Eight Idea-Stage Mistakes That Can Derail Your Picture Book Before You Write a Word
The KidLit Creator’s Chronicle #50
Here we are on edition 50 of the KidLit Creators Chronicle! 🎉 I’ve shared over 74,000 words of writing, publishing and marketing strategies with you. Thank you for reading them and all the lovely responses I get each week!
Today we’ll look at idea mistakes. Sometimes, when I do feedback, I can see the author has worked really hard on trying to make the plot work or the character interesting or to use lyrical or fun language (or all of the above). But the manuscript still doesn’t work, because the idea itself isn’t strong enough to support a book.
One specific example that comes to mind is an author who had the character go on a trip. But the whole idea was just that the character goes on a trip to a specific town. In the end, it just read as a series of events, because there wasn’t enough to the idea to make an interesting story hang together.
I’ve also seen a few manuscripts where the story was fully focused on a lesson, and the character really existed only to deliver that lesson.
These are just a couple of examples out of many.
That’s exactly why I want to talk about idea-stage pitfalls today. Because the mistakes you make at this stage are the most important ones to catch.
A flawed premise in a 500-word manuscript can lead to many, many revisions, but your story still doesn’t work.
Why Getting Your Idea Right Matters So Much
A weak idea is a problem in any format, but in a picture book it’s immediately exposed. There’s nothing to hide behind. Your entire story is 500 words and 32 pages, which means the idea has to do a lot of the work. If it isn’t working, everyone can feel it.
Also, picture book authors tend to fall in love with their manuscript very quickly, precisely because it’s short. You can hold the whole thing in your head. Sometimes, within minutes or hours, it can feel “done”. That makes it psychologically much harder to go back and address a foundational problem with the idea itself, because it really feels like you’re taking a step backwards, even though maybe you haven’t even written the first draft. The authors I often see struggle most are the ones who felt their story was finished before the idea was truly ready.
Catching these pitfalls early, before you’ve written a single page, makes everything much easier. Let’s look at the most common ones.
Eight Pitfalls to Watch Out For
1. Letting the lesson overshadow the story
A picture book can absolutely have a moral or a life lesson. Many great ones do. But the moment the lesson starts driving the story rather than emerging naturally from it, the book becomes preachy, and children switch off.
The story must always come first.
Kids learn far more from a great story than from a book that lectures them. If your character exists purely to deliver a moral rather than to live through a real, relatable experience, rethink your idea.
2. Writing for adults, not for children
This one is more common than you might think, and it’s easy to do without realising it. The story reflects what the adult wants to say, what the adult finds touching or important, rather than what a child will find relatable or funny.
Ask yourself honestly, “Is this story for the child, or is it for the adult reading it?” A child needs to see their world, their fears, their sense of humour, and their experience in your book. If the idea resonates more with grown-ups than with kids, rework the idea before you even write the manuscript.
3. An idea that’s too broad or too vague
“A story about kindness” or “a book about being different” are themes, not stories. A picture book needs a specific character with a specific problem in a specific situation. The broader the idea, the harder it is to write a story with real structure and a workable arc.
Narrow it down.
- Who is this character?
- What exactly happens to them?
- What do they want, and what’s standing in their way?
The more specific your idea, the stronger your story will be.
4. A problem that isn’t really a problem
Picture books come in different plot types, and not all of them need a character solving a problem. But if you’re writing a story where your character faces a challenge or is supposed to overcome something, that problem needs to feel real and create genuine stakes. If it could be resolved in one sentence in the first few pages, or if there’s no real tension or obstacle, the story won’t hold a child’s attention.
Keep in mind that the problem doesn’t have to be dramatic. It just has to feel real and urgent to the character living it.
5. Choosing a topic because it seems marketable rather than because you care about it
I understand the temptation. You look at what’s selling, you spot a gap, and you think, “I’ll write about that.” And while market awareness is genuinely important (more on that in a future issue), writing about something purely because it seems commercial, without any real personal connection to the topic, almost always produces a lacklustre manuscript.
The books that resonate most deeply with children are the ones written from a place of genuine interest or care. Your Why matters here, and so does your connection to the story you’re telling. (Find out exactly how to find your Why in The KidLit Creator’s Chroncle edition #47.)
6. A story that’s already saturated in the market
There are certain topics that are so well covered in picture books that breaking through with a new entry is extremely difficult. Bedtime resistance, sharing, starting school, and new siblings are all examples of categories with hundreds of titles already on the shelves. That doesn’t mean you can never write about these topics, but if you do, you need a genuinely fresh angle, a unique character, or a distinctive voice that sets your book apart.
Before you commit to an idea, spend some time on Amazon and in your local library seeing what’s already out there. You might be surprised.
7. Not knowing your target age group from the start
Who is this book for? A story for a three-year-old and a story for an eight-year-old are fundamentally different in terms of word count, concept complexity, humour, and vocabulary.
If you haven’t clearly defined your target age group before you start developing your idea, you’re likely to end up with a manuscript that doesn’t quite fit anywhere. So choose your age group early on, so you can create your book with that in mind.
8. An adult or outside force that saves the day
Your main character needs to be the one who drives the resolution. If a parent swoops in to fix the problem, a teacher appears at just the right moment, or the solution falls out of the sky with no real connection to what the character did or learned, the story loses its emotional payoff.
It’s often called deus ex machina* (pronounced day-us ex mah-kee-nah). It means a problem is resolved by an unexpected and unlikely outside force rather than by the character’s own actions or growth.
Children read picture books to see themselves overcoming things, figuring things out, and growing. When an adult takes over, that opportunity disappears. Make sure your character earns their victory or growth.
* Fun side note: Deus ex machina literally translates to “god from the machine.” It comes from ancient Greek theatre, where a mechanical crane (the “machine”) was used to lower an actor playing a god onto the stage to resolve an otherwise unsolvable plot problem. So the god would literally descend from above and fix everything. Over time it became a literary term for any plot resolution where an unlikely or contrived outside force swoops in to save the day rather than the characters resolving things through their own actions.
Why a List of Don’ts Is Just as Valuable as a List of Dos
Knowing what not to do is just as important as knowing what to do, and I’d argue it’s sometimes even more helpful. It can actually be easier to spot a don’t than to evaluate whether you’ve nailed a do. You can look at your idea and immediately see, “Oh, this is too broad,” or “This is really a lesson, not a story.” And when you fix those things, you’re already in a much stronger position.
It reminds me of something I read in a book years ago: if you ask people what they want for dinner, they struggle to answer. But ask them what they don’t want, and the answers come quickly and easily. For some reason, we are just wired that way. The same applies here. Running your idea through a list of don’ts can be a faster and clearer way of evaluating than trying to match it against a list of dos.
I’ve seen authors spend months writing and revising a manuscript only to realise the core idea had a fundamental flaw that no amount of revising could fix. Catching it at the idea stage before a single word is written is a much easier experience.
Real-life Examples
I’ll give you a few quick examples of how these pitfalls show up in practice.
Pitfall #8 (an adult saves the day): One author wrote a story about a little tortoise trying to overcome a challenge. It started well, but there was an early red flag: the moment things got difficult, his mother stepped in with all the advice. I hoped he might take that guidance and run with it himself, but by the end, the mother had stepped back in and essentially solved everything for him. The tortoise hadn’t really done anything.
If the character isn’t the one who drives the story and works out a resolution, the reader has no one to cheer on and nothing to celebrate at the end.
This one was a bit of pitfall #2 as well, as a lot of it was more about adults and how they see things, rather than a child’s world.
Pitfall #3 (too vague): Another author had an idea she described as “a story about being kind to everyone.” When I asked her what actually happens in the story, she wasn’t sure yet. The idea was too broad to write from. I got her to narrow down her idea to a specific character, specific acts, and a plot line, and from there she had a wonderful story.
All of these are salvageable, but catching them early on, before you spend time on the manuscript, is ideal.
Take your current idea, or the one you’re considering, and run it through these eight pitfalls honestly. You don’t need to have all the answers yet, but noticing where your idea might need work is the first step to strengthening it.
Comment and tell me one specific pitfall that resonated with you, either because you recognised it in your own idea, or because it surprised you. I read every reply and I’d love to know what came up for you.
And if anything in this issue raised a question, let me know!
The best picture book idea doesn’t have to be the most original or the most marketable. It needs to be clear, child-centred, and built on something you genuinely want to write about.
Now that you know what to watch out for! This means you’re already ahead of most aspiring authors who sit down to write without ever asking these questions.
