How to Make a Picture Book

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!

“How to Make a Picture Book” by Elys Dolan provides the ultimate step-by-step guide to ensuring that when one starts a picture book, that person knows just where to go and how to get to the end point. Cute characters share the inner workings of writing a story that will excite not only the author, but the readers.

It's important to first be able to come up with ideas and know how to use those ideas with something called “story math” to piece it together. For example, if one was to come up with two items such as a pigeon and a plane, they might decide to write a story about a pigeon airline. Then, it’s on to characters. Figuring out what characters to write about, whether they are people, animals, foods, or some other type of person, place, or thing is extremely important. It can be very helpful to interview characters and ask them questions about themselves, including who they are, what they do, where they like going, who they hang out with, etc.

Next, it’s on to setting. Where does the story take place and what other locations and places are around it? The story builder prompts and activities that are found throughout the pages of the book lend themselves well to figuring out how to truly put together a story that will entice the masses. It is also important to learn how to use pages to the best of one’s ability to tell the story as well as possible. There are various ways to use pages, including doing two-page spreads, small boxes (called vignettes), placing pictures in frames on the page, etc. Last, but not least, adding color to the pictures to make them “pop” and stand out even more is something all picture book authors and illustrators should do. Figuring out what colors will prove the most worthwhile may take some time, but it will be worth it in the long run.

The book is full of great tips, tricks, ideas, and colorful examples to keep any author on his toes. Anyone who gets started with this book will find his imagination soaring with possibilities of what to write, draw, and put together next!