The fewer words, the better the picture book. While that's not totally true, it should be the goal of anyone writing a picture book.While my first drafts are never 200,000 words, they're often 3,000 or more. Then the real work begins, cutting that story down to a thousand, then fewer than 500 words.
Eric Carle is an artist. It's easier for artists to write a book with fewer than 100 words because the words they use are often just explaining the pictures they've painted.
For someone like me, who is just a writer it is necessary to tell the story in a way that an artist can then add pictures that explain or add to the story.
2 comments:
You make a good point there, Robb. The cutting can be so painful for those of us who love to use words.
It can be so much fun, so enjoyable to describe the changing shape of a cloud or the movement of an ant or the way a ball is bounced, but in picture books those things are crafted within the brush strokes of the illustrator. The writee is left with: there was a dog in the sky or the ant went or the girl dropped the bakl.
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