by Darcy Pattison
This year, I’ve been doing Friday Ideas to help generate ideas for picture books.
After five months, here’s the update.
The idea was to try to write a picture book each week. Well, at least to come up with a viable idea for a picturebook each week. Ideas, I did. And, I’ve written five picturebook mss that I really like and am starting to market. Last year, I think I wrote two picture books. So, my production is definitely up.
Each week, we take a word and try to generate ideas that the word inspires. We feel free to take off on any tangent, as long as it’s a picture book idea.
One thing that’s happened is that some words are harder for picture books and actually inspired more middle grade novel ideas, rather than picture books. But I’m also better at generating lots of ideas from which to choose. We’ve sorta discussed why we develop this idea, rather than that one. It just has to be a story idea that stuck for some reason and won’t let us alone.
Here’s the list of words we’ve used. I want to go back through my notebook this week and see if there are ideas lurking that will grab me as a flip past them. When I write the words down in a list like this, it makes me think of magnetic poetry. So, I’m wondering if I could do a story using all of them?
Friday Ideas words to date: help, peace, phoenix, buzz, 80s, super-hero, wired, I Spy, green, polar, neighbor, red, sprout, crash, gravity, communication, hide, total snap, fortune, remember. Off to brainstorm more picture book ideas. But, the school/family pressures are finally letting up and I’m itching to get back to a novel! Soon!
Friday Ideas Updated for 2008
Related posts:
Discussion
No comments for “Friday Ideas–updated”