How to Write for Young Children (and Their Parents Who Buy the Book)

Read-to-me, easy readers, and early chapter books

It is 7:40 on a school night. A mother is sitting on the edge of a bed with a book open on her knees, and she is on page six for the fourth night in a row, because the child beside her will not let her skip it. He knows what the fox says on page six. He says it with her. He has heard it twenty times, and he wants to hear it again.

Across town another mother is reading another book. The child is looking at the ceiling. The mother is reading faster. On the last page, a kindly grandfather explains to the child in the story what she should have learned, and the mother, who paid for the book, closes it and reaches for a different one tomorrow.

Both books were written by Christian authors who love children and wanted to teach them something true. Both are trying to do what Moses told Israel to do with the words of God: “talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up” (Deuteronomy 6:7). The book on the mother’s knees is the lying-down part. One of them will be read a hundred times and bought for three cousins. The other will be read once.

This page is about the difference. A children’s book has two readers, the child who listens and the parent who buys, reads aloud, and decides whether there will be a second night. Both must be won, and the same craft wins both. Here is what we have learned from the best books on story and from the children’s manuscripts that reach us.

Make the child like the hero on page one

Blake Snyder named his most famous rule after a scene in a thriller. Al Pacino plays a detective running a sting on parolees. One of them has brought his little boy along. Pacino quietly flashes his badge so the father can take the child and leave before the arrests begin. One small act of decency, and the audience is his for the rest of the film.¹ Snyder called it Save the Cat.

Disney had to do the same thing to Aladdin. The original Aladdin was a conniving street thief, and test audiences did not like him. So the writers added a scene: he steals a loaf of bread, and then gives it to two hungry children. Now he is a hero.²

Children decide faster than adults whether they want to follow a hero, and they decide on the first page. Give your hero one small, specific, kind or brave or funny thing to do before anything else happens. Then, and only then, show the flaw. Jessica Brody’s reason for the flaw is worth a laugh and worth remembering: “Imagine if Harry Potter had started out a confident, powerful wizard.”³ A perfect child has nowhere to go. The flaw is the story.

The hero wants something a child can name

A story has an engine only when the hero wants one visible thing and is already doing something about it. “To be happy” is not a want. “To be good” is not a want. A puppy, a friend, a place on the team, Dad home for her birthday: those are wants, and a child can say them out loud.

James Scott Bell has a one-minute test any parent-author can run at the kitchen table. Fill in the blanks: “My Lead is a ___. His/Her Objective is to ___. She is Confronted by ___, who opposes her because ___. The ending will be a Knockout because ___.”⁴ If a blank will not fill, the story does not have a plot yet. It has a situation.

Bell’s picture of what a plot is could be drawn in crayon: get your hero up a tree, throw rocks at him, then get him down.⁵ The rocks are the story. A hero who climbs the tree and climbs back down with no rocks thrown has taught nothing and entertained no one.

The child solves it. The grown-up may not.

Here is the fault our editors see most often in Christian children’s manuscripts, and the one that costs the most. The child has a problem. The child worries about it. And then a parent, a pastor, a teacher, or an angel arrives and fixes it.

Christopher Vogler, who wrote the story memo that shaped a generation of Disney films, spent years on The Wizard of Oz as his model. Glinda and the companions are mentors: they equip Dorothy and walk with her. But when the Wizard’s balloon floats away without her, nobody carries Dorothy home. She clicks the slippers herself, and “there’s no place like home” is proved by her own act.⁶ A mentor is a job, not a rescue. The mentor gives the hero what she needs and then steps back.

Snyder’s word for the alternative is harsh and correct: a hero who is lured, tricked, or carried into the adventure is not a hero. “The hero must make the decision himself.”⁷ The child makes the choice that starts the adventure and the choice that ends it. Adults may help. Adults may not rescue.

Brody has a chapter on why that choice must be hard. Heroes “drag their feet. They hem and haw. They debate.”⁸ A child who learns the lesson on first hearing is not a child any child recognizes. Let yours refuse at least twice. The refusals are where the reader lives.

The small thing is the tragedy

Every story is a fight with some form of death, Bell says, and he means it for children’s books too.⁹ For a child the death is scaled: a lost dog, a broken friendship, a move, a failure in front of the whole class, a promise that cannot be kept. K. M. Weiland’s example is a burnt cake, which is nothing in a thriller and a catastrophe to a child who promised it to the bake sale.¹⁰ The small thing is the tragedy. Put it on the page, and put a clock on it.

Snyder calls the clock the glacier. A glacier that will arrive in a thousand years frightens nobody. The storm that is coming “someday,” the move “next year,” the bully who “might” be at the park: none of those get near enough to matter. Make the danger close, specific, and dated.¹¹

Snyder also insists that every story needs its All Is Lost moment, the place where the hero is beaten and knows it, and he anticipates the children’s author’s objection: “What if death isn’t anywhere near your story? Doesn’t matter.”¹² Hansel and Gretel go into the woods, and the woods are frightening. The promise of the shape is that they come home. A children’s book keeps that promise. It also keeps the woods.

Say the moral once, early, by someone else, and never at the end

About five percent of the way into a story, Snyder says, somebody who is not the hero says the lesson out loud, in passing, and the hero ignores it.¹³ Brody loves this beat for exactly that reason: “And this is what I love about the Theme Stated. The hero often ignores it!”¹⁴ Then the rest of the story argues the lesson until the hero proves it by what she does.

That is the opposite of the closing paragraph in which the grandfather explains what the child should have learned. Every craft book we work from names that paragraph as the besetting fault of children’s writing, and the summaries of those books for our editors say the same thing in nearly the same words: the lesson is embodied, never stated. Robert McKee’s rule, written for screenwriters, is the rule for picture books: “Master storytellers never explain. They do the hard, painfully creative thing—they dramatize.”¹⁵

One plain, in-character line at the end is allowed. Lightning McQueen, in Cars, gives up the Piston Cup to push the old champion across the finish line, and says one sentence about the trophy: “It’s just an empty cup.”¹⁶ That is a theme stated after it has been proved, by the hero, in six words. A paragraph of explanation after it would have ruined the film.

Brody puts the reason in one sentence every Christian author should carry: “People rarely change because someone tells them to change. People change only when they can see their flaws for themselves.”¹⁷ Children know this better than we do. They have been told to change all day.

Show the feeling in the body a child can picture

“She was sad” is information. “She sat on the bottom step with her shoes still on” is a child. Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi, whose Emotion Thesaurus sits on most working novelists’ desks, give the test in one line: “The single tear tells you that the person is sad, but how upset is she? Sad enough to sob? Shriek? Collapse?”¹⁸

For young readers, choose physical signals a child can see: stomping, hiding behind a parent, grinning so wide it hurts, saying “I’m fine” while kicking the table leg. Ackerman and Puglisi have a wonderful name for those signals. They are “like annoying little brothers and sisters, tattling on the dialogue and revealing true emotion.”¹⁹ A child reader catches the tattling instantly, and loves it.

Then give the cause. Lisa Cron’s correction of the oldest writing rule applies to the youngest readers: “Don’t tell me John is sad, show me why he’s sad.”²⁰ A picture book that shows a boy standing at the window at the time the school bus usually comes, on a Saturday, has said everything about missing his friend without using the word.

Give things the dignity of their names

Natalie Goldberg’s five-word instruction is for every writer, and children enforce it more strictly than anyone: “Give things the dignity of their names.”²¹ Not a bird but a blue jay. Not a dog but a beagle named Biscuit. Not a snack but a peanut-butter sandwich with the crusts cut off. Children notice. They know the names of things, and they trust an author who knows them too. Food is the fastest road into a child’s senses and memory, and the surest way to be asked for the book again.

Write for the voice that reads aloud

A picture book or early reader is performed, by a parent, at bedtime, often for the twentieth time. Read every draft aloud. Then cut everything the voice stumbled on.

Stephen King’s rule for dialogue tags is the one children’s manuscripts break most: “The adverb is not your friend.”²² Our editors find “exclaimed,” “giggled,” “whispered sadly,” and their cousins on nearly every page of a first children’s draft. “Said” is enough. King’s parody of the alternative, from a Jekyll-and-Hyde pastiche, is “Put down the gun, Utterson!” Jekyll grated,²³ and once you have laughed at it you will never write “she exclaimed excitedly” again.

King’s revision rule came to him on a rejection slip when he was a teenager: “2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%.”²⁴ In children’s books the number is closer to twenty. A read-aloud book has no room for a dead line. Verbs carry a child’s attention; keep the live ones and cut the rest.

And let the children sound like children and the adults like adults. Anne Lamott’s standard for dialogue is that a line should feel like eavesdropping, and no one may sound like the author.²⁵ A six-year-old who speaks in complete sentences with a moral in the last one is the author in a small coat.

Let them laugh

Seven in ten children between six and seventeen say the books they want most are the ones that make them laugh. That was the top answer at every age in a national Scholastic survey.²⁶ The same survey found that 40 percent of children between six and eleven who were no longer being read to wished their parents had kept it up.²⁷ Isaiah describes how a child actually learns anything, and it reads like a bedtime: “precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little” (Isaiah 28:10). The fourth night on page six is not a failure of the child’s attention. It is the method. The laugh is not decoration. It is the reason the child asks for page six again, and it is the safety zone that lets a young reader bear the scary part. Vogler calls the comic companion the trickster and names it as standard equipment for a children’s story.²⁸ Give your hero a friend, an animal, or a habit that is funny on purpose.

Lamott’s formula for drama is the formula for a joke, and she says so: “setup, buildup, payoff.”²⁹ A children’s book that is built like a good joke is a children’s book that gets retold at breakfast.

Ellen White asked the same of preachers, in a sentence any children’s author could frame: “In every sermon let a little corner be left for their benefit. The servant of Christ may have lasting friends in these little ones, and his words may be to them as apples of gold in pictures of silver.”³² Your whole book is that corner.

The parent is the buyer. Pitch to both.

A parent standing in a bookstore, or scrolling on a phone, gives your cover and description about the same five seconds a child gives your first page. The book must be pitchable in one sentence to a child and in one sentence to a parent. The child’s sentence is what the hero wants and what is in the way. The parent’s sentence is what the child will have learned without being told. Paul’s description of Timothy is the parent’s hope for every book she buys: “from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures” (2 Timothy 3:15). Known, not been lectured on.

Snyder’s test for a logline is whether a stranger can see the whole movie from it.³⁰ Our test for a Christian children’s book is the same test in church clothes: could a pastor recommend it from the pulpit in one sentence? If the answer takes a paragraph, the book is not yet designed.

Mary Karr’s advice to memoirists is the children’s author’s best structural tool: tell the story aloud to a child of the target age, start to finish, and notice what you said first, what the child asked, and what you never bothered to mention.³¹ The order and the omissions are your outline.

What to leave out

Every children’s manuscript that reaches us is written by someone who loves children. The faults below are the faults of love, not of carelessness, and every one of them is fixable.

• The lesson explained at the end.
• The model child who only obeys, and the adult who arrives to fix it.
• The want so vague the reader cannot say what the hero is trying to get.
• The villain too scary for the age, or the cartoon villain with no reason and no good side. Make the opponent a fear, a situation, a storm, or a sibling more often than a person, and when it is a person, give a reason and allow repentance.
• The slow start: weather, a routine day, a flashback. Young readers forgive nothing slow.
• The child narrator who reports what the grown-ups were thinking.
• The sudden change, learned on first hearing. Keep at least two refusals before the turn.
• Adults writing down. Children hear it, and so do their parents.

Before you send it

• What small, kind, brave, or funny thing does my hero do on page one?
• Can a child say in one sentence what my hero wants?
• Who solves the final problem? If it is not the child, start over there.
• What does my hero stand to lose, and when?
• Where is the moral stated? If it is at the end, move it to the beginning and give it to someone else.
• Have I shown every feeling in the body and given its cause?
• Have I read it aloud, cut twenty percent, and replaced every “exclaimed” with “said”?
• Where does the child laugh?
• Can a parent say in one sentence why she bought it?

This is the shape our editors read for, and it is what four editors and three designers bring to a children’s manuscript in our Professional, Advanced, and Premium packages. Picture books carry one more requirement that most authors do not know until the proofs arrive: every image must be resized to print resolution and converted from RGB to CMYK with the ink saturation reset, or a picture that glows on screen prints as a brown puddle. Our designers handle that. 60% of the books in those packages sell more than 150 copies, four times the rate for self-published books (the full table is on our Writer’s Tips and Guidelines page), and a children’s book that gets asked for on the fourth night is how that number happens.

Books worth reading

Jessica Brody, Save the Cat! Writes a Novel (2018). Blake Snyder, Save the Cat! (2005). Christopher Vogler, The Writer’s Journey (4th ed., 2020). James Scott Bell, Plot & Structure (2004). Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi, The Emotion Thesaurus (2nd ed., 2019). K. M. Weiland, Creating Character Arcs (2016). None of them is about children’s books. All of them are about why a child will not let you skip page six.

Scripture quotations are from the King James Version.

Mike Brazington, Publisher