Lesson 3 of 7 Free account 4 min read
Writing for Illustration: Leave Room for the Art
In a picture book, words and pictures each tell part of the story. Learn what your text should leave out, how to write art notes sparingly, and how to test a book with a dummy.
Key takeaways
- Picture book text should say what the picture cannot, and stay quiet about what the picture shows.
- The best picture books create a gap between words and art, so the child gets to notice something the text does not say.
- Art notes are for information the illustrator cannot guess from the text, and should be rare and short.
- A dummy, even a rough one with stick figures, reveals pacing problems no manuscript read can catch.
Most first picture book drafts read like short stories: they describe the setting, the character's clothes and every action. That's natural, since prose writers are trained to show everything in words. In a picture book, the illustrations do half of that work. Your job is to write the half the pictures can't.
What Should Picture Book Text Not Say?
Anything visible. If the illustration will show a red umbrella, the text does not need to say "red umbrella." If the art shows a messy bedroom, you don't need a sentence describing the mess. Cut physical descriptions, settings, colors, facial expressions and most stage directions. What stays is what pictures are bad at: dialogue, inner thoughts, sounds, the passage of time, cause and effect, and the voice of the narrator.
- Cut: what characters look like, what they wear, where they are, what color things are.
- Cut: actions the picture will obviously show ("she climbed onto the chair").
- Keep: what characters say and think.
- Keep: what happened before or will happen next ("By Tuesday, there were nine of them").
- Keep: sounds, smells and feelings the picture can hint at but not state.
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