Welcome to Day 10 of 40 craft lessons from 40 picture books. Choosing the best Point of View (POV) for a story is one of the trickiest decisions writers have to make. Many confuse the narrator with POV, so let’s start there. The narrator is the entity telling the story: a character, an object, an […]
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Welcome to Day 9 of 40 craft lessons from 40 picture books. A narrator brings us, readers, into the story world and honestly shares events and thoughts. Well… narrates, yes. Honesty? not necessarily. An unreliable narrator doesn’t lie maliciously. They genuinely misunderstand or misinterpret a situation. And that’s exactly what makes them such a versatile
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Welcome to Day 8 of 40 craft lessons from 40 picture books. What could immerse the reader better in the story world and give a clearer view of it than a narrator from within that world? That narrator isn’t necessarily a person; it can be an inanimate object, and we see this abundantly in picture
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Welcome to Day 7 of 40 craft lessons. One of the most popular pieces of writing advice is “raise the stakes.” And one of the most misunderstood ones! For me, that advice went in one ear and out the other. Stakes are for adult thrillers, right? I don’t write in that genre. So why would
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Welcome to Day 6 of 40 craft lessons from 40 picture books. Not all main characters change, positively or negatively. What if a character doesn’t change, yet changes the world outside? That’s a flat-arc character. The word “flat” suggests constancy, which is partly correct: the character stays constant, but the world around them changes. Annabelle,
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Welcome to Day 5 of 40 craft lessons from 40 picture books. Many terms in storytelling are confusing. Luckily, “character arc” is one of the clearer ones. Throughout a story, either the main character changes (dynamic arc) or the main character changes the world (flat arc). In both cases, the story revolves around that change.
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Welcome to Day 4 of 40 craft lessons. For a long time, animal characters have dominated children’s books. In recent years, human main characters have become more common. So, when is it still better to use animal characters? It’s tempting to choose animals simply because they’re cute. But cuteness alone isn’t enough to make a
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Welcome to Day 3 of 40 craft lessons from 40 picture books. A new male teacher with tattoos. Does he sound strange to you? Well, your reaction isn’t the point here. Mr. Mendoza might not seem unsettling to you, but to Xavier, the main character of My Teacher Has Tattoos, he is. In Xavier’s understanding,
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Welcome to Day 2 of 40 craft lessons from 40 picture books. Do you know what is more complicated than writing a book? Writing the first line! The first line is the gateway to the story’s world. It shouldn’t be banal or overly strange, nor should it be too slow, too rushed, or forced. Most
Welcome to day 1 of 40 craft lessons from 40 picture books. All well-crafted stories share one essential element. Whether it’s 32 pages or 300, readers keep turning the page because of it. In Monster Post, a beast finds a delicious-looking dinner: a child. The beast writes to his monster friends, inviting them to a
Day 1: Story Question Read More »