Rhythm and Rhyme in Picture Book Texts: Build your House!

If you write picture books, you've probably already noticed that rhyming picture books...are tough to sell. Many agents and editors state outright that they simply won't even consider a rhyming text!

The reason isn't because rhyme doesn't work in picture books; it's that it's very difficult to do well.

If you want to write a rhyming text, here's what you need to know:

Consistency.

There needs to be a consistent pattern of meter (stressed and unstressed word pattern), syllable count, rhyme and stanza length for the read-aloud to feel flawless (not "forced").

I call this building a house!

(I need to do what now?!)

No really! The four walls of meter, syllable, rhyme and stanza work together to support the narrative.

Wall 1: Meter

The stressed and unstressed pattern to your words. Examples (bold is stressed):

IAMBIC (x /) : That time of year thou mayst in me behold 

• every other word is stressed, starting with second

TROCHAIC (/ x): Tell me not in mournful numbers

• every other word stressed, starting with first word

ANAPESTIC (x x /): And the sound of a voice that is still

• every third word is stressed

There should be a consistent meter pattern with each line 

Wall 2: Syllable

Working together with a consistent syllable count in each line. Examples (number is syllable, line denotes meter pattern):

IAMBIC PENTAMETER (5 iambs, 10 syllables) 

That time | of year | thou mayst | in me | behold 

 1       2       3   4         5      6         7   8       9   10 

TROCHAIC TETRAMETER (4 trochees, 8 syllables) 

Tell me | not in | mournful | numbers
  1     2      3   4     5        6      7     8 

ANAPESTIC TRIMETER (3 anapests, 9 syllables) 

And the sound | of a voice | that is still
  1     2      3        4  5   6         7    8  9

Tip: syllable count is the first place I turn to look when a rhyming text feels "off"

Wall 3: Rhyme

The above two pieces create the rhythm of your text. You don't have to add rhyme but, if you do, each stanza should have paired words that sound alike. Examples:

Trains are humming, coming near (A)Coupled cars from front to rear. (A)Rumbling, grumbling, screech and squeal (B)Rolling, trolling wheels on steel (B)Trains Don't Sleep by Andria Warmflash Rosenbaum

___________________________________ 

Full fathom five thy father lies; (A)Of his bones are coral made; (B)
Those are pearls that were his eyes; (A)
Nothing of him that does fade, (B)
But doth suffer a sea-change (C)
Into something rich and strange. (C)
The Tempest, Shakespeare 1.2.456

The trick here is to pick a word that feels natural and organic to the unfolding narrative, rather than forced in just to rhyme. This often will require changing up your entire sentence rather than just picking a word that rhymes! Don't just try and make a word fit your existing sentence. This is often what results in a "forced" rhyme.

Tip: work backwards. If you know what word/words might fit your rhyme, start writing different sentences that also fit within your syllable count. Meter will often fall into place with syllable count.

Wall 4: Stanza

Finally, keep the number of lines per stanza consistent. The examples in #3 above are stanzas. Trains is a stanza made up of four lines. Tempest would be a stanza made up of six lines (it's not actually written in stanzas, just, you know, for the stake of example). You may have a text with stanzas of four lines each. You may have a text of stanzas of 3 lines, 2 lines, 3 lines, 2 lines. 

Note: final text placement may break your stanzas up for page-turn & visuals, but it should be presented consistently!

Roof: the idea and narrative connecting it all together

You don't need to use one of the established patterns given as examples above; your text simply needs to be consistent in whatever pattern you do use.

Exercise for you

1. Can you pick out the elements of the house in the examples for #3 above?
2. Take a few of your favorite rhyming picture book texts. Can you pick out the elements?

Here are some online resources to help:

RhymeZone: find words that rhyme listed out by syllable count

SyllableCounter: allows you to paste in your text to count your syllables 

Revision: Thinking of WHY not WHAT

For those of you in the process of sending your baby manuscript off and into the world, I wanted to expand on a previous post regarding conflicting advice.

When reading for critique, the instinct is to try and be helpful. Often, I think the result of that is a critique that offers advice rather than a breakdown of the issues at heart.

This is one of my favorite clips. I really hope no one has received or left a critique session with me feeling like this...

But it transitions us nicely (after a few calming laughs) into the reason you should always focus on the WHY instead of the WHAT: the critique you got very likely could be the reader trying their best to help you with a solution, rather than pointing out something that is actually wrong.

Your job when revising is to figure out if that solution is the right one for your work, or if there is something else causing your reader to make the comment that they did that helps to point to what you really need to revise. How? Ask why.

Let's start with the video. WHY did this gatekeeper start spitballing outrageous ideas instead of directly critiquing the work? Well, honestly: from an outside perspective, and someone who has thrown some pretty outrageous ideas out there, I think probably the gatekeeper just wasn't intrigued by the story.

WHY?

Well, there could be two reasons: first, the story itself IS boring and/or non-fresh enough to really spark interest and stand out, OR this gatekeeper wasn't the right fit.

There's nothing you can do about an agent not being the right fit. But you should explore whether or not your story stands out in the market AND, if it does, if you've started in the right place - if your characters and voice are engaging enough right from the start to capture interest. And there's where you begin. Research - does your book stand out? And evaluate - are your characters and voice engaging?

Much better than trying to re-work it to be JAWS, right?

Here are a few things you can consider if you're getting responses all over the board, lots of "just not for me"'s, or just want to think about other solutions:

• What's at stake in your novel? For your characters? Is it strong enough?
• Does the reader feel like everything will be ok, even if they don't finish the book? (stakes)
• What's the conflict in your novel? Is it easily solved? (a perceived lose-lose situation is ideal)
• Does your character have autonomy in the conflict and stakes?
• When do you introduce the conflict and stakes? Too soon? Too late?
• Could your readers run into your character on the street and know how he/she would react to a variety of bizarre situations? (voice)
• Does your character's voice resonate in your readers' heads even after the pages stop?
• What's your ratio of dialog-to-narrative?
• Do your chapters end with conflict, or resolution?
• Is your idea unique? Can you condense it into a one-line hook that doesn't sound like ANY other book? (PW has weekly deal reports you can browse for free FYI)
• Does your book contain elements not found or not often seen in your genre? Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
• What kinds of books does your reader/critique-r generally gravitate to? How would that influence what they would say? (don't focus on what you *think* an agent wants; what have they sold? Who do they represent? What have they read recently?)

Finally: what did YOU intend?

Find your book's focus. What are your comps? (in THAT genre, published in the last THREE to FIVE years). What do those books do well? What do you want YOUR readers to take away? What impression do YOU want to make?

Have you asked your critiquers if you've hit those marks?

If you need help figuring out the WHY: ask a friend! I'm sure the poor guy in the video above left scratching his head and maybe just thinking, WHAT?! And not sure where to even begin with the advice he was given.

Stepping back can be difficult; so try collecting the feedback you've been getting, and asking for some fresh eyes to help brainstorm: what should I read between these lines?

Keep an open mind...and don't be afraid to step back from a project, either, and write something new. You might not have found your perfect execution yet. You may need time, and more experience as a writer, to grow into it.

YA vs. Adult: what's so different, anyway?

One of my biggest pet peeves about submissions is reading queries from authors who are clearly trend-chasers.

Currently, the biggest offender: adult writers who call their novels YA.

Copyright 2013 stockimages

To start, let me quote Flux, the YA imprint of Lywellyn’s tagline: “Where young adult is a point of view, not a reading level.”

Obviously, I can’t speak on the actual definition from Flux, but for the purposes of the blog post: Just what does this mean?

Well, first, it means that AGE is not the determining factor of a YA.


Case in point:

Below are two passages. Both characters speaking are 17 years old:

I’m sitting in Grandma Meagram’s room, doing the New York Times crossword puzzle with her. It’s a bright cool April morning and I can see red tulips whipping in the wind in the garden. Mama is down there planting something small and white over by the forsythia. Her hat is almost blowing off and she keeps clapping her hand to her head and finally takes the hat off and set her work basket on it.

I haven’t seen Henry in almost two months; the next date on the List is three weeks away. We are approaching the time when I don’t see him for more than two years. I used to be so casual about Henry, when I was little; seeing Henry…


VS.

It was easy enough to sneak out of school. I knew that from experience. This time, all I had to do was wait until Mrs. Higgins had led everyone onto the outdoor track and then slip behind the bleachers and walk down to the other opening in the chain-link fence.
Sneaking back in, though…that would be a bitch. But I’d just have to deal with that when I got back. Like always.I shivered in the cool morning breeze. It was 7:00 a.m., or a little past, on the first day in May, and it wasn’t nearly warm enough to be out walking around in the stupid thin T-shirt and short shorts they made us wear for gym.


In case you didn’t guess, the first passage is adult, from The Time Traveler’s Wife, and the second is YA, from The Ghost and the Goth*. Clearly, the age of these characters did NOT determine if these were adult or YA books (though as a general rule, no, there aren’t any adult POVs in YA). Neither did the tense, or the point of view.

And that means: you CAN’T just find and replace all mentions of “twenty-three” with “seventeen” and slap YA on the cover page of your manuscript.


What determines YA is VOICE.
There a sophistication and maturity in adult books, no matter the age of the character, that shines through in the voice. To try and break down some elements of what this sophistication and maturity consists of:


1. The language (or word choice) is different.


2. The descriptive nature of the narrative is told in a different way.

Take how Clare tells us about the springtime: “It’s a bright cool April morning and I can see red tulips whipping in the wind in the garden.” Lovely. Gives us a wonderful sense of the world and a clear picture of this day. WE can feel it without her having to tell us how it feels to her; the I is barely present.

Now look at how Alona describes it: “I shivered in the cool morning breeze. It was 7:00 a.m., or a little past, on the first day in May, and it wasn’t nearly warm enough to be out walking around in the stupid thin T-shirt and short shorts they made us wear for gym.” This also gives us a very clear image of what this morning is like, but we experience it THROUGH HER eyes. We are COMPLETELY focused on HER world, HER experiences, how SHE is letting us see this.


In other words:


3. YA voices are very ego-centric.

Ok, ok, I’ll admit; these are definitely fine lines to walk on. More commercial genres of adult have voices that can sound very close to YA. Take Janet Evanovich; her writing is as sarcastic and “I” centered as any teen novel. What sets these apart are the mature situations -- not to say that YA books don’t, or can’t, deal with mature situations, but HOW the characters confront them is very different.


For example:

Mom starts on beer number six. It’s the one I call the Talking Beer….That’s why we’re here at the cemetery, after all. To mourn another lost boyfriend. To add another name to the Men Who Ditched Leona Fitch list.
“I thought he was going to be the one,” she continues. “He was so thoughtful.”
She’s right. Kyle was thoughtful. He gave me a brown bobble-head dog the first time Mom brought him home to meet me. And he earned bonus points for the fact that—in the six weeks he dated Mom—I never once caught him staring at my rolls of fat or my massive chest.

–Blue Plate Special* (YA)

This is sarcastic, but it’s also painful. A tough situation sparks sarcasm, but also injury to the teen soul. Stephanie Plum wouldn’t be so bitter about her mom’s drinking; it doesn’t have to affect her anymore. The character here, on the other hand, completely internalizes this situation, and when prompted to think of a moment of thoughtfulness in relation to her mother’s boyfriends, relates it back to herself to understand, for us to understand.

We are only capable of feeling her pain through her view of the world, no matter what the situation, or how sarcastic her voice.

I suppose you can think of it like a maturity thing; not that all adults are mature, but rather, YA voice vs. adult voice is certainly going to be less self-assured, less reflective of the world/life, less put into perspective. An adult may not have thought, above, that her mother's boyfriend was thoughtful because he wasn't caught staring at her fat rolls, but rather because he was kind to her mother, remembered her mother's birthday once when no one else did.

This is part of the reason YA novels can be so much more drama-tastic and angsty; the reader experiences the young adult perspective (ego-centric and not quite "worldly" just yet).


4. YA novels are experienced more than watched

What I mean by this is that YA voice is directly relatable; the reader feels like he or she is in the character's shoes. An adult novel, on the other hand, is enjoyed like one enjoys a movie - just as swept up and emotional as YA, but more in the style of watching the characters playing out the scenes, rather than feeling that emotional tug as if YOU are the character, playing out the scene. A virtual reality game (YA) vs. watching a movie (adult).

It's part of the reason, I think, that first person is so popular in YA; it's more directly relatable, and offers less distance to a reader. It allows the reader to directly put him or herself in the character's shoes more easily.

It makes sense, in terms of demographic; don't quote me on this, but 47% of 18-24 year olds read YA, whereas only 25% of 25 and up do. Maybe this is because the younger readers can remember and tap into the young adult emotions more readily, and so more easily put on the YA voice helmet and step into the YA characters' shoes?


(sometimes) 5. Sentence structure is different

YA tends to be shorter, snapier, less complex; less of my favorite little ; and more .


In all of this, I'm not trying to say that there is only ONE YA voice; there are a myriad of voices, just as there are people. But, the voices have elements of what I mentioned above; voice is defined by experience, by perspective, and so how COULD a YA voice EVER sound like an adult? It wouldn't be true, or realistic, to the age group.

I know my examples probably aren’t the most brilliant, but hopefully it at least clears up a few things on YA vs. adult – and why ADULT authors can’t just “become” YA.

And for reference: here is some further reading, on MG vs. YA
Is it MG or YA? on Kidlit.com
The Difference between MG and YA by Laura Backes, Children's Book Insider

Common Manuscript Mistakes, and How to Avoid Them

Quite frequently I’m asked to share what the most common themes I see in the slush are. I don’t really have an answer for that. It comes in waves; ghosts, werewolves, princesses, distressed teens dealing with peg-legs and missing dogs.

What I can talk about, however, are the most common mistakes I see with manuscripts.

Most of the time, I feel like this when I read a query and turn to pages:

CC by SA 3.0 at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SadCat1.jpg

Why? Top three reasons:

1. Poor pacing
2. Not connecting to voice
3. Plot not stand-out enough

In my opinion, there is a way to avoid all three: they’re called beta readers. Just kidding. That’s a copout; you should never rely on your beta to make your manuscript publishable and/or readable – which is step one on how to avoid these mistakes.

Other tips:

1. Avoiding horrible pace

Cut your prologue, dream sequence, and first chapter. Second, take a look at your synopsis. A lot of the time, the synopsis highlights the heart of the story, and will pinpoint exactly what the important details you should have – and what you shouldn’t have – are. Too much back-story upfront really drags pace, and too many tiny, unimportant, menial things like sports games, day-to-day activities, talking to mom/sister/great-aunt also really slow pace. You don’t need to tell me when your character goes pee or brushes her teeth. In other words, don’t summarize events; realize them in the plot.

The best way to improve pacing is to go back and snip snip snip from your finished manuscript; ask yourself: why is this scene really here? Does it actually serve a purpose to the plot?

Here’s a great site on pacing

2. Creating a likeable voice

This is the hardest one. Voice is impossible to fix. It’s the most subjective aspect of the book.
However, a few pointers from voices I haven’t liked: make a character snarky, not rude. Make your character believable and relatable (there’s a reason so many characters have no boyfriends and no lives and are so poor – the majority of us are like that too). If your character has un-likeable aspects, make sure there are still flaws, too. Sarcasm is great; whining is not. Think cheeky and feisty rather than arrogant and violent. Inner strength should shine through the voice, even if not in the action.

Personally, I gravitate toward more open and sarcastic voices, voices I can relate to in real life. Think of your audience – what kind of narrator would they relate to?

Voice is the aspect of the novel that lets the reader forget about the writer. In other words, it's what makes characters real. Your character should have a perspective, a unique way of thinking about and looking at things based on where he/she is from and the experiences he/she have had. Figure out that background and what that would mean for your voice.


3. Avoiding the “done” plot

RIGHT when you get your sni (shiney new idea), THINK about it. A lot. Write down the idea; see exactly how far this spark takes you. The reality is, there are a LOT of books out there, and having a “twist” alone isn’t going to make your book stand out. Adding a supernatural element is NOT enough to turn your teen love story into a sellable book, nor is changing up an existing supernatural creature or mashing two themes like death and divorce together.

Hopefully, you are reading in your genre – that is the BEST way to know if your sni is too close to what’s already been done. Make me go, “oh wow” when I read your query letter – and do not fall into the trap of the “done” plotLINE. A fabulous idea that follows the same structure as every other book out there – such as, teenaged girl discovers powers at 16, meets mysterious boy, has to save the world, or perhaps London debutante who hates the idea of marriage suddenly meets her match – is still a no for me. Avoid lighter, chick-lit plots; they often fall flat!

Creating Dynamic Peripheral Characters

This is a blog post I never thought I would write. Why? Because I had no idea, until I went head-first into revision with one of my authors, what to say about it.

But when an editor comes back to you saying she loves the book, but she’d like to see some revision on peripheral characters, well, gosh darn it, you figure out what to say pretty fast!

So here are some tips that I came up with for my author:

Ask yourself: What is their motivation?

One of the most important elements of your novel is understanding motivation. And not just your hero and/or heroine’s. A great exercise for this is to write a piece of the book in each of your character’s perspectives. You don’t have to include this; but see what they have to say. After you give them a voice, go back to your novel, and make sure their motive and perspectives come through without needing to be in their heads.

Avoid black/white characters

No, not physically; your peripheral characters can be purple for all I care. What I mean here is: avoid blanket good/bad stereotypes. Yes, sometimes these blanket characters pop up; epic stories usually have them. But the gray area is always so much more interesting and heartbreaking.

A great example of this came to me last night, when I (re) watched (for the millionth time) Pirates of the Carribean. Captain Barbosa is clearly a bad guy…right? But that last scene, when he dies, and the bright green apple falls from his fingers…you definitely feel heartbroken for the guy, don’t you? That little detail, those darned apples, were a beautiful plot device for making him more dynamic. They were a physical representation of his motive. He wasn’t bad for the sake of being bad; he was in pain. Yes, he also gets a chance to explain his motive to us, but it’s the apples that really drive it home.

Ask yourself: Are these characters just tools to an end?

Part of what may make a character seem less dynamic is if they only exist to drive forward the plot. Yes, yes; back to the epic fantasy example, sometimes it’s unavoidable to encounter these “extras.” Not every character in a movie needs to run up to the heroine and explain their motivation. I think, perhaps, creating a little map of where each character in your book falls in relation to the hero/heroine should demonstrate the appropriate level of development in your novel:





As the circle widens, the development lessens.

Great; I’ve done the circle and the exercise. Now what?

Good question. Everyone’s approach to revision is different. But to start, think back to the Barbosa example: allow your peripheral characters a chance to explain themselves. Their motivations are going to have to come through via interaction with the hero and/or heroine, if you don’t have multiple POVs (which I never recommend). So go back to pivotal scenes, and give them a voice!