---
name: childrens-story
description: |
  Writes children's stories for specific age groups (picture book, early reader, middle grade) with age-appropriate language, clear narrative structure, and themes that respect young readers' intelligence.
  Use when the user asks to write a children's story, kids' book, bedtime story, picture book text, or story for young readers.
  Do NOT use for young adult fiction (use short-story-writing with YA parameters), educational content for children (use lesson-plan-design), or adult fiction with childlike themes (use short-story-writing).
license: Apache-2.0
metadata:
  author: foundry-skills
  version: "1.0.0"
  tags: "creative-writing writing beginner-friendly"
  category: "writing"
  subcategory: "creative-writing"
  depends: ""
  disclaimer: "none"
  difficulty: "beginner"
---
# Children's Story

## When to Use

**Use this skill when:**
- The user asks to write a children's story, kids' book, bedtime story, or picture book text for any age from infant through roughly age 12
- The user wants to create a read-aloud story for a specific occasion -- bedtime, classroom, family gathering, or a birthday gift
- The user wants to write a personalized story featuring a specific child's name, interests, or real-life situation
- The user needs a story that handles a difficult childhood topic -- first day of school, a new sibling, grief, moving homes, a parent's illness -- with age-appropriate honesty
- The user is writing for a specific format within children's literature: board book, picture book dummy, early reader chapter, or a middle grade opening chapter
- The user wants a rhyming picture book and needs help ensuring the meter and rhyme are publication-quality, not greeting-card quality
- The user wants a story with an embedded learning goal -- counting, letters, colors, emotional vocabulary -- and needs it embedded in narrative rather than drilled as a worksheet

**Do NOT use this skill when:**
- The user wants fiction for ages 13+ (use `short-story-writing` with YA parameters -- YA has distinct conventions around voice, interiority, and stakes)
- The user wants educational content, lesson plans, or structured learning activities for children (use `lesson-plan-design` -- the distinction is narrative story vs. instructional sequence)
- The user wants adult fiction that uses a childlike aesthetic, fairy-tale frame, or whimsical voice (use `short-story-writing` -- Alice in Wonderland for adults is not a children's book)
- The user wants a screenplay or stage play for young audiences (use `script-writing` -- performance writing has distinct format requirements)
- The user wants an analysis or literary criticism of an existing children's book (use `literary-analysis`)
- The user wants to write a parody of a children's book intended for adult readers (use `short-story-writing`)
- The user wants a non-fiction book for children -- nature guides, biographies for kids, how-things-work books (use `nonfiction-writing` -- narrative nonfiction for children has different structural conventions)

---

## Process

### Step 1: Establish Age Group, Format, and Reading Context

Children's literature is not a single genre. It is a family of distinct formats with different word counts, sentence structures, vocabulary ceilings, narrative complexity levels, and physical formats. Before writing a single word, establish the target.

**Age-format matrix:**
- **Board book (0-3 years):** 50-150 words total. One concept per spread. Repetition is the entire structure. No plot required -- rhythm, sensory language, and a reassuring resolution are enough. Sentences: 4-6 words. Vocabulary: the most common 500 English words.
- **Picture book (3-7 years):** 300-1,000 words. The industry-standard sweet spot is 500-800 words. The text and illustrations are co-equal storytellers -- the text never describes what the illustration will show. Read-aloud performance is a primary consideration. Sentence variety is crucial: short punchy sentences for comic timing and drama, longer flowing sentences for warmth and description.
- **Early reader / beginning chapter book (5-8 years):** 1,500-5,000 words. Short chapters of 200-500 words each. Simple sentence structure with controlled vocabulary, but the protagonist faces genuine emotional stakes. The child is reading independently for the first time and needs frequent wins -- short chapters, white space, illustrations every 3-5 pages.
- **Chapter book (7-10 years):** 8,000-20,000 words. More complex plots, subplots, and ensemble casts. Sentence variety increases. The child reader is confident and wants to be treated as capable. Humor, mystery, and adventure dominate this category commercially.
- **Middle grade (8-12 years):** 25,000-50,000 words for a full novel. If writing an opening chapter, target 2,000-4,000 words. Middle grade can handle complex themes -- identity, loyalty, loss, injustice -- but the protagonist must be active, not passive. First person and close third person are both standard. Unlike YA, the themes resolve with some degree of hope; total bleakness is a category violation.

**Reading context questions to ask or infer:**
- Will this be read aloud by an adult to a child, or read independently by the child? (Aloud: prioritize rhythm, performance, and illustration partnership. Independent: prioritize vocabulary accessibility and pacing control.)
- Is this for a specific child? (Get the name, age, interests, and one concrete real-life detail to anchor the personalization.)
- Is there a specific occasion? (Bedtime: settling energy, sensory comfort, calm resolution. First day of school: anxiety acknowledgment, brave agency, hopeful ending.)

---

### Step 2: Build the Story Architecture Before Writing

The single most common failure in children's stories is a weak or absent structure. Children are not forgiving of narrative drift -- they notice when "nothing happened" even if they cannot name it. Every format needs a clear architecture.

**Picture book architecture (the four-spread rule):**
A standard 32-page picture book has roughly 14 spreads of actual story content (accounting for front matter, title page, and end pages). The structure breaks down as:
- Spreads 1-2: Establish the world, the protagonist, and the protagonist's normal (the "ordinary world")
- Spread 3: Introduce the problem, want, or inciting disruption -- fast, within the first 150 words
- Spreads 4-10: Complication, attempts, escalation -- typically three attempts or encounters (the "rule of three" is not arbitrary; it satisfies pattern recognition in young readers)
- Spread 11-12: The protagonist makes a choice that changes everything -- this is the child's agency moment
- Spreads 13-14: Resolution and a "new normal" that is different from the opening -- show what changed

**Early reader chapter structure:**
- Chapter 1: Protagonist, their world, their want, and the problem that disrupts it -- end the chapter on a micro-cliffhanger or unresolved question
- Chapters 2-4: Attempts, failures, and complications -- each chapter has a mini-arc of its own
- Chapter 5-6: Crisis point and the protagonist's key decision
- Final chapter: Resolution, and a beat that shows the character has changed

**Middle grade opening chapter goals:**
- Establish voice in the first paragraph -- middle grade readers select books by reading the first page
- Introduce the protagonist in action or dialogue, not in a mirror or waking up from a dream
- Plant the central story question within the first 1,000 words
- End the chapter with a disruption to the protagonist's status quo that makes the reader turn the page

**Structural traps to avoid:**
- Starting with weather, waking up, or a character describing themselves in a mirror (all three are so common they signal amateur writing)
- Spending more than 20% of a picture book on setup before the problem appears
- Resolving the conflict off-page (the protagonist must be present for and active in the resolution)
- Ending in "and it was all a dream" -- this is a category violation at every age level

---

### Step 3: Design the Protagonist with Intentionality

Children identify with protagonists, not plots. The protagonist is the engine of everything. Weak protagonists produce weak stories regardless of how clever the plot is.

**The three-part protagonist test:**
1. **Clear want:** The protagonist must want something specific and concrete. "Mia wants to find the lost puppy before dark" is a want. "Mia is a curious girl who loves animals" is a character description, not a want.
2. **Clear obstacle:** Something or someone must stand between the protagonist and the want. The obstacle should be specific, not vague. "Her legs were too short to reach the fence latch" is more powerful than "it was hard."
3. **Moment of choice:** The protagonist must make a decision that changes the trajectory of the story. The decision should cost something -- even small stories need the protagonist to risk something (embarrassment, failure, losing a friend's approval). Without cost, there is no stakes; without stakes, there is no story.

**Age-appropriate agency:**
- Ages 3-5: The protagonist solves problems with curiosity, kindness, or cleverness -- never with adult intervention alone
- Ages 6-8: The protagonist can fail, feel bad about failing, and try again -- resilience as active choice, not passive recovery
- Ages 9-12: The protagonist can make morally complex choices, face consequences, and grow -- the resolution need not be tidy, but it must be honest

**Animal and creature protagonists:**
Animal protagonists (bears, rabbits, dragons, foxes) are common in picture books because they create slight emotional distance that paradoxically allows deeper emotional identification. A bear who is scared of the dark is safer to identify with than a child who is scared of the dark. However: animal protagonists must behave like the human child they represent, not like actual animals. A bear who lives in a house, goes to school, and has a best friend named Rabbit is a stand-in for a child. A bear who hunts salmon and hibernates is a nature book.

---

### Step 4: Calibrate Language to Age Group with Precision

Vocabulary calibration is one of the most technically demanding aspects of children's writing. The goal is not to write simply -- it is to write at the exact right level of complexity, which is more difficult than writing at any level above it.

**Sentence structure by age:**
- **Board book:** Subject-verb-object with minimal modification. "The dog jumps. The dog jumps high. The dog jumps over the moon." Repetition with one variable changed each time.
- **Picture book:** Mix of very short (3-5 word) sentences for impact and longer (12-18 word) sentences for flow. Never two long sentences back-to-back in a picture book. Sentence variety IS the rhythm.
- **Early reader:** Short paragraphs of 2-4 sentences. Sentence length averages 8-12 words. Dialogue is punctuated carefully because new readers are learning punctuation conventions from fiction.
- **Chapter book / middle grade:** Full range of sentence structures, including complex and compound-complex sentences. Vocabulary can include challenging words when context makes the meaning accessible -- this is how children build reading vocabulary.

**The "reach word" rule:**
One or two vocabulary words per spread (in a picture book) or per page (in a chapter book) can be above the expected reading level, provided the surrounding context makes the meaning clear. "The old tree was gnarled and knotted, its branches twisted like fingers reaching for the sky" teaches "gnarled" through context. Reaching words encountered in a rich narrative context are retained at far higher rates than words drilled in vocabulary lists.

**Vocabulary to actively avoid by format:**
- Board book: abstract concepts (freedom, justice, memory), negations ("not angry" -- say "calm"), conditional tenses ("if you had been there")
- Picture book: latinate vocabulary without context, adult emotional vocabulary (grief, anxiety, melancholy), narrative distance language ("the protagonist felt")
- Early reader: passive voice constructions, flashbacks without clear "then/now" anchors, interior monologue longer than two sentences without a scene anchor

**Read-aloud optimization (picture books specifically):**
Reading aloud is a performance. The text must support the performer -- the adult reading to the child. This means:
- Vary sentence length to create natural breath patterns and dramatic pauses
- Repeat key phrases across the book -- these become the moments children chant along, which is the deepest form of engagement
- Use onomatopoeia deliberately -- "CRASH" and "shhhhh" and "kerplunk" are not childish; they are precisely calibrated sensory anchors
- Alliteration used sparingly is a pleasure; alliteration overused is a tongue-twister trap
- Test every sentence by reading it aloud at performance speed -- awkward syntax is invisible on the page and unforgiving aloud

---

### Step 5: Handle Theme Without Preaching

Children's literature fails at the theme level more reliably than at any other level. The failure mode is almost always the same: the author wants to teach a lesson and structures the entire narrative to deliver that lesson, producing what professionals call "the lesson story" -- a story where the narrative exists to justify the moral, rather than a moral that emerges organically from the narrative.

**The theme test:**
If you can remove the final paragraph and the story still communicates its meaning, the theme is embedded correctly. If removing the final paragraph makes the story meaningless, the theme is being carried by the ending rather than the story.

**How theme actually works in children's literature:**
- Theme lives in the protagonist's journey -- what they want, what they risk, what they discover, and how they change
- The theme is never stated; it is experienced
- Multiple readers should be able to name the theme slightly differently and all be correct ("it's about courage" and "it's about trusting yourself" and "it's about trying again" can all be true of the same story)
- The antagonist or obstacle should represent the thematic challenge concretely -- not symbolically, but literally

**Difficult themes (death, divorce, illness, loss, fear):**
Children's literature handles these better than adult literature in one specific way: it stays close to the concrete, physical, sensory level of experience rather than the abstract emotional or philosophical level. A picture book about grief is not about grief -- it is about the specific smell of a grandmother's house and the particular way her chair looks empty now. The abstract emotion is accessed through the specific detail, never the other way around.

Rules for difficult themes:
- Never lie to children about hard realities -- false comfort ("the dog went to a farm") damages trust and confuses children
- Name the difficult thing honestly but with appropriate emotional framing ("Grandpa died. That means we won't see him anymore, and that is very sad.")
- Give the child protagonist something they can DO -- a concrete action, however small, that represents agency in the face of something uncontrollable
- End with something true and comforting without being falsely resolved -- it is honest to say "we will miss him always, and we will be okay"

---

### Step 6: Write the Draft with Craft-Level Attention

With architecture designed, protagonist built, and theme calibrated, write the draft. The following techniques separate strong children's writing from weak:

**Picture book specific techniques:**
- **The double-page spread as a unit:** Every spread should have one image worth illustrating. If you cannot name what the illustrator would draw on a given spread, the text may be too dense or too abstract.
- **Page turn tension:** The text at the bottom of a right-hand page should create a micro-question that the turn of the page answers. This is the engine of picture book pacing and the reason children demand "one more page."
- **Text placement and illustration whitespace:** Leave room in the text for the illustration to add information. If the text says "it was the biggest, messiest, most terrifying thing Jonah had ever seen," do not also describe it -- let the illustration describe it.
- **Dialogue as revelation:** In picture books, dialogue should reveal character AND advance plot simultaneously. Every line of dialogue is working double duty.

**Early reader / chapter book techniques:**
- **Chapter-ending hooks:** End every chapter with an unanswered question, an unexpected arrival, or a revelation that reframes what came before. The hook does not need to be dramatic -- "But when Zoe turned around, the footprints were gone" is sufficient.
- **White space as pacing:** Short paragraphs, double-spacing between dialogue exchanges, and single-line paragraphs for emphasis are tools of pacing in early reader formats, not signs of thin writing.
- **Chapter titles:** Chapter titles in early readers and chapter books are part of the reading experience. They should be intriguing without being spoilers. "Chapter 3: The Worst Lunch of Zoe's Entire Life" is better than "Chapter 3: Problems at School."

**Rhyming picture books (a special case requiring special care):**
Rhyming picture books are the most commercially requested format and the most technically demanding to execute well. The failure rate in submission piles at major publishers is overwhelmingly concentrated in forced or imperfect rhyme.

Rules for rhyming picture books:
- Perfect rhyme only -- near-rhyme (moon/soon is fine; moon/home is not) breaks the spell
- Consistent meter throughout -- if you establish an anapestic tetrameter in stanza one, you must maintain it through the entire book
- The story logic must drive the rhyme, never the reverse -- if the rhyme forces an unnatural word order or a word that doesn't fit the story, the solution is to rewrite the couplet, not to keep the awkward rhyme
- Read every couplet aloud, stressed as a performer would stress it -- a meter error that looks fine on the page is a stumbling block in performance
- Common meter traps: filler words ("oh so very," "indeed," "quite"), inverted syntax ("the dog did jump" instead of "the dog jumped"), and forced articles ("a" vs. "the" swapped to fit the beat)
- The AABB rhyme scheme (consecutive couplets) is the most common and most frequently botched; ABAB (alternating) allows more flexibility; ABCB (ballad meter) is underused and elegant

---

### Step 7: Apply the Five Quality Tests Before Finalizing

Before delivering any children's story, run these five tests:

**1. The read-aloud test:** Read the entire story aloud at the speed and voice a loving adult would use. Mark every moment of stumbling, awkward breath placement, or momentum loss. These are revision targets, not minor blemishes.

**2. The agency test:** Trace the protagonist's decision points. At the critical moment, does the child protagonist make a choice that matters? If an adult swoops in to solve the problem, or the problem resolves itself through luck, the story fails the agency test.

**3. The condescension test:** Read the story imagining the target-age child is the world's most perceptive reader. Does any sentence talk down to them? Does any line explain something the story already showed? Children detect and deeply resent being underestimated.

**4. The illustration partnership test (picture books only):** Go through every spread and ask: what does the illustrator draw here? If the text describes the visual fully, the text has trespassed into illustration territory. If every spread has a clear illustration opportunity that adds something the text does not say, the text-illustration partnership is working.

**5. The satisfying ending test:** Read only the last spread or final paragraph. Does it feel earned? Does it land with emotional weight proportional to the journey? A rushed or too-convenient ending is one of the most common failure points. The ending does not need to be happy -- it needs to be TRUE to the story.

---

### Step 8: Deliver with Production Notes

Deliver the story in the output format below, including story notes that provide the user with actionable guidance for the story's life beyond the text -- read-aloud performance notes, illustration direction, and theme handling transparency.

---

## What Bad Output Looks Like

Recognize and avoid these failure modes:

- **The lesson story:** The entire narrative is scaffolding for a moral that is stated explicitly at the end. ("And so Maya learned that sharing is what makes us rich inside." -- No.)
- **The adult voice:** Correct children's vocabulary, but adult concerns, adult syntax, and adult emotional register. Children's problems should be children-scaled: the lost toy matters as much as the lost job.
- **The passive protagonist:** The child watches, is acted upon, and is ultimately rescued. Agency is absent.
- **The rhyme disaster:** Forced rhyme, near-rhyme, inverted syntax, filler words, and inconsistent meter. More damage is done to children's literature by bad rhyme than by any other single failure.
- **The nothing story:** Conflict so gentle that nothing is at risk. Even the most soothing bedtime story needs the sense that something -- however small -- was uncertain.
- **The illustration overwrite:** Text that describes every visual in detail, leaving nothing for the illustrator and nothing for the child's imagination.
- **The adult rescuer:** An adult who steps in at the climax to solve the problem the child protagonist has been working toward. This is not a safe narrative move -- it actively undermines the message that children can handle their own difficulties.

---

## Output Format

```
## [Story Title]

*Format: [Board book / Picture book / Early reader / Chapter book / Middle grade]*
*Target age: [X-Y years] | Word count: [count]*
*Theme: [The thematic core -- one sentence, not a moral]*
*Tone: [e.g., warm-funny / gently spooky / adventurous / tender]*
*Read-aloud or independent: [which]*

---

[STORY TEXT]

[For picture books: use --- between spreads with optional spread numbers]
[For early readers and chapter books: use chapter headings and chapter titles]
[For board books: use --- between page pairs with minimal text per pair]

---

### Story Notes

**Read-aloud performance notes:**
- [Specific guidance on pacing, voice variation, and emphasis]
- [Any refrains the child should be invited to chant along with]
- [Pauses for comedic timing or emotional weight]

**Illustration opportunities:**
- [Spread-by-spread or scene-by-scene illustration direction]
- [Moments where the illustration adds humor or information not in the text]
- [The visual that carries the emotional center of the story]

**Theme handling:**
- [How the theme emerges from the story journey rather than from stated moral]
- [What the protagonist's change represents thematically]

**Difficult content notes (if applicable):**
- [How sensitive content is framed and why this framing is appropriate for the age]
- [What the story does NOT say and why that choice was made]

**Rhyme/meter notes (if applicable):**
- [Meter scheme identified and marked]
- [Any deliberately stressed syllables or performance choices embedded in the meter]
```

---

## Rules

1. **Never state the moral.** The meaning of a children's story must emerge from the narrative journey of the protagonist. Any sentence beginning with "And so [character] learned that..." is a category failure. Cut it. The story already said what it needs to say.

2. **Never exceed the vocabulary ceiling without a context bridge.** Every word above the age-group's expected vocabulary must be surrounded by context that makes its meaning accessible. One or two reach words per spread (picture book) or per page (chapter book) are enriching; more than that is exclusionary.

3. **Never have an adult solve the child protagonist's problem at the climactic moment.** Adults can assist, can provide information, can be present -- but the critical action that resolves the central conflict must be taken by the child. This is not a stylistic preference; it is the core promise children's literature makes to its readers.

4. **Never write a story where nothing is at genuine risk.** Every story needs stakes appropriate to the age. For a 4-year-old, the risk of not finding the lost stuffed animal before bedtime is genuine, high-stakes tragedy. The stakes do not need to be large; they need to be REAL within the world of the story.

5. **Always read the draft aloud before delivery, marking every stumble.** A children's story that reads well silently but stumbles in performance is an unfinished draft. The read-aloud test is not optional.

6. **In picture books, always leave the visual description to the illustrator.** Text that says "the enormous purple dragon with three heads and golden scales and tiny pink wings" has stolen the illustrator's job. Text that says "the dragon -- the ENORMOUS one -- was waiting in the living room" and lets the illustrator provide the visual is a text-illustration partnership.

7. **In rhyming picture books, accept no near-rhyme, forced syntax, or filler words.** If a couplet requires "oh" or "quite" or "indeed" or inverted word order to make the meter work, rewrite the couplet. The reader will feel the forced rhyme as a stumble even if they cannot name it.

8. **Match the emotional register to the age exactly.** Board books should feel warm and safe. Picture books can be funny, scary, sad, and joyful -- but not traumatic. Early readers can include real disappointment and real failure. Middle grade can carry grief, moral complexity, and genuine loss -- but must end with some form of hope or forward motion.

9. **Apply the rule of three deliberately.** Three attempts before success, three encounters before understanding, three days before the event -- repetition with variation is the structural backbone of children's storytelling at every age. It satisfies pattern recognition and creates the "this time it will work" anticipation that keeps young readers engaged.

10. **Personalized stories must be genuinely specific, not cosmetically renamed.** Replacing the protagonist's name with the child's name and calling it a personalized story is insufficient. A truly personalized story includes a specific interest, a specific physical or personality detail, and ideally a recognizable real-life situation. The child should recognize themselves in the story, not just their name.

---

## Edge Cases

**Bedtime stories:**
The structural requirement of a bedtime story is the opposite of most narrative advice: the climax should be early and mild, and the final third of the story should descend in energy, not rise. Use sensory language that invites relaxation -- warmth, softness, starlight, the sound of rain, the weight of blankets. The resolution should model the transition to sleep: "and slowly, very slowly, her eyes got heavy, and the stars outside got brighter, and the world got quiet." Avoid comedy beats or exciting reveals in the final quarter of a bedtime story; these spike energy exactly when you need to lower it.

**Difficult topics (death, divorce, serious illness, trauma):**
The temptation when writing difficult topics for children is either to sanitize (falsely reassuring) or to burden (overwhelming). Both fail children. The correct approach is the specific-and-concrete method: do not write about grief in the abstract -- write about the specific empty chair, the particular smell of the person, the concrete thing that is different now. Give the child protagonist one active thing they can do: plant a seed, keep a photograph, tell a story about the person. End with something true: "We will miss her always. We will also be okay." Do not claim the child will stop being sad; claim that sadness and okayness can coexist.

**Rhyming picture book with imperfect rhymes in the brief:**
If the user provides a rhyming premise where the natural language resists clean rhyme and meter, do not force it. Write a short note explaining the specific metrical challenge and offer two options: (1) a revised rhyming version where the story logic has been adjusted to allow clean rhyme, and (2) a prose version that maintains all the warmth and rhythm of rhyme without the formal constraint. Never deliver a rhyming picture book with detectable forced rhyme or near-rhyme.

**Educational goal embedded in narrative (counting, letters, concepts):**
The story must exist independently of the educational goal -- the counting or the letter recognition should be something a reader could strip out without the narrative collapsing. "Five bears went into the forest" works because it is a story beat; "five (that means one more than four!) bears" is an instruction manual with a bear costume on. Let the educational element be a natural feature of the story world: the character counts because they are taking inventory of their treasure, not because the author wants to teach counting.

**Scary stories for children:**
Age-appropriate scary is a real and valuable genre. The rule is: suspense and tension -- yes; genuine dread, hopelessness, or lasting psychological fear -- no. The scary element must be (a) personified or concretized into something the child can confront rather than a diffuse existential threat, and (b) resolved through the child protagonist's courage, cleverness, or compassion. A monster under the bed is excellent because it can be confronted and demystified. A story about the random cruelty of the universe is not appropriate for children at any age. The ending of a children's scary story should leave the child feeling MORE capable than they did at the start, not more afraid.

**User provides a character or scenario with implicit stereotyping:**
If the user's brief includes character descriptions that default to stereotypes (the female character who is scared and needs rescuing, the villain who is coded as a specific ethnicity or appearance type), gently redirect by writing the character as more complex without drawing attention to the correction in the text. In the Story Notes section, note briefly that character complexity was applied. Do not lecture the user; demonstrate the better version.

**Story for a child with a specific need (autism, anxiety, processing difference):**
A story designed for a child with heightened anxiety should minimize ambiguity in outcomes -- clear causation, clear resolution, and explicit (but not preachy) naming of emotions: "Theo felt the tightness in his chest that he knew was worry. He knew worry's name now, and knowing its name made it slightly smaller." A story for a child with autism who is working on social inference should externalize internal states clearly in the text, since the subtext that neurotypical readers navigate intuitively may need to be more explicit. These are modifications of degree, not of kind -- the story is still a story, not a social script.

**Very short requested word count that creates structural problems:**
Some users request a 200-word picture book or a 100-word bedtime story. At these lengths, full story structure (want, obstacle, three attempts, resolution) cannot fit. Handle this by acknowledging the constraint in the Story Notes and structuring what is available as: world + character + problem + one attempt + resolution. This is a distilled structure, not a broken one. A 150-word picture book can still have a protagonist, a want, a single obstacle, and a satisfying turn -- it simply cannot have complexity or subplot.

---

## Example

**Input:** "Write a picture book text for ages 4-7. The main character is a small cloud named Nimbus who can't make rain yet -- all the other clouds can, but when he tries, he just makes tiny bubbles that float away. Funny and warm, should work as a read-aloud. I want a rhyming story."

**Output:**

---

## Nimbus Can't Rain

*Format: Picture book*
*Target age: 4-7 years | Word count: ~520*
*Theme: The thing that makes you different becomes the thing you're for*
*Tone: Warm-funny, gently encouraging*
*Read-aloud: Yes -- anapestic bounce with refrain*

---

**[Spread 1]**

High in the sky where the wind likes to play,
Where thunderclouds grumble and cumulus sway,
There lived a small cloud -- not enormous or grand --
The fluffiest cloud in the sky of the land.

His name was young Nimbus. He wanted to rain.
He'd practiced and practiced and practiced again.

---

**[Spread 2]**

The big clouds would RUMBLE.
The big clouds would ROAR.
They'd fill up the rivers and puddles and more.

But when Nimbus tried -- when he TRIED his cloud-best --
The rain wouldn't come from his small fluffy chest.

---

**[Spread 3]**

Just bubbles.

*Tiny, shining, wobbling bubbles.*

They drifted away on the warm morning air.
Nimbus watched sadly.
That wasn't rain. That wasn't even *close* to rain.
That was BUBBLES.

---

**[Spread 4]**

"TRY HARDER," said Stratus, who rained on the hills.
"BOOM LOUDER," said Cumulus, shaking with thrills.
"It's EASY," said Thunder, who'd done it for years.
"You just have to RUMBLE until it appears!"

---

**[Spread 5]**

So Nimbus he rumbled.
He grumbled. He tried.
He puffed up and huffed up
and swelled up with pride.

He squeezed his eyes tightly.
He held his breath in.

And then -- very quietly --
out came a...
*bubble.*

Then ten.

---

**[Spread 6]**

"Oh dear," said young Nimbus.
"I'm broken, I think.
I'm the only cloud ever
who makes bubbles, not drink."

He drifted away from the big thunderclouds' crowd,
the loneliest, bubbliest, small scrap of cloud.

---

**[Spread 7]**

He floated down lower.
He looked at the town.
And something he saw there
made him NOT want to frown.

---

**[Spread 8]**

A small girl was blowing
a bubble -- just one!
It drifted up, shining,
and caught the bright sun.

Then three boys were blowing
and five kids and ten!
The park was EXPLODING with bubbles again!

---

**[Spread 9]**

"MORE!" called the children.
"WE NEED THEM! WE DO!"
They reached up their arms toward the bright open blue.

---

**[Spread 10]**

And Nimbus thought: *Well.*
*I've got bubbles to spare.*
He puffed up and breathed out
his bubbles on air.

The bubbles came tumbling
in hundreds, in streams --
the sparkliest, swirling-est
river of gleams.

---

**[Spread 11]**

The children went: "OHHH."
And the children went: "AHHHH."
The biggest and shiniest floated most far.

Nimbus watched all of it.
*Nimbus made that.*
Not rain. Something better.
(Well. Different from that.)

---

**[Spread 12]**

"TRY HARDER," said Stratus.
"TRY LOUDER," said Cloud.
But Nimbus just smiled
at the small laughing crowd.

---

**[Spread 13]**

And if you look up on a bright bubble day --
when bubbles come tumbling from somewhere away --
look high in the sky where the big clouds all rain.

That small fluffy one?

That's young Nimbus.
*Again.*

---

**[Spread 14 -- final spread, quiet and warm]**

He still can't make rain.

But the children
don't mind.

---

### Story Notes

**Read-aloud performance notes:**
- The meter is predominantly anapestic tetrameter (da-da-DUM da-da-DUM da-da-DUM da-da-DUM) -- light and bouncy, naturally comic. Read it with a gentle swing, not a gallop.
- Spreads 3 and 5 break the rhyme intentionally to land the comedy: "That wasn't rain. That wasn't even *close* to rain. That was BUBBLES." Read this with a flat, deadpan beat after the pause -- the comedy lives in the anti-climax.
- "TRY HARDER" and "TRY LOUDER" (spreads 4 and 12) are refrain echoes -- slightly different the second time, which invites children who remember spread 4 to notice the change. Invite children to shout those lines back.
- The children in spreads 8-9 shouting "OHHH" and "AHHHH" and "MORE!" are natural participation moments -- pause and let the reading-along child fill them in.
- The final spread is two lines with white space between them. Read it slowly. Let the quiet land.

**Illustration opportunities:**
- Spread 1: Nimbus visually smaller and fluffier than all surrounding clouds -- visual comedy in the scale contrast
- Spread 3 (the bubble reveal): Close-up of Nimbus with a single wobbly bubble emerging, his expression somewhere between horrified and resigned. The bubble should be luminous -- this is the visual the whole book points back to.
- Spread 5: The sequential attempt -- Nimbus's face going through rumbling exertion, ending in a tiny constellation of bubbles. Visual comedy in the contrast between effort and result.
- Spread 7-8: The pivot moment -- Nimbus floating low over the town, and below him the park full of children blowing bubbles. Nimbus should see the bubbles before the reader does; the child reader turns the page to discover what Nimbus is looking at.
- Spread 10-11: The release -- Nimbus's expression changing from hesitant to joyful as the bubbles stream down. This is the emotional center of the book; the illustrator should make the bubbles fill the spread with warmth and light.
- Final spread: Just Nimbus, alone but content, small against a large sky. A few bubbles drifting upward. Simple and warm.

**Theme handling:**
The theme -- the thing that makes you different becomes the thing you are for -- is never stated. It is demonstrated through the contrast between Nimbus trying to be a "normal" cloud (spreads 2-6, where he is small and sad) and Nimbus doing the thing he actually does (spreads 8-13, where he is purposeful and celebrated). The pivot is self-initiated: Nimbus chooses to release the bubbles after seeing the children, rather than being told to or helped by a mentor figure. His agency is complete. The other clouds' repeated "TRY HARDER" appears twice -- once as a source of shame, once as irrelevant background noise Nimbus has moved past. The reader feels this shift without being told about it.

**Rhyme/meter notes:**
- Base meter: anapestic tetrameter (two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed, four times per line): "high in the SKY where the WIND likes to PLAY"
- Deliberate prose breaks at spreads 3, 5, and the final spread -- these are not errors; they are strategic drops out of meter to land emotional beats (the bubble reveal, the final comedy beat, and the quiet closing). The contrast between the bouncy rhyme and the flat prose makes the prose land harder.
- All rhymes are perfect rhymes (play/sway, rain/again, roar/more, etc.). No near-rhymes used.
- Spread 6 shifts slightly to a more contemplative meter to carry Nimbus's sadness -- still rhymed, but slower. Read it with less bounce than the surrounding spreads.
