I wanted to share something I have learned about writing for children. It’s something which seems toweringly obvious but I didn’t notice it for quite some time. It’s the knowledge that place is paramount.

I write or design on an iPad or iPhone. This frees me from a desk and helps me be more reactive to ideas wherever I am. Much as I love a notepad and pen, travelling by train so much means I would have to risk being unable to read anything I wrote at the end of two hours on a bumpy train.

So that’s how I write. And it works. Or so I thought.

Until it came to writing scripts for picture books.

It went something like this:

I’d write a story. Read it. Tweak it. Become very excited. Share it with friends. Listen to their criticisms. Rewrite. Hand it to someone who could draw. This is easy, I’d say to myself.

And it was. Until I was asked questions about specific pages…

Pages?

Was that my problem?

Oh.

So it was. And when I began to think of the story in terms of pages then I began to see what a muddle I’d made. What would make someone want to turn the page? Sure, the story itself was OK but it needed to be more than that. Each stage of the journey had to be compelling. Each page, each double page spread, had to be seen in terms of a TV episode. It had to be filled with enough wonder for an illustrator to run with as well as giving the reader a huge reason to turn each page.

It was only when I began to jot down each page in a stapled together book of my own that I could appreciate the shape a picture book needed to take.