Picture book writing has been on my mind for several reasons. One is the suggestion I teach a homeschool class on writing picture books. These lesson plans seem easy to modify into teaching units for my Teachers Pay Teachers store. Another is the Opal and Agate picture book series I now have three rough texts for.
Picture Book Creation Steps
Picture book writing seems so easy, so straight forward. Step one is the idea. Step two is a rough draft laid out to cover all the necessary pages. Creating the illustrations is Step three. Step four is editing and matching the text to the illustrations. Finally, Step five is to assemble and publish the picture book.
It’s not easy to create a picture book. Ideas are easy, true. But taking an idea into a rough draft is not.
Opal and Agate
The idea of this series came when Opal was only a day or two old. After all, kids are kids. And I had lots of tales about goat kids. Plus goat kids are cute.
Right off I had a book planned with the beginnings of a rough draft. Except it was not the first book in the series. Where should the series start?
Since Opal and Agate are Nubian dairy goats, perhaps I should first do a book about Nubians. Most people won’t know what they are. To many people goats are the caricatures of hairy, horned, bearded cantankerous creatures.
Now, this picture isn’t totally false. I’ve seen old brush goats that would fit this. But Nubian dairy goats definitely don’t fit this picture.
I worked on this idea. After two or three attempts, I gave up. It was a good idea, but wouldn’t fit into the series.
Now I have two books, one for Agate and one for Opal. These are when they are born. Agate was a bottle baby. Opal was raised by her mother.
Teaching Picture Book Creation
The steps are right. They work. However, they are not simple or easy. Somehow this needs to be part of teaching picture book writing too.
