I'M OFF
““I’M OFF,” Nina squealed as she ran in the kitchen,
Past Daddy who was halfway through putting a dish in
The sink, which was full of suds, bubbles, and more.
Nina ran past so fast the suds slid to the floor.
Before Daddy could catch her, she’d reached the next door.”
“I’M OFF” is a game that I used to play with my Dad. Essentially the rules were that I yelled “I’m off!” at him and then would have to run to the willow tree at the bottom of our garden. If he caught me before I got there, he was allowed to tickle me. I never made it to the willow tree!
However, that doesn’t make for a great story so I’ve changed the rules. All that needs to happen is for a family member to catch our hero, Nina, before she leaves the room.
I’m going to do something different for this story and detail more about how I put it together.
Work in progress word document
I knew it was going to be a picture book which are typically 32 pages long (it’s cheaper to print if they’re exactly 32 pages). They need extra pages for the front and back so 26 to 28 pages of content is fine (according to various YouTube videos and blogs I’ve read from published Children’s authors).
First I listed each 2 page spread and detailed what would happen on those pages. The structure of the poem is that Nina runs into a room, someone is in there, and she then runs out. Therefore I wrote which room it was and who was in there.
I then started to write each section one at a time. Sometimes I would have an idea for a later section so I would quickly add it further down the document. If I struggled to finish a line, I would write out the remaining rhythm of the line and highlight it in green. A bit like if you are singing a song and forget the words.
Every time I completed a verse, or if I got stuck, I would read the verse out loud to check that the flow was as expected.
Next I used https://www.rhymezone.com/ for the areas that I noted in green where I was struggling to come up with a rhyming word. This is probably cheating but it worked for me!
Finally, I did a full read through out loud to check that the poem worked together.
You may notice that the picture has the hero called Mia and now she is Nina. That’s because, as I was writing, I realised Mia was very like my friend. She is not called Nina now but decided that she was called Nina when she was little until she went to big school (this fact alone might explain why I thought of her while writing). Quite useful really as her real name has three syllables so would never have worked!
