Paige and Webb Evolve
This week I’ve spent a lot of time on my book Paige and Webb. At the very beginning of this project, it was a picture book. But after workshopping it with a couple of different groups, I wrote more for the book and it became a chapter book full of illustrations. I’m calling it a graphic novel, but most of it is non-fiction.
I finished the manuscript for it a few weeks ago and sent it to an agent to evaluate at the NJSCBWI Conference on June 17th. My next goal is to create a dummy for it. I hope to have the dummy done in time to take it with me to the evaluation on the 17th.
A dummy is where I mock up what each page in the book will look like. I did 7 drafts in the manuscript stage before I felt it was ready to move onto the dummy book which is draft #8.
Anytime I do a dummy book, I start with thumbnails. Since this book is more than 32 pages, my standard 32 page layout wasn’t going to be enough. I needed 3 sheets to finish the manuscript.
The thumbnails went fast, like they are suppose to. I think I spent about a week on them, but to be honest, I can’t remember.
Then I scanned in my thumbnails and blew them up to 5 inch spreads. So each page was about 2.5 x 3 inches and one spread was about 5 x 3 inches.
I took my very rough thumbnails and drew over them with the help of a light table. I was cruising along pretty good until I hit chapter 3. I was almost to the end of Chapter 3, when I paused to fact check something and discovered that I was off by 2 decades. Oops!
I spent a few days going down research rabbit holes, learning a ton of stuff I didn’t know, and re-writing Chapter 3. Chapters 4-9 went reasonably fast, with only one hiccup that I thought would be another rabbit hole, but after a little research, I decided that what I had written was the best way to describe the concept.
Today, I finished Draft #9!!!!! I feel really proud of what it now looks like. And on Monday, I’ll start with Draft #10.
There are a few things I learned from doing this dummy book.
A dummy book is a great editing tool. As I created my dummy book, I wrote all of the text on each page and cut sentences that were too wordy and wouldn’t fit on the page. I also got to see the manuscript from the perspective of the reader. If I could draw the concept just as well, then I cut the words out.
My drawings of my characters became more concise. If you have ever seen the very first book of Garfield the comic and compared it with the very last book of Garfield, this might make more sense to you. The more you draw a character, the better you get to know the character. I thought I knew both Paige and Webb pretty good. I designed them a few years ago and I’ve been drawing them off and on since. But over the last couple of weeks, I started to see what shapes I really liked and which shapes would work well for this book. Their characters shapes became more streamlined. They have evolved.
Creating a dummy book is exhausting. Several days this past week, when I’ve finished my four hours of working on this project and stopped for lunch, my body shut down. Today, I fell asleep and was still so tired my kids were worried about me when they got home from school. I’m hoping that this is just part of the learning curve. That once I’m used to this schedule, my afternoon will be available again for all the other art related tasks I have for myself to complete.