By Ishta Mercurio It’s NaNoWriMo, and even though this is a picture bookers’ blog, and NaNoWriMo is about writing a novel, the “Buckle down and write!” spirit feels like it’s permeated everything. So how about a craft/process post! My process is long and messy and it involves many many many manymanymanymany drafts and rewrites and scribblings and doodles and dummies. I have a book that I use for picture book manuscripts in process, and it’s full of pages that look like this: So rather than get into every element of my process, which would make for a really long post, I thought I’d share one thing I do that really helps me when things have progressed far enough that I need to see the whole story at once. This is important for tracking my main character’s emotional arc, tracking the passage of time, checking the pacing of the story, and generally seeing any bumps in the road. Any time I need to do any of those things, I make a thumbnail sketch of the book. A thumbnail sketch of the book is when you take two pieces of paper and draw a rectangle for each page spread on them, and in each rectangle you very roughly sketch an image of what’s happening on that spread as the story is written now. It’s not a complete representation of the whole scene--rather, it’s a representation of the thing you’re trying to track in this particular moment. So if you’re focusing on your character’s emotional arc, you can just draw emoji faces to represent your character’s emotions. If you want to track something else at the same time, you can add that element to the spreads. So, for example, the story in SMALL WORLD takes place over many years, so I wanted to simplify the narrative a bit by making sure that the progression of seasons from one spread to the next followed the progression of seasons in real life. I didn’t want to be jumping around from summer to winter to fall. So I used colored pencils to simply color-code the spreads, so I could check that the seasons in which each spread were taking place followed a logical order throughout the book, while I was simultaneously tracking other things like the progression of shapes Nanda encountered throughout the book (from simple to complex) and the progression of geographical concepts throughout the book (from house, to immediate community, to her city, to her county, etc.). It looked like this: When you do this, you can see very quickly and easily where you messed up: where you have a winter spread happening in the middle of summer, or an emotional turning point that’s coming too early in the story, or whatever. It’s a really good revision tool. I hope this has been useful, and I hope it helps some of you move your picture books on to the next stage. Happy writing, everybody! -- Ishta (pronounced EEESH-ta) Mercurio is an author, actor, and lifelong environmental activist. Raised in the US, she has also lived in England and Scotland, and has visited Venice, Italy; Paris, France; and a range of beautiful places all over the United States. One day, she hopes to visit her relatives in Cebu. She now makes her home in Canada, where she homeschools her two sons and films and photographs plants and wildlife, from the tall to the small, in her backyard. Find Ishta at www.ishtamercurio.com or connect with her on twitter at @IshtaWrites.
Her fiction debut, SMALL WORLD (illustrated by Jen Corace), is a STEM-concept picture book that explores a girl's journey of growing up in the world and discovering its beauty and marvel.
8 Comments
11/22/2018 09:57:15 am
I always love getting an inside peek into the process others follow. Thanks for sharing this, Ishta. And what a great tip about laying it out so you can catch mistakes.
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11/22/2018 02:13:38 pm
Thanks for the kind words! I love it when my manuscript gets to this stage: the overwhelming-but-almost-there stage! And when I need to see the big picture, it definitely helps to shrink the whole thing down to its essential elements!
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11/22/2018 10:59:30 am
Thanks, this is terrific. Thumbnails for just one or two elements is a great idea.
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11/22/2018 02:14:57 pm
Thanks! Yeah, when I feel overwhelmed by everything I have going on, I find that it helps to pare down what I'm trying to fix to one or two things. I cal always make another pass to fix the other elements!
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Sandra Sutter
11/23/2018 06:29:58 am
This is such a useful tool. I love mapping out the story in thumbnails/dummy form and finding those "kinks", those places where things need to run smoother. What a wonderful post and such great information to share. Thank you!
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11/23/2018 08:00:26 am
I'm glad this is helpful! I use dummies, too. There is nothing better for figuring out whether the page turns are working than a dummy.
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Kim Chaffee
11/26/2018 06:44:35 am
Ishta! This is wonderful! I love the color-coding idea and the emoji idea for tracking emotional arc! So simple and smart!
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11/26/2018 12:30:25 pm
Great post, Ishta! I love this idea for tracking all the multiple things going on in a picture book. Very cool! Thanks for sharing!
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