Book Review: Writing Picture Books Revised and Expanded Edition: A Hands-On Guide from Story Creation to Publication by Ann Whitford Paul

This was another required text for my grad certificate class “Writing Children’s Picture Books” and I learned a lot more than I expected from it regarding the picture book drafting process, such as the inclusion of figures of speech, format, book dummying, dialogue, and POV.

Summary

Paul takes her readers through the writing process pertaining specifically to writing and publishing children’s picture books. She does so through the employment of examples from well-known picture books as well as from her own publications.

Likes/Strengths

• Organization. Though our class was not instructed to read every chapter, the ones covered brought us through the process very fluently as one chapter would transition very cohesively into the next.
• Examples. The author incorporated examples from real picture books of how the topic in each chapter was done effectively or ineffectively and why.
• Interactive activities. Each chapter concluded with an invitation on the author’s part for the reader to practice the instruction covered in the given chapter with their own drafts.

Dislikes/Weaknesses

• Some redundancy. I felt like some of the chapters contained some repetitiveness in topics covered, but that may have been due to referring to previous instruction.

Author

Recommendations

I recommend this text to picture book authors as well as authors looking for instruction about how to simplify their writing process. This has been a very effective text for my own learning of the craft of children’s picture book writing and I know it could be for others if implementing in other creative writing curriculums!