When you want to write a story, how would you order the events? What about the characters? When and how would you introduce them to your reader? What about dialogues? How much of the character’s conflict reveal initially? And many more questions which seem daunting and impossible to tackle. […]
What is Narrative Structure? Read More »
In the previous blog post, we overviewed the meaning and the types of Character Arcs. This blog post is about positive-change and negative-change Character Arcs in picture books. Positive-change arc A classic example of learning the positive arc is A Christmas Carol (1843) by Charles Dickens. Initially, Scrooge
Change Character Arc Read More »
Previously, we looked at the meaning of a Character Arc (link) and positive-change and negative-change character arcs in picture books (link). This blog post looks at the flat-arc character in picture books What is a flat-arc character? If the character doesn’t change, why would a reader want
Flat-arc Character in picture books Read More »
The previous blog post was an introduction to picture book biographies. This blog post is about the most important element for creating a story: the Narrative structure in biographies. Why is the Narrative Structure needed? The Narrative Structure is the framework of the story. Without it, the story collapses—no matter
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This blog post is the summary of my research to answer one question. How to write a biography like a story, not a Wikipedia article? Most biographies give interesting facts but there don’t read like a story. And more importantly, how can I revise my biography manuscripts—picture books and
Info dump in picutre book biographies Read More »
What are your revision steps? Do you print the manuscript, take a pencil and read through the text and cut words? Or, do you make a dummy picture book first? These two were my intuitive steps. Until some comments from my critique partners showed me that some
Revision fiction manuscripts Read More »
What is a quiet story? Picture books with not many actions and more focus on the feelings and emotions of the character are called quiet picture books (Don’t confuse quiet picture books with wordless picture books). Most of the time, we can spot these books by looking at their
Quiet Picture Books Read More »
You may have heard this advice that making a dummy of your picture book manuscript is a great help. This helps to have a feeling of the story’s pace. It assists you to know how much dialogue and action have you envisioned for each page. This dummy is neither for
Make a digital shareable dummy in a few seconds Read More »
What is a picture book biography? Although picture book biography is a subcategory of picture books, their nature is different than other subcategories; they are NOT fictitious. A biography is based on heavy research and each line of the book should be 100\% verifiable and documented. The writer has
Introduction to picture book biography Read More »
This blog post is part of the blog post series I wrote about picture book biographies. Here is the complete list. To summarize a person’s life in 32 pages with less than 1000 words, we need to select the time frame carefully. The simplest and the most obvious choice
Time Frame in picture book biographies Read More »