Compose your first book for children.
This course will teach you how to write compelling, genuine stories that will connect with your audience by drawing on writing skill and child psychology.
As you progress through this course, you will produce one or more stories, workshop preexisting material, and analyse current trends and popular children’s books.
This course is great for prospective writers who want to strengthen their foundations or gain confidence in their skills. It can also aid more seasoned writers in gaining a deeper comprehension of genre, modes, and literary forms or a basic awareness of the principles underlying creative writing.
You’ll learn:
- short stories
- non-fiction for children
- picture books
- novels
- revision processes
Student Comment:
“I never considered children’s writing very stimulating, until now”. — Janine
Lesson Structure
There are 10 lessons in this course:
- Introduction
- Understanding Children
- Children’s thoughts
- Children’s needs
- Child development.
- Overview of Children’s Writing
- Categories (fiction & non fiction)
- Understanding the market place
- Analyse and understand what is needed for the different categories, etc.
- Conceptualisation: Conceiving a concept
- Where & how to find inspiration/influence.
- Developing a concept
- How to plan.
- Children’s Writing for Periodicals
- Children’s pages in magazines
- Newspapers, etc.
- Short Stories
- Non-Fiction
- Texts (writing to satisfy curriculum).
- Other (eg. nature, history, biography, hobbies).
- Fiction
- Settings
- Characterisation
- Fantasy
- Science fiction
- Adventure.
- Picture Books and Story Books
- Differences between types of picture books
- Age groups and picture books
- Editing your work
- Grammar
- Spelling & punctuation
- Improving clarity
- Cleaning out clutter
- Expansions.
- Project
- Write a short story, picture book or kids page for a (hypothetical) periodical.
Each lesson culminates in an assignment which is submitted to the school, marked by the school’s tutors and returned to you with any relevant suggestions, comments, and if necessary, extra reading.
Aims
- Explain the cognitive growth of children and set writing goals for various developmental stages.
- Describe the characteristics and range of children’s writing.
- Explain the planning process for a children’s writing work.
- Explain the preparation and procedures used when writing for children’s publications.
- Create a children’s short narrative for them to read.
- Describe the particular standards for producing children’s non-fiction.
- Explain the many subgenres of children’s literature as well as the writing techniques used.
- Describe the range and makeup of children’s literature.
- Describe the range and importance of editing techniques for children’s writing.
- Create a piece of writing for kids, assess it, modify it, and then deliver it.
How You Plan to Act
- Create lists of fictitious book titles and synopses for tales that would be suitable for children of various ages in your society (or nation).
- Examine the page(s) in a book geared at children in terms of the language used, the writing style, the substance, the graphic design, and more.
- Establish themes for kids’ writing.
- Create outlines for each subject that will aid you in writing about them.
- Consider what, in your opinion, is the aim of a children’s page in a daily newspaper and create a set of criteria (or a strategy) that a writer should adhere to when regularly preparing a children’s page in a newspaper.
- Why do you think this would be the greatest method for you to take while writing a comic?
- Create brief essays or stories that might be appropriate for publications for teenage boys or girls, preschoolers, or educational magazines.
- Create a brief tale.
- Choose a children’s non-fiction book that you would be qualified to write.
- Create a book outline for a potential nonfiction work. You would identify the primary topics (or chapters) that the book would cover and give a quick summary of what each chapter would contain in your outline. Provide a brief description of the book’s illustrations, such as whether pictures, line drawings, watercolours, or another type of illustration would be appropriate. Next you would pen a page or two for your non-fiction book.
- Create a short fantasy, adventure, or science fiction story that satisfies the required specifications for a 7-8 year old audience.
- Create a narrative for a 5- to 6-year-old.
- Edit a few brief example articles.
- A children’s picture book, short tale, or section for a newspaper should be planned before being written.
Daily new opportunities
Writing for children involves more than just creating picture books; it also involves creating web content, games, instructional materials, and kid-friendly apps.
As schools transition to readers and computers for kids, educational literature produced as ebooks are used more frequently.
Today’s kids conduct online research for their school assignments and read a wide variety of content.
For some adults, writing for kids comes more naturally than for others. Further to writing skills, it necessitates knowledge about children and how their needs, interests, and abilities change as they become older.
Writing for printed books has fewer opportunities. Yet, concurrently, additional opportunities have appeared. Youngsters now read more than ever, which means they have more possibilities than ever to write. Finding the fresh chances and seizing them to create a source of revenue is the trick.
In the past, aspiring children’s authors would send their manuscripts to publishers, persisting in this method until they eventually had something published and had begun to establish a name for themselves.
The strategy might still be effective on rare occasions, but for the most, there are other options that are more likely to pay off.
As there are so many manuscripts being submitted by aspiring children’s authors, many editors are severely limiting what they will accept. Submissions for picture books are no longer accepted by several publishers. The children’s book business is extremely competitive, therefore editors can afford to demand great quality and originality because there are so many options and publishers.
Only novels that they are certain will sell well will be considered by some editors. Some publishers might accept an extraordinary or unique book on the off chance that it becomes a new best-seller, but the majority have stringent prerequisites, so the author must conduct the necessary research to understand what the publisher wants. The publishing industry, on the other hand, is a dynamic one that adapts to the often quick changes in reader tastes, expectations, and reading levels.
The age range and genre you want to write for must be clearly identified before you begin writing for children.
Suggestions for Improving Your Children’s Writing
- Learn to comprehend kids more.
- Concentrate on the message. It’s crucial to have a distinct focus on the message you wish to deliver. Too much wordiness in writing makes it more difficult for the reader to concentrate on the important information. Reducing wordiness is therefore a crucial skill.
- Be harsh on yourself. Learn to look at your work from a different angle than what comes naturally to you. Consider the audience for your writing and how you might address certain demographics. You will write for a wide range of readers when you contribute to well-known newspapers and publications, from uneducated jobless people to highly accomplished academics. Your delivery must be as clear and uncomplicated as possible if you want all of these viewers to understand your complex subject.
- Use shorter, simpler terms with fewer letters and syllables if you can. Utilize language that the recipient will understand. If you use a word in a way that the reader is unfamiliar with, you can aid comprehension by placing the word in a sentence that explains its meaning. If you’re writing fiction and you think the word you’re using might not be well-known, you should define it in the text or, if you’re writing nonfiction, you should explain it in a footnote.
- The next section offers some suggestions for preventing misunderstandings.
- Write shorter sentences and shorter paragraphs if you can. This is especially true for non-fiction writing, when the point needs to be delivered clearly and briefly. Yet, brevity is not always suitable or preferred in fictional writing, as well as in some non-fiction works like essays. Wordiness and complexity can occasionally provide a crucial dimension to the mood, tone, and meaning of a writing and are required to portray a specific personality, viewpoint, or historical era. Avoid wordiness and complexity if they are not essential to the tale or content, especially if you are just starting out as a writer.
- To make difficult factual information easier to understand, display it whenever possible in tables, charts, graphs, or point form.