Lilla here. Welcome to Part 3 of my FREE three part #MATSprep that I’ve written for you ahead of my picture book writing course, My Kid Book Pitch. I hope you’re enjoying all the fun tricks you can use to make your writing better and learning that you are, in fact, a writer. I just love this stuff, and it’s why I love being a literary agent for my artists and authors and why I love teaching My Kid Book Pitch.
If you missed Parts 1 and 2, find them here. I hope you’ll go give it a read to catch up and get some top writing tips. Then when you’re ready, it’s time for Part 3.
This is the terrible text I wrote to use as our example:
Cami, a young girl, liked to draw big, grey anteaters with long snouts like the ones she saw yesterday at the zoo. She was going to carefully show them to her class next Monday. Suddenly, a dog chased her!
We talked about different kinds of backstories and why might our character, Cami, might be obsessed with anteaters, and this is what I came up with:
My mom asked me why I like to draw so many anteaters. She thinks they look a little weird.
“I draw them ‘cuz I feel like I am one,” I told her.
Today we’re focusing on adverbs and why they are so disliked in the writing biz. (To be clear, it’s not just me who thinks this. Pretty much everyone will tell you this.)
What’s an adverb? Adverbs are words that describe verbs (aka doing words). They typically end in ‘ly’ (although there are other kinds). The ‘ly’ adverbs are the ones that we’ll focus on today because they are easy to spot and they potentially weaken your text.
Here are some examples of adverbs:
- Suddenly
- Carefully
- Quickly
- Slowly
- Strongly
- Mindfully
- Terribly
- Angrily
- Quietly
- Loudly
Note: Adverbs aren’t adjectives. Adjectives describe nouns (or things), like ‘creaky old house’ or ‘loud music’. Adjectives are fine to use: just be sure they aren’t visual, because you want to leave that for the illustrations. (I talked about this in Part 1 of this #MATSprep if you need to refresh your memory.)
Make Art That Sells student Bronte Rose Marande created this gorgeous character for My Kid Book Pitch. Artists have such amazing imaginations and I love helping them to thrive!
Ok, I don’t mean that you can never use adverbs, but let’s see how we can improve this sentence by taking a hard look at the adverbs in the second sentence of my bad writing example:
She was going to carefully show them to her class next Monday. Suddenly, a dog chased her!
I’m sure you see that ‘carefully’ is really not making much sense (like how do you show something carefully, and why would you?). With only about 500 words to work with, you want to cut whatever words you can that aren’t serving your story. Yay! Cutting is fun! It cleans up your text and makes it stronger! I love helping my artists/authors edit. Their manuscripts shine afterwards. It’s like cleaning out that messy closet so you only see the pretty dresses, and did you even remember that you had those denim overalls in there?
First, let’s change ‘She was going to show them next Monday.’ Why? Because it’s mixing past tense (‘was going to’) with future (‘show them next Monday’.)
Let’s change it to this:
She planned to show her class.
That way, the whole sentence is talking about the future. I know; it’s not very thrilling, but we can make it better later. At least the tense is correct throughout.
Now we’re going to remove ‘suddenly’. This is such a commonly used word by beginning writers, and I’m going to show you all kinds of good reasons why you want to remove it.
Art by Make Art That Sells student Mackinzie Rekers for My Kid Book Pitch.
Question: Lilla, what’s your beef with the word ‘suddenly’?
Answer: It’s a wasted opportunity. You have a chance to show where and why the dog appeared, instead of instantly popping him up.
Generally you don’t want to make something happen completely out of the blue. It can be perceived by the editor as a lazy way of moving the story along. Ideally, there should be some foreshadowing, a hint along the way that something may happen in the future, by setting the tone. For example, if you’re in the kitchen and suddenly a ghost appears, there better be a hint that the kitchen is haunted, or that weird things have been happening in that creaky old house all day.
Think about why a dog might be chasing her suddenly. (I had no idea why when I wrote this terrible sentence, LOL.) Let’s get creative. Maybe you want her to be chased by the dog so that she will run and drop her art into a puddle, because you want the story to be about loss rather than about getting into a show.
Now I want you to write something about why a dog is chasing her. Make anything up. Imagine the scene and feel what you’re feeling.
Let’s divide the text into spreads (i.e. two pages facing each other). I actually love that these sentences begin our story. (We work on your first sentences quite a bit in the course, and I give you lots of examples from some stellar books.)
I’m going to cheat and put the dog chasing bit later in the book, because it makes absolutely no sense following the previous sentence.
Pages 1 and 2:
My mom asked me why I like to draw so many anteaters. She thinks they look a little weird.
“I draw them ‘cuz I feel like I am one,” I told her.
Pages 5 and 6:
Pico chased me again. I told him to sit, and he did, which was good because I didn’t want to drop my drawing.
or
Pages 5 and 6:
Pico chased me again.
I shouted, “Pico, sit!”
He stared at me.
“You have to stop chasing me all the time!” I yelled.
Every week in one of our TWO live Zoom events, we’ll look at some stunning picture books together and talk about what makes them so brilliant.
Dialogue Tags
Which brings me to dialogue tags. Those are the words you add to the end of dialogue so we know who’s saying what. Above, I’ve added, ‘shouted’ and ‘yelled’.
These days, the preference is to simply write ‘said’, as in, ‘she said’, ‘he said’. You don’t need ‘shouted’, ‘yelled’, and other descriptors. In this case, I’ll remove them, because the exclamation marks do a lot of the work.
The cool part is that if the reader can tell who said the sentence, then you don’t need to repeat ‘said’. It just kinda interferes and is clunky. As the narrator is telling the story, we know that she is the one talking.
Pico chased me again.
“Pico, sit!”
He stared at me.
“You have to stop chasing me all the time.”
I know that I haven’t established why the dog chasing part is important, but because this is all just pretend, we’ll assume there was a very good reason for it. You’re the editor!
Just to recap, here’s what we’ve covered in this whole #MATSprep, including Parts 1, 2 and 3:
1. Remove visual descriptions.
2. Revisit ‘feeling’ words. Remove them and show us why they feel the emotion, don’t tell us what they felt.
3. Keep the story moving forward in chronological order.
4. Just for fun, rewrite your text in the present tense.
5. Remove adverbs.
6. Consider removing or changing dialogue tags to “said”.
Art by Make Art That Sells student Jemma Jamie Skidmore for My Kid Book Pitch. What will your unique picture book look like?
Now, it’s your turn to be the editor! Revisit all three parts of this #MATSprep, then try rewriting any or all of the bad sentences I had the pleasure of coming up with for you below. Post your revised version (with art, if you like) on social media using the tag #MATSprep and tagging @makeartthatsells. I can’t wait to see what you do!
(If you want, head over to Instragram and search #MATSprep to see what other students have done. So much creativity! But maybe do it after you do yours, so you don’t get influenced by anyone else.)
- Philomena really wanted to eat pink shrimp today, but yesterday she slowly ate tuna fish on wheat bread with lettuce.
- Shimon was lonely and sad. He was hurt that his friend Marcus didn’t text him about the party. A year ago, he invited Marcus to his party. “Why didn’t you invite me to your party, Marcus?” sighed Shimon, slowly.
- Cherissa the cat liked to wear lots of eye makeup on her eyes. She smeared red lipstick on her lips and it came off on food when she ate cat food. She had to find some mice to eat but she was afraid she wouldn’t find any.
Still not sure you’re a writer? Before I go, I want to remind you of two things:
1. As a creative person, you have the magical ability to generate all kinds of original ideas, which is WAY more important than perfect text. Fresh ideas are what editors want to see. You’ve got this. I’ll help you.
2. When you get the book deal, you will get an editor who will polish your work. They are experts at that. They know that your text isn’t perfect. That’s ok. I just want you to have some writing tools under your belt so you avoid amateur mistakes and so that your text will be the best it can be.
I hope you enjoyed learning how to edit text to make it shinier and infused with feeling. We’ve packed so much into this short #MATSprep and I can’t wait to teach you a ton more in My Kid Book Pitch.
My Magic Cards will help you unlock your magical imagination and create your very own unique story idea! Watch the video below.
You can bring an idea for a story that you already have, or use my Magic Cards to come up with a brand new, unique idea. We’ll take it a step at a time, infuse it with loads of fun, and follow my Make a Story Recipe. You’ll get TWO live Zoom classes a week where we’ll go through the course material together, look at a ton of gorgeous picture books to see what makes them great, and review student art – maybe yours!
I can’t wait to see you in class. Join me here.
Lots of love
P.S. Want to save 25% on My Kid Book Pitch? The Children’s Book Bundle 2022 includes My Kid Book Pitch, Illustrating Children’s Books PLUS and Lilla’s Art Recipes: Drawing Faces, with a tasty 25% saving! Find out more and sign up here.
