How Do You Know?

“How do you know,” a reader asked, “when a picture book is right?” She was writing in response to my blog about my most recent failed attempt to write a Christmas picture book.

In the blog I said that after two rather intense weeks of work, I had a picture book text that I loved, but even as I finished it I knew it didn’t work. This reader came back to ask, reasonably enough, how a person knows when a picture book does work.

And the truth is, if I could answer that question definitively I would...