The First Steps to Tell Children's Stories

Illustrator and author Estelí Meza presents you with an exercise to create and organize the initial ideas of any story

Estelí Meza (@estelimu) is an author and illustrator of children's books, book covers and magazines, working acrossMexico, Spain, the United States, and the United Arab Emirates. She is an expert in creating engaging stories and has worked for publishers such as Scholastic, Anaya, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Kalimat, and Penguin Random House.

She has created an exercise which will help you learn successful storytelling steps, regardless of where your story is destined for.

This exercise uses written words, so you will need a notebook. Before you begin, you must know the name and some essential facets of your story's character.

Start by writing sentences. The first step is to write all kinds of ideas for your story: things you heard on the street, songs, or whatever you can think of.

Then, create seven columns. As shown in the image below, we will name them in the following order: Character, Verb, Noun, Adjective, Object, Verb, and Place.

You can increase the number of columns if you want, but it is not necessary.

The next step will be to complete the columns with words isolated from the phrases you wrote before. Estelí recommends that you make at least five complete lines.

If you want to write the verbs in the infinitive, that's ok.

After completing the lines, you will begin to form sentences with the words. You need to make them intelligible, so this is when you add conjunctions, prepositions, conjugate the verbs, etc.

Now, choose the phrase you like best: it will be the trigger of the story. Estelí chose the first one:

"Nicanor looks at the bird in the sky from the window and sighs in the jungle."

Estelí also recommends rewriting the chosen phrase on a new page.

Now, let's think of a story's essential parts: presentation, conflict, and resolution. Even if our story follows a different pattern, this is a handy foundation.

In the next step, we will brainstorm using our chosen sentence. In the case of Estelí:

"Nicanor looks at the bird in the sky from the window and sighs in the jungle."

We have to ask ourselves: what emotions does this phrase arouse?

Ideally, try to build the following sentences thinking about what we already know about our character. What would they do next? What were they thinking? Based on this Nicanor example, Estelí wrote the following:

"Impatiently, he waits for the moment."

"It's time to drink coffee and gossip."

The result looks like this:

Presentation: "Nicanor looks at the bird in the sky from the window and sighs in the jungle."
Conflict: "Impatiently, he waits for the moment."
Resolution: "It's time to drink coffee and gossip."

Although this is a concise and straightforward story, it will be a solid starting point. After all, telling a story is an additive process: one piece connects with another in a chain that can extend as long as you like.

If you want to learn how to create a character and turn him into the hero of an illustrated story, don't miss Estelí Meza's course, Illustration Techniques for Children's Books.

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