I just looked at the original word count for this children’s book I’ve been working on — it’s 277 words. The final rewrite is 167 words. It’s taken me a year to get there.

These are the longest 167 words of my life.

I think that some people imagine writing a children’s book is easy. Anyone who has read bunches of them know that it’s the furthest thing from it. Take away your low level for hire work — the stuff that is produced cheap and fast, the stuff you find in bins in dollar stores — and the celebrity stuff, where people trade in their fame for vanity projects, and you’ll find a pretty grueling process.

There is a conception that writing children’s books means writing simply, but that’s not it at all. Writing children’s books means writing with complexity in the simplest terms possible — saying as much as you can with fewer words. It also means trusting an artist to fill in gaps visually. Children’s book writing is about not writing so much.

Admittedly I only have one published children’s book, but in my defense I’ve had plenty of others considered by major publishers, so at least I can slip my manuscript in the mail slot — that’s a fancy writer variation on “get my foot into the door” — if nothing else. In fact, those 167 words are currently being looked at, and they point to the intricacy of how this process can work.

The lesson — before I even tell the story — is that you don’t just dash off a children’s book. Appearances are deceiving.

Here’s the process. Those original 277 words were presented to my wife, my collaborator in these matters, and she gave her suggestions. Whatever those might have been — at this point, it seems like decades ago, so I can’t honestly remember — I adjusted the manuscript and she drew out her dummy book. She showed it to her agent for some feedback. We went through several rewrites after that — this including much creative struggling and creative meetings, where, together we worked on the words and devised how the words and pictures would work together. This resulted in a different version of the same book. Then someone inquired, read what we had at that time, sent us some notes, and yet again, we completely rewrote the thing.

As it currently stands, it is more than 100 words less than our original conception, has a completely different narrative device, and a big role for a character that wasn’t even in the original version — all without a monetary transaction of any form. Just another day at work.

And so I’ve put in a year’s work on the simplest story possible, best summed up as “a kitten keeps getting into trouble.” At its core, the process involved whittling down the story to as close to those six words as we could get it.

And it’s still not done. It’s in someone else’s hands currently. When it arrives back to us, we might have to go through the grind all over again. It might turn out that 167 words is too long, and that the act of creation will continue to be the process of stripping away.

The bigger point here is that if we do sell the book, the amount of work that went into it may not be apparent in the final product — it’s often that way with picture books, and because of that can offer a whiff of easy money. But by the time it does get published, it will constitute probably two years work between two people. Let’s just say we are paid a $10,000 advance for the effort. That’s $5,000 a person for more than a year’s work each. Imagine a part time job in which you don’t see that pay check until you’ve worked it a couple years. Imagine if you’re not actually guaranteed a paycheck in the first place. Imagine if that pay check isn’t actually your pay, but borrowing against future earnings. It’s actually debt.

That’s why it is important to really want to do this with your life, expect no reward, but feel victorious when you get one. The majority of writers do not swim in money, they live project to project. But if I told you that poverty and uncertainty were both worth it, would you still want to be a writer?

Bravo if you said yes.

So I look ahead to the prospect of cutting down my words even further for a paycheck that is less hazy in the distance than it was a year ago, but still far enough away that I’m unclear it has my name on it. Is it worth it? For me, yeah, it’s what I signed up for. I’m ready to slash away more words if that’s what it takes to make it a great book — because making it a great book is the point more than anything other.