Welcome to day 19 of 40 craft lessons. Most stories are told chronologically because our brains better understand the consequences of events. The story of Before She Was Harriet (2019, Lesa Cline-Ransome, James E. Ransome) doesn’t follow this order. It opens with Harriet as an old woman and then moves backward, stage by stage: she […]

Welcome to day 17 of 40 craft lessons. We use simile quite often in our daily conversations. It helps us make ourselves understandable and makes our speech more vivid and colorful. But a simile is a more versatile asset than adding color to the text. It can change the entire approach to a topic. Consider

Welcome to day 16 of 40 craft lessons. If the story was finished by sunrise, that would be the last day of Scheherazade; Shahriyar would have killed her, just as he had killed many women before her. Night after night, Scheherazade told an unfinished story, and by the end—after one thousand and one nights, a

Welcome to day 15 of 40 craft lessons. Not all picture books should be funny, nor should they only tackle simple topics. We need picture books on every subject, especially the tough ones. In fact, those are often the most needed, particularly these days. But writing about complex topics for young readers is tricky. The

Welcome to day 14 of 40 craft lessons from 40 picture books. Imagine a fly-on-the-wall telling you a story! That’s third-person objective POV in a nutshell. If you like a fancier term, some call it “camera-eye POV.” This POV shows the story through an outside observer who reports only actions and dialogue. It doesn’t peek

  Welcome to day 13 of 40 craft lessons. If second-person POV sounds unfamiliar, what would you say about first-person plural POV (“we”, “us”)? It’s strange, isn’t it? But once upon a time, the first-person plural was the natural choice for oral storytelling. Many cultures told stories not from an individual’s perspective but from the

Welcome to day 12 of 40 craft lessons from 40 picture books. Third-person POV (“she,” “her”) is versatile. It can be an omniscient, god-like POV that knows everything—thoughts, feelings, and experiences of all characters—and moves freely between multiple characters’ minds. We don’t see the omniscient POV very often anymore. What we usually encounter is either