About This Book:
Everyone has a story to tell—and now you can learn how to tell it in your own picture book, using this helpful, humor-filled guide from an award-winning creator.
Have you ever wanted to create your own story—and capture it for posterity? Elys Dolan brings her comic touch to the process by portraying her narrator-self as a friendly worm (it’s quicker to draw than a person!). How do you come up with something to write about? Build and flesh out your story? Use color and space effectively? From combining two favorite things to form a story idea to “interviewing” your characters to physically putting a book together, the author walks readers through some surprisingly comprehensive beginners’ techniques that may have something to offer even seasoned storytellers. This witty, fun, conversational, step-by-step guide—part picture book, part activity book—is packed with prompts, exercises, tips, and jokes. So find your inspiration, grab your pens and pencils, and get making!
*Review Contributed By Karen Yingling, Staff Reviewer*
Helpful Hints and a Fun Story
There is a lot of great information in this book that would have been really helpful to me in 1971, when Miss Gordon had up create stories. Of course, back in the day, we created covers by wrapping cereal box cardboard in wallpaper samples, so my book was resplendent in turquoise flocked paper! I am absolutely convinced that encouraging very young children to tell stories is helpful to their later abilities to write, and creating actual books is very motivating. This is helpful even for older students, who seem to have a lot of trouble following the stream of consciousness technique that Bert uses to come up with his dinosaur pizza or pigeon airways stories!
I enjoyed that this was also a story about writing a book, and think this is especially appealing to the younger children. I would almost like to see this reworked for older students with more of a clean cut, list format. The ideas are excellent, but older readers might not be as interested in Bert.
This reminded me a little of Kramer’s Tell Me a Lion Story, another clever way to get children to think about story telling, and is a great book to add to books like Hanlon’s Ralph Tells a Story, Barnett and Rex’s How This Book Was Made and Pett’s This is My Book. If your young writers want to know more about how professionally published books are put together, I have fond memories of Aliki’s How a Book is Made (1988), especially the fact that she had the illustrator make her look older in the illustration so that if she talked about the book years after it came out, children wouldn’t ask why she didn’t look like the picture! Dolan won’t have that problem unless she transmogrifies into a worm!
