Writing Should Be a Visual Art
Picture books aren’t just for children.
The first books I read in my childhood contained images: five kids talking to a large policeman (Enid Blyton); a child looking in horror at a man who has escaped from prison, in the light of a fire (an abridged Charles Dickens); a tiger and a snake (Rudyard Kipling). Those dark pictures held so much drama; they lingered in my mind even after the pages had been turned. But I rarely find pictures in the stories that I read now as an adult. Why is this so?
Drawings and photographs run the risk of making everything literal. In books for children, they mostly are mere illustrations, directly representing the
