Picture Book Rules: Some Things Never Change!

by Lila McGinnis

If you believe there are no rules for writing picture books anymore, you would be wrong. For instance, is your first page the most colorful, charming, funny or scary twelve lines you can write? It should be. That’s Rule One.

These days you may write about almost any subject or theme if you use good taste, and good taste itself is up for question depending on the hour and the place. But if you want editors to consider your book for publication from the hundreds they read each week, there are still rules they expect you to follow.

With the help of some friends who have, between them, sold ten picture books, I have listed the rules we could think of below, beginning with Rule One, the best first page you can write.

2. Use correct spelling and punctuation. The first thing to do when you have a good draft of your book is to check the spelling and the punctuation. The last thing to do before sending it to an editor is to check it again. Never depend entirely on a spell-check program.

3. Create a main character the listeners will care about. In other words, whether a girl, a boy, or a pick-up truck, a character that children hearing the story will sympathize with. If you make this character downright mean—funny perhaps, sassy and cute and full of ideas but still basically mean—you will almost certainly lose your reader, or at least the one who has the editor’s desk. Children rarely care for mean kids.

4. Give your story a beginning, a middle, and an end. Pressed for specifics, my friends said let something happen at the beginning, let the tensions build as more things happen, and be sure all is okay at the end. Don’t let the story just stop. Don’t let it drift away. I reminded them that sometimes all cannot be okay at the end, these days. But there must be hope at the end, they said. Hope and, if not a laugh, at least a smile.

5. Think thirty-two pages, at least for now. Since the beginning of time—well, since the beginning of picture books—they have been created from two signatures of sixteen pages each. Look at the spine of a well-used, loosened-up-a-bit book and you will better understand signatures. With modern printing techniques changing rapidly, this rule will surely disappear, but until the publishers themselves say that length does not matter, keep thinking thirty-two.

That many pages gives you fourteen double-page spreads to play with. It means a single first and last page. And two remain, of course, for the title and publishing information. Cut a copy of your manuscript into sections that you think will fit on each page. Remember that one line is sometimes enough for a page, in a picture book.

Make yourself a dummy or a story board, get some removable tape, and begin to think like the illustrator.

6. The sixth rule is that you, the author of the story, must help the other half of the team, the illustrator whom you may never meet, to see the book as you see it. The illustrator will have only your words for inspiration. You, however, have the length and breadth of your imagination.

Visualize the pictures. Will they all look the same? Is there enough action? Does something happen for fourteen different spreads? Is there too much action? If you follow Rule Five, you will be forced to fit your story to size, which may be just what it needs.

Of course, you may find it is far too short to make a book. Can you add a scene? Or will its shortness give the illustrator more welcome freedom? The success of the book is not in the number of words but in the relationship between your story and the illustrator’s vision—created, remember, by your words.

Make the changes you need, read your manuscript again, and check the spelling. Let it rest a week or more, and check the spelling.

7. One last rule, but in many ways the most important: make it interesting. That doesn’t sound like too much to ask, but time and time again the editor picks up a manuscript or opens an e-mail and reads about a boy who needs a friend, a stuffed bear who would like to be real, the child who will now dream the most amazing dream and then wake up.

Time and again the writing will be dull and lifeless. Passive. Time and again the manuscript will be all surface, no depth. There is nothing for the child to remember, once the book is closed. Nothing worth thinking about, before sleep.

A fine example of depth in a picture book is Where the Wild Things Are, by Maurice Sendak. Max decides to sail for a year and a day back to where he is loved best of all. Many of us would have stopped the story when he arrives in his own room, sure that we were finished, and the book would satisfy. But Sendak gives us the truth about mothers, one many of you will still remember. When Max arrived back home, his supper was waiting—and it was still hot.

That’s what is meant by depth—three levels: a good story, lots to think about before sleep, and perhaps best of all, something the reader will remember the next time that reader’s mother is angry.

The best classroom for a children’s writer is the children’s room at the library. There you can read other picture books, notice the words they use, the cliff hangers to make you turn the pages, a character so real you are sure you have met him somewhere before, except he’s a rabbit . . .

When you go back to your own book, use your new ideas, new backgrounds, new everything except these old rules—follow each one to be sure your new ideas will make an editor smile.


Lila McGinnis has sold 68 short stories, five children's books, and one novel. She has taught writing and led critique groups, with her students selling a dozen books so far.