Craft a driving conflict for the main character to overcome, thinking about separate events that will convey the struggle to the reader.
Group the story's events into beginning, middle and end sections.
Outline three major events or incidents in your story. Often in picture books, the first and third suggest a polarity in event sequence or theme. For example, the butterfly can begin the story making a foolish decision and end the story making a wise one, or the mother rooster`s journey might begin at dawn and conclude at dusk.
Frame the incidents with an introduction and conclusion. Use the introduction to establish some sense of time and place and introduce your leading character. Have the conclusion give a sense of closure while returning characters to a setting similar to the initial one.
Begin a draft of the story, moving around individual events for a better flow as needed.
Use short sentences in the draft with a focus on using rhythmic language. Aaron Shepard of WritingPictureBooks explains two rules for keeping language rhythmic by paying special attention to each syllable that is "stressed." Shepard encourages writers to reduce both the number of stressed syllables in the words used and the distance between stressed syllables in the overall sentence structure.
Construct sentences that end with the greatest stress and begin with words of the second-greatest stress. Both of these should be phrases that need to be emphasized naturally in the story.
Review the arrangement of words in a sentence, keeping in mind the rules of rhythmic language. Try writing sentences several ways to find the simplest, most rhythmic flow.
Combine lines of dialogue with action and descriptive language when possible to reduce the number of sentences. Shepard suggests dialogue represent one-third of the overall text.
Use repetition when appropriate to engage young readers. This applies to both words and phrases and the patterns of beats in sentences and paragraphs.
Organize paragraphs so they contain as few sentences as possible. Combine similar ideas into one sentence and delete extraneous sentences. A good number of sentences in a paragraph is three.
Devise a final sentence to the book that will lyrically "wind down" the story while clearly indicating it is over. Popular examples of strong finishing sentences are "and it was just right" or the classic "They lived happily ever after."
Revise to ensure the structure clearly reflects separate events, that you have been succinct with your word choice, and that the story has a finality such as, "And then we read the book all over again."