Good advice on writing picture books

Tara Lazar, an aspiring author, has this great blog post on thinking strategically about your ideas before you begin writing.

A typical day as a newbie writer: sit down at the computer, start writing.

At least, that’s what I did two years ago. I got an idea and I didn’t stop to think: is this a good idea? Is it marketable? Has anyone written something like this before? Nope. I just wrote, motivated by my muse.

And perhaps this was good back then. I was honing my skills, finding the right words, crafting sentences, building stories.

But they were looooong stories. At an average 1,500 words my tales were neither picture books nor chapter books. I insisted I was writing picture storybooks, and I used Patricia Polacco’s body of work as an example of how my stories could be published, not realizing, c’mon, she’s PATRICIA POLACCO.

It took me a while to learn to THINK before I write.

Read the rest. (And if you haven't read the Patricia Polacco books she's talking about, get thee to a library. They're amazing.)