The Do's and Don'ts of Writing for Children

 I have one children's picture book that is currently published, but I have five children, so I feel like I am justified in talking about some basics when it comes for writing for children. I am going to use my book: Sal, Captain of the Baby Guards, and a middle reader book, Saving Bigfoot Valley, that just got a five-star review from me for examples.

1. Know your audience. Many people writing Indie books for children and think they all have to rhyme. This is false. In fact, unless you are a poet, you really shouldn't rhyme. Many books that I have reviewed in this past year that were rhyming children's books were written by people who used slant rhymes and neglected the meter. Sal, of course, doesn't rhyme. I actually have no desire to write a rhyming children's book. As you move into older age groups (i.e. 8+ is when beginning chapter books should start transitioning into a child's reading diet if not before), rhyming is not going to capture your audience. 

2. Unless your book has an upper and lower age limit, do not set it on Amazon. I get it. This feature can help you target your age group in Amazon searches. However, there is a big problem that I have occasionally fallen into: If you set a lower age limit, i.e. 14 years old, the upper limit is sometimes set to 18. 

So, if you click to Sal, you will see the age limit of 7-9. I probably should lower that to 3-9, but this works because adults are not going to pick up a picture book to read. Since the topic of the book is  a fear of vacuum cleaners, older kids aren't really going to be interested in it either. S.D. Brown's Saving Bigfoot Valley is targeting a specific age group: 9-12 year olds. Since this book talks about body changes during puberty, this is a good age group. One problem would happen if you wrote, say a book like Twilight, which would appeal to 14-year olds, but the top accidentally got set to 18 years. Twilight is a book that appeals to both children and young adults, so you have limited your audience. The other problem would be setting an adult book with adult subject matter to, say 13+, because it was written at a 4th-grade level. In this case, you are identifying your book as fit for children when the subject matter is not. Misidentifying your audience can lead to bad reviews. 

3. Including objectionable material in kids books. I list many things as "potentially offensive" in my reviews, including things like "parental disrespect" that some people might not find offensive at all. In this case, though it covers only the biggies: anything other than mild violence, rape (there a limited places where this could be used offscreen in a high school/YA book), any sex (again, offscreen is now okay in YA books, but this subject is touchy, so it's best not handled even in YA), religious topics unless it is a religious book, political topics unless it is a political book, LGBQT+ unless your book is an LGBQT+ book.

Anyone who has read the news, knows that several books are being banned from libraries and other places. Parents ultimately get to decide what their kids read, see, and hear. Inherent in the freedom of speech is the freedom to not listen to speech. If you include objectionable material in your book, you need to inform people about it instead of trying to sneak it under the radar just to sell books. Not telling your audience what they can expect leads to poor reviews and getting your book banned when parents allow their kids to check out a "children's book" only to find out it isn't. 

4. Does your theme make sense to the age group?

Just because you make a cartoon filled book, doesn't mean it is for children. If you make an adult cartoon book, you need to make sure that it is clear the audience is for adults. Animal Farm is a book about animals, but it also contains complex sociopolitical themes. It isn't really a book for 5-year olds. Think about what you want to say with your book and about the story you are telling. For younger children, complex explanations about nuclear physics is not appropriate. At the same time, books about everything from birthdays to potty training are in abundance. My son was afraid of the vacuum cleaner, which is why I wrote Sal. I couldn't find any books about that fear. For middle schoolers, the difficulties of going through puberty and books that show good examples of friendship are appropriate, but a book about potty training at this level or where a character gets married would not be. Young Adult books usually have characters who are on their own and out in the world--even if the character is only 16 and technically too young to have to face those things. Some books can appeal to more than one audience, but if you try to do that and fail, you risk getting bad reviews. 

Review: Saving Bigfoot Valley by S.D. Brown/Spike Brown

 In my reviewers group, this was a great find for upper elementary and middle school kids:

Potentially offensive items: mild violence, lying

This is the second book I’ve read by S.D. Brown, and I must admit, I was looking forward to it. I read Saving Bigfoot Valley with my fourth-grader before bed. She really got into it, was engaged and laughing, and afterward she wanted to discuss with me how she would have made better choices than some of those made by the main character, Arrth. In short, she enjoyed it immensely.

Bigfoot Valley is shielded by an advanced cloaking device. When Arrth, a “little” Bigfoot decides to save a rabbit from death at the hands of a hunter just outside the shield, he accidentally delivers one of the cloaking device repeaters into the skin-face’s hands causing the shield to destabilize. Wanting to make amends for his actions by finding and returning the device, he sneaks out of Bigfoot Valley and into the nearby skin-face town of Willow Creek (pop. 1743). Will he be able to do it before the remaining repeaters can no longer handle the load and shut down or will Bigfoot Valley have to be abandoned so the skin-faces don’t hunt all the Bigfoots (Bigfeet?) to extinction?

Many coming-of-age books focus on falling in love, but that is only one aspect of growing up. Here, the focus is on body changes, awkward clumsiness, and taking responsibility for your actions. There are a few schoolgirl crushes, but the story never becomes a romance, making it appropriate for older elementary and middle schoolers. It did have some typos, but it was so cute and appealing that it was easy to skip over them.

You Can't Break Grammar Rules You Don't Know

The last two indie published books I read (by two different authors mind you) were the same. Not in plotting or characters but in the fact that they existed on single sentence and single sentence fragment paragraphs. As in, almost the entire book was written this way with the authors hitting "enter" instead of the space bar after each sentence. 

Most people don't know anything about grammar except "rules were made to be broken." If you fall in that group, it isn't something to brag about any more than you should brag you are among those who know how to swim just enough to get yourself (or someone else) drowned. Personally, if you haven't taken at least one writing course at a college ranked in the top 100 in the U.S. or top 500 internationally by U.S. News and World Report, you need cough up the money hire an editor (and an editor is always good even if you have met the above requirement). I know, I am being harsh, but an unedited book doesn't just harm its author, it harms all indie authors. It keeps them from being accepted into contests for the traditionally published and encourages editors at traditional publishing companies to toss submissions from unsolicited authors without reading them. 

However, I am fair, I will explain what a sentence is (in case you were flirting with the kid next to you instead of listening in your high school class), what a paragraph is, and when sentence fragments may be appropriate. 

A sentence must have a subject and a verb. She ran. When I homeschool my children, I don't accept sentences under eight words. As you can tell reading this post, I practice what I teach (for the most part--I don't generally go back and edit my blogging posts). Short sentences have their place: They increase tension; they are great for young, new readers; they can stylistically be used to flush out a specific character's nuances through dialogue, and if someone knows how to use them correctly, they can contribute to an experimental or poetic work. If you didn't get a full on B.A. in English from one of the abovementioned colleges, don't even think you can craft something in that last category, please. I hate to say "no," but the fact of the matter is that one in a million people can do something like that without any training and 500,000 in a million will think they are that one. 

An incomplete sentence or sentence fragment, can be short or long and can have both a subject and a verb, but it is dependent on more information to form a complete thought. Into the night, the butterfly flitting left and right, fully abandoning myself to the freedom. That was a fragment. I know you are probably thinking that is just a jumble of nonsense and could never be a sentence. Try adding "I followed" at the beginning: I followed, into the night, the butterfly flitting left and right, fully abandoning myself to the freedom.

Fragments can be tricky. Most indie authors I read get overexcited about putting them in everyone's dialogue because they believe that is how people really talk. For one character, that could work. In response to a question in a tense moment, that could work. However, speaking in fragments denotes a character of lower intelligence (or one who wants you to think s/he is dumb). If you actually listened to people, you would soon discover that most use complete sentences in their dialogue most of the time. 

Another rule I have for my children are that their paragraphs must always be at least five sentences, but I am much more flexible on this. First, variety in paragraph size is a good thing. It adds interest to what you are reading. Second, whenever a new character talks, it needs to be a new paragraph:

"Will you go home with me?"

"No!"

"Why not?

"The game isn't over!"

The above is a perfectly natural stream of one-sentence paragraphs. However, when that is the way you wrote your entire book without rhyme or reason, it is like going to a movie and finding out the only background music through the adventurous parts, through the romantic parts, and through the comedic parts, is the same pounding four bars of music over and over and over and over and over again. You also would not want to write an entire book of back and forth one-liner dialogue. 

In high school, we were given paragraphs and told to find the main idea and then list the supporting details. Read your paragraph, and see if any of the supporting details ended up in the next paragraph (or next five paragraphs if you have resorted to mistaking the space bar for the "enter" key). Or pay a good editor to fix it (i.e., not an editor who is like, "Oh, you are such a creative genius for not using standard paragraph and sentence structure.")