Creating Magic When Writing For Children

Building Self-Esteem In Children. A Mentoring Program For Parents And Education Professionals To Build Self-esteem And Self-reliance In Children And Promote Strong Caring Relationships Between Adults And Children.

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Too many children’s stories are chosen because they sound good to adults. But children get bored with them. Look at stories that have travelled through time and are as popular with today’s children as they were generations ago.
Winnie the Pooh, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, and my favourite The Faraway Tree series.

Read these again. What makes them so magical, how do you feel when you read them, which words and sentences, ideas and pictures stick in your mind?

In other words, what works, and what doesn’t?

Ask the children in your life what works for them, what they love about the books they have, what they don’t like, what scares them, what makes them feel good, makes them laugh, which parts make them tingle.

Children are largely ignored when it comes to choosing what books are suitable for young people. It’s a curious oversight.

Tips on Writing for Children:

• When you write a story, have the courage to read it aloud to children. In schools, your children, friends children. If they don’t like it, they’ll tell you, and they will probably say why. Don’t argue them down. They like what they like, and they don’t like what they don’t like, and you’re not going to change their minds.

• Listen to the advice. What you like, they may not. If they say it would be really cool for the big old armchair in the corner to come to life and swallow Grandma while she’s doing her knitting, find a creative way for it to happen.

• Find something in your pocket. Doesn’t matter what it is. Look at the world from the perspective of that item. A day in the life of a sweet wrapper, a pen, a dollar coin.

• As practice write a letter to yourself as a child, from your perspective now. Then write another letter, this time as a child writing to yourself as an adult. What would each of you want to know?

• Do not judge yourself. Writing is a life long process, and for as long as you write the seed of self-doubt will be just below the surface. Keep it there, don’t let it sprout and grow because if you do, the writing can just dry up.

• That voice in your head that says you cant write, wont be any good, don’t know how, will never get published blah blah is just a voice in your head. It isn’t the truth, it’s just the past coming for a visit.

• Source yourself in positive people, those who like what you do or believe in who you are. They are the ones to listen to, not that negative voice in your head. Negativity never gained anyone, anything, ever, never will.

• Celebrate your successes. Be fully expressed when you get a win, however small.

• Take a photo every day of something in the garden, the country, in the house, at work, under the bed, at the bottom of the wardrobe. Write 700 words about it. See what comes up. These exercises wont give you a best seller (they might), but they will give you at least a germ of an idea to work with.

• Never give up. Be persistent. If writing is your dream, your passion, then recognise that by doing it you already have a life you love. That’s not magic, that’s simply you fulfilling your own dream.

• Never give up

• Never give up

• Never give up

• Never give up …

If you’re about to give up, read the above, re-visit your childhood and dare to take another sneak peek at what was under your bed …

Building Self-Esteem In Children. A Mentoring Program For Parents And Education Professionals To Build Self-esteem And Self-reliance In Children And Promote Strong Caring Relationships Between Adults And Children.

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Writers Writing For Children

There are secrets to life. Here's one you can apply to EVERYTHING ...

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"Who else wants to get paid to write?"

"Want to be a freelance writer? How about one that actually gets paid? Never write for free (or for peanuts) again."

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Writing for children is said to be the hardest kind of writing you can choose.

Children are the most direct, honest critics you will find. If they don’t like it, they’ll tell you. Worse still, they’ll simply walk away. Your feelings aren’t a concern.

Quite rightly, it’s all about them.

The pleasure from writing for children though, that’s something else again. There is more pleasure to be derived out of creating a story that children love than any other kind of writing.

Find your voice, get in the zone, and you’re unstoppable.

But writers often begin writing with the aim of not only getting published, but making money as well. Lots of money. They see J. K. Rowling and the staggering success she has enjoyed and say, ‘That’s for me!’

What got them into writing in the first place is lost, or at least pushed away. The love of writing, the feeling that there isn’t anything else you’d rather be doing than sitting at a keyboard letting the words pour onto the screen.

Anyone can write. Really they can. Most choose not to of course, because a world full of writers would be painful, but those who do are among the luckiest people here. They will live forever, because their stories will live on and entertain generations of people, young and old.

Don’t write for money, and the chances are increased that money will come. Not because some magic fairy will come along, wave her little finger and present you with pots full of gold, but because that pressure has been taken away. The pressure that comes with ‘Is it good enough’, ‘Will people want to buy it’, ‘What if they don’t like it?’. All that disappears.

Write for the very reason you began writing; because you enjoy it. Then, when something comes out you like and think other people will enjoy too, submit it and let it go. Then send thanks to whomever you thank for the good things that come along in life, and forget about it.

After all, you only produced that piece of writing for your own pleasure, so it doesn’t matter a jot if no one else appreciates it.

And don’t take this as ‘the truth.’ Try it on. If these suggestions fit, if they strike a chord and help with the creative process, great. If they don’t, leave them behind.
What works for one will not work for everyone.

Tips in writing for children:

• Find something you love talking or writing about. Then write about it as though you are talking about it. There is no secret about writing. Everyone can talk. Get the words you would say out loud and get them down on paper. Write about what you love, and that passion will come out.

• Take a favourite childhood moment. For example and from the top of my head, I remember walking downstairs on Christmas morning and finding a realistic plastic dalek suit wrapped up in Christmas paper. The first thing I did was put it together, get inside still in my pyjamas, go down the road and knock at my friend Michaels door.

He scrambled down the stairs and flung the door open, to find a dalek standing their screaming ‘Exterminate Exterminate.”

Michael disappeared up those stairs again so fast he flew up, and it took several minutes before he was coaxed down again with promises of mince pies for breakfast and ‘It was only Rob being an idiot.’
Now in my defence I was very young, and the intention was never to terrify Michael. However that memory gives me so much raw material for a story I could write a whole novel.

We forget just how impressionable children’s imaginations are, and how they live much of their younger years in such a state of fantasy that what they imagine and what they actually see are often mixed up. When writing for children, remember this. Delve back into your own childhood memories, and don’t just analyse them from afar, get in there and re-experience what it felt like. It’s a different world.

There are secrets to life. Here's one you can apply to EVERYTHING ...

Click Here!

"Who else wants to get paid to write?"

"Want to be a freelance writer? How about one that actually gets paid? Never write for free (or for peanuts) again."

Click Here!