Books are made in the self-edit stage, so keep going until you have something that is really quite something. Because nothing much less will be good enough when it comes to the next stage…
But first – I want to pause and look at some common mistakes. Because these are the things you need to watch out for before you even think about sending out to agents.
The cry-baby little sister. The dysfunctional dad. There are certain stereotypes we take for granted. So think when you make decisions about every character in your novel – can they be subverted? Can you show that boys can cry too, and that dad’s can do all the housework? This goes for race, gender, sexuality, disability and pretty much everything else. Write characters, not clichés.
This is becoming increasingly important in children’s fiction – and so it should. If you are writing about a character with an experience different to your own, then you need to ensure you do copious amount of research – including speaking to people who live this experience. This especially goes for anything to do with race, gender, sexuality and disability. There are things you can do to help ensure you are not portraying these lives in a way that is stereotypical or harmful. Sensitivity readers are now becoming a mainstay in children’s publishing and authors can even hire their own if they feel the need to check their facts. You should know however that no amount of research ever makes up for the real experience and you should learn from any feedback you have from readers, rather than challenge it.
Don’t let this put you off writing diversely as this is incredibly important for all children’s writers to do, whatever background they are from. But ensure you do it sensitively.
Think about what the inciting incident is, then give your readers an idea of what life was like for the main character before then. If the inciting incident is about to send them on a big adventure, then show the contrasting quiet life they had before then. If the big character arc is that they become braver, show them being scared early on in the story.
Alternatively, don’t go the other way and start your story somewhere that has nothing to do with the rest of the story, just because it is more exciting than waking up.
Your opening scene should excite, but it should also introduce the reader to the world that will appear in the rest of the story. So, if you’re story is about a girl’s relationship with her mother, then don’t start your story in the middle of a fist-fight unless that very quickly turns into something to do with the mother.
Of course, this changes if you are writing fantasy where the beginning of the novel is set in the everyday world before the magic is let loose. Still here though, ensure you are spending time introducing us to the characters and situations that will be important throughout the rest of the story.
Pick one, and stick to it (flashbacks permitting!). There’s nothing worse than reading a story that switches heads or propels us back and forth in time. Try reading this article on Psychic Distance if you need more clarification.
Depending on the the age of the children you may want to stick with one or two points of view so they find it easier to follow, but once you are writing young adult novels for teens, then don’t hold back from pushing boundaries and being brave with format and structure.
This is one of the biggest mistakes I see writers make – including myself. When you are trying to explain a world or situation, it can sometimes be easier to just dump that information on the page. And some of that is fine, but too much can slow action and feel amateur.
This one is particularly for the picture book writers amongst you. Rhymes are wonderful when they work, but I’ve seen writers fall into the trap of sacrificing sentence meaning to shoehorn in a rhyme.
If you are struggling to make a sentence flow because of your rhyming structure, then try something else. Or try no rhyme at all! Some of my favourite picture books don’t rhyme – it’s all about the characters and the story you are telling.
All new writers seem to fall into this trap. Perhaps we want to show off how beautifully we can write, so we pen long, languid sentences that dazzle and glitter with sparkly splendour.
Unfortunately, they also weigh down your words. Keep your sentences to the point and I promise that those metaphors and similes that you do scatter in, will be all the more breath-taking because of it.
This doesn’t feel very realistic, does it? That’s because people don’t tend to spend their time reiterating things they all already know. Avoid doing this in your own book – especially with parents and their children, which tends to be where the clunkiest dialogue comes into its own! Try these tips on writing realistic dialogue.
Finally, we have the ending. There is nothing worse than rooting for a child protagonist all the way through a book, only to have a grown-up step in and save the day at the end. Children want to see themselves as having the power to change the world. Sometimes, that might mean asking for help from a grown-up, but the decision to conquer should always come from the child.
This could be a whole other blog article in itself, and indeed there are plenty around. The more comprehensive overviews are things like this article on how to get a book published, or this one on how to find an agent.
Little Mermaid StoriesAgents will receive around two-thousand submissions every year and will only have space to take on one or two. Out of these one or two, a third then never find a publisher.
So the odds are perhaps not in your favour. But that’s okay. Because the fact that you have read all the way to the bottom of this blog post tells me that you are serious about writing a brilliant children’s book. And brilliant children’s books are the only ones that get published.
The other alternative to getting your book published is self-publishing. This shouldn’t be seen as a ‘last resort’ option. In fact, plenty of authors create lucrative careers from publishing independently and it is fast becoming the number one option for a lot of writers.
It can be a little harder to self-publish in the world of children’s books. Illustrated books don’t always transfer to eBook easily and the market tends to favour print in general. However, there are authors who are doing really well in the YA genre fiction market, particularly for things like paranormal romance. If you are interested in this option, then you can find plenty of free information here.
Being a children’s author takes an incredible amount of hard work and dedication, but it is the most fulfilling thing you can do (in my biased opinion!) Children don’t like books, they LOVE them. And once your book is published, hearing from those readers makes every step of this whole process completely worthwhile.
I’ve mentioned the Jericho Writers membership a few times in this article, and it is something to think about if you are serious about carving a career for yourself as a children’s author. Reading and writing will take us so far, but sometimes we need a helping hand from the experts to create something at the level it needs to be to get published. You can find out more about that membership here.
Sarah Ann Juckes writes books for young people. Her YA debut, Outside, was nominated for the Carnegie Medal Award 2020, shortlisted for Mslexia's Children's Novel Award and longlisted for the Bath Novel Award. Her YA novel The World Between Us will be published in five languages and her Middle Grade novel, The Hunt for the Nightingale was published in early 2022. Sarah is a Trustee for Creative Future, a charity supporting under-represented writers. You can often find her hibernating in her writing shed in East Sussex, with her cat. See more on Sarah's website, Twitter, or Amazon author page.
This year, more busy teachers and homeschoolers are looking for easy creative writing lesson plans, and some of them have used my summer writing prompts and my Christmas writing prompts.
So I put together this list of writing prompts for kids. They include some story starters, some funny writing prompts, and some mystery and adventure ideas. I hope these are helpful for parents looking for creative writing activities, too…so their kids can learn how fun writing can be. Then again, maybe they already know!
If you liked my story ideas for kids, please share them on Facebook, Pinterest, or Twitter—I really appreciate it! And if you don’t want to miss future posts, be sure to subscribe to the blog. Thanks so much for reading, and have a great rest of your week!
Thanks for this post. I think this is a great idea. Since my grandson always wants me to tell him stories and he always adds to them, I can simply give him one of these and let him create the stories. Also, I have several friends who are teachers. I will share your post with them. I’m sure they will appreciate these.
Hi Bryn, Just what I needed and at the perfect time! How did you guess? Tomorrow morning I am giving a Zoom meeting through Nepris for a class of 4th-graders. The topic is writing fiction. Since I am a Discovery Writer, I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to present “how to write fiction” till I remembered your index card plot illustration from Blank Page to Final Draft page 61. I simplified it a bit. Haha. I’ll bet you didn’t think it could be simpler than what you created. (Don’t worry, I give you credit) I feel confident now, that I will be able to help the students “see” the structure of a story. And then the BIG FINISH. We can let them choose an idea from your list to write their own story. It’s Perfect! Thank you so very much not only for this post, but also for all the tips, ideas, encouragement, and (OK I admit it) LOVE you give and are willing to receive.
Jessie! You’ll probably be done teaching by the time you read this, but that’s so great that this was helpful! I love it. Lucky kids, getting you for a guest teacher! Thanks so much for the kind words…you made my day. 🙂
YES! This is perfect timing. Both my kids have expressed interest in writing, and the youngest is getting a word processing machine (a Neo2) from Santa (he asked; how can I say no??) so I might have to print out this list for them. Thank you, Bryn!! <3
Hi there! Thank you so much for this incredible prompts! I have a little cousin who doesn´t like to write, she says that she never gets good ideas and that she gets bored when she’s writing, so I’ll try to use this prompts to increase her writing. There are so many funny and cute ideas in this post so I am sure that she will find something she would love to write about.
This is a very generous list! Thank you. Also , it reminded me that my dad always used to make up a story when he tucked me in at night, so good for this too.
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Choosing the right books for your child is important; getting it right the first few times can spark the beginnings of a lifelong enthusiasm for reading. So how can you spot a good children's book amongst the dizzying variety of titles and genres?
Start your free trial of Reading Eggs and let your child enjoy the children's book library, as well as hundreds of phonics and reading lessons that are fun and highly interactive.
Choose books that allow your child to explore different worlds and lives but are still familiar enough that they can see themselves in the characters. Even if it's a story set in an imaginary world of monsters and fairies, if the characters have hopes and desires that are easy to relate to, your child will be more interested in reading it until the end.
Whether it's learning a timeless moral in The Tortoise and the Hare or learning about numbers, fruit, and days of the week in The Very Hungry Caterpillar, the best books often teach things without us even realizing it. Choose books that deliver an important message or subtly teach essential skills such as the alphabet, counting, colors, or seasons.
Children's author Libby Gleeson suggests that when choosing a good book for children, parents should “resist the desire only to feed their children the books they loved when they were young”. Your child may not share the same passion for your childhood classics, and, as Gleeson notes, “The world has changed and children have changed.”
Use the Five Finger Rule if your child will be reading on their own. If the book has a few difficult words, read it aloud together with your child. There's nothing wrong with exposing children to more complex language in context. But if you know the language and concepts will be too difficult for them to enjoy the story, avoid putting them off reading altogether by choosing a simpler book.
Vivid and clear imagery that supports the story is powerful for early readers aged 4–8. Choose books that have good illustrations that correspond with the storyline. Wordless books are also a great way to develop your child's language skills, as they require readers to interpret the illustrations as the story progresses.
How many times has your child requested yet another reading of Dr Seuss? Books that rhyme or have a good lyrical flow are fun to read aloud and listen to. Read with enthusiasm and use different voices for different characters to bring the reading experience to life.
Talk to your child's teacher, librarian, or other parents to find out about popular children's books. Alternatively, search online for award-winning children's book lists or hop onto book review sites to read what other parents are suggesting. Jump on TikTok and check out what’s trending.
At the end of the day, what makes a good children's book is any age‑appropriate book your child wants to read! Let your child choose which books they would like to read because choosing to read over not choosing to read is a significant step towards a lifelong love of reading.
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Looking at and listening to picture and story books is a ubiquitous activity, frequently enjoyed by many young children and their parents. Well before children can read for themselves they are able to learn from books. Looking at and listening to books increases children's general knowledge, understanding about the world, and promotes language acquisition. This collection of papers demonstrates the breadth of information pre-reading children learn from books and increases our understanding of the social and cognitive mechanisms that support this learning. Our hope is that this Research Topic/eBook will be useful for researchers as well as educational practitioners and parents who are interested in optimizing children's learning.
We conceptually divide this research topic into four broad sections, which focus on the nature and attributes of picture and story books, what children learn from picture and story books, the interactions children experience during shared reading, and potential applications of research into shared reading, respectively.
Bedtime Storybook Bedtime Story Bedtime StoriesThe first section of this research topic focuses on the nature and structural attributes of picture and story books that influence the benefits of shared book reading. Three papers report empirical studies exploring how changes in story book attributes influence adult interaction style and child recall of story content (Greenhoot et al., 2014; Nyhout and O'Neill, 2014; Read, 2014). Greenhoot et al. (2014) examine the effect of storybook illustrations. Specifically, they gave parents either illustrated or non-illustrated stories to read with their 3–4-year-old children. Illustrated stories lead to more verbal and non-verbal exchanges between parents and children during shared reading and better recall of the story events by children. Nyhout and O'Neill (2014) explore the impact of narrative structure on book reading style. Parents read picture books to their 21-month-old children that either included contextual illustrations (narrative) or decontextualized illustrations (non-narrative). Although the two types of books elicited the same number of natural facts about animals overall, mothers reading narrative books provided more story-specific statements about the animals while mothers reading non-narrative books provided more labels and physical descriptions of animals. Finally, Read (2014) examined the effect of rhyme on children's learning of names for novel monsters. Two- to four-year-old children heard stories where either monster names did not rhyme with a descriptive feature, or where the name occurred before the feature (non-predictive rhyme) or after the feature (predictive rhyme). Children identified significantly more monsters by name if the names followed a predictive rhyme. Together, this sub-collection of papers demonstrates the dramatic influence picture and storybook attributes can have on parent reading behavior and children's learning.
The next two papers present cross-cultural comparisons of the messages conveyed by storybooks (Suprawati et al., 2014; Vander Wege et al., 2014). Suprawati et al. (2014) compared the nature of the challenges faced by protagonists in story books published in Indonesia, Japan and the United States, along with how these challenges were resolved. Japanese stories contained the largest number of challenges, and a greater proportion of challenges that were resolved by the protagonist alone compared to American stories. In a similar vein, Vander Wege et al. (2014) coded the illustrations of books published in Romania, Turkey and the United States for the depiction of emotional expressions. As predicted by cultural norms, American books showed more intense emotional reactions—especially negative expressions. These studies reveal that story books reflect (and may also teach children about) the values of one's cultural group.
The final two papers in this section consider the methods used by researchers to establish which features of story books best support learning. Wagner (2013) provides an opinion piece arguing for the need of a quantitative database of the content of children's books. She explains how such a database could be used to support theoretical claims about the content of picture books and to identify testable hypotheses about the features that help children learn to retell stories. A second methodological paper, by Burris and Brown (2014), reviews the external validity of narrative comprehension assessments, drawing particular attention to research with children from low-SES and minority populations. They argue that researchers should test comprehension using real-time, on-line assessments during the story reading (e.g., think-aloud protocols, probe questions), as well as off-line assessments of children's comprehension (e.g., free recall, cued recall and story retelling).
The next section in the series focuses on what children learn from storybooks. Three papers focus specifically on word learning (Houston-Price et al., 2014; Khu et al., 2014; Williams and Horst, 2014) and a further six focus on how shared book reading supports developments in children's understanding of people (Abad and Pruden, 2013; Golos and Moses, 2013), animals (Ganea et al., 2014; Waxman et al., 2014), food (Heath et al., 2014), and even geometry concepts (Flevares and Schiff, 2014). Khu et al. (2014) demonstrate that teaching 21-month-old toddlers the name of a novel object through a picture book facilitates their ability to learn objects' non-obvious properties (e.g., lighting-up with applied pressure; introduced through a second picture book). Houston-Price et al. (2014) found that both 4- and 6-year-olds were able to provide accurate definitions of new words introduced in stories, but that only the older group formed lexical representations that enabled them to make correct grammaticality judgments about these words. By reading stories immediately before nap time, Williams and Horst (2014) were able to explore the added benefit of sleep on word learning from story books in a preschool sample. Together, these papers add to the literature demonstrating that children acquire new vocabulary knowledge through picture and storybooks (see also Read, 2014) and further elucidate the extent and depth of the knowledge gained.
The next two papers present opinions on how story book characters can help change children's stereotypes. First, Abad and Pruden (2013) synthesize what we know about the influence of story books whose characters engage in atypical gender behavior on children's subsequent play. The authors argue that story books provide a practical (and inexpensive) method for influencing gender stereotypes in a positive way. Golos and Moses (2013) take a similar approach to examining children's perceptions of deaf characters. In addition to reviewing how story books can help present the Deaf community positively, Golos and Moses make recommendations about the quality of the story line required if story books are to captivate and engage children.
The next pair of papers examines the effects of anthropomorphism in story books (Ganea et al., 2014; Waxman et al., 2014). In Ganea et al. (2014), 3–5-year-olds were read books with either anthropomorphic or realistic illustrations and either anthropomorphized or factual language. Both anthropomorphic illustrations and language lead to lower levels of learning, especially for the youngest children. In Waxman et al. (2014), 5-year-old children listened to a book about bears before completing a reasoning task. Children who read a book depicting bears scientifically (e.g., Animal Encyclopedia) generalized properties from one animal to another in the reasoning task (a biological perspective), while those who read a book depicting bears anthropomorphically (e.g., The Berenstain Bears) did not. Note, the stories used by Nyhout and O'Neill (2014) and Greenhoot et al. (2014) also included animals.
The final pair of papers in this section branch out to explore how story books can be used to change children's perceptions of food and mathematics (Heath et al., 2014). Heath et al. (2014) report that looking at picture books about an unfamiliar vegetable with toddlers encourages them to eat the vegetable when it is later offered at a mealtime. The effect was largest for foods that were unfamiliar to children before they saw the books. Heath et al. suggest that picture books might help more broadly to familiarize children with situations that they might otherwise reject. Flevares and Schiff (2014) undertake a chronological review of the evolution of different perspectives on the role of books in supporting school-aged children's learning of mathematical concepts, such as plane geometry. They explore the benefits of using picture-based literature for children's learning of and motivation to engage with mathematics concepts, and for the training of teachers in the delivery of these concepts.
The third section in the series focuses on how children and parents interact with the story and each other during shared reading situations. Two papers in this section focus on the reading behaviors of middle-class African American (Harris and Rothlein, 2014) and Japanese (Murase, 2014) mothers. Harris and Rothlein (2014) found large individual differences in mothers' reading styles. However, the most common narrative-eliciting strategies included questions about the characters and refocusing statements (e.g., directing the child to look back at the illustration). Murase's (2014) 7-month longitudinal study of maternal reading behavior found that mothers initially focus on providing information to children and that they display more requests for information over time. The number of information-seeking requests by mothers was positively correlated with children's productive vocabularies. In the next paper, Kucirkova (2013) reviews how children interact with iPad books, which she suggests offer a useful tool for examining how children engage with stories. Kucirkova also highlights the need for researchers to acknowledge the learning opportunities provided by children's increasing experiences with digital media.
The final section of the series takes a more applied angle. Two papers (Adlof et al., 2014; Tsunemi et al., 2014) present preliminary data from interventions using story books that show promise in helping children improve key skills. Adlof et al. (2014) confirmed the feasibility of a new intervention for low-SES children: structured narrative retell instruction (SNRI). In a group intervention, clinicians asked children questions about each component of the narrative (e.g., the characters) after each reading. Children who completed the intervention showed improvements in narrative macrostructure (including the total number and diversity of the words they used and their mean length of utterance) and overall vocabulary scores. Tsunemi et al.'s (2014) intervention aimed to help school-aged children with autism improve their social perspective-taking skills. Parents read narrative books to their children for almost a week and asked questions about the mental states of the characters after each reading. Children in the intervention group improved in their ability to take second- and third-person perspectives in a social perspective-taking task. Together, this pair of feasibility studies suggests that narrative storybooks provide a suitable medium for a range of interventions to support children's development.
The goal of this Research Topic was to foster an interdisciplinary exchange of the methods that have been used to uncover how and what young children learn from books and the knowledge that this work has revealed. The final collection of articles has exceeded our expectations in regard to its breadth of offering, including work by researchers from fields comprising communication science, education, linguistics, psychology and speech and language disorders. The volume provides an eclectic but complementary overview of the current state of research on the status of picture and story books in young children's development. Our reading of this literature is that books are a powerful and somewhat unharnessed resource that could be employed to a much greater extent to help children to engage with and make sense of the world around them.
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