Tom wrote into the blog with a question about read aloud picture books. Check out my answer in video form, or read the transcript below. If you want to dig deeper into picture book voice, here’s my post on reading your way to great writing voice.

How Do You Write Read Aloud Picture Books?

Hi, this is Mary Kole and welcome to kidlit.com. Today I have a question from Tom, and it is all about read aloud potential and work for younger readers. So here we’re talking about picture books, we’re talking about chapter books, early readers, those sorts of categories. Some parents do read middle grade with their kids, but since you’re getting kind of into independent reader territory there, I’m just gonna talk about these younger categories. So Tom wrote into the blog and he said, “You know, I noticed that some works really, really have great read aloud functionality. If you wanna call it that. Some works are just great to read aloud, I read ’em to my kids, everybody enjoys it, it’s this great kind of family moment,” which is what we’re hoping to create when we write for kids, right, “and some works just don’t. They fall flat, the language doesn’t flow.” So he is asking, you know, how do you create more of the good stuff and less of the clunky dry voice that doesn’t lend itself well to read aloud potential.

“Read Aloud Potential” Is A Great Query Hook

Now, read aloud the potential is a phrase that I’m using very deliberately because when I used to look at query letters as a literary agent, one of the sales hooks for a picture book that would get my attention is if the writer had written “This book has great read aloud potential”. And then when I would turn around and pitch that book to an editor, that would also be a sales hook that I used all the time. Because when you’re pitching, you really want things to have hooks, you want to be able to say something, encapsulate a benefit of that particular project. Now if you’re thinking of writing a query letter, you should also be thinking along these lines of what are my benefits here for this project, other than it’s a great manuscript, right? We also want to try and find these little benefits, and read aloud potential is actually a great benefit. If you’re writing picture books, definitely put it in your cap and remember that saying something has great read aloud potential is something that sends a positive flag up in a query letter.

How To Identify Great Picture Book Voice

Now, the question becomes, how do you build that read aloud potential into a story? And that is where I think Tom’s question lies. So what makes for great read aloud potential? I have one tip that seems so incredibly obvious that I almost feel dumb saying it here, but I know that a lot of readers don’t think of it. I work as a freelance editor now with clients and writers all over the globe, and it is so much fun. But when I give this note, I’ve noticed that a lotta my clients sort of have a light bulb moment, and it’s like they hadn’t really thought of it before. So when I say this, you might be like, “Duh,” which is why I’m here, I hand out duh moments, read your work loud as you write it, as you revise it, read that work aloud. Only then will you know exactly what its read aloud potential is.

Here’s the thing that happens. We are…we train ourselves when we write in the flow and cadence of our own voice, if that makes sense. We know what our voice is about, we’re used to it, and that’s natural, right? It’s our voice, it’s coming from how we talk, how we write, we’ve had our entire lives to get used to this voice, and then that’s what’s most natural for us to use when we’re writing fiction. The thing is, you’re used to your voice, but what about anybody else? And this is where people tend to get tripped up because if you’re only writing in your head, your head is used to your own voice. And when you write something on the page and then read it back to yourself, again in your head, not by speaking, you gloss over things that tend to be clunky in the writing because you’re used to your own writing style.

Catching the Speed Bumps

It’s… One of my favorite parts of my MFA experience was the workshop part, where we would take our manuscript, pass it to the person next to us, or across the room, or whatever, and have them read it to us. It was most, most often an enlightening experience and embarrassing experience because they’re not used to our writing style, they’re not used to our voice. So when they read a piece of writing that they did not write, they’re coming to it for the first time and they start to struggle. You know, this sentence is really clunky, they trip over it because they’re not expecting the words to be in a certain order. When we’re reading that sentence in our heads during the revision process, we probably gloss right over it because we’ve read that sentence before, we know our own writing style, it just sort of we don’t notice where the bumps are. But if you have a writer reading it back to you, you’ll start to see that’s a speed bump, that’s a little hiccup, they tripped over that sentence, you’ll really start to sort of hear it in a way that you haven’t heard it before. And having somebody read your work is the ideal application of this advice, but not everybody has a person sitting there ready and waiting to read your manuscript to you. And if it’s a novel, nobody’s gonna read 80,000 words of your stuff without a whole heck of a lot of a bribery.

Read Your Work to Yourself

So the most common and useful application of this advice is to actually read your own work to yourself. This is more approachable, this is what most writers can actually do. And it’s different from reading something to yourself silently because it forces you to pay more careful attention to the page. It is my number one piece of voice advice, it’s my number one piece of read aloud potential advice, and if you’re writing picture books, early readers, and chapter books especially, you have no excuse, those manuscripts are short at the end of the day. So if you’re just sitting there and revising, open your mouth. Open your mouth and say the words, it’ll help you focus on the page in a different way, it’ll help you see what’s on the page in a different way, and you’ll be able to actually experience what it’s like to read that work aloud because a lot of these younger manuscripts are meant to be read aloud by parent to child. And it’ll really help you kind of see what you’re doing in a different way. And as you’re doing it, I wouldn’t even try to edit, like, right there on the page. I would actually have a pen in my hand, have the physical manuscript, have your voice ready to go, start reading, and then every time you stumble, every time you have to start over, every time something comes out in a way that maybe you didn’t intend, and without realizing, you’ve sort of put something clunky on the page, just mark it. Just mark it, circle it, put a check mark next to it, do whatever you have to do, come back to it later. And then as you’re trying to fix it, speak. You know, storytelling is a verbal art form. We started out storytelling around the campfire with our voices and our bodies, it’s a physical thing. And when we tend to, you know, just sit on the screen typing, we get disconnected from that very physical, very vocal art of storytelling.

Revise Aloud

So I’m sort of inviting you to bring that practice back into your writing life. Ideally, you would be doing this from the very beginning of writing your manuscript, but a lot of us have manuscripts already where we didn’t do it, so the next best thing is to revise aloud. And then when you’re coming across a section that you marked as clunky, when you edit that, speak several options aloud, see which one flows the best. Especially for these… My dogs are killing me, they are just snoring right there. Sorry about that. So especially for these younger readers, the shorter the manuscript, the more you want to speak what you’ve written, the more you want to revise with that in mind because those words really will be spoken. They’re not just gonna lie on the page like they do in a novel. So the best way to know if you have a voice with read aloud potential, is to read aloud the voice. Tom, I hope this helps. Thank you for your excellent question and I look forward to answering more. Thanks for watching.

Struggling with picture book voice? Let me help as your picture book editor. An experienced set of eyes on your work will put rocket boosters on your progress.