Writing for Children

HOW TO GET YOUR NONFICTION REJECTED
If you’re like most writers, you’ve heard by now that magazines need nonfiction. Actually, magazines are desperate for nonfiction. Magazines never get enough nonfiction. So, many writers smile and settle down to write an article. How tough can it be, after all, these are just kids? Well, tough enough that many of those writers collect rejection letters. How did that happen? Are editors hot for nonfiction or aren’t they? Well, it depends.

WHERE’S YOUR BIBLIOGRAPHY?
Children’s magazine editors are just as picky about sources as any other editors. They want to know that your information is current, unique, and accurate. Most writers can only be as good as their sources. An article on penguins cobbled together from watching a Discovery program and touring a few websites is not going to impress an editor. Television documentaries are notoriously inaccurate (after all, they need drama – lots of drama) and websites often pass misinformation from one site to another.

Nonfiction requires good research and good research requires work.

Listen to the full episode for four steps to avoiding getting a rejection!

Read more in our show notes: http://writingforchildren.com/024

Don’t forget to leave your questions!

The faculty of the Institute of Children’s Literature answers the podcast questions. You can leave your question at http://www.writingforchildren.com/speak. If it’s featured on the show, you’ll receive an awesome embroidered ICL all cotton baseball cap

What’s Working in Your Manuscript, What’s Not, and How to Fix It:
Go to https://www.instituteforwriters.com/critique-service/

QUERY LETTERS
Many of the more prestigious children’s magazines (and most of the YA magazines) prefer writers query instead of sending finished manuscripts. Most book publishers and agents require queries as well. Queries help (slightly) in keeping slush piles thin, and makes the editor’s job easier in some ways and more taxing in others. Queries mean editors are responding to your idea, your professionalism, your qualifications, and your scholarship instead of your finished product.

For many writers, queries are terrifying. We know we can write, but can we pitch? And a query is a kind of pitch. You are persuading an editor that your product will be superior, but you must do so with something other than your product.

Your query must convince the editor:

* you are qualified to write the story/article/book,
* you have the skills to write the story/article/book,
* the story/article/book will fit well in that specific magazine, specific publisher, or specific agent because you understand the desired style, tone, and the specific * * needs of that magazine, publisher, agent,
* the finished story/article/book is/will be special.
* the finished nonfiction will be accurate.

The queries that tend to grab interest quickly often have a few things in common.

To find out how to increase your chances of getting your pitch picked up, listen to the full episode.

Read more in our show notes: http://writingforchildren.com/023

Don’t forget to leave your questions!

The faculty of the Institute of Children’s Literature answers the podcast questions. You can leave your question at http://www.writingforchildren.com/speak. If it’s featured on the show, you’ll receive an awesome embroidered ICL all cotton baseball cap

What’s Working in Your Manuscript, What’s Not, and How to Fix It:
Go to https://www.instituteforwriters.com/critique-service/

POETRY FOR THE VERY YOUNG

Poetry for very young children has a lot in common with poetry for older readers. It’s built word by word, as poetry has no room for extraneous words. It sounds good to the ear. It gives the reader a different way to look at the world by drawing attention very closely to something. Still, when writing for the very young, some things must be kept in mind.

Generally speaking, the younger your audience, the more concrete your poetry must be. Young children have such a limited range of experience that they cannot make connections between the sun and a golden disk because they have no point of reference for "a golden disk." When dealing with young toddlers, they have difficulty grasping comparisons at all. To a toddler, dogs are so much like cats, that if you compare them, the child may have difficulty understanding that they are really different things at all.

BABYBUG is probably the magazine geared toward the youngest of all children. Poetry in BABYBUG may contain play on sounds, but they won't use much (if any) simile. The poems for this magazine are often 10 words or so. They will focus on very common experience: seeing a dog while on an outing with mom, watching water run in a tub, discovering that both balls and trucks roll. The poetry reinforces common experience, helping children discover their world. When the poem goes outside common experience, such as a poem about a bear cub snuggling with his mother, the poem stretches his boundaries slightly, but not too far since the poem will still deal with baby friendly ideas like snuggling with mom, snow is cold, night is for sleeping.

For more tips on writing poetry for children and suggestions on what magazines to submit your poems to listen to the full episode.

Read more in our show notes: http://writingforchildren.com/022

Don’t forget to leave your questions!

The faculty of the Institute of Children’s Literature answers the podcast questions. You can leave your question at http://www.writingforchildren.com/speak. If it’s featured on the show, you’ll receive an awesome embroidered ICL all cotton baseball cap

What’s Working in Your Manuscript, What’s Not, and How to Fix It:
Go to https://www.instituteforwriters.com/critique-service/

FEELING MYSTERIOUS?

Mysteries are one of the most popular genre in literature. In books, there are even thriving sub-genre, like cozies, hard-boiled detectives, and police procedurals, that have countless fans. Magazines like Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine have been feeding the adult reader’s need for short mystery fiction for generations. But what about kids? Do children’s magazines still want mysteries or is this the land of books only?

Many children’s magazines will accept mysteries. Many editors say they would love to get more good mysteries. So what makes a story good?

* A fresh idea with a clever puzzle.
* Strong characters.
* Lively, real dialogue.

In other words, the same stuff editors want in any story. So why aren’t they getting these things in mysteries? Well, mysteries can be kind of tricky. First, you really need to plan a mystery before you start writing it. This flies in the face of the writing style of many (especially many newer writers). So they come up with a possible problem (who took the teacher’s special fountain pen?) and they know who the main character will be so they jump in and start writing. But, when the writer doesn’t know who took the pen, often the result is (1) a solution that doesn’t flow logically from the clues, (2) a solution that flows too logically, making it not a puzzle at all since everyone knew who the villain was well before your ‘detective,’ or (3) a solution that falls back on old clichés (more on these in a minute.)

How do you plan your mystery? Listen to the full episode to find out!

Read more in our show notes: http://writingforchildren.com/021

Don’t forget to leave your questions!

The faculty of the Institute of Children’s Literature answers the podcast questions. You can leave your question at http://www.writingforchildren.com/speak. If it’s featured on the show, you’ll receive an awesome embroidered ICL all cotton baseball cap

What’s Working in Your Manuscript, What’s Not, and How to Fix It:
Go to https://www.instituteforwriters.com/critique-service/

FIVE TIPS TO A GREAT MAIN CHARACTER

What makes a memorable main character? Well, for a character to carry a series of books, you’ll need to make the person memorable. Although the “every kid” type will offer instant ability for readers to connect, it won’t be enough––the character needs specific, unique traits or abilities to linger in the mind of the reader. The unique trait might be learning disability (Joey Pigza in the Joey Pigza series by Jack Gantos has ADD) or unusual ability (Cam Janson has a photographic memory) or speech patterns (Junie B. Jones speaks like a real kindergartener, which makes some people nuts, but she does sound like a five-year-old) ––but the character needs something to stand out from the pack.

1. Make the main character matter emotionally.

That doesn’t mean the MC must be a paragon of virtue (in fact, no one like’s perfect people since they don’t read “real” and they’re kind of obnoxious), but you must give the character something we can connect with so that their fate matters to us. It’s the weakness in a character (and the character’s voice) that makes him/her linger in our minds.

For four more tips creating a great main character, listen to this episode of Writing for Children.

Find out how to be a good partner for your illustrator by listening to this episode!

Read more in our show notes plus get a handy guide on word count in today's children's publishing market at http://writingforchildren.com/020

Don’t forget to leave your questions!

The faculty of the Institute of Children’s Literature answers the podcast questions. You can leave your question at http://www.writingforchildren.com/speak. If it’s featured on the show, you’ll receive an awesome embroidered ICL all cotton baseball cap

What’s Working in Your Manuscript, What’s Not, and How to Fix It:
Go to https://www.instituteforwriters.com/critique-service/

BE A GOOD PARTNER!

These tips come from notes taken at a Writer's Retreat several years ago when the wonderful illustrator Brian Lies helped us gain an illustrator's eye view:

* Think about how things look as you write.

Sometimes we writers choose creatures for a story based on how funny they sound to our ear. We might giggle at the idea of an elephant who goes to live with a family of mice––but think for a minute about the job of the illustrator. How big is an elephant? How big is a mouse? How do we make them both fit on a page? Are we saddling the illustrator with choosing between showing the whole elephant (and little dots of mice) or showing the whole mouse (and just the tip of the elephant's trunk or perhaps a toe).

* Consider little things that make illustrations interesting.

It might be interesting to read a story that is a conversation between two kids––but after the first illustration, it's pretty dull to draw it. Keep the characters moving --new actions, new places, and new times of day can go a long way to making the story look good.

Find out how to be a good partner for your illustrator by listening to this episode!

Read more in our show notes plus get a handy guide on word count in today's children's publishing market at http://writingforchildren.com/019

Don’t forget to leave your questions!

The faculty of the Institute of Children’s Literature answers the podcast questions. You can leave your question at http://www.writingforchildren.com/speak. If it’s featured on the show, you’ll receive an awesome embroidered ICL all cotton baseball cap

What’s Working in Your Manuscript, What’s Not, and How to Fix It:
Go to https://www.instituteforwriters.com/critique-service/

DO YOU SOUND LIKE A KID?

Dialogue is one of the best ways to connect with readers and one of the quickest ways to lose them. Your readers know a fake kid when they listen to one––so your dialogue not only carries plot and characterization burdens, it needs to be real. Let’s look at some tips for “realifying” your dialogue.

Eavesdrop on kids. Libraries are great places to do this because no matter how often they’re shushed, when kids gather, they talk. You can often grab a chair or table near a gathering spot and simply take dictation. Then, when you’re at home, you can analyze what things make kid-speak unique.

Catch Kid TV. Yes, it hurts and it can be didactic and goofy, but bad kid tv will teach you almost as much as good kid tv. You’ll learn to identify young characters who are slipping into overly mature speeches and preaching to the audience––and then you can avoid it in your own characters. Not all kid-speak on tv is good––a lot of it is horrible. Spend time listening and you can begin to identify good and bad.

Find out how by listening to this episode!

Read more in our show notes plus get clickable links at http://writingforchildren.com/018

Don’t forget to leave your questions!

The faculty of the Institute of Children’s Literature answers the podcast questions. You can leave your question at http://www.writingforchildren.com/speak. If it’s featured on the show, you’ll receive an awesome embroidered ICL all cotton baseball cap

What’s Working in Your Manuscript, What’s Not, and How to Fix It:
Go to https://www.instituteforwriters.com/critique-service/

IS LAUGHTER REALLY THE BEST MEDICINE?

I don't know, but I do suspect that laughter is a great way to get published. If you spend much time listening to acquiring editors or librarians or agents, you'll soon discover that humor is very much something they desire. Kids love books that make them laugh. Humans, in general, appreciate humor, even in the darkest times.

Unrelenting horror or pain is hard to survive, so being able to step outside it, even a little, to laugh can be life-saving. And readers will appreciate a story that allows them to do that. But for an author to find the way to do that takes a little understanding of how humor works.

In Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, the alien character tries to understand laughter and comes to the conclusion that it's about pain and wrongness. In some ways, there is truth there. But, as a writer, I'm looking at humor as a technique and "pain" isn't really a helpful answer for me. So I began to look for what really makes something funny. What is a basic foundation of written humor that I can build on to lighten up my writing?

Find out how by listening to this episode!

Read more in our show notes plus get clickable links at http://writingforchildren.com/017

Don’t forget to leave your questions!

The faculty of the Institute of Children’s Literature answers the podcast questions. You can leave your question at http://www.writingforchildren.com/speak. If it’s featured on the show, you’ll receive an awesome embroidered ICL all cotton baseball cap

What’s Working in Your Manuscript, What’s Not, and How to Fix It:
Go to https://www.instituteforwriters.com/critique-service/

NEVER ADD THE ADVERB JUST BECAUSE ‘SAID’ FEELS BORING

Why is Harry Potter full of adverbs? Mostly to make the tag lines feel interesting to the writer. That’s pretty much the same reason adverbs clutter up the tag lines of many examples of beginning writing. Let’s face it, tag lines just feel boring. They aren’t particularly active and they feel redundant…he said, she said, he said, she said. As writers, we hate the idea that anything we write is boring so we look for ways to jazz it  up. And adverbs feel like one way, but without care, adverbs can become a little silly.

“I could eat you up!” he snapped bitingly.

“Get away from me!” he yelled loudly.

One excellent cure for the tagline blahs is to alternate a little narrative action for the tag lines; this gets more movement into the scene, increases our sense of being there, and adds sentence variety. Another cure is to cut tags if the speaker is extremely clear and you want to create a brisker pace. A balance between simple tag lines (using said or asked), the rare unusual tag verb (whispered or bellowed, but never queried or continued, keep it simple enough to add without distracting), narrative action, and simply untagged speech will quickly cure the tag line blahs. Then you can add your adverbs to tag lines only when you know they’re the perfect  word for the job.

“If you need an adverb,” he said decisively. “Then use an adverb!”

When is it okay to use an adverb? Listen to the episode and find out!

Read more in our show notes plus get clickable links at http://writingforchildren.com/016

Don’t forget to leave your questions!

The faculty of the Institute of Children’s Literature answers the podcast questions. You can leave your question at http://www.writingforchildren.com/speak. If it’s featured on the show, you’ll receive an awesome embroidered ICL all cotton baseball cap

What’s Working in Your Manuscript, What’s Not, and How to Fix It:
Go to https://www.instituteforwriters.com/critique-service/

HOW EVIL ARE ADVERBS?

Have you heard yet that adverbs are evil? Writers often mention their critique groups cutting out all their lovely adverbs. And you can also find writing books vilifying adverbs as an archaic evil creeping into modern prose. So, are adverbs evil? And if so, how do you make sure to kill them all?

WHAT IS AN ADVERB ANYWAY?

When you think of adverbs, you probably picture those –ly lovelies that shore up the dialogue tags:

“You’re not the sharpest knife in the drawer,” she said cuttingly.
“I love pillows,” he said softly.
“I invented the light bulb!” Edison said brightly.

But adverbs can be single words without an –ly also, and they can even be phrases. The key to whether something is an adverb is whether it adds more information to the verb.

She walks fast. [The adverb is "fast"]
Mark throws with precision. [The adverb is “with precision”]
Jack eats often. [The adverb is “often”]

So an adverb serves an informational purpose in a sentence; that’s good, right? So why are writers afraid of them? Sure, J.K.Rowling sprinkles them like spring rain through all of her Harry Potter books, but many editors frown on them. Why is that? Aren’t they a perfectly good part of speech? Don’t they serve a purpose?

Actually adverbs can be a very good thing.

Find out why in this episode.

Read more in our show notes plus get clickable links at http://writingforchildren.com/015

Don’t forget to leave your questions!

The faculty of the Institute of Children’s Literature answers the podcast questions. You can leave your question at http://www.writingforchildren.com/speak. If it’s featured on the show, you’ll receive an awesome embroidered ICL all cotton baseball cap

What’s Working in Your Manuscript, What’s Not, and How to Fix It:
Go to https://www.instituteforwriters.com/critique-service/