written and illustrated, but not published. There was a change in company staff and the new editors wanted to go a different direction. However, it's too expensive to start from scratch with new illustrations, so they wanted writers to take the existing spreads of illustrations and fix the text. I was fortunate to be one of the writers.

Here's part of what my editor said, "It has the potential to be a fine story, it just needs a little work. The main thing is that it’s pretty humorless. And with a title like that, it needs humor! Also Jake’s moaning about how his summer is ruined . . . gets old fast. Really try to write it from the mind of a kid. You can change the whole story or just tweak it. Try to make it more entertaining! Don’t be afraid to be funny. And you can change the title." Sound like an instructor letter, doesn't it? He also gave me the guidelines for the books, which have strict word lists and instructions, too. Sounds similar to directions in the ICL manual . . .

I read the original story and agreed that the main character was too whiny. I analyzed the story and found this main issue: the main character didn't have a strong reason to solve the problem and he wasn't in control. His mother made a lot of the decisions. That meant I didn't care about him. There also was a lot of telling.

So I did what I tell students to do—brainstorming. I asked how I could make the problem a bigger deal for this kid. I asked how it could become more important to him. What could make it worse for him? I made the problem relational—it wasn't just something ruined, but his friend's possession that was ruined. That raised the stakes. Now he might have his friend mad at him if he can't fix it.

Next I printed out the illustrations and ignored the existing text. (This could be a good exercise for you with a story you don't like.) I rewrote the story using showing instead of telling and made each set of words fit with the picture on a page. I rearranged some of the pictures. Changed a character where I could. Most every time there was a place for a decision or suggestion to be made, I had the main character make it—that put him in control, not his mom. Most importantly, his suggestion at the end of the story solves the problem.

Was I done? Of course not! Not only did I have to go back and edit to make sure my story was clear and said in the best way, I had to make sure I didn't have too many off-list words. I went through it a number of times. I used some analyzing software the editor recommended. I made more changes. Checked words again. Oh, and I changed the title.

When I submitted it to the editor, this is what I got back: "You’ve done a great job with this story! I think it works really well; it’s a lot of fun and now it makes a lot more sense why Jake was so worried . . . I really like what you’ve done. I have a few small changes to suggest . . ."

I let those "small changes" simmer in my brain overnight. I woke up with ideas on how to meet the expectations. A lot were to make the text a bit harder, while still staying in the word list. I combined some sentences together, expanded others, changed wording and rearranged text. In one place I changed the setting to add some words from the word list that I hadn't used before. This wasn't a ten minute fix. These "small changes" took at least an hour. I had to rerun it through the software and tweak some more.

Worth it? Yes! The resulting story made both my editor and me smile.

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