Coaching KidLit Episode 37: Poetry in Picture Books with Guest Dianne White

Sharon interviews Dianne White, an esteemed picture book author known for works such as “Blue on Blue” and “Who Eats Orange.” They delve into Dianne’s background, discussing her journey from being an elementary school teacher to becoming a celebrated author and talk about Dianne’s use of poetry in picture books.

Dianne shares insights on how her teaching career and love for languages have influenced her storytelling. The conversation also highlights the time-intensive nature of creating picture good books and the value of persistence.

Find Dianne online at diannewrites.com

Key Topics Covered:

Importance of rhyme and poetic language in picture books.
The balance between text and illustrations.
The role of critique partners and community in the writing process.
Revision processes and timelines for publication.
Reading and analyzing mentor texts.
Immersion in relevant picture books to enhance language and pacing.

Books and Resources Mentioned:

Blue on Blue by Dianne White, Illustrated by Beth Krommes
Who Eats Orange by Dianne White, Illustrated by Robin Page
Green on Green by Dianne White, Illustrated by Feilcita Sala
Winter Lullaby by Dianne White, Illustrated by Ramona Kaulitzki
Finding Grateful by Dianne White, Illustrated by
Rocket Shoes by Sharon Skinner, Illustrated by Ward Jenkins
Anyone Can Dance by Sharon Skinner, Illustrated by
Writing Picture Books by Ann Whitford Paul

Listen:

Transcript:

[00:00:00] Sharon Skinner: Welcome to Coaching KidLit, a podcast about writing and publishing good KidLit.

[00:00:07] Christy Yaros: We dig into various aspects of writing craft through a KidLit lens and provide inspiration and clear actionable items to help writers like you move forward on their KidLit writing journeys.

[00:00:19] Sharon Skinner: I’m Sharon Skinner, author accelerator, certified book coach, and author of speculative fiction and KidLit, including picture books, middle grade, and young adult.

[00:00:31] Christy Yaros: And I’m Christy Yaros, author accelerator certified book coach and story editor, focusing on KidLit, including middle grade and young adult.

[00:00:41] Sharon Skinner: Welcome, listeners to another episode of Coaching KidLit. Christie is still on hiatus. But I’m not flying solo. Today I have a special guest, Dianne White.

[00:00:51] Sharon Skinner: A fabulous picture book, author, Dianne White thinks there’s nothing better than a good book, a sun on shade day or an evening of wonder and dark on light.

[00:01:01] Sharon Skinner: She’s the author of many picture books, including the award winning Blue on Blue, illustrated by Caldecott medalist Beth Krommes Who Eats Orange, illustrated by Caldecott honoree Robin Page, and Green on Green, illustrated by Felicita Sala. Her other recent books include Winter Lullaby, Look and Listen, Dark on Light, and The Sharing Book.

[00:01:23] Sharon Skinner: A former elementary school teacher, Diane holds a master’s degree in language and literacy and an MFA in writing for children and young adults from Vermont college of fine arts.

[00:01:34] Sharon Skinner: She lives in Gilbert, Arizona. You can find Diane at diannewrites. com. That’s Diane with two Ns. Or on Twitter and Instagram at Diannewrites and with that, I want to welcome our lovely guest, Dianne White.

[00:01:50] Dianne White: Thank you so much for inviting me. I’m so excited to be here.

[00:01:53] Sharon Skinner: Diane, we’ve known each other for some time, and I would really like you to share with our audience a little bit about your journey. Can you give us some of your background, and what was it that brought you to writing children’s books?

[00:02:08] Dianne White: Well, I was a teacher for, mostly primary grades, first and third. And, , I taught kids how to read, and I also read many, many picture books over the years. And along the way, I began to wonder if I could write books for young readers like the beautiful books that I had been sharing with my students.

[00:02:30] Dianne White: I was not the kind of person who ever dreamed of becoming a writer. I never thought of myself as a writer. My sister was the writer in our family. She was the one who got notes home from school telling my parents what a wonderful writer she was. And I, though I was a good student, I did not ever dream of becoming a writer, but like I said, along the way in the classroom, I discovered the depth and breadth of the picture book genre, and I wondered if I might learn to write picture books.

[00:03:03] Dianne White: And so that began my journey. I started taking classes and joined SCBWI oh, so many years ago.

[00:03:11] Sharon Skinner: So you actually had a languages degree before you went back and got your MFA. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

[00:03:19] Dianne White: Sure. I loved studying languages. In sixth grade, we had French once a week, and that began my journey studying French in junior high and high school.

[00:03:31] Dianne White: I also studied Spanish. We moved overseas when I was in eighth grade, so I was kind of immersed in other cultures. And when I went away to college, I loved languages so much. Although I had no desire to teach foreign languages, I loved languages, and that’s what I majored in, despite, advice from my father, otherwise, but, I do think that my, interest in foreign languages, I’m still interested.

[00:04:00] Dianne White: I still study Italian right now. So I think that interest has influenced my attention to the sound of words. And the meaning perhaps also. So that’s how I got, from a degree in Spanish and French to eventually, because I didn’t want to teach high school, eventually going back to school to get a teaching credential and I was a bilingual teacher for many years.

[00:04:28] Sharon Skinner: Your books are very poetic and you use language, beautifully, and you don’t tend to do a lot of rhyme that is what we hear normally in picture books that is very sing songy. I mean, you do rhyme but a lot of it is much more poetic language.

[00:04:43] Sharon Skinner: Do you feel that your background in languages has had an influence on that?

[00:04:49] Dianne White: That’s a good question, and I’m not sure exactly where that comes from. I think it’s probably partially just due to the topics that I write about. All of my books are actually in rhyme, except for my latest book, Finding Grateful, which is free verse.

[00:05:06] Dianne White: But I was interested in poetry. I had a fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Clark, who loved poetry, and she used to stand behind our chairs and recite poems to us. And it was like, I felt, thinking about it later, this beautiful language just sort of falling into my ears. And into my heart and then as a bilingual teacher for many years, teaching, children how to read in Spanish, I was always looking for, poems and songs that parents would be familiar with.

[00:05:41] Dianne White: That were like, the English version of Mother Goose. And so that sort of got me into the poetry world of reading a lot of both poems in English and poems in Spanish. And so I think it’s sort of that combination of all those things that my love of languages foreign languages, and then.

[00:06:04] Dianne White: The experience of my fifth grade teacher and looking for poems in my students native language, all of that sort of, wove its way into my own, Writing voice, I guess I’d say.

[00:06:18] Sharon Skinner: I’m just gonna jump back to where you said you didn’t plan on teaching languages, you didn’t want to do that, but it also became part of what you were doing as an educator, was you were teaching Spanish to kids.

[00:06:29] Sharon Skinner: So, so tell me a little bit about how that sort of came to be.

[00:06:33] Dianne White: Okay, so I was teaching Children who did not speak English. And so I was teaching in Spanish, 80 percent of the day. And so it was a really nice mix of, my, college degree. 10 years later though, is when I went and taught for a year at a high school, Spanish four.

[00:06:55] Dianne White: And, did that as a long term sub and even though I had a degree, I did not have a lot of opportunity to use my Spanish, which sounds ridiculous, but that’s just kind of how it worked. We had to write papers in Spanish. We had to speak, but we didn’t have lengthy conversations.

[00:07:12] Dianne White: So, that year of teaching Spanish for really cemented my understanding of spanish language and my ability to speak it. And then for, I don’t know, maybe 10 years, I taught most of the day in Spanish. , and that transitioned in California, many years ago now. But, that was my initial experience.

[00:07:33] Dianne White: So, it’s that weird thing that , So many people start out with a degree in one thing and end up doing something maybe in some way related using some of the skills they had gained with their degree, but in a completely different field. So that certainly was true for me.

[00:07:50] Sharon Skinner: You taught for, 25 years at what point did you decide to get your MFA from Vermont?

[00:07:57] Dianne White: Well, I, I was a member of SCBWI, and I was taking classes through UCLA extension I had a critique group and at a certain point I began to feel like I’d gone as far as I could go with, critique groups and classes, and I needed something else, to jump start and get me a little bit closer,.

[00:08:22] Dianne White: That was probably, I don’t know, maybe eight years into, , taking classes, and, , it really,, was an intense course that. , just taught me probably everything I know, now, I’m a big fan of taking classes and, learning and reading all the things, to educate yourself about something you’re trying to learn, and so that experience was definitely that for me, and it’s been Gosh, almost next year will be 20 years since I started the two year program.

[00:08:57] Dianne White: So I still get together with a whole bunch of my classmates every year for a week and, some of us are still writing, some of us are not, some of us take a break and so on, but we’ve all been published since we graduated and, it’s definitely been a big community for me.

[00:09:14] Sharon Skinner: So how long after you finished your MFA, would you say, was it before you had sold your first picture book or signed your first picture book?

[00:09:24] Dianne White: Yeah, I sold my first picture book, probably, I want to say a year after I graduated. And then it took six years for it to come out. For, , all the reasons that, , we don’t always know. But, typically picture books, absolute quickest would be two years. And I’ve only had maybe one.

[00:09:44] Dianne White: I think one picture book that came out in two years. All the rest have been anywhere between three to six years from sale to publication.

[00:09:54] Sharon Skinner: I think it’s important for our listeners to understand that.

[00:09:57] Sharon Skinner: If I write a picture book, how long can it take? But, I think that a lot of, especially new writers, don’t understand that there’s a process of. acquisitions and then editing and all of those things before it even gets to the point where there’s an illustrator chosen and then hired and then the illustration process takes a long time.

[00:10:16] Dianne White: Many of my manuscripts, almost all of them there isn’t very much revision if anything. However, , depending on the schedule of the, publisher,, that’s part of it, the schedule of the illustrator, how long it takes them to find an illustrator.

[00:10:31] Dianne White: The process of writing before something is acquired could take, , months and months and months, on my end, but, I haven’t had too many. I can think of one,, maybe two manuscripts that really actually had a lot of revision with an editor. No, take it back, three. Okay. But, but mostly, yeah, I’ve been very lucky.

[00:10:52] Dianne White: I have great critique partners and, I would not know what to do without them.

[00:10:58] Sharon Skinner: That’s a really good point is that picture books are hard. People don’t understand how difficult I think a lot of times that picture books are to write because you are trying to tell a complete story in some way, shape, or form, but you have approximately 500 words to do it in.

[00:11:14] Dianne White: That’s so true. Yeah, it is like writing a poem. Every word counts. And you also need to think about leaving space for the illustrator. It’s not much fun for the illustrator or it’s less fun maybe for them to just illustrate what your words say. They want to have room to add to your words so that there’s this marriage of both illustrations and words, and that’s not necessarily, depending on the kind of book, always the case, but I’ve been very fortunate to have some beautiful, like, all amazing illustrators, and they’ve brought so much, a whole nother layer of story to my words.

[00:11:58] Sharon Skinner: That’s been my experience as well.

[00:12:00] Sharon Skinner: With Rocket Shoes when it came out and also with Anyone Can Dance, both of my picture books that are out, the illustrations are incredible and visual artists have a special way of looking at the world. And I think when you first start out, there’s a level of trust that you just have to have, or the ability to just let go.

[00:12:19] Sharon Skinner: Let go your ego, if you will, in order to allow that space for the illustrator. And so many wonderful things can come out of it . My picture books are much more beautiful and I like them so much more with the illustrations than even what I visualized.

[00:12:35] Dianne White: And that’s, I think part of the fun of picture books is that illustrators bring other things for kids to look at in the pictures that maybe aren’t in the words.

[00:12:44] Sharon Skinner: I think Green on Green is a special case too for that because there’s some beautiful stuff going on in the background with the illustrations in Green on Green that aren’t in the words, but that really enhance the story and serve the story in an intentional way that matches what you were doing.

[00:13:03] Dianne White: Yes, and, all of that, the words, the story is just poetry about the four seasons.

[00:13:10] Dianne White: But, the illustrator added a whole layer, a second layer of a story of the characters, who are not mentioned in the text but are, presumed to be there., it’s a family and, the mom is pregnant so by the end of the story you get to see the, life cycle. The interesting thing about The illustrations is, I learned from the illustrator, that she did a whole sketch dummy of, multiple generations of a family, and, the editor suggested that was kind of complicated, and so they pared it back, so the first sketches I saw We’re of the single family going through a year.

[00:13:55] Dianne White: So that as a great example of how, the text is one piece and then the editor, art director, and illustrator have a whole different. thing that they’re working on. And, I was not aware of that and probably never would have been had I not, , met Felicita and had that conversation.

[00:14:15] Sharon Skinner: So bouncing off of that idea of allowing space for the illustrations and the words to work together and that combination and how there’s that extra layering. I want to get into a little bit of how you extra layer your books with concepts and story.

[00:14:34] Sharon Skinner: When I first read Blue on Blue many years ago, it was Blue on Blue, and we went through blue through the various color scheme. So that’s a concept. But you also are telling the story of weather. And you showing us a storm, the blue skies and then the storm and then the blue skies again, so we have the white clouds against the blue and then they turn gray.

[00:14:53] Sharon Skinner: And so we’re getting both a story of weather, and it’s a true story with an arc, which I think is fabulous because it’s a story about setting and weather with a story arc, but it’s also a concept book for color. So you’ve got concept of color, concept of weather, and then you’ve got story arc.

[00:15:13] Sharon Skinner: Tell me a little bit about how you approach your writing so that you are getting all these things because that’s not the only book where you do that.

[00:15:22] Dianne White: Yeah. That was a book I wrote while I was still teaching and, I was teaching in Southern California. Yeah. We don’t get that much rain, but it was raining one day, and so with my students, we took out some picture books about the rain.

[00:15:39] Dianne White: I read a number of them to the kids. We collected rain words. I wrote them on the board for them. Splish splash, Drip Drop, Mud, Umbrella, whatever they, gleaned from, , the books I shared with them, and then they wrote poems, about the rain, and I was actually taking, after I had graduated from Vermont College, , semester that was specifically in picture books.

[00:16:06] Dianne White: It was a new program that they had just started. , so I went back and did one more semester, and I had an assignment due to turn in a manuscript to my group, my classmates. , and so I came home that weekend, after my students had written poems about the rain, and Some picture books in front of me.

[00:16:27] Dianne White: I just made lists of rain words, kind of like the exact lesson I did with my students. And then I just got the first line, Cotton Clouds, Morning, Light, Blue on Blue,. I hope that’s right. And that sort of got me going. , and so it was a poem basic about the coming and going of a storm.

[00:16:48] Dianne White: , it doesn’t mention characters. It doesn’t mention setting, , at all. And I didn’t have any notes about that. The story came pretty easily. And I don’t think it changed much. , the editor took out like one stanza, two stanzas maybe. And, I changed, I think, one word. However, if only that happened every time.

[00:17:12] Dianne White: You know, that’s a, a one time thing. So, if only we could make that reoccur, we would all be so happy. But, I did think, coming and going, There’s a little bit of tension there. But the story, the farm setting, Beth Krommes, , made a list of words for herself.

[00:17:30] Dianne White: You know, it says cotton cloud. So, she made a list of things that are cotton. So, you’ll notice in the illustrations, there are cotton diapers hanging on the wash line. And, she asked herself, who cares about the weather? Farmers. Sailors and so on. So you’ll see, a sailboat in the opening illustrations.

[00:17:53] Dianne White: She brought in some favorite kind of homages to a couple of her favorite paintings. In the artwork. And it’s just fascinating, I think, to discover these things about how an illustrator then is able to bring themselves into the work. And that might be the only one of my picture books that actually has a little bit of rising action with the coming and going of the storm. But I still think of all of my books as concept books in the sense that they’re about one thing, like that’s about rain, or the seasons, or, transitions, goodbye brings hello, or foods that animals eat, that kind of thing. So that seems to be where I do better work.

[00:18:45] Sharon Skinner: But that brings me to what was going to be my next question. Anyway, Who Eats Orange is not just a story about what animals eat, but it’s also a concept book about colors. So it’s colors and foods and animals. So again, you’re layering concepts in there. Would you say that it’s due to your teaching background that you tend to go there ?

[00:19:05] Dianne White: You know, I I’m not sure. The idea for that book was. I was on a field trip, when I moved to Arizona 12 years ago, I subbed for a couple of years, and so I was with kindergartners going to the pumpkin patch, and we sat down for lunch, a little boy reached into his lunch bag and pulled out an orange and said, “who eats orange?”

[00:19:26] Dianne White: And as soon as I heard it, I’m like, that is a title of a book. It’ll be food, it’ll be colors, it’ll be animals. And that’s all I knew, , for a couple of years. , I wrote down the title. I wrote down those three things that I thought it would be about, and then I tried off and on to poke at that idea, figure out what the structure would be,, and then, I often look for mentor texts to help me think about, what structure will my concept book take, or what voice, or what are my opening lines?

[00:20:04] Dianne White: And so there was an old picture book,, I think it’s called Who Hops by Katie Davis and I remembered that, two years after the idea, and I thought, oh, I could use a question and answer kind of format, and that, evolved I thought, oh, wouldn’t it be great to have animals in different habitats around the world?

[00:20:26] Dianne White: And, I had to do research and do back matter So all of that grew out of, a child’s, unusual question, who eats orange, and that led to the story, but it was a long process to get there. But yeah, definitely my teaching years come in to, some of the books.

[00:20:44] Sharon Skinner: Based on the fact that it took you two years to write that book. It took me two years to write Rocket Shoes, before it was ready to pitch . And it’s only 504 words. Picture books are hard. Picture books are not the easiest thing to do. So do you have an approximation of how long it typically takes you to write, on average, a book?

[00:21:04] Sharon Skinner: I know Blue on Blue kind of came out of an exercise that you were doing, but Who Eats Orange was inspired by a question that someone asked, and it took two years. First of all, approximately how long do you feel it takes you now on average to write a picture book that you feel is ready to pitch and my second question is how many picture books are you writing versus how many are pitchable and getting published.

[00:21:27] Dianne White: You know, for Who Eats Orange, it was two years of not really writing and just I had the idea I might spend, oh, 20 minutes trying to poke at it every six months or something and trying to see. And then once I sat down to write it, It was probably a couple of months like, I have to know where I’m going with the story.

[00:21:51] Dianne White: I might have the, Oh, this is a great title. And I think this is an idea that will sell. , but I’ve got to do the research and. So it varies really anywhere from, a couple of months to six months, I sometimes drag on for longer,, I don’t think it gets any easier, and I think every story is its own thing.

[00:22:14] Dianne White: So I don’t really have a average. Even though I know a lot more about writing picture books now than I did, , 10 years ago when Blue on Blue came out. I don’t think it gets any easier. If anything, maybe it gets harder. Maybe you try too hard, and it doesn’t come as easily. I think some stories, That have come to me more easily feel like I had a lighter touch to it. Maybe I wasn’t, , pushing myself so hard or something. I was more relaxed about it. I guess we try to figure out what’s the best way to write a story that’s actually going to work. Over the last couple of years, I’ve written a bunch of stories.

[00:22:52] Dianne White: I think they’re okay, but none of them have gone anywhere. So, that’s discouraging, but I love picture books, so I keep going with new ideas. And, , it’s a kind of a interesting business. You have to know why you love it, and you have to be willing to just Trust yourself and stick with it through the ups and downs and revisions and scrapping something and putting it away for a while and coming back to it, perhaps.

[00:23:20] Dianne White: I have one more example I can share. Winter Lullaby was a book that I wrote. Oh gosh, while I was at Vermont College, so, sometime, probably around 2006,, and then it didn’t go anywhere and it went out in 2012, I think, after I got an agent and then,, I came back to it like in 2017 or 18, something like that.

[00:23:47] Dianne White: And, , at that point my agent had Had children. She had some ideas about how to revise the ending. And then that one sold probably easily more than 10 years after I wrote it. So, you just never know. A story that’s sitting somewhere might just need a little, and it’s basically the same story.

[00:24:11] Dianne White: There’s not that that’s different, but it was just enough and then the editor had some great ideas to sharpen up the ending a little bit more. , so you just never know, what’s in a drawer that might sell at some point down the road.

So your most recent book is finding grateful. Correct?

[00:24:30] Dianne White: That’s right.

[00:24:30] Sharon Skinner: And it was read recently at the Mesa book festival by one of our council members, which is very exciting..

[00:24:36] Dianne White: Yeah.

[00:24:37] Sharon Skinner: So that’s what’s come out. But again, we know it’s a long tail for picture books. Do you have anything in the works? And I don’t expect you to spill the beans, but do you have a picture book or two that is pending ?

[00:24:50] Dianne White: I’m

[00:24:51] Dianne White: Working on a revision right now that I will be sending back to an editor soon, and hopefully that will be a sale. It’s for a companion to a board book that I wrote that came out earlier this year. So we’ll see. It’s not a done deal, but fingers crossed. So. Yeah, and I’m working on other stories and, , hopefully have more to tell down the road.

[00:25:17] Sharon Skinner: So, you teach as well as you write, so do you want to talk a little bit about your teaching?

[00:25:23] Dianne White: Sure. I teach picture book writing through UCLA Extension. I teach picture book one and two. I’ve been doing that for several years now, starting my third year in January.

[00:25:37] Dianne White: And I love it as a wonderful extension of, the writing that I do. I love talking about picture books for one. I love reading the work of other writers. I love the way it helps me think about my own writing. And it’s a full circle moment for me because I took many, many classes through UCLA Extension when I was just starting out. So I love that I’m able to now teach, through the same program that I got my start. and, I like writing, I like teaching, and I like school visits.

[00:26:16] Dianne White: Those are the three prongs of my writing life, and the parts that I want to continue to do.

[00:26:22] Sharon Skinner: So if someone wanted to take a course from you at, UCLA extension, where would they go?

[00:26:27] Dianne White: UCLA extension.org just Google, UCLA extension, writer’s program.

[00:26:35] Dianne White: It is wonderful. And, we also have another local writer, Kim Tomsic, who also teaches through the UCLA extension. And they have other, picture book writers as well teaching. And check out my website, I always mention, when I have a class coming up. So I’ll be teaching picture book two in January and picture book one in the spring quarter.

[00:26:56] Sharon Skinner: So one of the things that we like to do here at Coaching Kid Lit podcast is to give our listeners an action item so that they can further their craft. , so Diane, do you have , an action item for our listeners, something that they can do to help them do better, learn more, practice their craft in picture book?

[00:27:17] Sharon Skinner: Do you have an action item for our listeners today?

[00:27:19] Dianne White: Yes, I do.

[00:27:20] Dianne White: I learned this tip from Ann Whitford Paul, who wrote the book, that all picture book writers, need to, have in their possession, called, Writing Picture Books, by Ann Whitford Paul. She used to ask her students to type up stories, picture books that they’ve read, and she said it helps,, us get the language and the pacing and just the feel in our bones, and so that’s something I continue to do, if I have a picture book that I loved reading, if I have a picture book I enjoyed, but I’m like, how did that all come together, sometimes it’s hard to parse Illustrations from the words, I just type them up and make little notes to myself about it.

[00:28:12] Dianne White: It’s a nice way to get that pacing and rhythm into your body, if you will, while you’re typing. I also think just listening, I like to listen to audio books, not picture books, but adult audio books. , and I think just listening also helps you start to notice the language, because the language is so important in picture books.

[00:28:36] Dianne White: It doesn’t have to rhyme, but There’s so many levels to the sound of words and how they make you feel. And so finding that right word comes from paying more attention to the actual individual words. So I hope that helps.

[00:28:52] Sharon Skinner: I think that’s a great action item.

[00:28:54] Sharon Skinner: I’m going to steal something from what you said earlier in the discussion for the action item today, because I’m all about mentor texts, and I’m all about looking at what’s already out there, and so I love that you’re telling us that we should go visit those specifically, but what I loved about your example earlier, when you were talking about how you wrote Blue on Blue, was the fact that you took many picture books on that topic, and you went through them, and you pulled out the language of those specific picture books, to feed your brain.

[00:29:27] Sharon Skinner: As you were developing your story, and I’m a firm believer that if we don’t feed the hopper, we don’t have anything organically that will come from us. And I call the brain the hopper when I’m talking about this, I believe that if we feed that hopper, if we put all that language and that information in there, especially when we’re focused on a specific task, that it will then organically come out in our voice, in our language, And I think that that is really helpful.

[00:29:54] Sharon Skinner: So I want our listeners to think about picture book that you’re trying to write, the story that you’re trying to write, go out and get as many picture books that you can that are on that topic and read them, lay them out and soak them up and use that.

[00:30:11] Dianne White: That’s a great suggestion. That’s exactly what I do.

[00:30:14] Dianne White: If I do have an idea, not just for the language, but also just to know what’s out there, to know what your competition is, to know that, if you’re going to pursue this particular idea, your idea has to be different from what’s been, published in the last, say, 10 years or more, so, , it has a good chance of selling.

[00:30:34] Sharon Skinner: Absolutely. Diane, it has been fabulous having you here. I always enjoy our talks and our times together. And I think our listeners are really going to appreciate this episode. I would like you to say for us where we can best find you again.

[00:30:50] Dianne White: Well, thank you so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure to chat about picture books, one of my favorite things. And my website is diannewrites, d i a n n e w r i t e s. com. And, everything is there. All my books and contact information and helpful tips for picture book writers and more.

[00:31:13] Sharon Skinner: Thank you listeners. I hope that you got a great deal out of our episode today. I know I did.

[00:31:20] Sharon Skinner: Bye for now.

[00:31:21] Christy Yaros: We hope you enjoyed this episode of Coaching KidLit, a writing and book coaching podcast for writers who want to level up their KidLit writing game.

[00:31:28] Sharon Skinner: For more about us and to discover what a book coach can do for you, check out coachingkidlit. com and follow us on social media.

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For more information about Sharon Skinner, visit bookcoachingbysharon.com or follow her on Instagram @sharon_skinner_author_bookcoach and Twitter @SharonSkinner56.

For more information about Christy Yaros, visit christyyaros.com or follow her on Instagram and Twitter @ChristyYaros.

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Want to know more about working with a Book Coach on your KidLit book? Check out my KidLit Coaching Page or fill out my inquiry form to schedule a FREE Consult call and let’s get started!