Yes, you caught me. I cheated on the title of this post. Instead of “The Children’s book, pt 2”, I’m calling it by its actual title. Might as well start calling it what it is.
To continue the narrative from Pt 1
As I talked about at the end of the last post, I was struggling to write a story for the proposed book. I had an idea but I was putting so much pressure on myself to create a “classic” that I was going nowhere fast.
I suppose saying I was trying to write a classic is really overstating things. I had told a very high-level version of the story I wanted to tell to a friend who teared up at the end. When that happened, I put additional pressure on myself to have a story worthy of that reaction.
After two weeks of really no forward momentum I was really questioning myself.
Then it happened.
The story changed
We have a bird (a woodpecker) that lives in and around our neighborhood. I normally like woodpeckers but this one has decided my home is its personal property. Every year in the Spring, he uses my furnace chimney on top of the house as a drum. He bangs away on it because the acoustics are good (I presume). I don’t think he does any harm but it can be very annoying first thing in the morning (as the banging reverberates throughout the house).
Two years ago he expanded his program to punch some holes in the exterior of my hot tub. I was forced to fill in the holes and cover them with tin. He seemed to get the general idea and left it alone after blunting his beak on the metal. The following year, he left the hot tub alone completely.
Then, this Spring he resumed his reign of terror putting no fewer than six new holes in the hot tub and one in the playhouse I’d built in the back yard.
I was outside contemplating the damage, trying to think of how I would dissuade these attacks when my granddaughter came over. We talked about the woodpecker and I went into the house for a few moments to get something.
When I came outside, it was to see my granddaughter marching back and forth across the deck, stick in hand, guarding everything from the woodpecker. I knew I had my story.
Things moved faster after that
As soon as I had that new idea, things really began to gel. I had a rough draft of the story written in about an hour after that.
I then had to fill out the template given to me by McQuina (the illustrator). This forced me to break up the narrative by pages and think about potential illustrations.
An Ah-Hah moment
Thinking about the illustrations was an Ah-hah moment for me. The story was almost three times longer than would fit in the book. I realized that a lot of what I had written was describing the scene. Obviously, I wouldn’t need those words as they would be replaced by the illustrations themselves.
Happily, the words gave me ideas about the illustrations so they weren’t wasted. But this was a moment of realization. I could write a longer narrative (and probably should) to capture everything. That narrative could be shortened when I started thinking about the visuals and performed the edits. That was part of what held me back when I first began. How could I write something concise but meaningful?
The answer was, I shouldn’t try. Get the story down first and then begin the edits, cutting and refining.
More to come
You are probably thinking I’m dragging this story out. Maybe I am to fully capture what has been running through my mind for the past several months. Maybe I’m trying to be thorough so those of you who want to create your own picture book can see some of the pitfalls and decision points I’ve gone through.
I’ll let you decide.
