Writing a children's book

Woot! I’ve just completed my first draft for my kids’ book – one day before my self-imposed deadline. More incredibly I only exceeded my planned word count by 3000 words – 23,000 when I had planned 15,000 – 20,000. This is fantastic for me – normally my bloated first drafts turn out way bigger than they were meant to be. Of course, I suspect a good 10-20% of the word count to end up cut out, especially the overly hefty chapter 14 but it shouldn’t be too hard. It was interesting writing a children’s book. Both harder and more fun than I anticipated. It turns out that I have very little idea of what is appropriate in terms of scary content and language complexity for specific age groups for children. Having taught English at high school, I feel fairly confident about the specific tastes and average reading levels* of each year group. When it comes to primary aged kids though, I’m flying completely blind. Of course I can try to remember what I read back then, and at least with a lot of my favourite books I can work out what year of school I must have been in when I read it. So in many ways I can write for the 9 year old version of myself which is more or less what I did. I also raided the children’s section of the library a few times. They have one of those colour-coding sticker systems so a lot of the books are labelled and recommended as being for a two year age bracket. This was more troubling however. Some of the books were familiar old ones by Judy Blume, Margaret Mahy and Roald Dahl. I still feel now as I did back then that those authors perfectly pitched their material so that the story content was interesting to children and the plot was paced to move quickly. The books they wrote didn’t talk down to kids but they were still easy to read, and often quite conversational and humorous. However, I found some of the books I picked up to be either dull or patronising. I would have hated a lot of them when I was a kid and even now couldn’t be bothered to finish them. I suspect that many children who read are, as I was, rather fussy. The children’s books that get it right become popular classics and are frequently taken out of the library no matter how old or battered the book is. Great children’s books don’t date, they sometimes get made into appalling movies but the books will always strike a chord with those who read them. So after my time in the children’s section of the library, I started thinking about what I had wanted in a book when I was a kid. What made a children’s book a good one. The problem, I fearfully realised, is that as a kid, I wanted my books to have and be everything that a book could be. Now as an adult I have limited expectations from books. If I pick up a murder mystery, I don’t expect the detective character to have striking relevance to me as a person or it to be littered with insightful social commentary. If the mystery has some good, intriguing twists and keeps me turning pages, I’m happy. I don’t expect humorous subplots in all horror books, or touching moments about romance or friendship in action-packed thrillers or SF, and I’ve completely given up hope of finding any epic fantasy that is fast-paced and doesn't require wrist support to hold up the hefty weight of many, many pages. Back when I was a kid though, my demands and expectations from books were higher. The main character had to be likeable and believable. I was easily annoyed by characters who were children that came across as annoying brats like the ones in bad Hollywood TV and movies. I wanted my hero or heroine to be someone I could relate to. Relevance is a word that is often chucked about as the Holy Grail in children’s and young adult fiction, and it’s true that if you ask students what they want from a story, personal relevance is often high on the list. However, for me relevance wasn’t ever about the superficial and mundane aspects of a character’s life. It didn’t matter whether they were a boy or a girl, lived in New Zealand or a different country or a different time or world for that that matter. What made a character relevant to me was that they shared some of the same aspects as me in their lives. If the character was facing similar issues with their friends, parents or family members, growing up or anything else from the multitude of joys, problems, conflicts and passions of a young person’s life, I could relate. Other stuff like age, gender, race, social background or cultural beliefs didn’t matter nearly so much. Adventure was an important if not essential element as well. While the character had to have some realistic qualities to connect to, I didn’t just want to read about them doing normal everyday stuff. They had to be thrown into some exciting storyline filled with conflicts (the best were usually with some unjust authority figure), struggles to overcome seemingly impossible hurdles, finding out the truth about a mystery or secret or discovering what’s really behind some misunderstood character’s behaviour and finally saving the day against all odds. The scale and scope of the adventure wasn’t really a key factor for me. It didn’t matter if the adventure was in an epic fantasy world, a real life struggle in school with bullies and teachers, or the fight to save a beloved pet. What mattered was that the adventure was fast-paced and exciting, and that whatever the character was fighting for was something that really mattered to them. It had to be difficult for the hero. The stakes had to be high; it had to mean something when they finally came out on top. I don’t know if it was something that I even noticed let alone cared about as a child, but another thing I’ve come to realise is a common feature in the children’s books I loved is the personal growth of the main character. They had to not only solve the mystery, defeat their enemy or fulfil their quest - they had to learn something about themselves and the world around them through their adventure. I liked books where the main character was wiser, more confident or better in some other way at the end of the book. I wanted books to cover a range of emotions. I wanted to books to be scary, exciting, heart-warming, funny and ultimately triumphant in the conclusion. Charming or humorous comic relief characters are frequently the ones I loved best but the books that had touches of tragedy, the ones that made me cry at the sad parts, are the ones that stayed with me the most. The best loved books of my childhood did it all – they made me laugh, cry, get spooked, fear for the life of the protagonist and rejoice at their happy endings. I doubt I would have been able to express it back then but as a child I always liked books with a social commentary. The books that appealed to me had a strong sense of the injustice that I considered myself to have observed in life. As a kid, like many others I suspect, I had an over-developed awareness of whenever things were not fair. The books I enjoyed reflected the inequity of the world. Adults misjudged children; kids were not listened to or believed when they cried out the truth; authority figures abused their power; the big and strong bullied the small and weak; rules were not enforced consistently or they were unjust in the first place. That’s not to say that the books I read were all filled with adults as the bad guys or all rules were unfair. It’s just that I think children do have a passionate awareness of the potential for any power to be exploited by those who hold it. They’re always ready to spot unfairness and I think it’s a good thing for fiction to encourage the notion that we should never follow any rules or rulers blindly or without question. So when you put everything together it makes for an intimidating task. Write a book that covers a wide range of emotions, preferably with enough feeling that the reader empathises completely; write a main character who is completely believable, likeable and relevant to a modern child reader; plot out a thrilling adventure for the hero or heroine that not only provides that book with a variety of conflicts and situations to produce the aforementioned emotional spectrum but also helps the character to grow and develop as a person (but ensure that it is still fast-moving and exciting at the same time); chuck in a couple of loveable humorous characters and some insightful observational commentary about the injustice that today’s children face in the real world. Phew. I guess that's why only a few authors seem to have measured up to the quality of what I used to consider a good children’s book. I’m very grateful eight year old Debbie isn’t around to read my book. I fear she would have chucked it away on page 2. * That is the average reading levels of the students who actually read for pleasure. There are a whole bunch of kids who say they’ve never read a whole book and AssTLe test with the reading ability of very young kid. I figure as a young adult writer you’re either targeting the books that teens are taught in English classes or you’re actually targeting the more select group of teens who actually read books for pleasure and don’t regard reading as a form of torture. The light genre stuff that I write are not the type of books that make their way into studied texts lists, so I figure I can actually pitch the length and writing at the lovely literate bunch. You know, the kind of teens who don’t actually complain if a chapter is longer than six pages and the book hasn’t been made into a movie.