When your job is to write picture books for children, an imaginary child sits in front of you as you work and yells “TOO LONG” pretty often. (They can yell this in real life, too.) So you put your head back down and cut, reading shorter and shorter drafts to them until they yell “TOO LONG” fewer times, and eventually not at all.

You learn to appreciate this imaginary child, loud as they are. They are necessarily murky in age — since picture books are given to a wide range of kids, from toddlers up through early readers — and they are taskmasters.

You start out with something you think you want to impart to them — some kind of lesson or message, or at least a clever idea. And by the time they’re through yelling “TOO LONG,” you’ve cut everything you set out to tell them.

The result might still be a story, with a beginning, middle and end, or some kind of conflict that’s been resolved. But it’s clean and spare and maybe even abstract.

You feel more like you’ve made a dream than a book. It’s wonderful. Hell, you feel like a poet.

That, at its best, is what working on picture books is like. They’re around 32 pages long (though once in a while some of us go longer), around 10 to 12 inches tall and just as wide. Beyond that, there aren’t a lot of rules. It’s a wide-open and very enjoyable medium.

Now imagine that just as you’ve found your speed in this format — by conjuring the murkily-aged yelling child who forces from you the best that you’ve got — your imaginary child is taken away. In their place, someone puts a more specific imaginary audience member. This one is clearly a baby.

The baby has a note taped to them. The note says, “I can’t read. I can’t talk. I don’t care about stories or plots, classically speaking, or characters as they’re usually defined. What do you have for me?”

What we have for them, it turns out, are board books. I’m talking about original board books here, conceived as such, as opposed to the aforementioned 32-ish-page picture books that are sometimes later repackaged as board books. These original board books are often even shorter than picture books, and smaller in dimension, too.

If the graph I’ve begun to draw for the 32-page picture book has “inverse amount of material to work with before I get imaginary yelled-at” on one axis and “capacity for feeling like a poet” on the other, it stands to reason that this shorter and smaller book, plus this baby sitting on the floor in front of me who is apparently uninterested in almost everything that I’m used to making, together could create the absolute ideal conditions for abstraction, dreaminess and occasionally feeling like a poet.

When you look to capture the attention of a baby, your (or at least my) impulse is not to try to teach them anything or be clever. You know they’re not receiving those messages yet. You’re simply hoping to engage them minute to minute.

As an author for babies, you start right away in that clean, spare state of mind you work so hard (and get imaginary yelled-at so much) to achieve when your audience is a little older. And because board books are so short, you have less time to ruin that fragile mood once you’ve found it.

I didn’t come to this conclusion on my own. The potential of board books was shown to me mainly by the work of two people: the Japanese author-illustrator Taro Gomi and the undisputed queen of this format, the American author-illustrator Sandra Boynton.

Boynton’s “Hippos Go Berserk!” marked the first time I saw my son, then not quite a year old, listen intently to anything being read to him (and not for lack of trying). It sat him down the way every author hopes to sit their audience down.

I had heard of Boynton’s work, and knew it visually, but until then I didn’t know she was a witch. She sings a song from the woods and children follow her into her pastel-colored, soft-animal-filled world. I don’t pretend to know what she is doing technically, rhythmically or tonally that speaks directly to the very very young. And so, lacking in scientific capacity, I revert to the grand tradition of labeling her a witch.

But the comparison to music is useful here. Boynton is also a songwriter, and board books can behave more like songs than stories when they want to. It would be selling her short, however, to say her books are just songs that happen to be laid down on (heavy) paper.

Crucially, Boynton understands how to make her audience want to turn the page to see what’s next, maybe for the first time ever in their lives. And she is able to craft an emotional, energetic rise and fall without needing a plot or a problem to solve. Her drawings are simple and calm, her characters always look a little confused to be there, and the world it all adds up to is rich and memorable.

Taro Gomi is similarly gifted at creating vast worlds out of deceptively simple elements. His illustrations are, for my money, some of the best going in any format. “Bus Stops” is the first work of his I saw, and it is achingly beautiful. It builds momentum, glides and then gently touches down, again without a plot, a premise, a hero or a villain.

But the book of his that really showed me what the board book could do was “Spring Is Here.” In this circular lullaby, Gomi establishes loose visual rules that let him bend space, scale and time.

After finishing it, I remember thinking to myself, “Board books can do this?” and answering, “Well, Taro Gomi can do this. But you can try, too.”

I recently did try. And I’m happy to report that the process was as fun and rewarding and poetic as I was hoping it would be. I loved it.

Like a real baby, the imaginary baby in front of me as I worked didn’t give me as much feedback as the older child I’m used to dealing with has given me. So we’ll see how the books actually go over.

But who knows what babies really think of anything anyway. Maybe only Sandra Boynton knows.