Alison Green, publisher at Alison Green Books (Scholastic) edited The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson and

Axel Scheffler and now works with them on their new titles, such as Tabby McTat. She also works with

Helen Stephens, Deborah Allwright and Nick Sharratt. Here she provides some hints and tips on creating

your picture book.

First steps – who is your story about?

The most important question when you’re writing a book is: who do

you want to be your central character? Is it a child? An animal?

Maybe even a robot or a machine? And where is your story set? A

town? The jungle? The North Pole? The choice is yours.

Now, what story are you going to tell about your character? A good

place to start is to ask yourself: ‘What does my character want, and

why can’t they get it?’ Perhaps your character wants his friends to

come to a party but no one is at home when he calls. He wonders

what they’re all up to. How does he feel? A bit sad? A bit cross?

Why are they all busy doing something without him? Then you set

up your resolution: Aha! They weren’t leaving him out of their plans

at all – they were secretly preparing a really big cake for his party!

Essentially, you set up a problem, elaborate on it, and then resolve it,

perhaps with a twist in the tail.

You can have more than one main character, of course. Perhaps it’s about two friends, or a child and their

pet, or a parent and child. If you try and have too many central characters, though, you may find there isn’t

room to give them all space to speak and develop their characters. Look at Tiddler by Julia Donaldson and

Axel Scheffler. It’s set in a school, so there are lots of characters, but Tiddler is clearly the main one.

Johnny Dory is an important secondary character. The other fish are named, but very much in the

background.

From Fleabag by Helen Stephens

From Tiddler by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler

Developing your story – how to divide it up

Now you’ve got to work out how to tell your story in 24 pages. That’s how long most picture books are.

(On top of the 24 pages, they then have a title page, a copyright page and front and back endpapers.) The

easiest way to think of this is as twelve double-page spreads.

It’s easy to get carried away with writing, and then find that you’ve spent half the book introducing the

main character, and there’s no space left to tell the story. It can therefore be good to think about how to

structure your twelve spreads. Your favourite books may follow all sorts of different structures, and there

are no hard-and-fast rules, but the following structure can be a useful way to start:

• The first three spreads: introduce your character and set up your story. What does the character want?

Why is it a problem?

• The next six spreads: develop your story, so that it reaches a climax or crisis point on spread nine.

• The last three spreads: resolve your story, so you sort out the problem and finish with a happy (or

funny or surprising) ending on spread twelve.

It might help to ‘block out’ what happens on each page before you write your text i.e. Spread 1: ‘Bear

wakes up – it’s morning’; Spread 2: ‘Bear scratches his head and wonders what to do’; Spread 3: ‘Bear

decides to go for a walk’. You can then write your text around that so you know what each page will do. If

you’re clear about what’s going to go on each spread, you could even give pairs of children one spread

each to write.

While you are at this stage, you might also want to think about your ‘page turns’ – why would someone

want to turn the page? What exciting thing will happen next? It can be nice to end some of your spreads

with a bit of a cliff-hanger that you resolve on the next spread.

How much text?

Not too much! Most picture book texts

are only about 300 to 700 words long.

More than 800 words may start to feel

very long when you read it aloud. And

remember, the words don’t have to do

all the work: you’ve got the pictures to

help you tell the story, too. The text

might read, ‘Max was a bit

disappointed’, while the picture shows

Max destroying his bedroom. Try

contrasting what is said with what is

seen to add extra interest.

If you think of a story like Rosie’s

Walk (Pat Hutchins), the text is

incredibly simple. It just tells you that

Rosie the hen went for a walk across

the farmyard. What it doesn’t tell you

is that she was chased all the way by a

fox - and she never even noticed! It’s a

classic example of showing things in

the pictures that aren’t described in the

text.

From Tabby McTat by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler

Design tips – what should the pages look like?

You will probably want to give your picture book one main setting, but it’s worth thinking about how to

make it look different on every page. For example, if you choose a child’s bedroom as the setting, you might

find every spread starts to look the same. That’s where going on a journey can provide good, visual variety.

You also need to think about what style you will use for illustration. Crayons? Paints? Collage? Maybe

computer graphics? Do the children want to use the same style on every page? Or lots of different styles?

Decide how large you want your text to be. It needs to be a size that will make it easy to read aloud – at least

16pt, and with some nice line spacing so that it doesn’t look too cramped and daunting for the reader. Divide

your text into the relevant blocks for each page. That will then show you how much space is left for the

pictures. You can be quite creative about where the text goes – in the sky, along the ground, or even inside

one of the images – along a pathway, or even inside the sun or moon, if they’re big enough. Have a look at

how your favourite picture books place the text.

Deciding on how to illustrate your story is a bit like making a film: it’ll look more interesting and varied if

some of the images are close-ups while others are long-distance scenes. It’s good to have some images that

fill the whole spread, while other pages have a series of little pictures or vignettes. Sometimes you could

have a single image on one page and lots of different images on the facing page. It all helps to keep the

reader’s interest.

From The Fox in the Dark by Alison Green and Deborah Allwright

Another thing to consider is ‘continuity’. You have to make sure that your characters always look the same

from page to page – especially if your character has stripes or other patterns! If a character has claws and a

tail on one spread, make sure they have claws and a tail every time they appear. It might be good to provide

one picture of the main character that the illustrators can look at as they create their spreads and to annotate

it with key features, e.g. “He has a white tummy and white ear”.

Sometimes continuity can be a real nightmare. When I was working on Room on the Broom (Julia

Donaldson and Axel Scheffler), I went through the spreads time and again to check that the witch had

everything she was meant to have on the broom in every spread: cauldron, hat, magic wand, bow in her hair

etc. If your characters are carrying props, make sure that they keep them from spread to spread.

Another nice feature is to create extra small stories or incidents in the background, which are great for the

reader to find. For example, there might be some funny insects or a couple of squirrels having a

conversation. You could hide a mouse on every page that readers might not notice at first.

From Sidney the Little Blue Elephant by Sharon Rentta

From Peculiar Pets by Victoria Roberts and Deborah Allwright

The Ending

If your book ends too quickly, it can feel a bit unsatisfying. That’s why it’s good to build up to your ending

over the space of the last three spreads or so. There might be a big, dramatic moment three or four spreads

from the end of the book, so the reader starts to wonder, ‘how is the character going to get out of this?’.

You then have time to resolve it in your last few spreads, finishing with a good, satisfying final spread.

It’s good to have a final line that acts as a full stop to the story. Something like: ‘And it was the best

birthday party ever’, or ‘And he never went there again.’ Have a look at some of your favourite books.

What do you like about the endings? They might be happy endings with a reunion, like Stick Man (Julia

Donaldson and Axel Scheffler); or funny endings with an unexpected twist, like Mr Wolf’s Pancakes (Jan

Fearnley)

Most importantly, have fun with your story, and write something that pleases you. If you’re pleased with it,

there’s a good chance that other people will like it, too.

From Stick Man by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler

© 2010 Scholastic Limited

Images reproduced by permission of Scholastic Children’s Books.