It’s a first on our River Street Power Q & A series: we have a children’s book author joining us! In our experience, we’ve found writing children’s books quite challenging, but kidlit author Kate Jenks (Beatrice & Barb, Kid Can Press, 2023) is here to make an important distinction and dole out some advice for those of us who may struggle writing this genre.
Q: Writing for children can be incredibly difficult. What is one thing you’ve learned to make it easier for you?
A: It’s not so much that I find writing for children difficult. In my experience, children are the very best audience. They’re often bolder, more enthusiastic readers than adults. If you give kids a really great story, one that’s worthy of their attention, they’re willing to take great imaginative leaps.
It’s more that the picture book as a form can be exceptionally challenging to write. Most people don’t realize, for example, that they’re are almost always exactly 32 pages long (including front and back matter), and are generally between 0 and 800 words long. Because of this, picture book authors must be masters of pacing, ensuring their stories have exactly the right number of beats, and that the story begin and end in just the right places. They need to know how and when to speed the action up and when to slow it down.
Beatrice & Barb by Kate Jenks. Kid Can Press, 2023.
Picture books share qualities with many different forms—they’re part short story, part poem, part comic book, part theater script— but they’re also unlike anything else. To write picture books well requires you to accept that what you’ve signed up for is a team sport, particularly if you are not also the illustrator. It is a bit like running a relay race — you do your part the best you can and then you pass the batton to the next runner.
A great picture book manuscript has to leave room for the artist to collaborate equally in the storytelling, but it’s a unique sort of collaboration, because traditionally author and illustrator are not encouraged to communicate during the creation of the book. You can include art notes in your manuscript if absolutely necessary, but adding too many of these is generally frowned upon. I do my best not to dictate what the pictures should look like, but instead to make sure the scenes I write are rich with visual possibility.
At the same time, picture books are oral texts as much as they are visual ones, because they’re so often read out loud. You’re essentially writing a script that parents, teachers, and librarians are going to have to preform. Because of this, you need to make sure your text is a pleasure to read, with sentences that flow, imagery that captivates, and, above all, jokes that land.
The very best picture books also leave lots of imaginative space for the reader. There should be gaps where they can decide what has happened, and what the story means. Failing to do this almost guarantees your book will not be picked up a second time.
All of this is a lot to hold in your mind when you sit down to write. It’s almost impossible to create anything that feels as loose and free as you want it to if you’re trying to consciously take all this into account. The trick, I’ve found, is to invest a great deal of time into studying other picture books I love, the ones I jealously wish I had wrote myself. I do this by typing them out into the same template I use when I draft my own stories. I look at how many words are in the manuscript, and consider what proportion of that word count is taken up with narration versus dialogue. I note how much time elapses over the course of the plot, and how many different settings there are. How many of the spreads consist of spot illustrations, moving the story along at a clip, versus how many are taken up by a single image depicting a single emotional beat. How many pages are wordless? How do the images relate to the words? How long are the sentences? Is there much repetition? How challenging is the vocabulary? What compels the reader to the page?
This practice has given me a reasonable grasp of the form, so that when I sit down to draft a story, a lot of these considerations are addressed by a more automatic part of my brain. It also means that when a manuscript isn’t working, I’m better able to diagnose and fix the problem myself before sending it off to critique partners or editors.
There’s another benefit, too. By closely reading the work of others, I have been able to cultivate my own tastes and to calibrate my own voice. Closely reading the work of others helps me understand where my writing sits in relation to the work of other authors, how it is alike and how it is different from what is already out there.
This gives me the best possible shot at achieving the ultimate goal—landing a manuscript in the center of the Venn diagram where the stories I feel compelled to tell overlap with the stories the market is hungry for. I’m not saying it allows me to do it every time—not even close! I’ve only had two “yeses” for the hundreds of “nos” I’ve endured. But it tips the odds just far enough in my favor to keep me moving forward.
The respledent Kate Jenks!
More about Beatrice & Barb:
In this heartfelt story of friendship, a young girl is determined to save her most unlikely pet. Beatrice desperately wants a pet of her own. Her mom has other ideas. No dog. No cat. No hedgehog. They finally reach a compromise, and Beatrice gets ... a Venus flytrap. Being a good sport, Beatrice makes the best of things. She gives her new friend a name, Barb. She does all the things with Barb that good pet owners do, such as taking walks and playing fetch. Only, now, despite all the love and care, Barb is starting to look sick, with black spots on her leaves and some parts of her turning mushy. Beatrice knows she has to find a way to save Barb. But how? The debut picture book from author Kate Jenks Landry offers a universal and powerful message about how to take care of those we love. It also celebrates differences, unique friendships and what makes each of us special (like how Barb needs to eat bugs to survive!). This story has strong curriculum connections to social-emotional learning and offers excellent character education lessons on caring, perseverance and responsibility. Vivian Mineker's illustrations are imbued with the soft greens of plant life and beautifully convey the warmth and affection at the heart of the story.
More about Kate Jenks:
Kate is a graduate of OISE, and of the MA in Creative Writing program at the University of Toronto. She's also the creator of the blog The Needle and The Knife, where she shares interviews with other creatives, exploring questions of craft, community, and creative process.
Her debut picture book, Beatrice and Barb, was published with Kids Can Press in October, 2023. Her second book will follow in spring, 2025.
Kate lives with her partner Michael, their children Zoe and Mae, and a wily bernedoodle named Leo in Kitchener, Ontario, on the traditional territory of the Neutral, Anishinaabe, and Haudenosaunee peoples.
Connect with Kate online:
Website: katejenkslandry.com
Instagram: @katejenkslandry
Blog: theneedleandtheknife.com