Hello fellow Creatives! This is a five-week challenge based loosely on the 12x12 Challenge. For an awesome, more balanced, more supported platform go there.
For a quicker,
looser, self-motivated experience, read on.
Borrowing
from Kicking Corner’s tradition of 300 Thursdays, where I post poetry and short
stories 300 words or less, this is a challenge to write one children’s picture book
per week over the next five weeks.
I’m not
talking manuscripts that are polished, perfected, ready to start subbing agents
and publishers. These will be first drafts, ideas in the making.
At the end of five weeks, you’ll have a handful of stories that stand out from the others and a general idea of how to generate more. Do these challenges again and you'll have ten stories. Again, and you'll have fifteen. Into infinity.
From these, you'll have multiple handfuls of picture book plans that truly interest you and/or your target audience. Those
will be the ones you put your heart into further drafting.
While I recognize there are gazillions of rules for formatting/structure based on age, genre, style, etc. in the publishing world, we’re going to keep it simple here:
1. Word count:
300-500 words. Seriously. Don’t go over.
2. Write only
what the illustrator can’t illustrate. Allow room for their art (or yours if
you’re illustrating your own stories) to bloom too.
3. Be kid
friendly. More on that in Week 1
That’s it.
Totally doable, right? Surely we text more than 300 words every day to our friends and family.
This post is just over 300 words. This is doable.
I promise.
If you dream of writing and/or illustrating children’s picture books, you can
do this.
Every week,
for the next 5 weeks, I’ll post prompts, writer/artist resources, things I’ve
learned and am still learning through my own process. If you have more thoughts
and resources, I’d love you to post them in the comments or contact me. I heart
hearing from you.
And here we
go.
Week 5--Week of Formats and Dummies
Bonus Week--Week of What Now?
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