You Want to Write for Kids: Some Answers to Your Questions!

How do I begin my career as a children's author?
Study the many wonderful books and articles published by successful children's authors about writing for kids. Talk to elementary teachers, school librarians and other educators about books and magazines popular with children. Examine websites by and for children’s writers. Become a member of children’s writers’ associations, such as the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI). Examine the hottest new magazines and books and those that have remained in print for two or more decades. Adopt the writing and illustrating techniques that have made these books and magazines successful, and imitate what you can with your fresh, new material. Write, revise, and revise again. Test your stories on your kids and grandkids, school and church groups.

How do I gather ideas and impressions before writing?
You might prepare by studying everything from stages of child development to children's literature. Look to the tastes of your own kids or memories of your favorite childhood books and stories. You’ll make many trips to the realms of your imagination to search for seeds of a story. It’s always possible to draw from direct experience, recreating a story from an incident in a kid's life. If you’re a teacher or parent you may know of an unfilled need for a certain type of book. Ideas and approaches to writing kids' books are as numerous as stars in the sky.

What age group should I write for?

Once your ideas and inspiration have merged into the itch to write, you’ll be confronted with decisions relating to your intended audience. The three major categories of children’s literature are picture books for children approximately 2-6 years old, juvenile chapter books for 6-10 year olds, and young adult books in two age groups, the middle grade readers 10-12 years old and young adults 13 and up. Of course, good writing is often spontaneous, so you may start with an idea for a picture book, but end up with a juvenile or young adult story after the fact.

Are there different types of picture books?

The classic picture book tells a story mainly through pictures, with few or no words at all. Sometimes a piece may bridge both concepts, with illustrations and text that would each be nearly meaningless without the other. Or the picture book may be a story coherent without illustrations, but enhanced and made more attractive by the addition of illustrations on each page. The standard picture book is 32 pages long total including title pages and endpapers, so you’ll find that most picture book manuscripts have two pages of text or less, though an occasional book may have double or triple that.

In many most popular contemporary picture books, text and pictures complement each other. One shows what the other does not, making the story alive. Ideally, the lyric and rhythmic sounds of the words provide the movement that pictures cannot, and link the pictures coherently within the framework of the story. Likewise, the pictures provide emphasis and clarity to the text, sometimes adding a whimsical twist.

What topics and treatments should I use for picture books?

Children enjoy recognition. Books may center on familiar themes of home, family, sibling relationships, pets, school, and friends. Small kids enjoy animals that behave like people, contrary to the contemporary advice to avoid anthropomorphism. Humor in wordplay and pictures is always appreciated by kids and can range from the subtle to the outright absurd. Matter-of-fact text combined with hilarious pictures is often a real tickler. Adaptations of folk tales are popular and engaging, as are contemporary tales told in the pattern and rhythm of folk literature. These stories teach lessons, center on the morals of their cultures, or explain natural phenomena. Some feature humorous disasters or dramas of some kind, both popular with kids.

There isn’t a firm line between books of two adjacent age groups. Some picture books bridge juvenile material. Juvenile books tend toward handling issues requiring some maturity, such as family difficulties and urban problems, although these types of issues are now being treated in picture books in brief form. Complex story ideas that are beyond the scope of a picture book may be suitable for a collection or for development into juvenile chapter books. Juvenile books have more text, fewer pictures and handle complex stories and issues. They are generally (but not always) divided into chapters. Simple picture books may also have plots with neat divisions that can be chaptered.

How is nonfiction used in picture books?

If you lean toward expertise in nonfiction, you might excel in the writing informational and concept books. Small children are learning about everything and pepper their language with who, what, why, where and ‘how come’. These books handle subjects within kids' experiences and consider their limitations. Concept books usually cover physical matters such as size, colors and shapes, or abstract concepts such as time, distance, and growth. Most depend upon accurate description and comparison to convey ideas.

Informational books also deal with real world information but often have a poetic or narrative form. Many nonfiction books for children might be compared to the adult genre of creative nonfiction, for they capture the wonder and range of emotion not present in the recitation of facts. In writing informational pieces for children strive for the delicate balance of providing information simply without sacrificing accuracy, and for teaching values or stating facts in a playful or compelling manner.

Specialty books are the fun and quirky pieces limited only by the ingenuity of the creator and publisher. These books include paper-engineering innovations such as pop-ups, pullouts, lift-up flaps, scratch and sniff panels, sliding panels, or novelty shapes. These are popular with the parents of toddlers and preschoolers and not likely to be found in libraries, though libraries order them sometimes for non-circulating collections to entertain visitors. Some fiction and non-fiction books for older kids have specialty features, too.

What are the differences in picture books for readers and non-readers?

Good picture book stories are alive, believable (even when pure fantasy), direct, and to the point. From a non-reading child’s viewpoint, the words of a picture book are heard and the pictures seen. In this sense, the picture book is a direct experience related to live theater. This is the angle you’ll want to write from. Picture books tend to have universal themes with strong plots. If you can create a vivid and believable world within the brief parameters of a picture book manuscript, then you’re headed in the right direction with your story. The vibrancy and significance of picture book stories is found also in the unseen and unspoken elements of the story.

Books for beginning readers depend on repetition of simple words without outstanding narrative, though they aren't without a definite story. The words and sentences of an early reader must be brief enough to not intimidate children learning to read. The text needs to be distributed sparingly to avoid frustrating the reader. A little rhyme, some whimsical action, a bit of humor, and some charming illustrations may turn you into the next Dr. Seuss of the early reading world!

What else do I need to know about writing and revision of children’s pieces?

Young adult and juvenile stories follow the same outlines as adult literary pieces. Picture books are brief— make every word count! Keep your text tight and focused on the bones of the story. Remove unnecessary adverbs and adjectives but emphasize action verbs and vivid images formed from simple descriptions. The “show, don’t tell” rule is twice as important in kids' pieces.

As with all stories, you’ll be editing your children’s pieces for grammar, plot, setting, characterizations, and dialogue. Is your story's vocabulary at your reader's level? Children’s vocabularies are limited, but they don’t like to be talked down to. There is a fine line between understandable stories with spark and stories that use overly simplistic terminology. Using a big word here and there can tweak the child’s interest in language and learning, but too many will turn the child away from a book.

Read your story aloud many times so you really feel and hear it before you consider it finished. Conveying a sense of place adds a lot to a story, but an incorrect detail can also destroy it. Kids spot a phony plots, characters, or settings a mile away. Are your stories believable and driven by your characters, or are you twisting your characters to fit your plot? Create sufficient tension and surprise within the plot, and don’t let your endings be too predictable. If you must have a predictable ending to make a story work, lead up to it with sufficient tension so that the finale seems fresh. Are your characters flat stereotypes or are they real, multidimensional personalities? Is the characters’ dialogue realistic and to the point? Be sure that your characters’ actions always fit their personality, and that their words and actions drive the story forward. There’s no room to ramble in a picture book.

If your story has a moral or a point to make, let it be subtle. Sneak the moral in and let its discovery be fun. Kids are bored by preaching but enjoy lessons flavored with a generous dose of humor or pathos. By the same token, don’t feed kids fluff. They know that every day isn’t filled with sunshine and butterflies. Kids appreciate books that resonate with truth, enlarge their worldview, and inspire them to think or behave differently.

How do I make sure that editors understand my manuscripts?

Be professional. Research publishers' lists and follow their submission guidelines. If your story is for older children or is a picture book story coherent without illustrations, you’ll be submitting just a manuscript to possible publishers. If your work depends on illustrations and you’re not an artist, prepare a book dummy to clarify your vision of the finished book. The dummy will consist of 8 sheets of paper folded and stapled in the middle to form a 32-page booklet. Your book dummy can help you and your prospective editor experience the unity and progression of your story, see its structure in relation to pictures, and suggest needed revisions. The shape and proportions of the book dummy suggest a particular mood and guide the reader's eye in a particular direction. If you're stuck on a promising story, preparing a dummy just for yourself can be a good story-generating tool.

Children’s books are more than just stories or instructional pieces. They are an art form satisfying to make and gratifying to share. Your new interest may become your lifelong passion! Keep working and consider the many rejections you'll receive from publishers as stepping stones to success.

Kate is a published poet, creative nonfiction and feature writer. She is a mother of four, has soaked up children's literature for over twenty-five years, and enjoys retelling folk tales and cultural stories. One of her picture book stories was a runner-up in Writer’s Digest 1998 Writing Competition, and another original story was accepted for a 2002 publishing date by a house that went belly up! An early childhood story may soon be under contract with a West coast publisher.