Hi, folks! I find that I keep waffling back and forth about whether or not to post this, mostly because I suspect these are incredibly basic questions that I'm somewhat embarrassed to have to ask. That being said, though, I really want to feel like a part of this amazing community and I feel like if I don't just jump in with the embarrassing questions, five years from now I'll have one of those "Long time lurking, first time posting" kind of posts, and I'll have muddled my way through without ever actually having my specific questions answered.
And so, here we go.
I have a picture book manuscript that I wrote some time ago before I knew anything about anything. Because of that, I now know that the formatting is COMPLETELY AND TOTALLY WRONG!!! Like, couldn't be more not right, I suspect. I know revising is going to be quite a process (Is it ever not?) and I'm totally up for that... but I want to make sure I'm revising in the right direction.
One of the things I really like about this story is that the text and the visuals really complete each other in a lot of ways, working together to tell the story in a way that neither on its own would quite accomplish. I want to maintain that quality, but I'm not sure how to achieve this without just describing too much of the illustrations. When I first wrote it (again, had NO idea what I was doing), a wonderful artist friend of mine was going to illustrate, and so I felt comfortable detailing the images and having a dialogue with him which allowed both of our creative expressions to be their strongest. I now know that this is not the accepted way of things.
So, that's sort of the general thing that I'm concerned about. How do I draft a manuscript that makes clear that the visuals will complete the story where the words fall short? Most recently, I've seen something similar to what I'm talking about in Ame Dyckman's picture book, "Dandy." There's a moment in that book where the only text on a page is "But he was too late," but the image supplies the punchline which is that a Daddy lion is ready to cut down a dandelion in his yard but is thwarted when his young daughter has become fond of the dandelion. But again, the text itself doesn't reflect any of this. Further in this same book, the lions' neighbors act as something of a Greek chorus, speaking in word bubbles.
Both of these types of scenarios are in my story, and I just don't know how to tackle them. For the parts where the images provide context, I'm vaguely aware that I can include suggested Illustrator Notes, but I'm not sure how to do that effectively, and I also wonder if doing that too much throughout will result in automatic rejections. For the parts where a character speaks via word bubble, since there's no attribution such as "... he said" in the text, would I just write that part more like a script? Like, there's a part in my story where the text says something like, "A dragonfly flew by, not doing anything important," and the dragonfly actually responds to the narration, insisting, "Hey! I'm doing important things!" Would this be something like this:
A dragonfly flew by, not doing anything important.
DRAGONFLY: Hey! I'm doing important things!
Okay, yes. So those are pretty much my incredibly long-winded questions that I apologize for needing to ask. Thank you all for taking the time to read all this rambling nonsense.