“Writing for young people is a great responsibility, because their minds are impressionable and what they read can affect not only their current lives but their future ones as well.”
—Lee Wyndham,
Writing for Children & Teenagers
Children’s publishing is a vibrant market for today’s writers, but it can also be a tough market to break into. Editors say that 95% of the submissions are poorly written and inappropriate. Most of these rejected submissions are by writers who don’t take the time to learn the ins and outs of writing for this deceptively tricky market. Writing for children isn’t easy. Because children have short attention spans and a wide range of reading abilities, in many ways writing for children is more difficult than writing for adults. It takes much more than a good story.
In order to get the most from this intermediate-level workshop, you should have a completed first draft of a fictional story targeting children over seven years old (early chapter book, middle-grade novel, or young adult/teen novel) You should also have a strong grasp of mechanics and composition, as well as an understanding of basic fiction-writing skills and techniques for writing specifically for children. (The Fundamentals of Writing for Children Workshop is strongly recommended as a preliminary.)
In this workshop, you will work with a professional children’s author who will help you take your writing skills to the next level. You’ll also be able to interact with other children’s writers: sharing ideas, giving peer feedback, and discussing the ins and outs of writing for kids. The workshop’s goal is to take the seemingly abstract concepts behind writing for children and to show writers practical ways of translating those concepts into the story or novel you are working on. The course will help you develop rules, checks, and rewriting procedures for a writing process that will help you make your first draft more marketable through your understanding of the revision process and the elements of the craft for creating stories children want to read.
This workshop will consist of seven one-week sessions. The sessions will include online lectures and reading assignments, as well as suggested reading in successful children’s books to reinforce and explain the principles presented in this course. Each session also has a writing assignment specifically related to your story or novel, which will be submitted to the instructor for private review at the end of the first week of each session. During the second week of each session, work will be posted for group review and feedback in an on-line critique-group format. Throughout the workshop you will participate in asynchronous lecture discussion and encouraged to take advantage of ongoing informal discussions and posted self-directed writing exercises. (1.4 CEUs)
| Workshop length: |
Seven weeks |
| Textbook(s) to purchase: |
There is no textbook for this course. |
| Course Developer: |
Patricia Wolff |
| Tuition: |
$325.00 |
Workshop Outline
Session One: Connecting Your Character to Your Reader
The fictional dream; the revision process; identifying your many target readers; writing your story in the proper format; the writer-reader contract; hooking the reader with strong beginnings
Writing Assignment: The first 500 words of your story
Session Two: Number One Rule of Writing: Show, Don’t Tell
Reason behind the concept; how to recognize telling and change it to showing; power words that do more; when we must show and where we can tell; the role of narration; using narration for pacing and rhythm; narrative summary; narrative transitions; narration within action; narrative descriptions; writer intrusion
Writing Assignment: A 300-word scene that shows real-time action and includes narration; A 300-word scene of dialogue that includes narration
Session Three: Characterization and Point of View
Empowering the child; complex, rounded characters; understanding our characters; characterization through interior monologue; characterization through dialogue; characterization through action; the role of other characters; choosing our point of view character; types of point of view
Writing Assignment: A scene of up to 750 words showing characterization
Session Four: Conflict and Subplots
The main story problem; high-stakes story problems; importance and types of conflict; how to present conflict in text; internal monologue; roles of antagonist and minor characters, and getting the most from them
Writing Assignment: A scene or scenes of up 1,000 words that show conflict about the main story problem, show conflict from a subplot, and/or show conflict within the protagonist through interior monologue
Session Five: Scenes and Plot
Plotting stories through scenes; definition and components of scenes; major scenes and plot points; transitions between scenes; presenting backstory and flashbacks; using scenes and rhythm to manipulate readers’ emotions; definition of plot and what it must accomplish; arcs and trajectories; character-driven plots
Writing Assignment: A scene of up to 1,200 continuous words containing a dramatic scene that shows emotional change in the character (and, by extension, the reader)
Session Six: Endings and After
The climax—what it is and what it must accomplish; identifying what the child reader wants from this major scene; where and how to end a story; the professionalism in submissions; line-editing; active, expressive verbs, deadwood and redundancy; style manuals; word searches
Writing Assignment: Submit up to 1,500 continuous words in final-draft form that lead up to and include (at least part of) the story’s climax
Session Seven: Keep Writing
Workshop Wrap-up
Writing Assignment: Submit up to 2,000 words of text in final-draft form. (Can be continuous or several units of text you want final feedback on.) Include a list of potential appropriate publishers where you plan to submit your story.