How to write a kids' book storyline with AI (using Claude)

Part 2 of the Vivlore and the Lost Vikings series. This part is about turning a small idea into a proper storyline using an AI chat assistant like Claude, then trimming it down to what a picture book actually needs, which is far less text than you'd think.

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Start with the idea you already have, not a blank page

Don't open a chat window and type "write me a children's book." You'll get something generic. Instead, give the AI the one true, specific thing you're starting from, a toy your child named, a place you visited, a fear they're working through, and ask it to build around that.

For the Lost Vikings, the actual first prompt was close to this:

"My toddler named his toy longship 'the Lost Vikings.' I want to build a picture book around a small crew of Vikings who get lost somewhere unexpected and have to find their way home. Ask me questions to help develop this before writing anything."

That last instruction matters. A good AI storyline session is a conversation, not a single request. Let it ask you things, where are they lost, who's the bravest one, what almost stops them from getting home, and answer honestly. The details you supply are what make the story yours instead of generic.

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Shape it around the five-part arc

Every picture book Vivlore's kids' template is built for follows the same five-part arc: once upon a time, the world, the trouble, the turning point, and happily ever after. Once you've got a premise you like, ask the AI to structure it explicitly around those five beats:

"Structure this as a five-part picture book arc: once upon a time (introduce the crew), the world (their ordinary Viking life before the trouble), the trouble (how they get lost), the turning point (how they find the courage or the clue that gets them home), and happily ever after (the return). Give me two or three sentences for each part."

This is the single most useful prompt in the whole process. It stops the AI from writing a meandering short story and forces it into the shape a small child can actually follow. If a part feels flat, ask for three alternatives for just that part rather than regenerating the whole thing.

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Now cut it down, hard

Here's the part most first-time AI-assisted authors get wrong: they take the AI's nicely written five paragraphs and try to use them as the book. A picture book is not a short story with pictures attached. It's roughly one sentence per page, sometimes less. The rule from the anatomy of a children's picture book is one full-bleed image and a line or two of text, per page, nothing more.

So once you have your five-part outline, ask for the cut:

"Now turn this into 10 to 14 individual picture book pages. Each page should be one sentence, or two very short ones, written for a read-aloud voice, age 3 to 6. No page should need the previous one explained, each should work as a caption for a single illustration."

Read what comes back out loud. If a line makes you stumble, it's too long. If a three-year-old would need the last page explained to understand it, it's not standing on its own. Push the AI to shorten anything that doesn't pass both tests, or shorten it yourself, you're the editor here, not just the prompter.

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Keep your child's actual voice in it

The single detail that makes an AI-assisted book feel handmade rather than generated is a real, specific, unedited detail from your own child. A mispronounced word. A thing they said that made you laugh. Drop it into one page, unchanged:

One of the crew was small and couldn't say his R's, so "row harder" came out "wow hawdew," and everyone loved him for it.

An AI can write a perfectly good generic children's book. It cannot know that. Only you can put it in, and it's usually the line that ends up being everyone's favourite.

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Bring it into Vivlore

Once you've got your final list of pages, one line each, you're ready to build. Start a kids' picture book, add each line as a page, and pair it with the illustration for that page, which is exactly what Part 3: AI illustrations and covers for a kids' book covers next.

You don't need to finish in one sitting. Save the outline, come back to it, add a page whenever you have five minutes. The Lost Vikings' storyline took three separate conversations with Claude over about forty minutes total, spread across a week. That's the whole time investment for the words in a book that will outlast the toy that started it.