Writing-for-Children-EbookThe Author’s Guide to Writing Stories for Children is a free 200-page ebook to help authors learn how to craft creative, engaging, and inspiring stories for children.
Author Mabel L. Robinson shows how to meet young readers on their own grounds by approaching children as equals, not as adults writing down to them. Robinson discusses how to know their type of dialogue, their interests upon action and climax, their understanding of plot involvement, their sort of humor, pathos, and views. Authors will learn how to grab a child’s interest and how to keep it.
Writing for children from the viewpoint of the writer is a massive amount of fun. Unlike the adult story which must eventually centralize around or reveal the consequences of a love problem, the juvenile or children’s story is limitless in the sources from which it may draw its material. Motor boating, sailing, hiking, exploring, keeping the wolf from the door, confronting danger of any kind, succeeding or failing of any kind, almost anything which touches active life can represent the foundation of a children’s plot.
Authors will learn that the children’s book in its framework is a sequence of short stories, each of which creates a chapter. These chapters are strung like beads on the sturdy wire of a unifying interest, but each one, so as to keep the enthusiasm of the child, must be a complete event within itself. The children’s book is a collection of stories in chapters tied together by a thread of unity through a solution of a problem.
Young readers want to encounter a scenario which stimulates their inquisitiveness in a new chapter, and leaves them at the end of the chapter feeling that they have accomplished something, enough to permit them to close the book. Yet in the back of their minds must linger the gnawing urge about “How it is coming out?”–enough to avoid their forgetting to finish the book.
Therefore the author of the successful children’s book uses regularly the technique of the short story. Through it he or she discovers how to make cross sections of life, sharp and clear, and to introduce them without the redundancy which defines so many books.
We have formatted our eBook as .pdf file so that you can read it online, on any mobile device, or in any iPhone or iPad .pdf app reader, such as Kindle or iPad.
Cover artwork: Monica Mizzi