Hannah Barnaby: Jumping into Picture Books

It’s a small world, and if you’re in kidlit, it’s even smaller.  This is a good thing, especially in Virginia, because it means that you get to bump into Hannah Barnaby on a pretty regular basis. I first met Hannah at one of the world’s best author events, YAVA, formerly known as Teen 13 (and then Teen 14 and Teen 15). I met her again a few months later at a Highlights retreat, where she graciously sang to cover up my rudimentary guitar playing.

Anyway, I’ve mostly known Hannah as a YA author, but this spring, she’s coming out with two (2!) picture books, which means I get to subject her to my usual questions about genre jumping.

Hannah: A short story in Tenth Muse, my high school literary magazine. It was about a girl’s experience during orientation in heaven, and it was truly terrible. (But given the recent success of “The Good Place,” maybe I was ahead of my time?)

Hannah: Technically, the first book I was paid to write was Curious George and the Firefighters, when I was an editor at Houghton Mifflin. But the first book with my name on it was Wonder Show, an historical novel about a traveling sideshow.

ed. note: Wonder Show was also a nominee for the William C. Morris award.

Hannah: I’ve got two picture books coming out this year: Bad Guy and Garcia & Colette Go Exploring. And another one, There’s Something About Sam, slated for 2019! I’ve also got an early chapter book on submission. Once I opened up to thinking about writing stories in non-novel forms, once those boundaries were loosened up in my mind, it became more and more fun to experiment.

I always have multiple projects going — it’s the best way to avoid getting stuck or spinning my wheels on one particular story. But I find it difficult to work on more than one novel at a time, because of the large scale of the story and all the different characters and details involved. Picture books and chapter books are a great way to shift my focus for a little while, and because I’m a slow writer when it comes to novels, those shorter forms give me a sense of accomplishment when I actually finish something!

Almost every story I’ve ever written has been launched with a “what if” question. What if a regular girl found herself living among a cast of sideshow performers? What if a little boy who loved to play the villain with his little sister unwittingly taught her some of his tricks? So I think that sense of curiosity is what drives most of the stories I write.

I learned so much about story structure from working on picture books, and I’ve found it really helpful to apply that on a larger scale to my novels. I’m not a natural plotter, so any practice I can get is a good thing! 

Because I had worked on picture books as an editor, I thought I was prepared for the experience of seeing someone else interpret my words in their illustrations. I knew there would be changes, and that I had to be flexible. But the absolute thrill of seeing the finished artwork by Mike Yamada for Bad Guy and Andrew Joyner for Garcia & Colette actually caught me off guard! (It’s kind of addictive. And it’ll definitely keep me writing picture books.)

I’ve been working on a middle grade for what feels like forever! And with two kids in elementary school, I’ve been reading a lot of graphic novels lately, which are super fun. Young adult is my first love, but I’m definitely drawn to books for younger readers these days.