Writing Picture Books: Draft It in Free Verse First!

As a poet, I write in many forms, depending on what the subject matter calls for. But when something suddenly inspires me, and often in answer to a prompt submitted by a member of my writing group, my go-to is free verse. In fact, a prompt in my group inspired a poem that became my picture book SPRINGTIME STORKS: A MIGRATION LOVE STORY.

That got me thinking. Not all picture books make sense as a free verse poem, of course, but writing your first draft as a poem could help you strengthen your manuscript and give you strong bones to build your prose story.

Here are just a few features of free verse that can help.

Word Choice

Poems work hard to make every word count, just as picture book texts do. Writing in free verse, more so than writing in prose, forces you to select your words and phrases carefully and to use the most powerful, most accurate verbs. (IMHO, powerful verbs are the magic beans of picture book writing.)

Here’s a verse from SPRINGTIME STORKS:

     While snow flew
     and wind whistled,
     the man minded my wing.
     The child fed me,
     tended my nest in the barn.
     I wondered and worried about Luka.

In the story, my main character Katerina is injured in autumn. To show the passage of time, I could have said something like “When winter came” or “It snowed and the wind blew.” But that’s not evocative or lyrical or lovely, is it? Writing in free verse makes you think about language in a structure that practically begs you to be concise and clever.

Emotion

Evoking an emotional response from your reader is key in writing poetry—and in picture books as well. (Are you seeing a pattern here?)

With every line you write, every scene you create, ask yourself what emotion you want your reader to feel at that moment. What can you do to bring the reader’s emotional response to a higher level? Writing in free verse helps you stay focused on this, and using strong verbs, as I mentioned above, helps too. But what else? Line breaks.

In the verse above, imagine a line break after “wondered.” This break would give the reader a beat to wander away from your intent to begin to wonder about their own things at this point in the story. However, keeping “wondered” paired with “worried” eliminates that beat, and your reader stays on the emotional journey you want them to experience. When you write in prose and don’t have line breaks to consider, you might miss opportunities like this to improve your reader’s emotional response.

Literary Devices

Assonance, consonance, internal rhymes, alliteration – these and more are all important to writing in free verse. And what else benefits from these devices? Yep. Picture books. (You’re definitely getting it now, right? Free verse poetry and picture books are soul mates!)

In the verse above, think about the w sounds of “While snow flew and wind whistled.” It’s a quiet sound of heavy snowflakes falling. “Wondered” and “worried” carry the heavy emotion Katerina is feeling. And the s sounds in “snow” combined with “whistled” (a powerful verb) helps you hear the wind.

Learn the poetic devices and put them to work in your poem. When (if) you revise your story as a prose version, be sure to keep the juicy goodness of the devices you’ve used.

Rhythm

These free verse and picture book soul mates both use rhythm and musicality to draw readers in, keep them caught up in the story, and improve their emotional experience.

Let’s look at this verse, which occurs after Katerina first tests her wings and feels the lingering pain of her injury:

     Still, I had to try.
     I took long strides and leaped, wings fluttering, flapping.
     I flew!

The varied sentence length creates a nice rhythm that matches the emotion I want the readers to feel. The long line gives the reader time to experience what Katerina experiences. And the short line that follows conjures that sudden, happy feeling when she realizes her success.

Next Step

Once your poem is drafted, you need to decide if it should remain as a free verse picture book. If not, you have a strong base to build on. Begin by changing the poem’s physical format by putting it into paragraphs. Add more dialogue, if need be. Flesh out the story where it needs more. Think about page turns. Play with it, but try to keep all the emotion, rhythm, imagery, and lyrical language from the original poem, and as you add new text, keep that poetic flavor in mind so it blends seamlessly with the free verse text you kept.

Don’t know how to write free verse poems? Ah, that would be a whole new blog post for me, and many others have already written them. Search “writing free verse poems” and you’ll find them. (This is an excellent one! https://writers.com/how-to-write-a-free-verse-poem)

Other Free Verse Picture Books

Here are some picture books written in free verse you might like to explore.

• Our Joyful Noise by Gabriele Davis, illustrated by Craig Stanley
• See This Little Dot by Jane Yolen, illustrated by Laёtitia Devernay
• Mud to the Rescue: How Animals Use Mud to Thrive and Survive by Tanya Konerman, illustrated by Melanie Cataldo  (released 5/20/25)
• The Diamond and the Boy: The Creation of Diamonds and the Life of H. Tracy Hall by Hannah Holt, illustrated by Jack Fleck
• If You Want to See a Whale by Julie Fogliano, illustrated by Erin E. Stead
• Dear Tree Frog by Joyce Sidman, illustrated by Diana Sudyka

Happy writing!

Carol began thinking about writing when she was about seven years old, trying desperately to figure out how to describe things. The color yellow, a dog running across its yard, the way the world looked outside her window. She started writing stories and poems then, and eventually worked as a copywriter in advertising, then as a freelance marketing and editorial writer. When she gave up her business, she focused on writing for kids. She’s active in two online communities for writers (12 x 12 Picture Book Challenge and Courage to Create), leads a critique group, volunteers for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, has participated as a poetry judge in the We Need Diverse Books/Penguin Random House Creative Writing Awards, and twice judged the Fiction Picture Book category for Cybils. SPRINGTIME STORKS is her debut picture book. She lives in western Massachusetts with her husband.