Children's Book Insider — Writing for Kids Articles

The following articles by Laura Backes will help you learn tips and techniques for writing for a young audience, including special topic considerations, trends, research, and marketing — plus excellent instruction on general writing, story development, and editing skills.

Writing for Kids: Working with Cause & Effect
By Laura Backes
Successful fiction is dependent on a logical progression of cause and effect. In real life nothing happens in a vacuum; feelings are a response to an event, action is followed by reaction.

Writing for Kids: Characters and Point of View
By Laura Backes
The point of view — how you choose to tell your story — determines the voice of your writing.

Writing for Kids: Understanding Children's Writing Genres
By Laura Backes
It's true — you can read three different books on writing and find three different definitions of "picture book." So, to make your life easier, here's what I hope is a definitive glossary of children's publishing genres.

Writing for Kids: Writing About Controversial Subjects
By Laura Backes
After the Columbine shootings, I wrote that, as writers, one thing we can do is realize that all kids deal with pressures and problems that we never faced growing up, and we should make a greater effort to address this in middle grade and young adult literature.

Writing for Kids: A Look at Current Trends
By Laura Backes
In the constantly-changing world of children’s book publishing, it’s often hard to keep up with what’s hot. ... Here are some areas where editors are currently buying.

Writing for Kids: Editing Secrets
By Laura Backes
Checking your basic grammar and spelling are of course important, but authors need to go beyond surface editing if their work has a chance of catching an editor’s eye.

Writing for Kids: A Common Pitfall — Expository Dialogue
By Laura Backes
Dialogue adds to the narrative by allowing your characters to speak for themselves. It's not simply narrative surrounded by quotation marks.

Writing for Kids: Writing Great Beginnings
By Laura Backes
When an editor opens up the envelope containing your manuscript and begins to read, you have 10 seconds to get her attention.

Writing for Kids: Great Fiction Comes from Writing Lightly
By Laura Backes
Great fiction appears effortless to the reader. The characters and setting are so real, the story so believable, that the reader is completely unaware of the author behind the words.

Writing for Kids: Eliminating Lazy Writing
By Laura Backes
In order to make your manuscript rise above the rest, you not only need an enticing story and vivid characters, but your prose must be solid and fresh.

Writing for Kids: Tips for Developing an Original Voice
By Laura Backes
A story without a strong voice does not come alive for the reader, does not touch the reader’s imagination. ... Voice is the simplest writing technique to learn, because it’s already in you.

Writing for Kids: Eliminating Passive Writing
By Laura Backes
Passive Writing is common pitfall, one so insidious that it even pops up in the writing of very experienced authors from time to time.

Writing for Kids: Turn Personal Struggles into Books for Children
By Laura Backes
Many writers turn difficult periods in their lives into books for children, hoping to help young readers through similar painful experiences. Here are some tips to keep in mind when creating and selling books based on real-life events.

Writing for Kids: Writing Powerful Endings
By Laura Backes
Once you draw your readers in and take them through your story, you need to leave them with a satisfying conclusion. Here, then, are some tips for writing powerful endings.

Writing for Kids: Researching the Market
By Laura Backes
How, exactly, does one research a market that produces thousands of new products each year? I suggest a systematic, three-part approach which works for book and magazine publishers.

Writing for Kids: Tips for Writing Mysteries
By Laura Backes
Mysteries are very popular with middle grade readers. They are generally fast-paced stories that build self-confidence by allowing the reader to solve the crime.