Creating a Picture Book

Posted byChantelle GriffinPosted inPicture Book, Writer ThoughtsTags:, ,

I was discussing a children’s book with a friend that was two thousand words long and filled with incredibly long and difficult words. The friend asked if I would write a book for children and I dived into an explanation of how hard it would be to write for a young audience. Bear in mind that at this time I was writing the final confrontation for a young adult series. In a picture book every word counts and like a poem the story is highly structured. There is an art to making a child’s story appear simple.

The dare

As I continued writing my friend said, I dare you to write a children’s book that begins with “once upon a time” and ends with “the end”. I peered over the laptop and exclaimed that I would not be attempting such a task any time soon, that was seven years ago. Prose is my secondary writing style, I have several although my primary style is poetry. The thought stayed with me even after dismissing it and while working on poetry the story verse style became once again fashionable for children’s books. The story verse structure is a style I am far more comfortable with because it is simply storytelling in the form of poetry. My depth of poetry far exceeds my depth of prose and so it felt like returning home.

The problem

While the story had been written there was a looming problem and it took a while to come to grips with. At the age of eighteen almost all my artwork had been destroyed, deliberately taken and destroyed, stolen for other artists to paint over. And with that simple act my school had removed all the joy I had experienced in art. It is not usually something I discuss because the memory is quite painful, I sobbed and my mother pleaded with the school to no avail. Almost all my artwork was gone, there were no photos, nothing. So I was faced with a large hurdle, if I was going to create a picture book there would need to be pictures and it took years to face what had happened. One of the paintings was a magnificent floor to ceiling height dragon flying free on a beautiful blue sky. While the paintings are gone, perhaps some of that can live on.

Published by Chantelle Griffin

Chantelle’s mother remains one of the most famous witnesses in Australian legal history. The first large screen movie the author saw, at the age of nine, had an actress playing her as an infant when she was at Uluru on 17 August 1980 at the same campsite as the Chamberlains. She began publishing poetry later in life with the first release coinciding with the fortieth anniversary of the disappearance of Azaria. While most poems have been released in the volumes for the anthology, more than a thousand were written throughout a twelve year period. Chantelle has a Master of Environmental Planning and enjoys life at half pace with two cats. Her first fantasy book was released too soon, after a near death experience and a second edition was published four years later. She resides in Tasmania and continues to write as a past time in the evening.