Wordless picture stories: telling a story with pictures alone

A wordless picture story has no text, or almost none. The reader, often a child and a grown-up together, works out what is happening from the pictures and tells the story in their own words. That makes them a lovely format for very young listeners and for families who share more than one language. It also makes them harder to plan than they look, because there is nowhere to hide a confusing page.

What makes a picture story work

Picture book awards such as the Caldecott Medal judge the pictures on how they carry a story, theme or concept across the sequence of pages, not on each picture alone. A wordless book takes that to its limit. Each picture has to do two jobs: show what is happening now, and make it clear how we got here from the page before.

From our own drafts, three rules matter most:

1. One clear action per page. Not "the bird explores the garden" but "the bird lands on a flower".
2. One big subject. If the reader has to hunt for the main character, the story stalls.
3. An obvious change from the previous page. Something moved, appeared, cracked or fell asleep.

An example: The Egg That Wobbled

This eight-page story is one of the wordless templates in our design library. Read down the action column and notice how each page changes exactly one thing:

The words are optional. Some are sounds, some are a single greeting, and one page has none at all. They give a grown-up something to say out loud, but the story is fully readable without them.

Planning your own

Start from a tiny event

Wordless stories suit small, physical events: something hatches, something floats away, something climbs up and slides down. Big emotional arcs or plots that depend on what a character is thinking are much harder to show without words.

Write the plan as actions

List the pages as actions you could act out. If a line includes "realises", "decides" or "remembers", it is probably not drawable. Rewrite it as what the reader would see: "the snail looks up at the rainbow, eyes wide".

Keep the world steady

Readers use the background to keep track of where they are. If the nest is on the left of the branch on page 1, keep it there. Change the setting only when the story moves somewhere new, and make that move a page of its own.

Pick a calm ending

Many of our wordless stories end with the main character asleep and the evening sky coming in, which makes them easy to use at bedtime. That is a choice, not a requirement. What matters is that the last page feels like an ending: something settles.

Panels or full pages?

Our layout library uses one large picture per page for the youngest readers, and up to two stacked panels per page for slightly older ones. More panels let you show smaller steps, but each one gets smaller. When in doubt, use fewer, bigger pictures.

Test it without saying a word

The best check for a wordless story is the simplest. Print the pages or lay them out on a screen, give them to someone who has not seen the plan, and ask them to tell you what happens. Do not help.

• Where they hesitate, the change between pages is not clear enough.
• Where they tell a different story from yours, a picture is showing something you did not intend.
• Where they skip a page, it may not be needed at all.

You can make a wordless story in Kids Books Maker: choose Picture storybook, then No words. The same planning habits help with any picture-led book, including a calm bedtime story and a coloring book that follows one character through a day.