Picture Book Dummies for Smart Writers by Guest Author Carrie Finison

Today I have a special guest--my critique partner, Carrie Finison! Her picture book, HURRY, LITTLE TORTOISE, TIME FOR SCHOOL! published July 19th from Random House Studio. I've been able to follow this story from draft to picture book. As a kindergarten teacher, I also can't wait to use read it to my students. Welcome, Carrie!

I’m a picture book writer, not an illustrator, but over the years making a picture book dummy has become an essential part of my drafting and revising process. 

Picture book dummies are well known in the domain of picture book author-illustrators. When an author-illustrator submits a story for publication, most often the submission includes a full-scale mockup of the book (pages that turn, with rough illustrations), some finished art samples, and the manuscript text. In my first few years of writing picture book texts, it never occurred to me to try and make a dummy. I can’t draw, right? What’s the point?

But once I tried it, I discovered that making a dummy — with pages that actually turn — helped my writing immensely. A dummy allows me to see how my story flows from page to page, whether there is enough change from scene to scene, whether I’m using the suspense and drama of the page turn adequately, whether the amount of text on each page is comparable, and simply put, how it feels to read the story as a “real” book.

Here's an example of how the process of making dummies helped me refine the text of my recently-released book, HURRY, LITTLE TORTOISE, TIME FOR SCHOOL, ultimately illustrated by Erin Kraan, but first illustrated by me with stick figures!

First, some background. The dummies I make are small. I make them by folding 4 pieces of printer paper in half so that I have a booklet that measures 5.5 inches wide and 8.5 inches tall. Then I cut that booklet in half, right in the middle, so that I have two smaller booklets that measure 5.5 inches wide and 4.25 inches tall. Each of these smaller booklets has 16 pages. At this point, I insert one booklet into the other for a 32-page book. Sometimes I staple along the spine, but it’s not really necessary.

(For a little more information on picture book structure, here’s a recent and excellent post from SCBWI Southern California about why picture books are 32 pages)

You could achieve the same thing simply by folding 8 sheets of paper in half. The reason I like to make smaller dummies is so that I can carry them around with me, in my purse or jacket pocket, to read and make changes whenever I have a spare moment, especially while I am waiting around at my kids’ various practices, lessons, and so on.

When I first got the idea for HURRY, LITTLE TORTOISE, TIME FOR SCHOOL, I knew that it would push my dummying skills into overdrive, for a few reasons.

First, I envisioned that the story would actually use the physical structure of the book as part of the storytelling. Little Tortoise begins her journey on the far-left side of the first two-page spread. As the story progresses, she moves, inch-by-inch, toward the far-right side of the scene. This visually mirrors the slowness of her journey.

Second, I wanted to use both dialogue bubbles and onomatopoeia in the story. Both of these needed to appear near the characters that were speaking or making sounds, but also needed to flow from left to right on the page in an order that made sense to the reader.

This is the first dummy I made for the book. At this point, the main character was actually “Mr. Tortoise” and he was hurrying somewhere for reasons that remained mysterious. The fact that he was a teacher and running late for school was not revealed until the end of the story.

To add the text to my blank dummy booklet, I reformatted the text in my manuscript to have a 1-inch margin on the left side and a 3-inch margin on the right side. This means the text occupies about 4.5 inches in width, and therefore will fit onto the pages of my 5.5-inch wide dummy. Then I print the text and cut out the text blocks for each page, and tape them into the book.

There are probably lots of other ways to do this, but I like the freedom this method gives me to position text on the page, take it out again and cut it up differently, and so on. I also like working with my hands and this method takes some time with all the cutting and taping, which is great for when I need a break from staring at my computer screen!

Usually, I repeat this dummy process two or three times. However, as I mentioned above, HURRY, LITTLE TORTOISE stretched my dummy-making to the limits, because I needed to make sure that the story would work with the physical structure of the book.

In order to make my life a bit easier, I ended up creating a document in Word to contain my dummy. I set a custom paper size in my printer settings (under Page Setup in Word), to 11 x 4.25 inches. This would ensure that the dummy that printed out was the same size as the ones I was used to working with. Then, on each page of the document, I created a two-column table, with borders.

I used stock-photo silhouettes to position my animal characters exactly where I wanted them on the page, and typed my text right into the document, rather than my tried-and-true taping method. 

When I printed the dummy, I cut out the “pages.” After that, there was some finagling with taping the front and back of each page together so that the story would flow correctly. But of course, all that taping gave me a break from the computer so that was fine with me.

Finally, after many drafts, suggestions from my critique groups and agent, Mr. Tortoise became Little Tortoise, and Little Tortoise landed a publishing contract (in addition to being on time for school)!

The bottom line is, reading a picture book is a physical experience. As writers, it can immensely benefit us to recreate that physical experience, as nearly as possible, as part of the drafting process.

If you have another method for making a picture book dummy, be sure to share it in the comments! 

HURRY, LITTLE TORTOISE, TIME FOR SCHOOL!

Written by Carrie Finison

Illustrated by Erin Kraan

Random House Studio, July 19, 2022

Thank you so much, Carrie, for sharing the dummy process for your new book! 

Carrie Finison writes picture books with humor and heart, including Dozens of Doughnuts (Putnam, 2020), a Junior Library Guild selection; and Don’t Hug Doug (Putnam, 2021), an ALA Notable Children’s Book, which received starred reviews from both Kirkus and Publishers Weekly. Her most recent picture books are Lulu & Zoey: A Sister Story (Running Press Kids, 2022), and Hurry, Little Tortoise, Time for School! (Random House Studio, 2022). She lives outside of Boston with her husband, son, and daughter, and two cats who permit her to work in their cozy attic office. For updates and giveaways, subscribe to her newsletter, check out her website, or follow on Twitter or Instagram.

Talking to Your Reader with Second Person POV--Guest post by Carrie Finison

Today I (Tina Cho) welcome my writing friend and one of my critique partners--Carrie Finison! Her latest picture book, Don't Hug Doug, hit bookstores the end of January. Carrie is sharing some expert advice on writing in second person point of view and benefits of doing so. Take it away, Carrie!

As I shared recently on Beth Anderson’s blog, the early drafts of my picture book DON’T HUG DOUG were all written in the third person, with a traditional narrative arc. An early draft of the manuscript began this way:

 

One day, when Doug was hammering and gluing and generally minding his own business, some relatives stopped by. They’d been invited to lunch.

Aunt Muriel wrapped him in a pillowy, billowy embrace. “Such twirly curls! And such big, brown, puppy dog eyes!”

“He’s squishier than a jelly doughnut,” said Uncle Hank-the-Tank.

“Dug-ga-hug-ga,” babbled sticky Sukey.

They hugged him and squeezed him and squooshed him and smooshed him.

Their hugs made Doug feel as shriveled and wrung out as a week-old balloon. But he thought it would be rude to say so.

He tried going stiff, but they just hugged him tighter. He tried going limp, but they just hugged him longer…and longer…and LONGER.

I liked the story told this way, but I could not get the ending right. In one version, Doug built a robot for his relatives to hug instead of him. In another version, he adopted a puppy to soak up their attention. In another version, he set up a booby trap with a giant stuffed animal who took on their enthusiastic embraces.

 

While these endings were fun, and funny, they felt wrong because they didn’t truly solve Doug’s problem. Yes, he managed to avoid his relatives’ hugs — this time. But what about next time? Or the time after that? Eventually, he’d be right back where he started. His real problem wasn’t avoiding a single hug — it was getting his relatives to listen to him and accept the fact that he didn’t want hugs from them.

 

THAT problem felt insurmountable. How could Doug solve this problem? How could ANY kid solve it? The truth is, adults often don’t listen to children’s wishes when it comes to hugging (and lots of other things, too) — and often they don’t even think to ask in the first place.

 

Doug, I realized, could not force his relatives to listen to him — but I could. As the writer, I could make readers say things out loud. I could make them say things to each other. I could give them an invitation to interact — with the book, and with each other.

 

I rewrote the story in the second person point of view, addressing the reader. Here it is in published form:

The beauty of writing from the second person is that you create an interactive experience. In this case, I wanted both child and adult readers to have plenty of practice asking and answering the question, “Do you want a hug?” So I made them say it out loud, right in the text of the book. (Cue writerly cackle.)

And, I could give them a chance to physically practice a high five as an alterative to hugging.

By using the second person perspective, I was not only helping my main character make his wishes clear, but also giving readers space, practice, and opportunity to think about their own wishes, and perhaps verbalize them — the takeaway that I wanted for readers from the beginning.

 

Thinking more broadly, the second person point of view can be helpful in an array of circumstances:

 

-        You want your reader’s experience to be interactive — either verbally (the reader says things out loud) or physically (the reader physically interacts with the book in some way).

-        You want to immerse your reader in the experience of the main character. In these books, the narrator addresses the main character of the book as ‘you’ and the reader “becomes” the main character.

-        You want to persuade the reader.

-        You want to convey a familiar childhood experience in a humorous way.

 As always, the best way to get familiar with writing this way is by looking at mentor texts. Here are a few that demonstrate the broad range of what can be done with the second person point of view.

Don’t Feed the Coos by Jonathan Stutzman, illustrated by Heather Fox

Don’t Push the Button by Bill Cotter

The Elephant’s Guide to Hide and Seek by Kjersten Hays, illustrated by Gladys Jose

Flying Deep: Climb Inside Deep-Sea Submersible Alvin by Michelle Cusolito, illustrated by Nicole Wong

How Do You Dance? by Thyra Heder

How to Babysit a Grandpa by Jean Reagan, illustrated by Lee Wildish

How to Wear a Sari by Darshana Khiani, illustrated by Joanne Lew-Vriethoff

If You Decide to Go to the Moon by Faith McNulty, illustrated by Steve Kellogg

If Your Monster Won’t Go to Bed by Denise Vega, illustrated by Zachariah O’Hora

The Iridescence of Birds: A Book About Henri Matisse by Patricia MacLachlan, illustrated by Hadley Hooper

The Secret Code Inside You by Rajani LaRocca, illustrated by Steven Salerno

Warning: Do Not Open This Book! by Adam Lehrhaupt, illustrated by Matthew Forsythe

When Grandma Gives You a Lemon Tree by Jamie L.B. Deenihan, illustrated by Lorraine Rocha

When Your Elephant Has the Sniffles by Susanna Leonard Hill, illustrated by Daniel Wiseman

You DON’T Want a Unicorn by Ame Dyckman, illustrated by Liz Climo

Bio: Carrie Finison writes picture books with humor and heart, including DOZENS OF DOUGHNUTS (2020), DON'T HUG DOUG (2021), and the forthcoming HURRY, LITTLE TORTOISE, and LULU & ZOEY (2022). She lives in the Boston area with her family. For updates and giveaways, subscribe to her newsletter, check out her website or follow on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.