Irreverent Picture Book
(~20 pages)
In groups of three or four, you will be writing, illustrating, printing, and binding original books that look and
sound as though they’re for children but are really for adults. Some examples of such books are Go the F**k to
Sleep, You Have to F**king Eat, Monsters Eat Whiny Children, and The Adventures of the Princess and Mr.
Whiffle.
This is an exercise in parody. To write these books, you’ll need to consider two things. First, form. What formal
techniques or rhetorical figures do picture books use? Rhyming, onomatopoeia, personification, colorful
illustrations—these kinds of things. Second, content. What types of subjects do picture books address? Think
here about themes of growing up, having adventures, learning to count, and so on. To create an irreverent
picture book, you will violate the content of traditional picture books, but you will make that violation benign
by using “picture-bookish” rhetorical techniques.
Take these lines from K Is for Knifeball as an example. It’s a rhyming alphabet book, but notice how it alters
the content:
A is for apple.
Eat one every day.
And then wash it down
with your mom’s Cabernet.
B is for blender.
Your daddy won’t mind
if you drop in his Rolex
and set it to “GRIND.”
Now, as you know, picture books require illustrations. They are often remembered for their illustrations. Yet
the illustrations in your books need not be intricate or fancy. As in prose, simplicity goes a long way. Look at
the illustrations in Not a Box by Antionette Portis, for example: many of them are nothing more than black
lines on a white page, straight out of the stick-figure tradition. Look, too, at the illustrations in I Want My Hat
Back by Jon Klassen. They’re a tad more involved than those in Not a Box. A tad. I want you to create clear,
captivating illustrations, but I do not need you to produce elaborate watercolor paintings (though you can if
you want!).
Length matters as well. I say at the top of this page that your books should be approximately twenty pages
long. Fear not! Maybe you’ve noticed, but in case you haven’t, picture books usually have very few words. Not
a Box, a twenty-seven-page book by Antoinette Portis, contains seventy words. Noisy Nora, a forty-page book
by Rosemary Wells, has two hundred and four words. Deciding which words will go on which pages—yes, you
need to decide on this—will likely prove your greatest challenge.
Good luck!