The Formula for Picture Book Writing

Getting the Most Out of a Conference. Surprisingly.

When you attend writing conferences, you are invited to attend any number of sessions from fellow writers. Sometimes, you will understand from the session title exactly what you are going to learn, but in others you’re winging it.

The session that changed my writing forever was one of the latter.

I signed up late for the conference, and so found several of the more popular sessions full when I filled out the form. That’s why I ended up in a one-hour talk on “emotional core.”

I am sorry to say that I forgot the name of the woman who led it, but I do remember that she was fabulous, and wrote both middle grade fiction as well as picture books. (If you know who it may be, please let me know!)

At any rate, she spoke about the need for a story to have an emotional heart that guides everything that happens in it, and gave us this equation to help us figure it out:

“My story is about X, but it’s REALLY about Y.”

Story Synopsis v. Emotional Core

She made sure we understood that the X represented the synopsis of your story, and could be a paragraph if you wanted. But the Y was the emotional core and should only be a couple of words, or one short sentence at most. If you couldn’t define the Y for your story, you probably needed to take another stab at it until you could.

This notion has informed my writing every day since.

Think about the books you read to your kid only once, versus the ones they request over and over again. I’m willing to bet that whatever book ended up as a favorite had a clear and obvious Y. An emotional core gives a story heart, brings characters to life, and allows the reader to relate to it on a gut level.

This may seem self-evident, but I’m not sure it is. As any writer knows, our ideas may come to us fully fleshed out in our heads, but getting them down on paper is very different. On many occasions, I’ve completed a story proudly, only to revisit it the next day and find it lacking. It is almost always the Y that’s missing.

By embracing that equation, and applying it to everything I now produce, I am able to get more of my intended message onto the page sooner.