Putting That Creative Spark into Book Form

Inspired by the April 3, 2008 I.N.K. post by Anna K. Lewis (Books to Ignite a Creative Spark), I‘ve compiled several titles that help kids put their own ideas into book format. For my purposes, a book is defined as a sequence of words and/or pictures that tells a story or conveys information. It may be as simple as a folded piece of paper that provides four pages to fill, a ready-made journal, an accordion book, and so on.

Over the years many people have asked me for a book about how students could write their own books. Not once did anyone request info about how kids can learn to illustrate, i.e. combine artwork with words. Perhaps that‘s because “art” isn’t prominent in standardized tests? Yet this world is jam-packed with images and surely it‘s an important skill for children to be able to analyze and work with images, is it not?

Since I think art is indeed useful, the title I created is Look at My Book: How Kids Can Write and Illustrate Terrific Books. It follows three characters from brainstorming to rough drafts, revising, lettering, and binding as they create an adventure story, a nonfiction bird book, and an autobiography. Click on the cover below to see all the pages. For a larger version, click on the orange eyeballs:There are quite a few children's books about writing and/or drawing… for this post I tried to focus on some that are likely to inspire a child to create a book project, rather than just enjoyable stories with a writing theme or directions about how to draw cats, dogs, etc. The recommended age levels are included as a guide, but kids often defy such labels, of course. Please add your favorite titles in a comment!

Books for kids:

Max‘s Words (age 4-8)

Kate Banks and Boris Kulikov (illustrator)
Max finds out his collection of words can be arranged to create stories, with amazing results. An inspiring introduction to the power of words, as well as wonderful illustrations.

You Have to Write (age 8-12)
Janet S. Wong, Teresa Flavin (illustrator)
This picture book speaks directly to kids about common fears they may have about “what to write about” and other dilemmas.


How to Write Your Life Story (age 9-12)
Ralph Fletcher
In addition to this title, Fletcher has written numerous books to help kids develop as authors, including A Writer’s Notebook: Unlocking the Writer Within You; Boy Writers: Reclaiming Their Voices; and Poetry Matters: Writing a Poem from the Inside Out.

In Print! 40 Cool Publishing Projects for Kids (age 9-12)
Joe Rhatigan
Innovative ways to showcase writing and illustration projects, some book-like and some not.


Another Book About Design: Complicated Doesn’t Make it Bad (age 9-12)
Mark Gonyea
The sequel to A Book About Design: Complicated Doesn’t Make it Good, one of very few resources about design directed to children.


Art for Kids: Comic Strips: Create Your Own Comic Strips from Start to Finish (age 9-12)
Art Roche
Children love comics and this gives them a guide to making their own. For older students, Making Comics by Scott McCloud is a comprehensive how-to presented in a comics format.

Books for Teachers:


Nonfiction Matters: Reading, Writing, and Research in Grades 3-8
Stepanie Harvey
One of the few books to concentrate on teaching nonfiction writing (also next entry.)

Nonfiction Craft Lessons: Teaching Information Writing K-8
Joann Portalupi and Ralph Fletcher

Notebook Know-How: Strategies For The Writer's Notebook
Aimee Buckner

Personally, I never once made a book while attending elementary and secondary school in the late 60s and 70s, Lots of paragraphs, reports, a poem or two, but that was about it. The first book I made was as an adult, a dummy to try and get my first book published. Once I began visiting schools in the 1980s, it was so nice to see that writing by very young children seemed to be everywhere. Many schools sponsor Young Author events to showcase the students’ writing and illustration in book form, and some even put those books in the library to be checked out. I would have loved a supportive atmosphere like that.

For students who want to try to get published, the Kids Are Authors contest sponsored by Scholastic is a wonderful impetus for the creation of thousands of books every year.

The Tyranny of the Spread

A few months ago I attended a seminar given by Edward Tufte on the visual presentation of data and information. Tufte is a Yale professor who has written (and designed) a number of books on presenting and analyzing information graphically. Here’s a link to his site:
http://www.edwardtufte.com
PowerPoint is one of Tufte’s pet peeves. He makes the case that people who rely on this presentation software begin to see the world in PowerPoint slide terms: a headline and a few bullet-points per concept. Not all information can be forced into this template without distortion or omission, a point he makes elegantly (if not succinctly) in his analysis of how PP presentations were, to some degree, contributing factors in the Columbia shuttle disaster. Here’s a link to that essay, for anyone interested in reading further: http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB&topic_id=1

His books are brilliant — I recommend them.

For writers, illustrators and designers of picture books, especially non-fiction books (without a plot-driven narrative to lead one from spread to spread) thinking in terms of individual spreads is both a gift and a trap. Like the PowerPoint slide, the spread allows us to present information in a very controlled context. We can choose words and images and define their relationship to the pages themselves to make create a compelling experience for the reader. Their can be a temptation, however, is to think of a book’s contents too much as a series of discrete chunks. Sometimes a single idea — one that might make the most sense presented all at once — won’t fit on two pages and has to be broken into a series of spreads. If the book's format dictates a head on each spread, this single concept may get awkwardly broken into pieces.

In making books I am always trying to find the balance between using the spread as a self-contained ‘unit’ of information and presenting a single, larger, cohesive story that works at the level of the entire book.










It’s interesting to look at some of the ways that what I —somewhat hysterically — called the ‘tyranny of the spread’ can be subverted.

In the book Move! (written with Robin Page, designed by Robin) a series of animals is shown, each moving in two different ways. The repetition of the animals, the anticipation of the second example (which requires a page turn) — even the use of ellipses in the text — all tend to blur the boundaries of a particular spread. The book was conceived as a kind of 32-page filmstrip.






In another collaboration with Robin (Sisters &Brothers) we use an even simpler technique, letting an image run off one spread and onto the next.








Robin Page's Count One to Ten is based on a traditional handmade Japanese folded paper book. It subverts the limitations of the spread by working as both a book and, when pulled open, as a series of panels that are visible simultaneously.












Lois Ehlert, in Color Zoo, and Laura Vaccaro Seeger, in First the Egg, ingeniously punch holes through the pages so that we see into the next spread. These books work in both directions — we can also look into the previous spread to see where we have been. In The Three Pigs, David Weisner makes the physical format of the book part of the story, so the reader becomes aware of the stucture of the book.

I’m sure there are many other examples and other ways of working within and around the limitations of the roughly 15 spreads in a typical picture book.