Reading The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society made me want to write a novel made up of correspondence between characters. However, although it appears deceptively simple, the letter-writing format (like the diary format) can be difficult to execute well. I remember reading The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis way back in my youth and thinking I'd like to use that format for something. I ended up placing letters from a character periodically throughout a novel I was working on, but never actually finished that book.
Authors can have many different reasons for choosing the format their book takes. With my children's picture books, one key choice I have to make is whether to write the text in rhyme, blank-verse poetry, or prose. My first picture book, One Wolf Howls, basically wrote itself in rhyme. It flowed very naturally from the beginning.
My second picture book -- Big Cat, Little Kitty (Sylvan Dell Publishing, spring 2011) -- started out as blank-verse poetry. Editor Donna German liked it, but said she thought it might work better written in prose. I was willing to give that a try and quickly found out that she was right. The prose version evolved from the blank-verse stanzas I had written, and both Donna and I were very pleased with the result.
I am now working on a third picture book, and it *feels* like it needs to be in prose.
So -- fellow writers -- how and when do you decide what form your book will take? Have you tried writing a fictional diary or series of letters between characters? What other forms have you tried? Stream of consciousness perhaps?
What comes most naturally for you?
