PB, MG, or YA? Finding the Best Format for Your Story

By Lindsay H. Metcalf 

Eunice Newton Foote’s story hooked me immediately. Here was the scientist who in 1856 who found that excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would warm the planet. Then the world forgot about her and credited a man with the discovery. Curiosity would propel me through research and writing. But how best to write Eunice into history? I assumed I was writing a picture book, but nope. This project would evolve into a YA novel-in-verse! (Footeprint: Eunice Newton Foote at the Dawn of Climate Science and Women’s Rights releases February 10 from Charlesbridge.)

 In the beginning, I focused on who Eunice was rather than what I would write. I read countless articles, traced their sources, and scoured those, too. I mined Ancestry.com, Google Patents, historical newspaper archives, museum databases. When I exhausted all I could find about Eunice and her family, I pieced together a comprehensive timeline. 

I had published only picture books, so Eunice’s story would be a picture book biography, right? One problem: My timeline overflowed with juicy information, none of which I wanted to eliminate. I also wanted to center Eunice’s voice. Archives held her letters written decades after any throughline that would make sense in a PB bio.

A longer work for older readers could include all of that, plus explore historical forces and contradictions that shaped Eunice and her family. 

But could I pull it off? 

My first attempt came out as a poem. Aha! I could use metaphor to translate emotion without inventing Eunice’s feelings. Breaks between poems would provide natural transitions, and thematic imagery could fill space without making anything up.

Here's an example. A primary source said Eunice had painted landscapes, but I didn’t know specifics. So I created three poems about Eunice painting that pondered her life in broader brushstrokes (heh). The following poems appear throughout Part Two of Footeprint. 

Painting
With oils,
Eunice deconstructs
shadows, highlights, ombré tones,
ripples, straights, ridges.
Shade by shade,
stroke by stroke,
she translates each landscape
from three dimensions to two
until the likeness looks true
& Eunice swells with relief.

Painting II
Painting with facts,
Eunice reconstructs
each invention, each concept,
to tell a science story.
Question by question,
measurement by measurement,
she eliminates possibilities
until only truth remains.

Painting III

Painting her life,
Eunice brushstrokes her truth
with enough pressure to etch glass
but enough control
to avoid cutting herself
open.

“Painting,” “Painting II,” and “Painting III” © Lindsay H. Metcalf, 2026, from Footeprint (Charlesbridge Teen)

I had my format—a novel-in-verse. I tried to write straight nonfiction, because I wanted researchers to be able to use my work as a springboard for further discovery. I filled gaps in the timeline with poems about historical events, such as the New York legislature’s 1845 vote to allow married women to claim patents.

But as I wrote, my approach shifted. Sometimes I felt Eunice would have interacted with moments in history, but I couldn’t prove it. I bridged those with light fiction, writing, for example, that Eunice learned about the women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls by reading a newspaper. The news article was real, and Eunice attended the event, but I didn’t know whether she read the article. I detailed what I had fictionalized in an author’s note, and a massive bibliography showed what I had not.

Did I know I had written a YA? No—not until I saw the “Charlesbridge Teen” logo in the first-round edits with my publisher. Someone up the chain had declared the target audience as 12 and up. I’m just happy I wrote the story I needed to tell without restricting myself. I hope Eunice would be proud.

She is getting three books this spring: Footeprint, plus two picture book biographies (Foote Was First! by Jen Bryant, illus. Amy June Bates; and Change Is in the Air by Rebecca Donnelly, illus. Mercè López). To me, that’s evidence of the myriad ways to tell a story. No one will write your story like you will!

***

Try these exercises with your manuscript:

1. Write a poem about a scene in your manuscript. Use poetic devices such as metaphor and simile, consonance and assonance. 
2. Rewrite a page of your manuscript from different points of view. Switch from third to first person or even second. Perhaps change third person-omniscient to third person-close perspective
3. Rewrite that page for a different audience. If you have a picture book, try middle-grade or an early reader. 
4. Flesh out the version that begs to be written!

There are a million ways to tell a story, and no one will tell it like you. Eunice is getting three books this spring: Footeprint, plus two picture book biographies (Foote Was First! by Jen Bryant, illus. Amy June Bates; and Change Is in the Air by Rebecca Donnelly, illus. Mercè López). Eunice is such an amazing subject, she deserves a hundred more.

 

Lindsay H. Metcalf writes nonfiction and poetry for children and young adults while balancing her laptop on matching Cavalier King Charles lapdogs. This February, Charlesbridge will release her young adult debut, Footeprint: Eunice Newton Foote at the Dawn of Climate Science and Women’s Rights, a biography-in-verse about a nineteenth-century scientist and suffragist who discovered carbon dioxide’s atmosphere-warming properties. A former journalist, Lindsay lives in rural Kansas, downwind of the neighborhood cows, with her husband and two teen sons who remain unimpressed with Lindsay’s writing awards—not even the ILA Social Justice Literature Award for No Voice Too Small and No World Too Big, or the Green Earth Book Award for No World Too Big. Learn more at lindsayhmetcalf.com or @lindsayhmetcalf on social media.