Writing Tips – Writing Children’s Stories 2

By georgelthomas on 21 Sep 2017 • ( 2 )

Hi everyone, I had a little bit of time, and so I thought I’d write some more Writing Tips for writers who find crafting children’s stories as difficult as I do. You can find parts one and three of this series here and here.

So, without further ado, here are another five.

Be Prepared
Writing any kind of story is dauntingly hard work, but writing for children can be particularly challenging. You need to think about language and structure in a different way to how you would when writing for adults, so be prepared to work hard and don’t give up if it all starts to get too much. Take your time.

Messages and Themes
While messages and themes can each be an important part of a children’s story, sometimes, a story can just be a story with no hidden meaning, messages or themes such as ‘right and wrong’. Sometimes a kid just wants to be entertained with a good tale.

Be Literal
Be as literal as possible. Children tend to be very literal in the way they talk and understand things, so complicated metaphors will more than likely be confusing. You should make things clear without oversimplifying your ideas. In most children’s stories, everything is straightforward and black and white. There are no grey areas.

Don’t Panic
Your first draft may stink. It may be the worst thing to land on paper in the history of the written word but don’t panic. For most of us, this is very normal. Nothing is ever perfect first time around. The whole point of a first draft is to get all of your ideas out onto the page. You can make sense of everything in your second draft and polish it all to a beautiful shine in your third.

Slang
Try not to use slang words in your children’s stories because, by the time anyone gets to read your hard work, the slang that was common when you began to write, will more than likely have grown out of use and your characters may sound outdated. If you really want to use slang in your dialogue, you could always try making up your own slang words.

Thank you, as always, for reading my words if you have, I really do appreciate your time.

Until next time,

George