This is an exercise in developing story structure. Take an existing short story or picture book that you have written and break it up into 15-24 short scenes. (Think about how it would look if made into a picture book.) Once you have your scenes, think about how the pictures for each scene might look. For each imagined picture, identify and describe the following:
- The characters represented in the picture
- The main emotion and desired emotional impact for the picture
- The subtext for the picture (underlying theme, relationships between characters, etc. Something not directly expressed within the text.)
- The action represented in the picture
- The setting represented in the picture
- The conflict or tension represented in the picture
- The hook to the next page (can you identify why a child would want to see the next picture? Is it because of what the character is doing, the colors on the page, or ?)
When you are done, take a look at the "big picture." Are all of your imagined pictures sufficiently different? Taken together, would the pictures alone tell the story? Do the imagined pictures go along with the words on the page? Did you have difficulty envisioning a picture to go along with the words?
